Diverging Biographies: Two Portuguese Peasant Women

Life-histories and biographical portraits frequently fall into the trap of "the typical" the narrator is presumed to represent key elements supposedly common to most or all other members of a culture. Avoiding this path, we focus on the life courses of two women in a Portuguese hamlet pertaining to the upper and lower extremes of a manifold social hierarchy. These two villagers' individual life-cycle::;, their marital and familial universes, and their total social worlds are indeed sn divergent that we are led inexorably to the question despite their common place of residence, do they have anything in common at all? Three major phases of the two women's life paths are sketched childhood and adolescence, adulthood and marriage, old age and death highlighting the Central European features ofthis community in Tras-os-Montes province, and stressing its profound dissimilarity from the Mediterranean culture area. A number of theoret­ ical stances within the field of biographical studies hover in the background: classic anthropological texts recited by one ego, more sociological angles on social mobility and group trajectories, philosophically oriented hermeneutical portraits , and recent forays into post-modernist schemes focused on the dialogic relation between the observer and the observed. This paper falls clearly into the second of these trends. Might there not be at least two or even three "typical" life courses within European villages of this kind?

What is it really like to be a peasant woman in a tiny hamlet in the extreme Northeast of Por tugal? What is the nature of the social world around her, and how is it perceived and inter preted by her?
jectivity. Can we come as near as possible to reproducing some ofthe fe elings and experienc es of real farming women1 without dissolving hundreds of them into a larger statistical mass? What is the character of the sequence of overall phases oflife through which these women pass? Let us glance closely at one specific case: a rural community of some 200 inhabitants in the province of Tras-os-Montes. Focusing on the life-cycles of various women who were born and raised, and who lived and died, within the confines of this small hamlet will allow us to arrive close to the point of an imaginative leap into the subjectivity and consciousness of these peasant women. This kind of portrait fo llows, therefore, less closely a path of objective, dis tant, or descriptive anthropology and more the course of a humanistic exercise in quasi-liter ary identification, although our aim will fall short of actually taking this leap into fu ll sub-

Childhood and adolescence
Let us briefly trace the life courses of two women fr om rather different social origins. Immediately, we note that the ritual moment of birth is actually a fa lse start. That is, one's life does not begin abruptly at the moment ofbirth: in social terms, an entire series of patterns, habits, and orientations2 are already prepared and set in motion by the total fa mily world revolving around the infant. This will be clear when we grasp the almost diametrically oppo-site life paths of Julia (a fa irly well-to-do-peas ani, with two celi bate and one married daugh ters) and Caroli na (an unmarried moth er of fo ur ba::;iard:;): the "card::;" in play in each of ihe:;e l i fe-cycl e:; had a l ready been to a l arge exieni siacked with greater or lesser advantage fo r each of the women involved. One of our apparent paradoxes of analysis is th is very fa ct how can we exp la in the coexi:;tence within the same minuscule hamlet of two so divergent biographical paths?
Carolina is c urrently 64 years of age, and Julia would be 94. Both were baptised in the tiny Catholic chapel of Fontelas", although in Juli a's case the space oftime between birth and b apti s m was merely a fortnight while in Caro lina's it was almost three months .4 Upon bap tism, they entered not only the consecrated world of ecclesiastical registers but th e social world of family ritual and ceaseless fe stivals of commemoration, which include Christmas, Easter, patron saints' days, first communion, and a whole array of lesser religious holidays. At the actual baptismal ceremony, however, we can already detect some disparate details: al though all the ritualised steps carried out dur ing the occasion appear identical, in the social realm we find a wider circle of relatives around Julia, different modes of physical poise and dress around Carolina, but almost identical ways of cooking the baptismal fe ast in the infant's home (although the quantities of food and kinds of socialisation between the guests show subtle differences).
On this day, both babies will acquire a pa drinho (godfather) and a madrinha (godmoth er) to look after them in the event of their parents' premature deaths and, in general, also to provide a parallel source of informal educa tion and parentage. But who precisely are these padrinhos and madrinhas in each case? While Julia acquires a highly respected landowner or local political figure and a well regarded school teacher as her godfather and godmother, Caro lina will obtain a day-labourer or middling fa rmer and a peasant woman of no particular social distinction. While Carolina's godparents occupy this position perhaps for the first time, Julia's godfather and godmother play their roles not only for children of their own high social The priest prepares holy water which will be sprin kled over the child's head shortly, above the stone font (pia bapti.�mal). Note the age of the child: in cases such as this, emigrant parents resident in France may decide to wait up to three or fo ur years to baptise their children within this village setting during their summer return visits in August.
standing but also for literally dozens of others fr om the lower peasant strata in outlying vil lages of the area, thus spreading their prestige outwards and downwards fr om their own fa m ily and social station.
Also on this day, Julia's and Carolina's par ents become the co-sponsors (compadre and comadre) of each of their respectively chosen ;sodfathers a:ld godmothers, thus establishing a strong social, economic, and fe stive tie be tween various households which will continue to be reinforced via multiple occasions of coop eration and reciprocity. But almost no one at Carolina's baptism is a relative of Julia's, and very few of the guests at one of the ceremonies are involved in regular agricultural or social relations with the guests at the other: they constitute vi rtually two separate worlds. In this sense, apart from the 30 or 40 rel atives and a few fr iend:; present at each baptism, through the fo rgi ng of godparental ti e:;, both Julia and Carolina become immediately absorbed into two complex and highly dissimilar social fields of interrelationships. How, then, do the two women pass through their years of childhood in the village? What can we see as common or divergent in their daily domestic and agricultural activities as each of them grows up?
Firstly, let us glance at the houses in which Julia and Carolina were raised. At the South ern end of the hamlet, directly next to the resident priest's enormous house, we find Julia's ( Fig. 7) a large building with a spacious veranda fa cing South overlooking a large thresh ing-floor or eira. A stairway here in back, hid den fr om the public eye, leads directly into the priest's kitchen, allowing any and all of the members of these two connected households to pass fr om one to the other in complete privacy. In fa ct, both contiguous houses were originally one huge cas ain Julia's childhood -as Julia is the priest's maternal aunt. The two houses were divided upon the death of the priest's mother (Julia's sister) when a general inherit ance division was effected. The bedrooms (quar tos), kitchen (cozinha), and living room (sala) where visitors are received are large, ample divisions, permitting a wide variety of fu rniture and decorative objects to be displayed.
Immediately Carolina's house provides a truly stark con trast (Fig. 2). Located at the Eastern extreme of the hamlet, in a section (bairro) composed of three other tiny inhabited houses and a few haylofts, the aggregate spaces comprising thi:; household total merely about one-fifth ofthat of Julia. Indeed, all of Carolina's domestic life takes place in one single room: her own and two smaller beds are crowded onto one side, and a few thin poles extend above her wooden floor boards and open hearth (lareira) to smoke-dry sausages in the winter. The stone walls are pitch-black with soot, accumulated over dec ades of natural fireside heating and cooking. There are no windows anywhere in the room . On the other side of the street, and immediately behind this minuscule house-room, extend some kitchen-gardens belonging to other villagers; Carolina does not own a private threshing-floor, but merely a share in part of the space compos ing one ofthe eleven corporate threshing-floors pertaining to groups of fa milies in the hamlet (in her case, there are another six co-owning households). The fu rniture and miscellaneous objects exposed inside Carolina's room are pal try, and the entrance doorway opening directly onto the street exhibits her room instantly to any passing villager. There is no veranda, no patio, and, indeed, upon inviting the anthropol ogist inside, Carolina herself presented her living quarters with an emphatic note of shame.
