Handle with Care: The Fiddly Concept of “Transitional” When Partitioning Europe in Regional Family Systems

While exploring the map of European family models, this essay aims to appraise the robustness of the category of “transitional zone,” that is, the intermediary area between Eastern and Western Europe, reinterpreting it as a typology of regions with a common transition period from monolithic complex forms to multifaceted societies, where the “simple”/“stem” family gradually prevails. While an intermediate value in a scale does not elucidate anything new, an “intermediate” type in a typology approach is endowed with its own semantic space. The author pinpoints some critical issues in a “gradient-dependent” approach. Gradients are not typologies, and reasoning by gradients generates unanticipated effects. Typologies of family patterns can be inserted into three-dimensional space, and a meta-analysis of narration can add precious value. Last but not least, a map of European family systems must have historical depth. As a consequence, the author draws two time-lagged fault lines and two corresponding “transitional zones” in between. From this standpoint, the idea of transition should be viewed within the historical period of change from “joint” to “simple” family systems, in the broad sense of the terms