Volume IV, Issue 1, 2010
Abstract
The purpose of this paper while taking into account the social and
ethno-cultural background, as the ethnic minority status is to see how Romania,
especially the western part called Transylvania, goes through economic and
demographic transformations and how this is reflected in young generations life
strategies, prolonged youth lifecycle, grounding a family and the prolonging of
events that are attached to it, especially shifting the age of childbearing. The
empirical sources of the paper came from a survey realized in 2006-2007 in West
Romania of a 2930 randomly selected representative sample between 19-45 years
old, who belong to ethnic Hungarian minority community. According to our
findings, we may assert that the dates of the transition to adulthood are postponed
to older ages in the case of younger cohorts, but there are significant differences
among different social groups. Thus, it may be seen that successive cohorts
postpone to increasingly later times their moving out of the parental home in
Transylvania, starting with the cohorts burn in 1967. Postponing is more
significant among women and at all ages a higher proportion of women live
separately from their parents and they leave the parental home earlier than men.
We may not only speak about postponement of the age of leaving home, but the
heterogeneity of life courses has also increased. It seems that there are no unitary
and socially expected practices for the establishment of individual households.
Keywords
Adulthood, youth, postponement, leaving home.
Abstract
The following papers examines the changing spatial structure of an
extremily dynamic Romanian city, the regional centre of Transylvania, Cluj-
Napoca. Two main questions are analised. First, we examine the natural and
hystorical factors of the citys development, and, second, the changes in the spatial
structure of the present-day city, emphasising the question of the residential zones.
The study reveals that the city has strengthened his tertiary functions after 1989,
especially the educational, cultural, medical and financial functions. It has hugely
contributed to the further social differentiation of the citys population, and to the
expantion of the residential areas.
Keywords
Urban development, residential areas, spatial structure, functional zones.
Abstract
In an age when marriage is no longer considered the final step in a
couple’s life, living together outside marriage is considered common place in
Western societies, in social behaviours and interpretations alike. Is this the case in
Romania as well? For lack of a local ethnographic literature of contemporary
couples, scholars tend to work in their analysis of change with Western concepts,
although there is always the question to what extent these can cover specifically
Romanian cases. This article aims to reveal the meanings given to free unions by
young people from Bucharest, based on a qualitative research. The current
investigation allows an insight into the current changes in couples’ lives in
Romania, how this category is being (re)defined while closing the gap with the
trend in modern societies on a wider level.
Keywords
Couple, cohabitation, mariagge, postcommunisme, Romania.
Abstract
The traditional Hungarian historiography believes in long lasting denominational structures, which do not produce much change on short term. If there are relative quick changes, they occurred because of external factors (forced changes), or they are not real ones (falsification of statistics). Usually no demographic factors are mentioned between the components of change. The author tries to make a revision on this picture reconstructing the development processes of religious groups of historical Transdanubia (the Western part of present Hungary and the province of Burgenland in nowadays Austria).
The starting point of the investigation is the conscription of 1722 which is compared with the later sources. The data show the structural change through time: the Roman Catholic Church is gaining dominance during the 18th 19 th century in Transdanubia while the Protestants are driven back into scattered geographic enclaves of the population. If we look the figures of change by denomination we can see highly uneven growth patterns between the different churches especially the increase of the Jews and the decrease of the Greek Orthodox population are remarkable.
Beyond the changes of population size, distribution and structure we can see several parallel processes. There are in, out and internal migrations, conversions, and differential patterns in natural increase. These changes together are resulted a growing denominational mix in the population of the single settlements and a general shift toward the Roman Catholicism. The spatial dispersion process of the different religious groups at the same time will decrease the religious separation, causing a growing cultural mix and forms fragmented cultural minorities. While during the 18 th Century between the elements of structural changes the long term migration and the forced conversion have important role, in the next century the differential fertility, and the internal migration together with the emergence of intermarriages are the most decisive factors in forming the structure.
The investigations have several results. First it proves the value of early church statistics: the figures about denominational groups give important markers about internal migration and differential fertility well before the beginning of official statistics. Second, the research proves the different growth patterns of the religious groups as well as the mutual interaction between the demographic, religious and regional processes and structures. Finally it underlines the fact that the differences of demographic behavior had decisive role in the changes of denominational structure during the 18th and 19 th Centuries. The aggressive interventions of the politics and the Churches had no sole and exclusive impact on religious composition of the Transdanubian population before the 20th Century.
