NCJ Number
159520
Date Published
1994
Length
199 pages
Annotation
Based on archival records of prosecutions of the three most important rural types of crime before the penal courts of Upper Bavaria in the late 19th Century -- arson, infanticide, and poaching -- this study in historical anthropology reveals the fabric of the village society.
Abstract
The rural village in 19th-century Europe was caught in conflict between its traditional local culture and its new integration into the grasp of State institutions and modern social structures. Local practices were turned into crimes; the social meaning of crime within the village culture was redefined by the new standards of bourgeois penal laws and psychiatry. The language of the intruding agencies has structured, by a wealth of written documentation, the image of village life for the outside world. Criminal investigations, however, had to be based on interrogations of the villagers themselves. It is through this record of a traditional oral culture that the villagers' own views, language, and symbolic gestures have been preserved. This book uses an analytical approach informed by social history, folklore and gender studies, anthropology, criminology, and psychoanalysis to reconstruct the cultural implications of these documents, which originated from the very moment when traditional village culture was being called into question. Focusing on the individual in conflict within the household economy and the local community, this study provides a new and original interpretation of power structures, gender relations, and generational rites of passage within the village. The author concludes that the village is not autonomous, nor is it a structure sufficient unto itself. When conflicts shake its rule systems and the internal village checks or resources fail, it has to rely on the alternatives offered by the bourgeois outside world and the courts, which can now effectively assume control over decisions concerning right and wrong. In this structural dependency of internal village contradictions, a process of norm setting from outside begins, whereby bourgeois society penetrates peasant society, initiating a structural transformation and burrowing into the villagers' unconscious through the questions and proposed interpretations of the judges and psychiatrists. Chapter footnotes