ABSTRACT
Taking the extensive corpus of nineteenth-century source material − private correspondences, diary entries, memoirs, but also normative texts produced by pedagogists, legalists and theologians − as a starting point, this chapter sets out to address the emotional economy of family relations in Greece in the second half of the nineteenth century. From this starting point, the chapter expands on what its primary sources clearly reveal as a versatile emotion: love. Weaving together historical and anthropological assumptions on kinship and emotions, it aims to show that nineteenth century's diverse descriptions and expressions of family love disclosed a shared quality that the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins defined as ‘mutuality of being’.