Keywords
Transdanubia, denominations, migration, conversion, differential fertility.
Abstract
The results of the analyses presented below are to form the
demographic basis to potential studies on the children population of Krakow in
the 2nd half of 19th Century. As far as this city is concerned, they are the first step
to satisfy the demand presented by Philippe Aries: to study thoroughly the
childhood and the family of the past centuries (Aries 1960). For the last fifty years
a lot has been done in this respect (the reader might find it helpful to study the
following publications which present valuable biblioghraphic clues: Famille et
parenté: le renouvellement des approches 2000, Kuklo 1995, 2005, Kopczyński 1997,
Szołtysek 2003), however, the detailed research of Krakow population has been
neglected, one of few papers on the family in Krakow is a very interesting article
by W. Najdus (1991).
Keywords
Family history in 19th Century, history of children, censuses in
Habsburg Monarchy, hauseholds in 19th Century Krakow, religious structure of
population in Krakow.
Abstract
Trying to capture the phenomenon of death in the city of Arad in the
late nineteenth and early twentyth Century we focused our approach on a
demographic analysis and structure based on the following: age, gender, ethnicity
and religion, occupation, level of education. Sources used for the quantitative,
demographic dimension, (parish registers of civil status, statistical sources) show
significant population growth in the segment time in question of Arad county. But
the upward trend was interrupted by the periods (1851-1857, 1871-1880) when the
population decreased because of various epidemics, like cholera, in the years
1872-1873. These negative values were not recorded in the city of Arad.
Keywords
Arad, cholera, demographic transition, alcoholism, infant mortality.
Abstract
The entrance of Transylvania and Banat in the Austrian Empire space
determined in the second part of the 18th Century the constitution of the Military
Border (Militärgrenze) in the region of the mountainous Banat, the south of
Transylvania and in the north east of this province. The Military Border
represented an area that was removed from the local feudal authority and that was
subordinated directly to the Viennese Court, which led to a reinvention of the free
peasantry in this area, that represented a modernity outbreak, a laboratory of
modernizing the social experiments of the empire. These experiments include
those concerning the reconfiguration of social communitarian structures, including
the family, its organization, but also the reconfiguration of the rural habitat,
especially the one of the household and the rural precinct. In this study we will
analyze the reforms in the family organization domain, through the constitution of
the house communion, inspired from the zadruga model of the southern
Slavs, which will replace the nuclear, typical Romanian family in the area of the
Military Border. The existence of the extended family, which grouped in the
house communion more related families (usually brothers), but sometimes
unrelated, with a large number of persons, imposed the reconfiguration of the
household and of the dwelling. The latter gets an imposing aspect, with a large
number of rooms, like in the case of the houses from the mountainous Banat
where development occurred through agglutination, addition or annexation of
new rooms to the initial core of the house when a new family was founded, as in
the case of the Năsăud area. After the dissolution of the Military Border, in the
second part of the 19th Century, despite the fact that the external imperatives of
the family and of the household have disappeared, the logic of the communion
structures regarding the house and, implicitly, of the home, have been maintained,
so that even nowadays one can see on the field vestiges in dissolution of these
organizations, as I have managed to highlight through the field surveys from the
Şanţ locality and from the mountainous Banat area.
Abstract
Childbearing can be seen as the interaction of two contrasting forces
that affect human choices: the factors of “choice” and the factors of
“constraint”. Choice is a prerogative of humans, implies an act of will,
but is conditioned in its expression by the forces of contraints. This is
true for the choice of a partner; for the decision to enter into a stable
union; for the timing, spacing and number of children; for the degree of
parental investment on children. Constraints may be of a material nature –
such as the availability of space, of energy or material resources; the
quality of the environment; the intensita of pathologies – or immaterial
ones, such as social norms, obligations, group or clan loyalties. This
paper is a reflection on the concepts of choice and constraint and their
changing nature in history”.
Keywords
Birth, childhood, cultural differences, choice and constraintforces
.