Inbred Marriages in Potes and Liébana (1600-1850)

ad_hlab_min — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 16:30:03 +0000

Emigration in Liébana had a direct effect not only on its demographic density, but also on the marriage patterns of the town. According to the sources, it can be concluded that the social relations of the people of Liébana were restricted almost exclusively to their own community, with more than two thirds of the inhabitants marrying people from their own parish, 87% if we extend this to marriages between individuals from the same valley and 95% if we include the whole region. In Potes, on the contrary, during the 17th century only half of the marriage registers show that both partners were born and resided there.
Over the years, kinship increased the ties of neighbourhood, to the point that in very small parishes they became almost as close as the closest blood relationship. Nevertheless, the figures for endogamous marriages began to fall with the beginning of the 18th century in both places (Liébana being higher at all times), stabilising between 25% and 35% from the middle of the 18th century until the middle of the 19th century.

The post Inbred Marriages in Potes and Liébana (1600-1850) first appeared on History Lab.

Ethnic endogamy in the parish of San Antonio de Toacazo, Ecuador (18th-19th centuries)

ad_hlab_min — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 16:28:46 +0000

In the northern Andes, the introduction of the Catholic marriage ritual defined guidelines for controlling the life cycle of the indigenous population, influencing the biological reproduction of the group. During colonial times, two stages must be distinguished, comprising the encounter and collision of the 17th century and the second, which involved the stabilisation of the colonial order based on the European-Catholic family model. The clash between the two worlds and their different practices unleashed spaces of mixture in which no one clearly followed a single practice or norm. Therefore, different social and ethnic groups articulated different forms of families in different spaces and at different times. The ups and downs of nuptiality throughout the seventeenth century expressed the difficulty of imposing a specific ritual for which one had to pay. Thus, getting married according to ecclesiastical canons implied submission to the colonial powers by imposing a practice configured from another order. After the achievement of Independence, the practices ordered by the costly Church-Republican State pact to “change everything without changing anything” in matters such as the management of spaces in people’s private lives increased. Throughout the 18th century, the settlers of Toacazo maintained almost impassable ethnic distances. The main human contingent – the indigenous men and women who accounted for 85% of the population in the 1778 census – related, following their customary tradition, only among themselves, both through the distribution of resources and community spaces and through the networks of compadrazgo that protected them and guaranteed their survival as a group. Of the total number of separate marriages in the two centuries, 89.2% and 83.8% took place between indigenous people, just as the vast majority of Spaniards and mestizos did the same. White women residing in the community, who accounted for 2% of the total in the 18th century and 9% in the 19th century, married their peers.

The post Ethnic endogamy in the parish of San Antonio de Toacazo, Ecuador (18th-19th centuries) first appeared on History Lab.

Endogamia - History Lab

Inbred Marriages in Potes and Liébana (1600-1850)

Ethnic endogamy in the parish of San Antonio de Toacazo, Ecuador (18th-19th centuries)