Page 14 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Aleksander Panjek

social activities, in particular through written documents, enables histo-
rians an easier insight into the historical parables of families and individ-
uals belonging to the rural and peasant elites. Nevertheless, the long-run
approach has been revealed as a useful tool for the emergence of patterns
and tendencies at the rural community level as well.
Upland elite families reveal a quite clear commitment to ensuring the
continuity and persistence of the family itself over the long term. In the
case studies presented here, in Veneto, Tyrol, Friuli, and Slovenia, they
pursued this commitment, among other things, by diversifying their eco-
nomic activities, by establishing marital and economic alliances, and by di-
recting their members towards different professional careers, both related
and unrelated to the family’s original sector. Faced with the political and
cultural changes of the nineteenth century, both in the Swiss Valais and the
Slovenian Karst, members of different social strata of rural society proved
far from impervious to adopting new modes of political and even religious
orientation that allowed their communities to persist and develop in a re-
newed form. On the other hand, both cottagers in Bohemia and peasants
and cottagers in Slovenia were able to immediately seize, and turn to their
advantage, the increased opportunities for employment and earnings that
emerged between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The combination of the microhistorical and long-term approaches re-
veals the history of rural families, elites and communities as a continu-
ous dialogue between continuity and change, in which both continuity and
change may be of exogenous or endogenous origin. Their economic and so-
cial agency enabled rural people to creatively adapt to periods bringing op-
portunities, disruptions or challenges by using their existing knowledge,
skills and cultural values or by widening them by borrowing and develop-
ing new ones. In doing so, although it is clearer in the case of the rural
elite – but is also true for the “masses” – they themselves became agents
of change, contributing to transforming the economic, social and cultural
landscapes of the mountain and upland countryside.

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