We must not lose sight, however, of the di mension of time -born in 1902, Julia grew up within her current household with her sister and two brothers, whereas Carolina, born in 1932, grew up in another one with her fo ur sisters and two brothers. While the fo rmer, as a child and adolescent, will have heard much of the Monarchist Revolt5 led by Paiva Couceiro in this region between 1910 and 1912, and have lived through the inception ofthe First Repub lic and the First World War, the latter will recall the Second World War and, a few years earlier, the presence in the hamlet of fu gitives fr om the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. Rarely travel ling outside the confines of the circumference of twenty or so small hamlets in the environs, or of the fo ur Spanish hamlets between five and ten kilometres distant on the other side of the border, both women possess the common fate of Fig. 2. View of the central sections (bairros) of the hamlet., showing t.he crowding of houses which in some cases are connected by the same stone wall. In the fo reground lie half-a-dozen highly fe rtile kitchen-gardens (cortinhas), each pertaining to different owners. At centre-right, to the left of the small house with the white wall and just behind the chimney, the roof of Carolina's tiny house is visible.
rural lives circumscribed almost totally within the bounds of their own fa milies and natal village. Without ignoring such external or in ternational events as those mentioned above, our fo cus must continue along these lines of fa mily and village: it is within these two con texts -not so much in their links with the outer world, or in the temporal epoch in which the two girls grew up -that we can trace the main divergences in these two lives. Family and vil lage constitute two fo rms of social filters, through which all outside events and processes are trans formed. Let us continue to examine why these two women obtained such differing experiences through this same social filtering process.
During the first years of infancy and child hood, perhaps the most striking divergence in Julia's and Carolina's lives can be perceived via a simple opposition between an inner, domestic field (stressing the confines of the rural house) and an outdoor, agricultural sphere. From a 100 very early age, almost all of Julia's activities within her fa mily's social world were confined strictly to the household: rarely would she par ticipate in farming chores which involved long distances fr om the house, and even her brief visits to the nearby fa mily kitchen-gardens allowed only the most fleeting of verbal ex changes with other villagers. The sphere of relatives around her -including her siblings as well as an array of first and second cousins in adjacent households in the centre of the hamlet -is relatively small, thus tending to limit her instances of play and recreation to a narrow circle of two or three other households. Rarely will she be seen playing with a larger group of children in the public streets or open spaces of the hamlet: careful and conscious social train ing will avoid this sort of indiscriminate min gling of children, viewed by the wealthier strata as distinctively chaotic. Dress patterns, the learning of social etiquette, forms of speech and fo rmal linguistic address, her first religious confession11 and holy communion, her entry into school, first menstruation, and the contours of her ov erall personality and femininity will all be gently but forcefully shaped by her immedi ate domestic context; her mother, sisters, aunts, and madrinha will play decisive roles in the process.
Carolina's upbringing will clearly evince a number of parallel patterns -true, she will also have her first confession at around the age of 7 or 8 and fi rst communion around the age of 14, enter school at the same age as Julia had earlier, and acquire her own distinctive person ality via the influence of her own mother, sis ters, and other women. But here we catch the difference: the outdoor world and the roles of childhood fr iends and neighbours will stand out strikingly. Why should this be so? Firstly, throughout these years Carolina will spend an enormous amount of time outside her home in agricultural tasks with other women. The re treat fr om open places, the almost introverted escape fr om the public eye that characterises Julia's fa mily's fo rm of social comportment, and the avoidance of socialisation with the other village children are all perfectly inverted in Carolina's case. From the minor tasks of her household such as ploughing rye fields, cutting hay, planting potatoes, and irrigating their gar dens to the more large-scale events such as the enormous threshings (mal has) uniting up to 50 or 60 villagers or the annual pig-slaughter (matanr;a do porco) and its Pantagruelian fe asts, Carolina fr om a very early age began to work, eat, speak, cooperate, play, and joke alongside a wide array of fe male villagers, incessantly ex changing agricultural labour tasks throughout the fo ur seasons of the year. In contrast to JUlia's primarily domestic activities, Carolina's have included a much greater portion of time outside the household in the fields, either at work with implements or carrying meals to and from the plots to serve the large teams or work parties joined for each occasion. This is not to say, obviously, that the same activities do not occur in Julia's household, but ratherthatJulia's social visibility as an active participant in them has been radically more restricted and mute.
Two reasons for this are, firstly, differences Girl aged 9 helps her parents, grandparents, and celibate uncle (not visible) reap rye grain in late June with a sickle (fouce). Small fields such as this one are reaped with fa mily labour in a few hours, while larger ones may take an entire day or more and require work-parties of up to 10 or 15 villagers. All labour is highly valued, however slow or untrained, regardless of sex.
in the ownership ofland and, secondly, the role of domestic servants. At the end of the 1970s, Julia's household owned a total landholding of 35 hectares, the fo urth largest in the hamlet. Of this total, 5 hectares were rented out to other poorer villagers, the rent being paid each year not in money but in a fixed amount of bushels (alqueires) of rye grain. The large size of this fa rm implied, necessarily, the continual hiring of day-labourers to execute the myriad agricul tural tasks needed for the farm's upkeep. Many of these labourers came either fr om Carolina's own fa mily or wider kindred group, or fr om households of similar socio-economic standing. Virtually all of Julia's land was inherited: she has never needed to purchase, rent, or swap plots of land in order to subsist. In contrast, Carolina's landholding -total ling little more than 1.5 hectares, of which the major proportion of tiny parcels were either rented or lent to her for cultivation -is one of th e te n smalle:;t in the 60 or so hou:;eholds comprising the hamlet as a whole. Carolina is barely able to provide meal:; for her:; elf and her two resident sons, and depends upon fr equent donations offood fr om her brothers, sisters, and fr iends during periods of festivity and abun dance. This scenario with respect to land has meant that Carolina, just as her siblings, has had to work for wages or payment in kind (grain, bread, meat, fruit, and wine) on a daily basi:; throughout every year for other more well-to-do fa milies. During her childhood and adolescent years, this fa ct became gradually clearer, as Carolina herselfparticipated in such paid labour. However, parallel with this kind of work, there have also been a multiplicity of tasks carried out for her own fa mily and kin: at these, the type of festivity and the atmosphere of mutual aid was markedly different. We should bear in mind, though, that precisely those short comings that Julia avoided (due to her high social status fr om the start) were all problemat ic realities fo r Carolina: the size and nature of the key resource of land thus conditioned fr om a very early stage two entirely different orien tations to work and general economic wealth.
