Class, property, and structural endogamy: Visualizing networked histories.

This article examines kinship linkages in the Austrian village of Feistritz. Relinking is a concept of structural anthropology developed in contemporary and historical studies by researchers who have shown the importance of marital relinkages between families as a means of alliance in European villages. Marital relinking of the ancestral lines of two or more couples occurs when there exists a circuit of consanguinal links among them. In the genealogical graphs for this Austrian case, there are many circuits created by relinking marriages, and many of them overlap to form larger blocks. Blocks and circuits differ fundamentally from simple intermarriage between two families, since circuits of relationships glue different families together in an entirely different way. In the present case, by identifying such blocks, the constitution of class differences both in intermarriage and the transmission processes governing the flows of property is better studied. Matrimonial blocks entail easily recognizable social boundaries that may be involved in a variety of social inclusion and exclusion processes. Matrimonial relinkings have a dual aspect at the boundary between the individual and the social. While at the individual level they may embody specific marriage strategies, when considered sociologically, they may have group and boundary formation as a consequence.