In “Whither Family History? A Road Map from Latin America,” Nara Milanich reviews the three-volume work The History of the Family (edited by David Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli) and uses it as a springboard for a broad assessment of the field of family history. While the project shows what European family historians have accomplished, she notes, it offers few clues about where the field is going. She further suggests that family history in general suffers from a dearth of interpretive paradigms and consequently has become a ghettoized field disengaged from the broader terrain of historical inquiry. Milanich points to colonial and postcolonial societies, heretofore marginal to family history, as offering new directions for scholarship. Drawing on the historiography of Latin America, a region characterized by some of the most persistent and yawning divisions based on color, caste, and class in the world, she concludes that a new agenda for family historians might be found in examining the role of family, kinship, and household in the production and reproduction of social hierarchies.
