The Paris History and Anthropology Round Table II and the Wenner-Gren Foundation Symposium No. 85

Abstract

The History and Anthropology Round Table II, sponsored by the Max Planck Institut f?r Geschichte (G?ttingen) and the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (Paris) was held in Paris, June 11-14, 1980. The Round Table brought together 25 historians and anthropologists from West Germany, France, Britain, the United States, Switzerland and Italy. Its topic was Family and Kinship, Mate rial Interest and Emotion. The ''Preliminary Considerations by Drs. David Sabean and Hans Medick posed the problem: In analyzing the family, anthropologists and social historians have often found difficulties in handling the relationship between emotional needs and material interest. Rather than carefully sorting out the nature of rights and du ties, claims and counter-claims within families in different social and cultural con texts and delineating the corresponding specific territories in which emotion, trust, and sentiment are structured, emotions and interests are treated as opposites which cancel each other out. They noted the danger of simple linear interpretations of temporal change or cross-sectional differences and called for anthropological and historical papers on the following themes: 1) central moments of exchange within the family or household which mediate both emotion and material interest; 2) the interconnection between various planes of activity?the public and the private, the interior and the exterior; 3) specific relationships within the family; 4) the role of kinship in survival strategies. The papers, which were submitted and circulated in advance, addressed these substantive themes in cases ranging from American slave society and New Guinea to seventeenth century France and Italy to twentieth century France, Greece, and England. Discussion was lively and informed. All participants were open to comparative insights and methodologies so there was much stimulating interchange. Professors Herbert Gutman (CUNY) and Jack Goody (Cambridge Univer sity) summed up and pointed to directions for further research. Goody noted that affective bonds could only be discussed in a generalized way from anthropo logical data, and historians can do even less. He remarked that although anthro pologists in general tend to see cases as highly individual and particular, the meet