Under One Roof: Household Formation and Cultural Ideals in an Astu Rian Mountain Village

Abstract

Using the concept of "operational cultural ideals, " the study examines household formation in the Asturian mountain village of Escobines and argues that such ideals are not a set of preexisting perfectly compatible norms against which countrymen and women can easily measure their actions and achievements. Rather, what is seen is a series of negotiated understandings of incompatible ideals —between man and wife, parents and children, lineal and collateral relatives, and between villagers and external powers such as aristocratic landowners and the government. These understandings repose in the sense of the appropriate relationship between building structures and family structures, between the desire to gather "under one roof" and the impulse toward separation of individual conjugal units.