Family and Kinship in Western Europe: The Problem of the Joint Family Household During the last twenty years there has been a remarkable revival of interest in the history of the family. As a consequence, a considerable body of new, detailed, and often quantified information on European kinship before the nineteenth century has become available. The analytical introduction, by Laslett, as well as the articles contained in Household and Family in Past Time, and articles in the issue of the Annales. E.S.C. dedicated to Famille et Societe are evidence of the progress which has been made by an international group of scholars investigating family history, and these are only the most visible items in an extensive bibliography.I Thus far, recent historical attention has focused on the family household, while relatively little attention has been given to the ties of kinship as they extend beyond it. The thesis advanced in the present paper is that this separation of household structure from kinship system can no longer be maintained. Because the subjects are interdependent, material drawn from comparative ethnography can be brought to bear on the problems raised by historical demographers. I have, in the following pages, considered specifically the joint family household, as it appears in European history, in the light of material drawn from comparative ethnography. At the same time that the demographic methods practiced and publicized by the Institut National d'Etudes Demographiques (I.N.E.D.) in Paris and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure in England have been accumulating quantified information on family size and structure, social anthropologists have been developing new tools, theoretical and practical, for investigating kinship. Comparative information on some six hundred cultures is readily available in tabular form in Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas, based