Domestic groups and rural habitat in northern Portugal - the contribution of Le Play school (1908-34)

Abstract

In Portugal, sociology as an autonomous field of research is mainly tributary to the studies on social morphology carried out between 1908 and 1934 by the followers and adherents to F. Le Play. After having collected and analysed most of the monographies by Rocha Peixoto, L. Poinsard, Bento Carqueja, José Fontes and P. Descamps, the author attempts to give an order to the sociographic data on the rural societies in mainland Portugal, and convert them as far as possible into the modern conceptualizations of sociology and anthropology. Although a secondary analysis of such data enables nothing but a brief outline of the main features and structures of the social systems in northern Portugal, the author tries to show the significance of such a sociological contribution for the intelligibleness of the existing regional disparities. The late inoculation of a scientific spirit within the area of the moral and social sciences proves the underserved lack of interest for such earliest studies; for a very long time, the moral and the social sciences have thus been completely drawn away from the essential discovery regarding the functioning of the contemporary Portuguese society, i.e., the long-persistent customary practices inherited from the old regime.