
David I. KertzerBrown University · Department of Anthropology
David I. Kertzer
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Publications (102)
In one of history’s ironies, the republic that arose in Rome out of Europe’s revolutionary wave in 1848 was crushed by the new republic that had formed in France at the same time. In an additional irony, the destruction of the Roman Republic and the restoration of the papal theocracy were overseen by the internationally renowned champion of constit...
Studies of migration rely heavily on the use of identity categories. Yet the uncritical use of such categories has had serious negative consequences for the understanding of migration and related social processes. This chapter examines the tendency to treat often ill-defined identity categories as reflecting an external reality, and the danger of i...
Following eleven years' work, in 1998 a high-level Vatican commission instituted by Pope John Paul II offered what has become the official position of the Roman Catholic Church denying any responsibility for fomenting the kind of demonization of the Jews that made the Holocaust possible. In a 2001 book, The popes against the Jews, I demonstrated th...
On the occasion of the Conference on the State of Italy, held at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies on 29–30 October 2013, David Kertzer interviewed former two-time Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi. Their focus was on the evolution of Prodi's involvement in Italian government and politics. This first in what is planned...
Italy represents an unexpected and in some ways paradoxical outcome in terms of fertility control: a drop to one of the lowest birth rates in the world has been accompanied by continuing extensive use of traditional methods despite the availability of modern contraception. Using data from 349 interviews conducted in 2005-06 in four Italian cities,...
In the 1970s, when the social science history movement emerged in the United States, leading to the founding of the Social Science History Association, a simultaneous movement arose in which historians looked to cultural anthropology for inspiration. Although both movements involved historians turning to social sciences for theory and method, they...
The deep drop of the fertility rate in Italy to among the lowest in the world challenges contemporary theories of childbearing and family building. Among high-income countries, Italy was presumed to have characteristics of family values and female labor force participation that would favor higher fertility than its European neighbors to the north....
Our motivation in this paper comes from a growing concern in demography for a
better understanding of context in reproductive behavior outcomes. This takes on particular
importance in Italy, a country still characterized by very low fertility. We exploit detailed life
history calendar data for a large, nationally representative sample of Italian wo...
The theoretical underpinnings of the project reported on here (ELFI: Explaining
Low Fertility in Italy) lie in the development of an approach that takes advantage of the
valuable theoretical perspectives and methodologies of mainstream demographic,
sociological, and economic studies of fertility, while capturing the central role played
by culture i...
Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37.1 (2006) 125-126
Many attempts have been made to shed light on Vatican finances, but all come up against the paucity of crucial documents in the Vatican archives. At the time of this book's writing, those archives were not available for documents more recent than 1921, and, even for the earlier period covered...
This article examines the conception of population composition as an object of political struggle. It acknowledges that census holds a powerful sway over political analysts and explains that census becomes a political battleground not due to vitiation of what should be a technical exercise, but rather because of its fundamental role in representing...
In the last dozen years of the 20th century anthropological demography as both a specialty within anthropology and as a recognized part of demography began to come into its own. Special graduate programs sprang up, a regular committee of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population devoted to the field, begun somewhat earlier, att...
Honour and Violence. Anton Blok. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2001. 358 pp.
For many millenia, in cultures around the world, the concept of generation has prospered. Its privileged place in Western societies is reflected in its codification in the Bible, while the most disparate societies of Africa, Asia and Australia have incorporated the generational concept in their notions of the social order. It is no surprise that th...
This review examines one of the most fundamental issues of family history, the nature of domestic groups in which people lived in the past. The focus is further limited to the evolution of family forms in Europe. Although such models as those originally proposed by Laslett and Hajnal for western family history have been shown to be wanting, they ha...
Book reviewed:
Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad, David D. Laitin
In the midst of the Damascus Affair, another diplomatic case involving the
government of Adolphe Thiers and the rights of Jews was unfolding, unknown
to the public. In June 1840 the government of the Papal States attempted
to seize the newborn daughter of a French Jewish couple in Rome on the
grounds that she had been secretly baptized and thus cou...
Recent work on the large-scale abandonment of European infants has focused on abandonment itself, how the infants were treated, and how many survived infancy. Little is known about what happened to those who survived. The authors focus on what happened to the foundlings of Bologna, Italy, over the course of the nineteenth century, at the point in t...
A great deal of scholarly attention has been devoted in recent years to the large-scale abandonment of new born babies in the European past, with special emphasis given to the staggering rates of infant mortality among the foundlings. For the most part, scholars have agreed with the foundling home officials of the past in assigning much of the blam...
Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. Catherine Bell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 352 pp.
The article analyzes age structuring in foundling homes in Italian cities, and shows how the authorities who founded and ran the homes applied age criteria differently in different places. The age of the child was an important criterion for determining how long authorities rendered payments to foster parents, as well as when children were judged to...
The large-scale abandonment of infants in the European past has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention in recent years. Its staggering dimensions in many countries of Europe, as recently as the nineteenth century, have prompted some uncomfortable rethinking about family life and parent–child (and especially mother–child) relations in the pas...
Gender, Family and Work in Naples. V. A. Goddard. Oxford, England: Berg, 1996. 264 pp.
Although in its early years anthropology often used demographic research and showed interest in demographic issues, anthropology and demography have more recently grown to distrust each other's guiding assumptions and methods. Demographers have stressed universal causal models and standardized survey methods, while sociocultural anthropologists hav...
