La maisnie, « la plus petite unité sociale » Précisions terminologiques.

The present paper brings into light the French word maisnie, currently used in the Social Sciences by scholars dedicated to the study of households units, especially from the South - East European region. In 1974, the Romania originated French anthropologist Paul Henri Stahl is the first one to introduce this 11th century French word into the Social Sciences. His choice came as a response to a translation dilemma he found himself confronted with, while writing his studies regarding the South - East European social units: the inexistence in the currently French language of a word able to designate the “smallest social unit”, as he called the household. Instead of creating a new word (as in the well known case of the zadruga), he propose one which had actually been used in the different regional French dialects in the Middle Ages, maisnie. This word used to designate a social unit very similar to the Romanian gospodărie, the Bulgarian družina or kupčina, the Serbo-Croatian domačinstvo, the Albanian shtëpi or the Greek mikokiato. Starting by specifying the particular context in which this word made its entrance in the vocabulary of the Social Sciences, the paper continues by focusing on the social reality hidden behind this complex notion. In the last part conclusions are drawn with regard to the applicability of the ancient French notion of maisnie to comparable social units from the South - East European region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]