Eighteenth-Century Matrimonial Strategies and Emigration to the Americas The House of Berrio in La Bastide Clairence*

In a 1983 lecture at the Sorbonne entitled “History and Ethnology,” Claude LéviStrauss offered an example of the connection between these two disciplines based on his work on “house-based societies,” in which he compared eleventh-century Japan, the Fiji Islands, and medieval Europe.1 In his earlier work, Lévi-Strauss categorized kinship systems by using combinations of binary opposites, such as patrilineal/matrilineal and exogamous/endogamous. However, close examination of how “houses” such as the great European houses of the pre-modern period were transmitted across generations reveals that both men and women could inherit. It also demonstrates that alliances between families at times involved closely-related families but could also be established between families that were only distantly related. According to Lévi-Strauss, the “house” is a social unit distinct from the family because it does not necessarily correspond to agnatic lineage and may “occasionally even lack any biological basis.” Instead of constituting a transgenerational