Work conducted in Europe upon European historical demography has been central to the development of the field. The impetus for European historical demography came mainly not from historians but from demographers and to a somewhat lesser extent economic historians. The author notes the influence of Louis Henry and his successors in France and Italy....
In the debate over “maternal indifference” and, more generally, over the ways in which children were viewed and treated in the European past, the care of abandoned children has attracted a good deal of attention. Huge numbers of newborns were consigned to foundling homes in past centuries, and attempts to keep the children alive depended heavily on...
In this collection of essays ten anthropologists and two historians address the world-wide pattern of falling birth rates. Fertility has commonly been treated from a specialized demographic perspective, but there is today widespread dissatisfaction with conventional demographic approaches, which are criticized for neglecting the cultural, social, a...
RésuméJusqu'à la fin du XIXe siècle, dans une grande partie de l'Europe, très nombreux étaient les nourrissons abandonnés qui se retrouvaient dépendant d'un cadre institutionnel. Si une des justifications anciennement avancée pour justifier l'existence de ces institutions avait été qu'elles sauvaient la vie à des créatures autrement condamnées, les...
RésuméL'étude empirique des liens de parenté au-delà du ménage pour l'Europe du passé reste vraiment sous-développée. Cette étude se concentre sur une population qui vécut à Casalecchio di Reno, près de Bologne en Italie, ville en voie d'industrialisation et habitée par des métayers. La nature et l'impact de leurs liens de parenté avec d'autres mén...
Kinship ranks second only to economic factors in social-scientific attempts to explain who migrates, when they move, and where they go. A person’s household circumstances are commonly thought to influence his or her propensity to move, as is the presence of other kin in the same community. Furthermore, the existence and location of kin in other com...
Reviewed in light of evidence from the commune of Casalecchio, the Hajnal thesis and its subsequent reformulations are shown to be in need of modification. With respect to the “Mediterranean marriage pattern” (postulated by Peter Laslett), the Casalecchio evidence shows a strong patrilocal tradition of postmarital residence but not a concomitant ea...
Contents: M.W. Riley, Foreword. Part I:Introduction. D.I. Kertzer, Comparative and Historical Perspectives on Age Structuring. Part II:Age and Power. W.H. Sangree, Age and Power: Life Course Trajectories and Age Structuring Power Relations in East and West Africa. J. Keith, Cultural Commentary and the Culture of Gerontology. D.L. Featherman, L.K. S...
Focusing on the industrializing, sharecropping town of Casalecchio di Reno, in northern Italy, this article examines the extent to which children lived with or near grandparents, and clarifies the coresidential situation of the older segment of the population. The three-generation household, closely identified with the traditional sharecropping eco...
Ronald Reagan's visit to the German cemetery at Bitburg, the funeral rites for slain Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, the highly publicized arms negotiations meetings between Soviet and American leaders—these are recent examples of how powerful the effects of political ceremony and ritual can be. In the most comprehensive study of political rit...
This historical context necessary for understanding Italian family life from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century is outlined in this introduction. Italy's backward economy and its political fragmentation in the first half of the nineteenth century is detailed, the major economic differences among various parts of the country a...
Debates about the nature and geographical distribution of complex family households in the European past continue to animate much of the work of family history. This ar ticle criticizes the common view that demographic constraints prevented the realization of com plex family forms in western Europe. It also takes issue with recent attempts to contr...
- Peter Boomgaard, Denys Lombard, Marchands et hommes d’affaires asiatiques dans l’Ocean Indien et la Mer de Chine 13e - 20e siècles, Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. 1988. 375 pp., Jean Aubin (eds.) - Gary Brana-Shute, David I. Kertzer, Ritual, politics and power, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. xi, 235 pp...
PIP
A detailed study of the factors associated with the decline of infant mortality in the town of Casalecchio di Reno, near Bologna, Italy, from 1865-1921 was generated from household tax records, birth and death registers, census data, and a variety of scholarly sources. Infant mortality had been 400/1000 in 17th century, fell to about 250 in the...
In the past decade a tremendous increase in family history research in Italy, Spain and Portugal provides new insight into family processes and has many implications for generalizations regarding the course of European family history. In this article many of these new findings are detailed and their historical and theoretical implications assessed....
Internal migration remains one of the most important issues in European social history. Our entire concept of community and of social life rests on certain assumptions about residential stability, yet these assumptions have only been inadequately tested for most historical periods and in most places. We now know that previously accepted characteriz...
This study examines patterns of male migration in central Italy during its transformation from an agrarian to an urban-industrial society. The Italian population registers provide data on the extent and type of emigration among more than 3,500 men (ages 10 and over) who immigrated to the commune of Casalecchio di Reno, bordering the city of Bologna...
The use of data from population registers in Western Europe to examine historical trends in migration back to the beginning of the nineteenth century is considered. The authors attempt "to show how such sources can be utilized to yield rich historical detail on migration by making use of some well established demographic techniques particularly tho...
The growing interchange between family historians and sociocultural anthropologists is part of a broader movement linking anthropology and history, which is discussed in this article. Two traditions in anthropology—one symbolic and the other social organizational—have contributed in different ways to this in terdisciplinary development. The reasons...
This study examines processes of life-course transitions in 21 African age-set societies, a group of preliterate societies where age is a major organizing principle, and compares processes of transition there with those in the United States today. The analysis challenges some longheld views about the putative smooth course of passage throught the l...
Sydel Silverman. Three Bells of Civilization: The Life of an Italian Hill Town. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. xvi + 263 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography and index. $15.00.