OBZORJA STROKE tema Glasnik S.E.D. 45/4 2005 stran 38 Strokovni Ëlanek/1.04 dr. Siegfried Gruber THE DATABASE ON HOUSEHOLDS AND THE FAMILY IN THE BALKANS WITHIN THE HALPERN COLLECTION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GRAZ Abstract The Centre for Southeast European History at the Univer- sity of Graz houses the Halpern Collection. This collection, donated by the U.S. cultural anthropologist Joel M. Halpern (professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts), includes unique material encompassing the area of Yugosla- via in the last two centuries. It comprises sources necessary for the quantitative investigation of family and household structures (census lists, tax registers, status animarum), as well as additional sources (fieldwork notes, interview mate- rial and autobiographies). The collection is rounded up by a comprehensive selection of monographs and essays relevant to the family history in the Balkans. A considerable part of the sources has already been converted to data files. In the following this article will focus on these data files. IzvleËek Halpernova zbirka je shranjena na Oddelku za zgodovino Jugovzhodne Evrope na Univezi v Gradcu. Podaril jim jo je ameriπki kulturni antropolog Joel M. Halpern (zasluæni profesor na Univerzi v Massachusettsu) in vsebuje edinstven material z obmoËja nekdanje Jugoslavije v zadnjih dveh stoletjih: vire, ki so potrebni za kvantitativno prouËevanje druæine in struktur gospodinjstev (sezname popisa preb- ivalstva, registre davkov, zapisnike duπ), kot tudi druge vire (terenske zapiske, intervjuje in avtobiografije). Zbirko zak- ljuËuje celostna zbirka monografij in esejev, ki posegajo na podroËje zgodovine druæine na Balkanu. Precejπen del virov so æe spremenili v podatkovne datoteke; priËujoËi Ëlanek se osredotoËa prav nanje. Joel M. Halpern began to gather statistical data and data for quantitative research already during his first field study in Oraπac in the years 1953 and 1954. In the years 1961 and 1962 he was once again in Yugoslavia with his wife and the his- torical situation of that time was very favourable for him. The USA delivered considerable amounts of wheat to Yugoslavia and this led in turn to a high amount of dinars in the Ameri- can embassy in Yugoslavia. Most of this money was used for improving Yugoslavia’s infrastructure, but parts of it were reserved for scientific purposes. This resource enabled a gene- rous funding of Joel M. Halpern’s research and he could hire dozens of students and ethnologists. The collaboration with the Central Statistical Office of Yugoslavia allowed him to copy original census material of selected settlements. (Kaser and Halpern 1994, 116) This data together with the material gathe- red by the students during their fieldwork formed the basis for the planned series of the village studies in all republics of Yugoslavia. These studies should have been done according to the first one on Oraπac. (Halpern 1958) These settlements were chosen so that some of them were near industrial centres and others in remote areas. They should have covered the whole ethnic and religious spectrum of Yugoslavia and had about 2.000 inhabitants.1 The relevant archival material from the 19th century was also copied by hired personnel, especially for Oraπac and the neighbouring villages. (Kaser and Halpern 1994, 114‡116) The archival material derives mostly from the Arhiv Srbije, the census material from the statistical offices, and the extensive material about Oraπac from the village office and the parochial office. The entering of the data began already in the sixties of the 20th century with the help of the punched cards which enabled a comparative quantitative research of the censuses of 1863 (7 settlements), 1931 (1 settlement), 1948 (4 settlements), and 1961 (11 settlements). In addition birth, marriage, and death 1 A description of the setting of these places you can find in: Karl Kaser and Joel Martin Halpern, Contemporary Research on the Balkan Family, Anthropological and Historical Approaches. In: Septieme Congres International d’Etudes du Sud-Est Europeen (Thessalonique, 29 août‡4 septembre 1994). Rapports. Athens 1994, pp. 113f. 2 Information about it is in the Halpern-Collection. tema OBZORJA STROKEGlasnik S.E.D. 45/4 2005 stran 39 records were stored on punched cards. This database formed the resource for many of the Halpern’s publications. Later on tax lists of the 19th century, the census of 1884, and other sources for Oraπac were added under the direction of Joel M. Halpern and Richard A. Wagner. 