ABSTRACT
The house as a construction, as inhabited space, bears witness to a certain type of social formation that conditions the way in which domestic relations are understood and lived. Historians as well as ethnologists have pointed out that the process of privatisation of the western family has been reflected in different forms of domestic space distribution that indicate new ways of defining the frontiers between the public and the private, intimate life and the life of relation, masculine space and feminine space, the space of each generation. Kinship and neighbourhood ties beyond the conjugal nucleus continued to exist, but the couple were independent, and a new family feeling developed around the new houses built by emigrants. The isolation of the family combined with the disintegration of traditional forms of relation, the split in what the people have called family time and social time, has its counterweight in a specific form of affirming the collective self-identity.
