Modelowanie rozkładu kapitału ekonomiczno-społeczno-kulturowego poprzez genealogię masową

Abstract

A coincidence has made it possible to create a new academic discipline in the borderland of genealogy and historical demography. Using the Social Network Analysis (SNA) the new discipline answers the questions of sociology and social history. The article presents an example of applying massive genealogy to an essentially sociological analysis: what the distribution of the cultural and social capital is like and how it is transmitted. In addition, the article shows how it is possible to measure a certain weight which seems to be a yardstick of the capital in question or at least of the component that is transmitted through families. The examples presented in the article are quantities calculated on the basis of the situation of a person in a big family network such as the chance of being a hero of an article in the Polish Biographical Dictionary or the chance – if the person died between 1821 and 1861 – of being mentioned in ‘Kurier Warszawski’. The article also contains an analysis of social prestige of various professions in the 19th a nd 2 0th centuries (based on the analysis of the headlines of entries in the Polish Biographical Dictionary) and the presentation of differences in the impact of paternal and maternal ancestors on the chance of their child becoming a member of the Academy of Sciences.

Keywords

• massive genealogy
• cultural capital
• social capital
• history of the intelligentsia