2 In the summer of 1985 the majority of the punched cards were transferred to magnetic tapes (about 15 percent of them were in a condition too bad for it), so that the data can be used also after the end of the reading of punched cards by the machines. (Carey 1985, 1) In the year 1993 the collaboration between Joel M. Halpern and the Department for Southeast European History at the University of Graz began with the research project “Balkan Family”. Halpern gave the magnetic tapes to the research team in Graz,3 and also provided us with the sources of the data on microfilm or xerox copies. In the meantime the data entered in the USA was revised and additional data added to this database, especially tax lists from the 19th century and the censuses of 1863 and 1884 for the neighbouring villages of Oraπac. Information about this database is available at: http: //www-gewi.kfunigraz.ac.at/suedost/datenbank.en.htm. Overall the files originating from the material of Joel M. Hal- pern contain the data of about 115.000 persons. The collection has been extended over the last years within the framework of several research projects, and the inclusion of some 130.000 people from Albania has opened up a further Southeast Euro- pean country to quantitative studies on household and the fam- ily and to demographic research. Today some 200.000 people from the Southeast Europe are recorded in the database, which will be augmented by data from other countries of the region in the future. This data is available in SPSS-format in a Ger- man and an English version. The Serbian data (26.767 persons) was collected by Joel M. Halpern and was entered in the USA since the sixties of the 20th century. The data of the village of Oraπac was revised respectively and entered by Richard A. Wagner from 1977 to 1984. The Serbian data was revised within the framework of several research projects since 1993 in Graz. The data entry of additional villages of the head tax lists of 1830 and 1831, the livestock census of 1859, and the population censuses of 1863 and 1884 was done by Siegfried Gruber in the years 1996 through 2003. The Croatian data (24.656 persons) of the population census of 1712 in the region of Lika and Krbava (Military border) is a basis of the habilitation thesis of Karl Kaser. The data entry of the population census was done by Hannes Grandits in 1997, while the data entry of the property census was done by Siegfried Gruber in 1998. The Slovene (4.890 persons) and Macedonian data (5.458 persons) was also collected by Joel M. Halpern and was also entered in the USA since the sixties of the 20th century. The Slovene data was revised and enhanced by Silvia SoviË for her doctoral thesis. The Macedonian data was revised and enhanced within the framework of the research project “Family Structures and Ethnicity. Case Studies from Macedonia” by Kurt Gostent- schnigg and Anna Hausmaninger. The data of the Albanian population census of 1918 was entered within the framework of the research project “The 1918 Albanian Population Cen- sus: Data Entry and Basic Analysis” by Gentiana Kera and Enriketa Papa. The data of the Albanian population census of 1929 was entered within the framework of the research project “Patriarchal Social Structures in the Balkans”. The Albanian data amounts now to 132.938 persons. An inventory of the data files for research on household and family in the Balkans is available at: http://www-gewi.kfunigraz.ac.at/suedost/datafiles.html. Some of the data (86.575 persons) is not available for research yet, because it is still in older SPSS-formats, not standardised yet, cleaned of errors and documented. Almost all of these data files derive from collections of Joel M. Halpern and were entered since the sixties of the 20th century in the USA. The only exceptions are the population census of Zagreb done in 1857, which comes from the Vienna Database on European Family History,4 and the Montenegrin population census of the 19th century, which was entered within the framework of the research project “Balkanfamily” in the year 1994. An inventory of these data files, which are not ready for usage, is available at: http://www-gewi.kfunigraz.ac.at/suedost/datafiles_not_ ready.html. This database is the foundation for a series of doctoral theses beginning with Richard A. Wagner and his study on the ferti- lity decline in the village of Oraπac.5 Hannes Grandits used the Croatian data in his investigation of the change of everyday life in two villages over a period of almost three centuries.6 Silvia SoviË made use of the Slovene material in her study on households and local economies in Slovenia in the 19th century.7 Siegfried Gruber used the census material of the 19th century for the Serbian villages for a comparative study of them concerning household composition. (Gruber 2004) It is planned to include this database in the near future in GAMS (asset management system for the humanities at the University of Graz). This system should manage collections of photos, data files, texts, media files, and other material within the departments of the faculty for the humanities. None of the departments has then to develop its own system for mana- ging its collections and this system also allows for storing and managing the data of research projects like the database on households and the family in the Balkans. Some small collec- tions are already available for the purpose of demonstration at the following URL: http://www-gewi.uni-graz.at/gams. For information about the data and its usage, please contact the author at gruber@gewi.uni-graz.at. 3 Karl Kaser, Hannes Grandits, Siegfried Gruber, Peter Teibenbacher. 