Servants provide another significant fa ctor. By tracing backwards a number of families via genealogies and parish documents, we can con clude that the half-dozen wealthiest house holds have nearly always had resident servants (criadas I criados). These would be both fe male as well as male, the fo rmer ideally aiding in domestic chores and the care of children and the latter in the heavier outdoor tasks in the fields and with the animals. But who were these servants, and what were their social origins? Usually they were villagers fr om the very poor est offamilies, whose subsistence in their moth ers' households was precarious. At a very early age (as young as 8 or 9) they would be taken on as servants in aprop rietario or lavrador house hold, remaining there for a long period of years. Once married, however, they would depart; we will see nevertheless that a large proportion of servants remain unmarried for the rest of their lives. Carolina herself was a servant in a number of households in the hamlet for a span of a few years at a time, while Julia's household had 102 hired serva nts consistently during preced ing generation:;. ln fa ct, some serva nts ended up working for the same family their mother or fa ther had served in many years earlier.
But our key point here is perhaps the f(Jllow ing: in Julia's case, a whole series of fe male servants (as many as three or four at the same ti me) were constantly around the house and capable of carrying out cooking and cleaning tasks as well as the rearing of children, whereas in Carolina's case, a larger sector of her life was spent working for others and in continual da ily contact with women of a higher economic stand ing and, indeed, diflering social values than her own. One outstanding characteri stic of Carolina's adolescence, therefore, in relation to Julia's relative immobility and permanence, was an exceedingly mobile and flexible series of abodes. She shifted residence between a pleth ora ofhouseholds in different parts of the ham let, never really settling down in any one of them, and never accumulating any considera ble fo rtune or capital in land, animals, a house, fu rniture, or financial assets. Although not a perpetual servant, Carolina provides a model for most poorer and middling women who have spent some portion (however brief) oftheir lives working for others. 7 Finally, courtship reveals another point of contrast which, again, indicates differences rath er than any universal local fe minine norm. Girls of Julia's status, for example, rarely court more than once. There may be quite a lot of talk concerning boy A fr om Fontelas or boy B fr om a neighbouring hamlet, but real and fu lly defined courtship (namoro) tends to occur as a prepar atory phase for marriage (casamento). There are a number of prescribed stages involved among upper level fa milies: the parents must have intimate knowledge of their daughter's fu ture groom and his fa mily context. Ve ry little contact is actually made between the two fian ces apart fr om ritually controlled visits and some occasions of joint fa mily fe stivities (reli gious or lay) or at public dances (bailes). One key aspect is the status of a girl in Julia's social class: once a noiva (fiancee) linked in betrothal to a specific noivo, if the courtship relation breaks off, establishing a second one is ex tremely difficult and can lead to total blockage Patterns of dress, hair styles, and social poise among the wealthy, and even the spatial location of the person photographedalways indoors, and usually alone -demarcated them quite clearly fr om the rest of the peasantry.
for the girl involved. The stakes are high, and virtually everyone in the hamlet at any one moment knows exactly who is pledged to whom.
Girls in Carolina's situation confront a rad ically different social and sexual world. In the social groups of day-labourers, cottagers (caba neiros), and artisans (carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers, masons, and tailors) there exists a tacit rule that courtship does not necessarily lead directly to marriage. Many women in these groups never marry at all, but bear children nonetheless; some establish common-law "mar riages" of cohabitation with men, who in some cases are not the biological fathers of all oftheir partner's children. Other women may marry at as late an age as 60 or 70. Courtship, in these cases, barely exists at all. This is not to say, however, that there are not a prescribed series of phases or steps through which a girl and boy pass in their personal sexual or romantic ties. On the contrary, the latter ties proliferate -but they simply do not in the vast majority of cases lead immediately on to marriage. Carolina her self had several partners and married none of them. But there is a price to be paid for this semblance of fr ee love or at least fr ee choice -when we analyse the social statuses of girls and women with multiple or sequential courtships or lovers, they systematically turn out to occupy the lower and middle rungs of the social ladder.
Many sexual encounters in Fontelas are ex tremely brief and take place, curiously, in out door contexts far fr om intimate bedroom spheres: in fields, meadows, thickets, and hay lofts. There appears to be no pressing repres sion of sexuality or indeed of reserved social demanour when women speak of these relation ships. Only in cases of outright rape (uiolat;ao I estupro) or the exploitation of servants or maids by their male employers (frequently, these men are married) does a note of bitterness enter the discussion. Otherwise, the entire topic of court ship seems to remain quite remote fr om the conversation and preoccupations of these fa m ilies. Marriage is a simple matter-of-fact affair -sex and love are quite another thing.
This absence of a well-defined set of norms and restrictions on adolescent and youthful relationships suggests that for women (and the same holds for men) there are two worlds of courtship: one, strictly fo rmalised and carefully controlled in the case of a small group of wealth ier fa milies, and another, much more flexible and lax, among the poorer and middle-level fa milies. Virginity is simply not a crucial fa ctor in these women's lives: even a bastard child by ing invitations to dunce :.1t a local baile follow ing a reli gious fe.�ta in honour or a patron saint. Althoul-(h an occasional outsider -:1 rela tive or friend irom a nenrLy town or city -may atte nd these dances (woman at fitr left), they arc predominant ly composed of rural you ths from the host village unci a dozen or so neighbouring h amlets. These local fcRtive events constitute crucia l moments of social encounter between prospective mar riage partners: the summer months can provide a maxi mum of up to 20 or :.10 such dances in the area compris ing Fontelas and its surrounding hamlets.
another fa ther does not constitute an obstacle to cohabitation or later marriage. The existence oftwo distinct spheres suggests that the respec tive weight of fa ctors such as property, social prestige, and the fa mily name vary drastically in relation to each of these socio-economic lev els. Clearly, individual characteristics such as beauty and general physical appearance, health, a reputation for hard work, and the subtle emotional and psychological attractions between two specific personalities play their roles: but what we note with particular attention is the absence of one, and only one structured path fr om courtship directly to marriage. Some other and quite complex mechanisms must be opera tive within these women's lives, in order to explain such divergent life paths with respect to courting and early liaisons.

Adulthood and marriage
In July of 1932 in the small chapel of Fontelas, at the age of29, Julia married a Customs Guard (guarda-fiscal) from a neighbouring parish (aged 31). Although Julia was listed as aprop rietaria (landowner, or wealthy peasant) little addition al information contained in the brief entry in the Parish Register tells us any more about the social context of this wedding. The youngest of fo ur siblings, Julia married third in order: one brother and one sister had both married in 1923, the eldest brother marrying much later in 1943 at the age of 46 (his bride was 38). Of Julia's th ree daughters, the two eldest remained celibate and the youngest married a spouse fr om another hamlet in the area, later moving out: this couple had a son and a daughter, who are now Julia's only grandchildren.
