Släktens territorier : en jämförande studie av sociala regelverk i det förindustriella bondesamhället i Dalarna och Hälsingland 1734-1826

Sammanfattning: This study examines how social regulations in pre-industrial agrarian society influenced the location of settlements and patterns of cultivation. The theoretical framework is based on the assumption that the organization and physical features of the cultural landscape can only be properly understood by elucidating the inner structure guiding the result. The thesis is a comparative study of empirical investigations of three hamlets situated in the southern part of northern Sweden, a south boreal region. Two hamlets are located on old sedimentary soil in river valleys, the third in forest. The earlier mixed farming was organized around the farm in the hamlet and the shielings in the forest. One class, freeholders, constituted the socio-economical structure of the hamlets. Combining empirical data from the minutes of different land registers, church ledgers, maps and inheritance documents gave information about the social organization and its reproduction. The empirical findings show that the hamlet in woodland and those in the river valleys had different preconditions for agricultural activities and different socio-economy and population combinations. The exploitation of resources within the compass of close or more distant relatives, however, seems to have followed similar principles of inheritance. Partible inheritance was practised. This implies fragmentation of land. Different strategic actions of the farmers counterbalanced this tendency, however. A mutual exchange of marriage partners (“sibling-exchanges”) between farmers in and outside the hamlet, remarriages from other hamlets, strengthening of kinship ties and endogamy were expressions of the social organization. The social group constituted by bilateral kinship was reproduced through horizontal integration between households and vertical integration between generations according to a cognate system. The society was built up by those two different ideas of kinship. The farmers adjusted their holdings among themselves according to their needs and agreements and generally they could find solutions suitable for the production and ecological balance between needs and resources. The territory of the hamlet consisted of individually and commonly owned land. The production was based on infield and outfield activities and this very fact made it possible for inheritors to settle down permanently in the outfields; an interior colonization. Beside topological conditions kinship relations, marriages and rules of inheritance affected the localization of settlement as well as the pattern of cultivation. The transfer of farms to the next generation was embedded in moral duties, rights and stipulations typical for exchange in a social system based on a network of kinship.