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This study deals with a period of Württemberg rural history when a particular aspect of kinship became a charged political issue. The term “Vetter” (cousin) reverberates throughout the texts from the 1740s through the 1820s, usually in the context of social or political controversy. There are indications that by the second half of the eighteenth century oligarchical structures, coordinated through familial alliances, dominated the chief civil and ecclesiastical institutions of the country as well as county (Oberamt) and local government. In this chapter, I consider the origins of the specific discourse about cousins and differentiate the kinship logic of that period from what went before and after. My central concern is the formation of the particular language of kinship that accompanied a redeployment of power at the level of the village magistrates. People frequently referred to a local court as a Vetter-Gericht or Vetterlesgericht, alluding to the fact that its members were all closely related and acted as a tightly organized syndicate to coordinate the use of village resources, to dispense patronage, to channel various emoluments to themselves, and to defraud the central government of taxes, tithes, and other sources of income. The different ways kinship was talked about from period to period reflected considerable differences in social practice and the constitution of authority and power in village life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of kin in a society never emanates from a single strategy, applied by all individuals. Although many generalizations about structure can be drawn from statistical correlations, it is impossible to describe a kinship system adequately without examining the logics of different occupational, wealth, political, gender, and age groups or taking into account the diversity of practices, whose creativity and reiteration continually shape, support, and reconfigure relationships between individuals and classes. This long chapter presents 13 biographies of village men who interacted with one another during the last two decades of the eighteenth century and first two decades of the nineteenth. Each of them, to use Pierre Bourdieu's image, was dealt a different hand and each maneuvered within the rules of the game with quite different resources, skill, and intensity. The biographies are based on scattered references in the sources, but the breaks, surprises, and inconsistencies would still be there if the record were fuller. The point of the exercise is to explore the range of kinship practices by steadily shifting the point of view and to link them to different strategies of class, family, and political culture. Each biography interacts, so to speak, with the others, and reflects back on the singularity of a particular life but also adds to an unfolding story, whose focus, despite abrupt shifts in temporality and perspective, follows a line of social and political development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the middle decades of the eighteenth century, kinship changed dramatically. Some people in the village began to marry cousins and to call upon other cousins to be godparents. An alliance system emerged that favored consanguineal relatives over affinal ones, but the connection between the two categories is complicated, and the one was frequently reinforced by the other. When a man or a woman married a cousin, other cousins consequently became in-laws and were then frequently prepared to coordinate their activities in new ways. The innovation lies in the fact that cousin marriages allowed alliances forged in one generation to be replicated in another. Not all sections of the village adopted the new practice at once, and not until the early decades of the nineteenth century was it generalized, although even then the kinds of cousins chosen correlated closely with different social strata. The new system lasted in its essential form until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the systematic alliance of agnatically constructed “lines” gave way to a form of exchange mediated by women. At this point, it would be tedious and not especially rewarding to go over each indicator of kin interaction to show the precise departures and continuities at every point. A fuller discussion of the intricacies of the system – once it was fully in place and subject to a half century of experience – will be taken up in the section on the third cohort (centered on the 1780s). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, there were two basic coordinates for alliance formation between households and within and across generations. Inheritance, as already mentioned, distributed individuals onto a clearly marked-out social terrain and prescribed everyone's place in the village hierarchy. Initially, the position of any individual in the village wealth hierarchy was the outcome of birth into a particular family. Devolution established the framework in which marital strategies were worked out, and in contrast to later in the century when the market played a central role in the distribution of village resources, family and kin dynamics were largely circumscribed by inheritance. The second coordinate of alliance formation was set by exogamy rules and practices (Chapter 3). Because such a large circle of consanguineal kin were not marriageable, alliances struck in a particular generation between householders could not be replicated easily in the following generations. For example, if two “houses” established close relations with each other through the exchange of spouses, the obvious way to reproduce the connection in the next generation was to have the children (now cousins) marry each other. Or the families could wait another generation to arrange marriages between the grandchildren (second cousins). But these sorts of strategies were closed to Württemberg villagers at the beginning of the eighteenth century, either as a result of direct prohibition from the state or because they were unwilling (or practically unable) to take recourse in the possibility of dispensations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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