Carolina has never married and, at the age of 64, will probably not marry any of the fo ur fa thers of her fo ur illegitimate children (two of these fa thers married other women, the two others remaining unmarried and residing with their married sisters). Carolina gave birth to these four sons between 1958 and 1966 -she was respectively aged 26, 28, 31, and 34 at the time of each ofthe births. In each case, the child was baptised subsequently in the chapel sys tematically registering an unknown father (pai incognito). Although these baptismal ceremo nies all involved fa mily celebrations, there were no marriages and no weddings. To all appear ances, Carolina produced a matrifocal kinship group of mother-and-children with socially ab sent and legally invisible fathers.
How can we interpret these cases in the light of the overall life-cycle phases of marriage and adulthood in this rural society? Let us first glimpse at the general picture before returning to the cases of Julia and Carolina.
Not everyone -and we refer here equally to men and women -necessarily marries. At the end of the 1970s, for example, only 32 of 76 women over the age of 15 were married (35 were single and 9 were widows). Of the women aged 40 or more, 19 were married but 20 were still unwed. The age at which women marry is also significant: if we compare all 105 marriages in the hamlet between 1870 and just before 1980, the average age ofbrides has been 31.0 and that of grooms 33.2. It is extremely rare for women to marry in their teens or even in their early twenties. Another fa ctor is the total absence of any fo rm of dowry (dote). When a woman mar ries, she can expect virtually nothing fr om her parents or groom apart fr om a trousseau (enx oval) ofbed linens, towels, and other fabrics. No land, animals, houses, or large sums of money are donated to the bride or even for that matter to the newlyweds as a couple. In fa ct, in most cases there is no new household at all: th e groom usually takes up residence in his wife's parents' household thus maintaining the over all number ofhouses in the hamlet unchanged. That is to say, marriage is disconnected with the construction of new homes: each married cou ple is absorbed by one of their parents' family lines (usually the wife's).
Four fu rther fa ctors are also crucial. Occa sionally, the newly married couple may reside separately in each of their parents' households for up to 10 or 15 years after their marriages. In anthropological terminology, this is called na tolocal residence, because both bride and groom continue to work and take meals in their natal households. They have merely a room in the bride's parents' household to which they retire in the evenings. The next morning, the husband will eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner as well as work the entire day with his own parents. The children are brought up in their maternal grand parents' household with their mother, granting the fa ther the distant, nocturnal role of a visit ing husband. Eleven couples studied resided in this fa shion (22 spouses) for between one and 15 years, but historical documents and genealo gies indicate additional examples in fo rmer decades. The key point to stress here is that within this fo rm of marriage, the bride and groom are as it were preserved as if they were still unmarried children. In other words, they are treated only as semi-adults living in a kind of extended or prolonged adolescence. Marriage changed virtually nothing in their life courses. Or, in more precise terms, the long-term social implications of marriage only take effe ct dec ades later, when their children are already well into their own life-cycles. We can well ponder: why did they marry at all?
The significance of this fo rm of residence may not seem clear at first sight, even fo r anthropologists. There are very few cases re ported in the ethnographic literature indicat ing, firstly, that the phenomenon is relatively rare and, secondly, that ethnologists themselves may not have granted it due attention. The first possibility appears most probable: in fact, the only detailed analyses available of natolocal residence (also termed by some duolocal resi dence) are those by Robin Fox (1978) for Tory Fig. 6. Bride (noiua) a fe w moments prior to her wedding (boda). As is common in these Northern Po rtuguese villages, this bride was some months pregnant at the time. A schoolteacher in another nearby hamlet, her husband was aguarda-republica na (a municipal offic ial concerned with the mainte nance of "law and order" in local towns and villages). The wedding will also be fo llowed by a dance. Ireland, Carmelo Lis6n Tolosana (1971) for the province of Orense in Spain's Northwestern region of Galicia, and Meyer Fortes (1970) for the Ashanti in West Mrica. Other briefer descriptions have men tioned natolocal residence in N ortheastern Por tugal near Bragan\(a (Rio de On or) and in neigh bouring regions of Spain, namely Leon and Salamanca (Pais de Brito 1989). This overall geographical rarity, along with repeated cases registered in the Northwestern areas of Portu gal and Spain, is simultaneously curious and perplexing, and suggests the need for fu rther comparative research.

Island in Northern
One of the most striking aspects of this type of conjugal residence is the almost hidden na ture of the married couple. Everything indi-cates the newlyweds' subjugation to a highly authoritarian grand parental generation: it is the maternal grandparents who bring up the grandchildren (the children of the bride and her visiting husband), while the paternal grand parents maintain control of their married son's labour and time. The possibilities of construct ing a totally independent house are minimal or indeed nonexistent: the new husband and wife must simply wait for a fu ture period of domestic independence. During these years , each natal household (that of each pair of grandparents) prevails over the conjugal pair who reside sep arately. Why is this situation accepted at all? Firstly, there are no direct means of access to financial capital (at least not until the late 1980s); secondly, the semi-communitarian so cial organization of the hamlet limits the total number of houses composing the community (each of which maintains at least some fo rm of use rights on communal land), thus avoiding an imbalance between scarce communal resources and an excess of households or population. Thirdly, each grandparental household admits that they "need the labour of their children even when married"; fo urthly, the grandparents are themselves psychologically dependent upon their children, thus fa vouring an extremely slow process of the latter's leaving home. All of these constitute reasons explaining, at least partially, the existence of this fo rm of post marital residence.
But there is a fifth explanation, which re sides within the structure of the society as a whole, within its system of property transmis sion. As no fo rm of property is inherited until the death of a parent, adults in their 40s or 50s still do not have access to large quantities of capital. This constitutes a sort of biographical social fa ct with repercussions for our analysis of women's life courses: both women as well as men pass through prolonged phases of econom ic and psychological dependence on their paren tal and grandparental generations. We fo und that many cases of natolocal residence termi nate precisely at the moment that one (or two) of the parents of one of the spouses dies.At that date, they take up joint residence. This means that, rooted within the system of reproduction of the rural houshold, lies a seat of domestic power which grants a high degree of control to the elderly and a subaltern role to younger adults resi ding natolocally. The latter live a kind of nocturnal married life, a form of semi matrimony, akin to Caribbean styles ofmatrifo cal fa mily structures in which the figure of the absent (or visiting) husband is preponderant.
Clearly, a husband and wife who reside na tolocally lor some 5 or 10 years will always end up living together at some later date -but during tho�:�e years they will have lived within a fo rm of semi-permanent matrimony with a note of repression. The husband is termed pai (fa ther) and the wife mae (mother) by the children, but the term for the wife's fa ther, for example, will be an extension of the word "father" -pai Andre. Similarly, the maternal grandmother will be termed mae Amelia, etc. The paternal grandparents, in contrast, have no special term of address-here the standard Portuguese words for grandfather and grandmother are used (avo I av6). These linguistic usages afford proof of the virtual social obliteration of the parental gener ation (the husband and wife residing separate ly). The grandparental generation, as it were, jumps past the parents directly to the grand children's generation, leaving aside the biolog ical mother and father. It is important to stress that there is a strict gender equality within this phenomenon: both husband and wife are re stricted in their conjugal life -neither the masculine nor the fe minine lines are favoured. That is, there appears to be no special emphasis on male dominance or on fe male precedence.
