Conclusions

This chapter reviews the impressive and creative reworking of Islamic thought for Christian purposes that was dependent on the continued strength and support of the central government. It points out that the centralization of the church under Cyriacus and Dionysius was a product of good relations with the caliphs. It also recounts the war against Byzantium after al-Maʾmun's death and succession by his brother al-Muʿtasim, which meant that the Christians of the caliphate also came under suspicion. The chapter talks about the reign of the new caliph that led to the unravelling of Dionysius' political position, which had sustained his innovative cultural and intellectual stance during the reign of al-Maʾmun. It cites the realities of preindustrial society that meant the elimination of Christian populations' ability to resist the government, limiting their political agency and the esteem in which they were held by their Muslim co-citizens.

Intergenerational mobility in the very long run: Florence 1427-2011

We examine intergenerational mobility in the very long run, across generations that are six centuries apart. We exploit a unique dataset containing detailed information at the individual level for all people living in the Italian city of Florence in 1427. These individuals have been associated, using their surnames, with their pseudo-descendants living in Florence in 2011. We find that long-run earnings elasticity is about 0.04; we also find an even stronger role for real wealth inheritance and evidence of persistence in belonging to certain elite occupations. Our results are confirmed when we account for the quality of the pseudo-links and when we address the potential selectivity bias behind the matching process. Finally, we frame our results within the existing evidence and argue that the quasi-immobility of preindustrial society and the existence of multigenerational effects might explain the long-lasting effects of ancestors’ socioeconomic status.

The dynamics of men's cooperation and social status in a small-scale society

We propose that networks of cooperation and allocation of social status co-emerge in human groups. We substantiate this hypothesis with one of the first longitudinal studies of cooperation in a preindustrial society, spanning 8 years. Using longitudinal social network analysis of cooperation among men, we find large effects of kinship, reciprocity and transitivity in the nomination of cooperation partners over time. Independent of these effects, we show that (i) higher-status individuals gain more cooperation partners, and (ii) individuals gain status by cooperating with individuals of higher status than themselves. We posit that human hierarchies are more egalitarian relative to other primates species, owing in part to greater interdependence between cooperation and status hierarchy.

Sleeping Around, With, and Through Time

This article includes autoethnographic vignettes that explore the emotional, embodied, relational, communal, and ritualized aspects of sleeping. As a Western, White, upper-middle-class professional woman in a long-term relationship with a partner who has similar characteristics, I describe sleeping in the familiar environment of our primary and vacation homes, where we both define ourselves as sleeping well together. To tease out important aspects of what counts as a good night’s sleep, I contrast sleeping at home to sleeping in other places, such as in an airplane, hotel in a foreign country, and a hospital, and then compare my experience of sleeping in a modern Western environment with sleeping practices in preindustrial society. I examine my definition of “a good night’s sleep” and how it is affected by historical and cultural narratives of normative sleep. Questioning my original conceptions of good sleeping and sleeping ritual, I explore and put into practice alternative storylines regarding how to accomplish a good night’s slumber.

Widowhood Strategies in Preindustrial Society

In preindustrial society, the loss of a spouse usually impelled the surviving party to adapt quickly by choosing between certain strategies: to remain the head of the household, to remarry, to enter a household headed by a child or the spouse of child, to dissolve the household and enter into an unrelated person's household, or to migrate out of the parish. The use of competing-risk hazard models and longitudinal microlevel data shows that demographic, socioeconomic, and gender-related factors interacted in determining the choice of strategy in a rural area of southern Sweden during the nineteenth century.

On the Way to a Post-Familial Family

Whereas, in preindustrial society, the family was mainly a community of need held together by an obligation of solidarity, the logic of individually designed lives has come increasingly to the fore in the contemporary world. The family is becoming more of an elective relationship, an association of individuals who each brings to it their own interests, experiences and plans, and who are each subjected to different controls, risks and constraints. It is therefore necessary to devote much more effort than in the past to the holding together of these different biographies. Whereas people could once fall back on rules and rituals, the prospect now is of a staging of everyday life, an acrobatics of balancing and coordinating. This does not mean that the traditional family is simply disappearing. But it is losing the monopoly it had for so long. Its quantitative significance is declining as new lifestyles appear and spread. These in all their intermediary and secondary forms represent the future of families, or what I call the contours of the `post-familial family'.