4 http://www.univie.ac.at/Wirtschaftsgeschichte/famdat/ index.html., 23rd December, 2005. 5 Wagner (1984), published as Wagner (1992). Joel M. Halpern fin- ished his doctoral thesis already before the creation of the database and his wife Barbara Kerewsky-Halpern used other material out of their fieldwork for her doctoral thesis. 6 Grandits (1996), published as Grandits (2002). 7 Silvia SoviË, Peasant Communities, Local Economies and Household Composition in Nineteenth-Century Slovenia. Colchester 2001. OBZORJA STROKE tema Glasnik S.E.D. 45/4 2005 stran 40 Bibliography: CAREY, James W. 1985: Final Report. Serbian Data Cards to Tape Project. Manuscript. GRANDITS, Hannes 1996: Familie im kroatischen Dorf. Zum Wandel des Alltagslebens im Turopolje und an der Save (18.‡20. Jhdt.). Graz, Doctoral thesis at the Karl-Franzens- Universität. GRANDITS, Hannes 2002: Familie und sozialer Wandel im ländlichen Kroatien (18.‡20. Jahrhundert). Zur Kunde Südos- teuropas, Vol. II/32. Vienna, Cologne, Weimar. GRUBER, Siegfried 2004: Lebensläufe und Haushaltsformen auf dem Balkan. Das serbische Jasenica im 19. Jahrhundert. Graz, Doctoral thesis at the Karl-Franzens-Universität. HALPERN, Joel M. Halpern 1958: A Serbian Village. New York. KASER, Karl and HALPERN, Joel Martin 1994: Contem- porary Research on the Balkan Family, Anthropological and Historical Approaches. In: Septieme Congres International d’Etudes du Sud-Est Europeen (Thessalonique, 29 ao_t‡4 septembre 1994) Rapports. Athens, pp. 103‡132. SOVI», Silvia 2001: Peasant Communities, Local Economies and Household Composition in Nineteenth-Century Slovenia. Colchester, Doctoral thesis at the University of Essex. WAGNER, Richard A. 1984: Children and Change in a Serbian Village, 1870‡1975. Amherst, Doctoral thesis at the University of Massachusetts. WAGNER, Richard A. 1992: Children and Change in Oraπac, 1870‡1975: A Serbian Perspective on Fertility Decline. Amherst, Program in Soviet and East European Studies Occa- sional Paper Series No. 22. Datum prejema prispevka v uredniπtvo: 1. 8. 2005 IzvleËek S tem prispevkom1 se navezujem na stiËiπËa ter na podob- nosti in razlike med etnoloπkim (kulturnoantropoloπkim) in socioloπkim raziskovanjem lokalnih skupnosti. OsredotoËil se bom πe zlasti na πestdeseta leta, ko smo zaËenjali z rednim empiriËnim socioloπkim raziskovanjem. To pa je hkrati tudi æe Ëas vzpostavljanja stikov z raziskovalci v mednarodnem merilu, πe zlasti z ameriπkimi druæboslovci. Med prvimi je bil ravno prof. Halpern, in to v Ëasu, ko so bili navzlic doloËeni liberalizaciji vsi stiki z AmeriËani æe à priori obremenjeni z ideoloπkim in s politiËnim sumniËenjem. Abstract With this article I would like to relate to the connections, similarities and differences between the ethnological (cultu- ralanthropological) and sociological research of local com- munities. The focus will be especially on the sixties, when we started with the regular empirical sociological research. At the same time this is the time when we started to maintain contacts with the researchers in the international scope, Strokovni Ëlanek/1.04 akademik prof. dr. Zdravko Mlinar ZA»ETKI SOCIOLOGIJE LOKALNIH SKUPNOSTI V SLOVENIJI IN SODELO- VANJE Z AMERI©KIMI DRUÆBOSLOVCI OB SRE»ANJU S PROF. JOELOM M. HALPERNOM especially with the American social scientists. The contact with prof. Halpern was among the first, during the times when all the contacts with the Americans where a priori bur- dened with the ideological and political suspiciousness. Decembra 1958. leta sem se v Beogradu, na Inπtitutu za druæbene znanosti vkljuËil v prvi organizirani podiplomski πtudij sociologije v nekdanji Jugoslaviji. Tam sem se seznanil tako z ameriπkim sociologom Irwinom Sandersem, ki je bil znan po svojem delu Balkan Village (1949), kot tudi z delom kulturnega antropologa Joela Halperna Serbian Village (1958). To delo, monografska πtudija srbske vasi Oraπac, je izπlo prav leta 1958 in je predstavljalo nekako pribliæanje in konkretiza- cijo znotraj balkanskih flarea studies«. Oba avtorja sta bila 1 Na tem mestu objavljam razπirjeno besedilo svojega prispevka, ki sem ga predstavil na naπem skupnem sreËanju s profesorjem Joelom Halpernom leta 2004 v Ljubljani.