Although neither Carolina nor Julia resided nato locally, each of them has siblings, who, at one moment or another, resided for a number of years separately fr om their respective spous es.
But three further elements complicate the issue of marriage: firstly, bastardy is wide spread in Fontelas and its neighbouring ham lets -since 1870 a total of 4 7% of all infants baptised have been illegitimate. Some women bear up to fo ur or five natural children (jilhos naturais) of the same fa ther, later marrying him, while others have serial liaisons and serial bastards. The vast majority of jornaleiras (day labouring women) and domesticas ("women engaged in housework") also had unknown fa-thers, as well as mothers and grandmother::; who were themselves illegitimate. We should however note that none of these relationship�:� are ever referred to (even by the women them selves) as remotely resembling any kind of prostitution: no money circulates, and none of the persons involved conceptualises the liai sons in such fa shion.
In other words, there are various diflering legal and social statuses linked to the figure of the illegitimate child. For example, the parents of a bastard may later marry each other, th u�:� legitimating the child completely. In these cas es, the biological fa ther may legally recognise his natural child (this process is termed perfil hac;ao) but not marry the mother. In this case, the illegitimate child remains partially re deemed and financially protected via the judi cial (but not matrimonial) link established be tween the father and mother. But a larger number of cases fo llow a more pitiful path: these are cases of zorros (the word derives fr om the Portuguese for fox -raposaand suggests mischievous and/or malicious activities), whose natural parents never marry nor recognize them juridically. This category of bastard is the most shameful of all, because the child remains en tirely divorced fr om all possible links to the biological father. Neither in legal nor in social terms are they ever assisted by the latter. This explains the pejorative connotation of the word zorro I zorra -these bastards are marginalized out to a virtually sub-human level. Linguisti cally and symbolically, they represent savages (raposas) within a natural world, shunted away from cultural and domestic spheres. This is an important point for our analysis of Carolina: all fo ur of her bastard children by fo ur different fathers are zorros.
Secondly, couples occasionally live together out of wedlock -they are termed amancebados or amantizados by the Church or simply viewed as juntos (living jointly) by other villagers. The children need not be the children of the resident male, and we must note that local priests toler ate all of these practices. Particularly among the lower social groups, children (legitimate or not) are a key resource as labour, wage-earners, and domestic company. The fact that such cou ples are not strongly ostracised by the rest of the community �mggesis that there arc not merely one but two patterns of "married" life which can be followed. The technical term con cubinage is applicable here, although it tends to place greater stress on the concubine as a lesser or secondary spouse in relation to a husband; the unwed mother is th e key pivot, around wh ich multiple men revolve. The pattern ap pears almost polyandrous or mairifocal, as re ported for the Caribbean area, with women collecting a siring of relationships with differ ent men, some of whose children they bear and retain as fut ure domestic aid.
How can we explain these differing marital models? One means is via analysis of the inher itance system -a few heirs are fav oured by their parents and marry at a relatively young age, while their brothers and sisters arc subile ly pushed aside into the realm of temporary unions, concubinage, and bastardy. Thai is, one heir obtains the greater portion of a house and the parents' land, while the other brothers and sisters acquire much less. Few paths are open to these -either they emigrate, marry into anoth er village, or remain celibate in their brother's or sister's household, in social roles somewhat suggestive of that of domestic servants. This is why so few people actually marry: the key to high social standing is not marriage, but rather inherited wealth.
Ve ry few women marry up strategically into the higher social groups, while a great number marry husbands of equal rank or marry down via relationships of sex and co-residence out-  side wedlock. In this fa shion, the landholdings and social status of the upper groups are in no way threatened by this parallel world of second ary unions: their property is not divided (or, more exactly, it is divided between fe wer heirs) and the presence in the village of a large number of bastards with little or no claims to landed wealth only serves to uphold and reinforce the status of the proprietario group. Many of these bastards -particularly the girls -pass through a phase of servanthood for these very families. The inheritance system, thus, affords a clue to the internal logic of the dual marriage pattern.
Marriage, then, is not immediately coinci dent with adulthood. This is quite clear in Carolina's case -never passing through the fo rmal ritual phases of ecclesiastical wedlock, she nevertheless has managed to participate in a whole field of other social relations and expe riences including the rearing of children and membership in a large kindred group. The con tact between her sons and their many cousins is constant: indeed, two ofher sons live elsewhere -one with an aunt, and another as a servant in a laurador household. However, there is a price to be paid. This price is exclusion, or relative removal, fr om high social status. This is where Julia's example takes over. By retaining a cen tral role in a wealthy household, she has main tained high status both as aprop rietaria as well as her fe minine role as a married woman. But it is not marriage per se that has granted her this, but rather an entire fa mily legacy of social prestige and high respect. When both Julia and Carolina -mature and in their twenties or thirties -confront the question Who am I?, they fa ce the entire patrimonial and matrimonial history of their kindred groups (Bourdieu 1980:249-70). On the one hand, in Julia's gene alogy we find schoolteachers, aldermen who sat on local councils, priests, landowners, Customs Guards, police officers, and even (back in the eighteenth century) an informer or fa miliar of the Portuguese Inquisition resident in Fonte las. Carolina, on the other hand, has an im mense array of relatives with less prestigious occupations populating her genealogy: day-la bourers above all, cottagers, servants, shep herds, artisans, and some middling peasant lauradores. All of her eight siblings (sisters as well as brothers) have had one or more bastard children at some point in their lives, and many of these have also lived in temporary unions. Only two of them married. This is not to say that some people do not move up the social scale at some moments, but simply that the relative position of any specific woman within her social group is very clearly established early on in her life-cycle. The mar gins or limits of each individual woman's ef fo rts, skill, and personal inventiveness will vary and, of course, affect each one's own life path to varying degrees, but always within the general confines of her social group. Thus, a celibate woman of 45 years of age -exemplified by both of Julia's daughters -maintains a highly re spected social role in the hamlet despite her idiosyncratic fe mininity as an unmarried wom an without children. Carolina's social status, however, remains quite low and her only hope of aid in old age are her sons' fu ture assistance and the sporadic support and reciprocity avail able via her larger group of siblings. Thus, Fig. 9. Middle-level lavradora woman (left) preparing sausages with the aid of two neighbours. This kitchen is typical of many recently refurbished houses: note the new chimney and roof. Hanging above the table and hearth (lareira) are smoke d hams (presuntos) and two of the variety of local sausages.
instead of marriage, the key nexus of fe male adulthood is social status and its derivation fr om landed wealth.
A final element concerns labour and produc tion. One of the fa ctors contributing to social status among all but the very wealthiest wom en is a reputation for hard physical work. This applies to all women of the middle and lower groups. There are only half a dozen or so truly heavy and difficult agricultural chores which even the strongest women must leave for men to do. Thus, women can be seen occasionally ploughing, they will assist in the shearing of sheep (tosquia), guide water along irrigation ditches into their meadows and gardens, rake and collect hay (feno), cut rye grain in the fields with sickles during the June reapings (sega das), collect straw in enormous bundles at the August threshings (malhas), gather fr uit and chestnuts in the autumn, cut firewood in the winter, and orient virtually all of the tasks comprising the December pig-slaughter except the actual killing and butchering of the swine.
