“Naming the house and naming the land: kinship and social groups in the Polish highlands”

The house is the core of social and economic identity, and a metaphor for kinship, for the Gorale of southwestern Polad. This article argues that Levi-Strauss's idea of `house societies' can be applied to peripheral, rural cultures in contemporary Europe. Rather than a transitional form between kin- and state-based societies, however, the house in this context maintains a shifting power relationship with the state, in response to changes in the broader political economy. Regardless of its actual economic importance, in ideological terms the house is consistently represented as economically dominant, a representation reinforced by kinship and neighbourhood reciprocity, and by the rituals of the house.