Pour la période de l'Ancien Régime, l'étude de la mobilité géographique, jusqu'à présent, a été centrée sur un stade de la vie : le mariage. Les renseignements contenus dans les actes de mariage des registres paroissiaux permettent assez souvent de dresser une carte de l'origine des conjoints. Par cette méthode on obtient les proportions de conjoints venant de points situés à cinq, dix, vingt, cinquante kilomètres. Cette technique mesure une mobilité géographique d'amplitude longue, donnant la résultante de tous les mouvements d'un individu de la naissance au mariage. Il est alors impossible de savoir comment et quand les individus arrivent à leur lieu de mariage, et si ensuite ils en repartent.
This article is the result of collaboration between a linguist and an anthropologist. In La Troisième planète. Structures familiales et systèmes idéologiques (The Third Planet: Family Structures and Ideologies) (Todd, 1983), anthropologist Emmanuel Todd provided a world map of family types, which he used to explain the distribution of major political philosophies around the world. However, this did not explain the distribution of the family types themselves. Indeed, a concluding chapter entitled &dquo;Le Hazard&dquo; (The Effects of Chance) stated that the distribution of family types did not seem to be the result of any particular economic or ecological factor and was therefore a prime example of the uncertainty principle at work. However, Laurent Sagart, a linguist specializing in Chinese dialects, noticed that this map of family types exhibited a structure well known to experts in historical linguistics and dialectology, contrasting a large, continuous zone in the center with a number of small, independent zones located around the periphery of the central zone or in isolated enclaves within it. When such maps appear in linguistic atlases, dialectologists usually conclude that the central zone was the innovative area while the peripheral and isolated zones conserved the original features. The same analysis, if applied to the map of family types, would lead to the conclusion that the communal family system in the center of the map represented a more recent innovation than the systems around the periphery.The map in La Z'roisienae ptanete was intended to explain the modern political philosophies that developed after the breakup of the great agricultural civilizations. In the entire Old World it distinguished only about 60 different human groups, excluding numerically small peoples and nomadic populations. Since this map was intended to reflect a hypothesis about the history of family systems in the Old World (that is, the entire world as we understand it
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