Women are tireless toilers, accumulating this wide variety of essentially outdoor tasks above and beyond their domestic chores of cooking, washing, shopping, childcare, and the fe eding and tending of household animals. Physical labour, in this sense, tends to create an entire sphere of social evaluations within which indi vidual women are closely watched and judged by other women (and men) as particularly skill fu l, patient, and dedicated to their fa mily's farming rhythms. The slightest lapse in this cycle of work is immediately noticed, and can contribute to negative gossip and even mali cious slander.
Work, then, and more specifically highly visible outdoor work, constitutes a constant field of activity and mutual vigilance between women. While in the case of women of the highest social status, any kind of agricultural work becomes demeaning (they simply avoid being seen working outdoors), for all the re maining women in the hamlet one of the keys to generalized social respect and prestige is the maintenance of a good reputation for healthy and consi::;tent travail.
Even th e personalities of the two women exhibit feature::; linked to thel:ie working pat terns: that of the reclusive and excessively shy Julia contrasts sharply with the more expan sive, humorous, and extroverted character of Carolina. There is no end to this rhythm of work in temporal terms: young girls are socialised rapidly into agricultural tasks, adult women continue heavy labour endlessly, and elderly women carry on working oudoors into their 70s or 80s at lighter tasks until the onset in infirmi ty or old age.

Old age and death
A glance at patterns of old age and death will now allow us to conclude our comparison of Julia and Carolina. Death, unlike marriage, constitutes the major fu lcrum around which much offamily life revolves. It is at death and not marriage that major readjustments of prop erty and emotional relations take place -both between brothers and sisters or children and parents as well as between other relatives such as uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, grand parents and grandchildren. Virtually noone in any social group inherits any property at mar riage, which means that extremely long life cycles store up property partitions until very late in villagers' lives. Many mature adults only really inherit legal titles to land when they are in their 40s or 50s: until then they must depend exclusively upon the resources of their parents or upon slow and cumulative purchases or trades of small plots. Indeed, many villagers only marry precisely at the point in their biographical tra jectories when one set of their parents has died, thus in a sense liberating them fr om fiercely dependent obligations upon their close natal kin.
The significance of this is, partly, that upon reaching old age and later senility, elderly vil lagers have a guaranteed source of protection and care via their children, whether the latter are married or not. In anthropological terms, this kind of kinship system appears to place a much stronger stress on descent or consanguin eal relations than upon marital or affinal ones. Fig. 10. Corpse of a woman who died (aged 66) in 1977, exposed in the living room (sala) of her house on the day fo llowing her death. This night, villagers will visit the deceased, sprinkle holy water over the corpse, and remain for some period between approximately 21:00 and 02:00 at the vigil (mort6riol I vigilia), talk ing, praying, and accompanying the close relatives of the deceased. Each of the hamlet's 60 or so households should send at least one person to this vigil. The burial (enterro) and fu neral service fo llow on the next day, normally in the late afternoon.
Hence the importance for poorer women of having some descendants, even if these are bastards. This will imply that the elderly al ways have someone fr om among their kin to assist them as they age; and we recall that they preserve their legal titles to land, literally until their dying day. Mortuary ritual and mourning indicate an openly expressive attitude towards death, reminiscent ofPhilippeAries' category of mort apprivoisee (1976). Into the nineteenth century, corpses were buried in the earth under the chapel's floorboards. Afterwards, they were buried in the churchyard (adro) immediately outside the church walls, until 1957 when the hamlet's cemetery was constructed. Death is confronted in an extremely natural, matter-of� fact way, and the memory ofdecea::;ed relatives is con::;tuntly refreshed ann uully during masses fo r their :;out:; and on 2 November when 11owers and peta ls arc spread on earthen or (more recently) marble gravestones. Vi llagers know exactly who is buried in each grave of the cemetery, and in many cases who was buried directly u n derneath as w e ll.
Upon arriving close to old age , even with ailments and a grad ual retreat fr om physical task:;, most elderly villagers (livi n g together or as widows) can be relatively sure that their kin will provide ample support. The agricultural and festive cycles also assure that even isolated ind ividuals rarely enter deep depressive phas es of introversion or hopelessness. There are always some fam ily members nearby with whom one can share and collaborate. However, even at the moment of death, we find gradations of social status constantly apparent: while the fu nerals of women of Carolina's social standing may comprise some 50 or so odd persons, those of wealthy proprietarias such as Julia draw up to a few hundred, and usually include villagers fr om many kilometres away. We should be care ful therefore, when discussing wide-ranging models such as those of Aries concerning men talities or attitudes towards death, not to re main blind to the subtle local differences in real peasants' practices and social comportment at such mortuary occasions.
One way ofvisualising the life-cycle of wom en in this case is to step back slightly and compose an overall regional comparison be tween Fontelas and the Mediterranean cultur al area to the South. We can construct the fo llowing simple diagram, which will bring us back in the end to our two fe minine examples. In the first part, we have a schematisation of the basic pattern of the life-cycle in the Mediter ranean societies of Southern Europe, whereas the second part depicts the three possible life courses of women (and, in fa ct, of men as well) in Fontelas and other communities within the circum-Alpine region.
The key difference in these systems -in which that which characterises Fontelas re sembles the mountain areas ofN orthern Spain, the Pyrenees, and the French, Swiss, and Aus- trian Alps (Burns 1963) -is that in typically Mediterranean life-cycles property and social status are transferred twice in every person's life-cycle8, first at marriage via dowries and again later at death. Further, each marriage leads to legitimate births and, because of the high value placed upon marriage, there is a very low incidence of celibacy. Life-cycles are short, and marriage takes place (for women at least) at a very young age.
Fontelas, in contrast, affords an example of an extreme stress removed fr om marriage and shifted to death as the key moment oftransmis sion. There are not one or two, but actually three common fe male life paths: (a) celibacy, (b) parallel liaisons or unions (brief or permanent) such as concubinage or popular marriage, and (c) fo rmal marriage. Reproduction can occur in two of these paths (b & c) while high social status can be achieved also in two of them (a & c). In the Mediterranean, through the course of three women's life-cycles there are normally six moments at which the transfer of property and social status take place. In contrast, in Fontelas there are only three -all delayed until death. This is the crucial distinction. Furthermore, Fig. 11. Woma n placing flow ers on the simple earthen grave of a re lative on All SouiR' Day (2 November). Note the marble gravestone;; of anoth er fa m i ly to the right, with respective dates, verHes, and oval photograph of the de· ceased. These marble vaults (jazigos) are now progressive ly ubiquitous, thus displac ing and antiquating the more primitive burial mounds of earlier ti mes. many people in the Portuguese case only marry after the deaths of their parents. Marriage is thus practically dissolved as a key biographical moment.
