The Life of Property

by Jenkins, Timothy

• ISBN13: 9781845456672
• ISBN10: 184545667X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-04-09
• Publisher: Berghahn Books

Summary

Longstanding and resilient local ideas of property and practices of inheritance control the destinies of those living in Béarn, a region of south-west France in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. Based on extensive fieldwork and archival research that combines ethnography and intellectual history, this book explores these long-term continuities of a particular way of life within a broad framework. These local ideas have found expression twice at the national level: first, in sociological arguments proposed by Fredérique Le Play about the family that shaped debates on social reform and the repair of national identity in the last third of the nineteenth century—debates that would play a part in subsequent European thought and in contemporary European social policy. Second, they fed into late twentieth-century sociological categories through the influential work of Pierre Bourdieu. This study of Béarn illustrates the multi-layered life of local concepts and practices, and the continuing contribution of the local to modern European national history.