DEMOGRAPHIC STRUCTURES AND CULTURAL REGIONS IN EUROPE1

There is now a renewed debate within anthropology concerning the relation between 'culture ' and the material world. Even those who have been very heavily influenced by Marxist thought now concede a primary, or at least major role to 'culture however that is defined.1 The historical and contemporary situation within 'Europe ' enables us to speculate further on these matters for there is a vast amount of material already assembled concerning the relations between geography, economy, demography, society and mentality over the last thousand years. This is indeed a rich laboratory for the anthropologist and one that is throwing up some intriguing challenges. One of the curious findings of recent years has emerged as a result of work in demographic history. It is a pleasing irony that one of the 'hardest ' of the social sciences, concerned with the analysis of numbers of births, marriages and deaths, should be nudging us towards that realization of the importance of 'culture ' which, so some have argued, is the special contribution of anthropology.2 The collapse of many accepted beliefs about the nature of the European past can be seen within the wider context of a retreat from a rigid evolutionary framework in general. It is very tempting for the human mind to think in terms of 'stages', one of which will inevitably follow the previous one. This approach, partially modelled on Darwin's work on the evolution of species, has come to dominate mos