In other words, the entire life-cycle (and here the model applies to all social groups) is an extended, prolonged, and severely delayed pro cess in which marriage and conjugal relations are subordinated to the firm links between consanguineal kin, particularly elderly parents. Bastards and single mothers simply reinforce this pattern. Thus, unlike the Mediterranean, in any one life-cycle, there is only one point (not two) at which major rearrangements occurthis is at death. Control of rural households by chefes de fa milia (household heads), the divi sion of land parcels, and the redefinition of agricultural labour roles all tend to take place only fo llowing a death, not before. This creates a tendency toward an excessive postponement of crucial biographical decisions to a very late phase in the cycle.
But what is the meaning of this contrast for our two specific cases? The first conclusion we can reach is that this part of the North of Portugal presents a radically different fe mi· nine world fr om that of the South. Our major anthropological studies confirm this: as early as 1935 Paul Descamps noted the distinctive ness of certain Northern regions, although his fa mily monographs in the style of Frederic Le Play were but incipient ethnographic works (0'Neill 1994). Even demographic studies con firm the pattern as well (Rowland 1984). Emilio Willems (1955) pointed to patterns of matrilo calismo (matriarchality?/matrilocality?), and three modern anthropologists all note the per vasive roles of women in rural communities of the Minho province in Northwestern Portugal, although this region has been characterised fo r a long time by intense male emigration (Callier Boisvert 1966;Brettell 1986;Pina-Cabral 1986). In other words, there are indications that the striking matrifocality of Northern Portuguese rural society (particularly in the Minho) is a very old pattern, but we do not yet know exactly how old or precisely to what degree (and when) the process of male emigration has contributed to this state of affairs as a primary or unique conditioning fa ctor in the Northeast region of Tras-os-Montes.
But in the Alentejo and Estremadura prov inces of the South, we find a much more radical subordination of women to men particularly in the public and political spheres (Cutileiro 1971;Lawrence 1982;Riegelhaupt 1967). We have not fo cused closely, for deliberate reasons, on the roles of women as reflected by the roles of men. For instance, Fontelas simply exhibits a rather calm and relaxed relationship between the sexes, quite the opposite of the tensions and conflicts described for Mediterranean Portugal.
Sully Cole's recent study of' Po rtu gu ese fi shing women in a Northern coasta l village (1991) is particularly interesting fo r its discussion of women's roles in r·elation io men. Furthermore, illegitimacy seems io be pervasive also in other rura l communities of the North, as noted al ready by Livi Bacci (1971) unci more recently by Al bino (1986) in Braganc;:a, Hurra (1987) in Beira Alia, Callier-Boisvert (1988) in ihe Alia Minho, and Godinho (1995) in 6 municipalities ofAiio Tn1s-os-Montes. The theme as presented here fo r merely one ham lei affo rds only the iip of the iceberg: patterns of parallel fa mily and sexual life, ill egi timacy, and alternative fo rms of marriage consti tute one of the particular fas ci n ations of early modern and contemporary Portuguese history.
Finally, we cannot ignore a micro-regional component: precisely as reported fo r the collec tive, communitarian village of Rio de Onor in Northeast Portugal (Dias 1953;Pais de Brito 1989), the socio-political status of women in many of the hamlets in Tras-os-Montes is ex ceedingly high. In Fontclas as well, widows and unwed mothers retain a voice and even votes on the village council (conselho de vizinhos), and they are consulted whenever an overall deci sion affecting the entire village must be taken. In wider geographical and cultural terms, then, we confront an example of the substantially high social status of women in European rural societies (a point already very convincingly made by Goody in 1976 andagain in 1983), in contrast to the extensive Mediterranean case of relative fe male subordination.
That is to say, we find in the rural villages of Northern Portugal a fo rm of kinship organiza tion along bilateral or cognatic lines: all broth ers and sisters inherit property and social sta tus on an equal legal fo oting. Primogeniture is rare, and we have no reason to affirm that there are any fo rms of overriding or glaring male dominance. Women are simply not repressed, devalued, subordinated or exploited by men or indeed by the overall society (note that in the situations of natolocal residence we have re fe rred to, it is the married couple and not just the wife who is suppressed). Women are cer tainly not used as pawns in a game of chess, through complex circulations and marriage 114 exchanges between individual men or collective f�tmilies or lineages (Goody 1990). Th is is why the social system exemplified by th is ham lei is so radically distinct fr om villages thai belong to the Mediterranean world: this kind of behav iour and the social statuses of women we have been examining would be almost total anathe ma in Southern Portugal, Southern Italy, An da lusian Spain, Greece, Sicily and Sardinia, or the Maghreb. Women in Fontelas simply live on a different planet.

Conclusion
Returning to Julia and Carolina, we arc aware that a large series of questions hover unan swered. We have not constructed a truly bio graphical profile of either of these two women, but rather simply a prelude to the inner dimen sions of subjectivity, fe elings, emotions, and overall socio-psychological orientations. We have no doubt that the two cases constitute little more than illustrative case-studies. But we have tried to deconstruct the presupposition, or assumption, that there must necessarily be only one model of the fe male life-cycle in a small rural Portuguese village. We have stressed that there are at least two very different extremes of personal trajectories. 9 Neither Julia nor Carolina rose socially in the course of their life paths10, nor did either of them descend or fa ll dramatically in the social scale. Each remained almost exactly within the same socio-economic niche occupied by their respective parents. Neither upward nor down ward mobility characterises their social life cycles. Instead, they provide crystalline models of the maintenance or even somewhat hegem onic holding of specific role positions within a concrete hierarchy of social ranks. This is why their biographies are so diverging: born and brought up within the same apparently com mon cultural context, their individual trajecto ries exhibit totally different paths. We could in fact pose the question -what do they have in common at all?
But the topic may be complicated yet fu rther.
Why not propose the coexistence of three fe mi nine life-cycles? While stressing the upper and lower extremes of the social ladder, we have perha ps lo::;i ::;ighi of the middle-level groups. These, indeed , shift more flexibly between rel atively mobi le niches in the middle rungs: the social group of' la umdores, or "pca::;ani plough ers", partake both of aspects specific to the upper rungs as well as clements ofthose lower down. This makes them even more difficult to analyse. For instance, it is among the lower and middle group::; thai we veri(y the highest rates of emigration to the more developed Western counirie::; ::;ince the 1960::; -villagers left mostly for France, but also Germany, Switzerland, and Luxembourg. This wave of emigration was not Fig. 12. The inner emotion al world, the subjective per ceptions and fe elings of ru ral Po rtuguese women, re main relatively out of the reach of classic anthropo logical monographic models drawn in objectivist, de scriptive tones. Brief case studies only give us a fleet ing glimpse of these highly personal, intimate dimen sions. Long, detailed indi vidual life-histories, narra ted orally by these women themselves, constitute a task of another order. totally nor predominantly masculine, th us pre cluding a situation in the village resembling that described fo r the Minho, of mobile male migrant::; and resident female villager::; (Brei tell 1986). This migratory element surely com plicates any form of analysis of women's life courses. But another angle on the problem of the middle social groups is also pertinent: how closely do Julia's and Carolina's biographical paths resemble those of these middling laura dora women? Unlike wealthy proprietarias or near-destitutejornaleiras, women in this mid-die group tend to ach ieve a reasona ble modicum of sc l f�s u ffi cicn cy based upon a minimal land ho l din g, a large domestic group or many chil dren, and 1:10me (if not exCCl:ll:live) �:�ocial pre::; tige . 11 Arc we con f'ro ntccl, therefore, rathcr thun wi th a series or gra dation�; or the same basic fem ale trajectory, with th ree d ivergen t life paths in es�;cnce, or merely two opposing ends of an oventll py ram icl with upper and lower extremes?
