JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . The MIT Press and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. How people in the past used and valued kinship in their daily lives is one of the most important and most elusive matters in contemporary social history. The largest issue is the character of community life and how that character changed in the temporally imprecise, yet unmistakable, transition from the traditional to the modern world. Intimately related to this central question are others surrounding the nature of family life and the relationship of family to the various ecologies, economic systems, demographic regimes, and cultures that dotted the historical landscape of Europe and the West.We propose that a social network approach not only serves to conceptualize kinship and community in new and productive ways, but also helps to reconcile two long-standing concerns in family history that have led historians to study kinship in competing ways, and which reflect the current division between family history and family demography. In support, we offer a case study of kinship in an Eastern European peasant estate in the midnineteenth century. Although we do not advance either a fullfledged model or a complete application of the social network approach, the network perspective that we apply adds to the understanding of European kinship and provides a guide for future work.

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In the past two decades, social network analysis (SNA) has become a major analytical paradigm in sociology and now occupies a strategic place in disciplinary debates on a wide variety of issues. Historians, however, have been slow to adopt the approach for at least three reasons. First, the conceptual orientation of sociologists practicing historical social network analysis (HSNA) remains unfamiliar to the majority of professional historians. Just when SNA was maturing in the late 1980s and 1990s, the interdisciplinary interest in social science theory among historians, so characteristic of the 1970s and early 1980s, began to wane. The subsequent turn toward post modernist thinking in history left the profession increasingly uninformed about both classical and contemporary social theory. Second, those quantitatively-oriented historians who might be predisposed to use SNA's specialized statistical methods constitute less than a quarter of the profession today, thus the risk of SNA finding its way into mainstream historical scholarship is low to start. Third, SNA's data requirements are formidable. SNA demands evidence of social interaction among all members of a social system for a variety of behaviors, and thus necessitates a broad range of high-quality records for the place, time and activities being studied. Because historians are plagued by an incomplete historical record and imperfect understandings of past social relations, HSNA remains an inherently problematic enterprise. Yet despite conceptual, methodological and evidentiary obstacles, SNA possesses real potential for historical analysis.

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