Most of our material seems to go against the idea of a harmonious, undirrc rentiatecl, i dyllic, and nostalgic rural Arca dia -even among 200 or so villagers, the a nthropological lens can fo cus on enormou�; social ch asms between wom en li ving in houses a few dozen metres away fr om each other. Thil:l analysis p rovides, then , in a sense, a backdrop for further and more detailed biographical analyses. Life-histories, biographical portrait�;, and the use oflocal doc uments such as diaries and letters could carry on fr om here and lead u s mu ch deeper into the subjectivity and inner worlds of specific indi vidual women.12 Our aim, however, will have been achieved in part if we have, firstly, suggested with clarity that there is no single programmed life course fo r rural women, no one fo rm offemale personal development, and perhaps even no simple ex pression in any patrticular village context of any hypothetical fe minine norm of"Portuguese culture" carried within the minds or hearts of real peasant women. 1'3 Secondly, should our materials have provoked even the slightest note of doubt, confusion, query, and perplexity, then we will have succeeded in highlighting some of Portugal's intense fa scination. In delv ing briefly into the lives of two women, we have merely scratched the surface of one of the most complex rural corners of Europe.
1. We have not adopted here any fi1rm of theoreti cal analysis deriving from fem inist anth ropolog ical schools or the topic of "gender re lations", al though such approaches could offe r eq ually stimulating results. Our major stress -as re flected in the contours of our original re::;earch has been pl aced upon stratification and c;ocial hierarchy rather th an on masculine/feminine diffe rences. Wh ich f�1ctor deserves ultimate pri ority (gender or hierarchy?) remains a pa radox.
2. P. Bourdieu (1980:87-109) would call this con glomerate of patterns, habits, and orientations habitu.s, or a set of durable dispositions inculca ted slowly but forcefully over time within the behaviour and mental i ty of villagers via complex processes of education and socialisation . 3. "Fontelas" is a pseudonym for a hamlet located in the district of Bragan((a in 'l'ras-os-Montes prov ince. It is one of four hamlets comprising ihe parish and is approximately 4 kilometres from the Spanish border (Orense province, Galicia). 4. We have access to these dates via the Parish Register of baptisms, marriages, and burialH for all men and women in the fo ur hamlets of the parish for the period . Innumerable other forms of information on demographic and social patterns such as intervals between births , ages of single and married mothers, kinship tics, ages at marriage and death, etc., are contained within these very detailed ecclesiastical sources, and are susceptible to sophisticated historical and anthropological analysis. 5. This Monarchist Revolt was a kind of small scale, modern Po rtuguese counter-revolution re sembling the Ve ndee in Western France at the end of the eighteenth century. 6. At the age of 7, children normally make their first confession in the church and appear listed in the priest's Confessional Roll (Rol dos Confes sados), which is another rich archival document for the study of social and familial relations. All residents of the parish's fo ur hamlets over the age of 7 are listed, with their fu ll names, ages, other co-residents in the household, marital sta tus, occupation, and an annotation indicating "confession" and (when taken) "communion". 7. Until recent national legislation in Po rtugal fo l lowing the political and social transformations inaugurated in 197 4, the legal status of domestic servants was extremely precarious. In remote villages such as this, their contracts were almost exclusively arranged by word of mouth via direct personal accords between servant and employer. Pa yment could fo llow any fo rm: goods, clothing, fo od, wine, grain, or money -or, of course, any combination of these.
8. The anthropologica l literatu re on Mediterrrl ne an societ ies is hy now quite vast.. For a ge neral overv iew on women and property in Mediterra nean l� u ropc, see the collect ion of elol�ay� ed ited by Rav is-Giordani (1 !J!:l7). La�lutt's map of fi1ur broad sub-regions of Europe (]98:.1:526-7), if somcw hatquc�tionablc in anthropological terms, is nevertheless high ly provocative in high light ing the contra�t between a Southern Mediterra nean fiunily area and a more Northerly, Central European one. Sue al�o Dia�· cla��ic but �till high ly perti nent points on the cultural history of the Suevi in Northern Pnr·tuga I (Dins 197 4). 9. We have aq�ucd elsewhere (1987b), following Edmund Leach's heret ical theoretical proposi tion� (]961), that not merely one but two :;y:;tcms of inheritance cocxi�t in thi� hamlet. Th is is our major point, which ha:; :;trongcr implications lor biographical stud ius of a �nciological natu ru (Be•· taux 1981; Bourdicu 1986; Mintz 1960) th an fo r either classic anthropological life-histories (Sim mon:; 1942; Smith 1954) centred on one narrator, more recent po:;t-motlerni:;t biographical por traits fo cusing on the ob:;erver/observed dia logue relation (Crapanzano 1985), or more phil osophically oriented hermeneutical analyses (Watson & Watson-Franke 1985). One of the most fa scinating and ch al l engin g questions for fu ture research resides in the potential for fus ing or combining two or more of these four gen eral trends, as Catani (1982; has shown. 10. The concept of life path is derived here fr om Giddens' discussion of the dimensions of time and space developed in the work of the geogra pher T. Hiigerstrand (Giddens 1984:110-119). Clearly, the term suggests other kinds of concep tualisation ofthe biographical life course, whether in the form oflife-histories narrated orally (Smith 1981) or of trajectories or the social mobility of individuals (Bertaux 1978;Bertaux & Bertaux Wiame 1988). 11. Curiously, women in the lavrador group almost always marry and bear large numbers of chil dren, practically never hire servants, and very rarely give birth to bastard children. We have dealt elsewhere (O'Neill 1987a:173-259) with the complexities of these differences between upper, middle, and lower level women with re gard to marriage, celibacy, and illegitimacy. 12. Unfortunately, no such written records (diaries/ autobiographies) were fo und in Fontelas for ei ther women or men; our earlier study ( 1987 a) did not entail a fu ll-scale search for documents of this nature. In other villages and towns of the area, fu ture searches might well yield fe rtile materials in the fo rm of letters, diaries, and memoirs. Anthropologists have not to date re corded any truly exhaustive oral life-histories of peasants in Portugal, despite Brettell's brief text (1978), although recently more attention has been granted to biography (Conde 1991;1993, Lamas (1948), su perbly documented with hun dreds of ethnographic photographs . This <:lassie work on women leave� no :;bred of doubt a� to the wide variety of social contexts throughout the country sh a pi n g th e life cou rses of rural wonwn .