Details, details

I understand that there’s still one canton that, technically, hasn’t recognized women’s right to vote.

If a majority of the population is well accustomed to certain basic rules and if these rules work reasonably well common people even tend to stick more to these reliable rules than members of parliament and government would do – even if these rules are very unjust for some individuals or even major groups.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Alison, I agree. I said that somewhat tongue-in-cheek, precisely because it is extremely unlikely anyone who’d write this would be thinking about that. But I think it’s an amusing result that it could be interpreted as such.

Well, now: I had a similar reaction when I entered the US for the first time and was confronted by a customs form that was to be filled out only by the head of the family… it was a small reminder that I was going to a place that had rather old-fashioned ideas about how society might conceivably be arranged.

…but yes, Switzerland is a long way, culturally, from the Netherlands.

Switzerland being as heavily regulated as it is, I am wondering whether this is really the idiosyncrasy of a single hotel. I am very frequently in Switzerland, and have seen this in more than one hotel. Indeed, though I can’t say I’ve paid too much attention to these forms before, I’m pretty sure this line item is always there; and I’ve noticed the very thing Eszter is pointing to, and thought it odd. I assume, though, that it is something called for by (say) the Eidgenössische Hotel Check-in Information Act of 1887. The false assumption of this line item might have been just as wrong then, but less surprising.

BTW, Cranky @ 6, most Swiss hotels don’t really make you fill in all those line items. I am usually asked to give name and address, and occasionally passport number. Of course, I am usually travelling alone. I have stayed in a Swiss hotel with the brood only once (an overnight in Lugano, so we could drive through the Gotthard Tunnel the next day at crack o’). But even then, they didn’t ask us to fill in the numero dei congiunti. Perhaps, being so close to the Italian border, the Luganesi are infected ever so slightly with the charming lawlessness of their cousins to the south.

Only men and lesbians are assumed to be heads of household in Switzerland?

I know you said this tongue-in-cheek, but I have family members (in Bavaria) who’d find this to be an entirely reasonable way to determine the “head of household”: If there’s a man around, it’s him; if not, well, we have to make do with one of the women. (If there’s two men, well they’re “Manns genug” (“enough of a man”) to sort it out.

This isn’t limited to hotel forms. Even worse, Swiss tax forms still use “Ehemann/Einzelperson” (Husband/Individual) for the person filling out the taxes, indicating spousal information with “Ehefrau” (wife). It doesn’t get any more official than that.

Also, none of the questions were in French! Why would that be?

This reminds me of the trouble couples from Iceland can have when checking i to hotels in some countries. In Iceland women keep their own surname after marriage, and to make things more confusing the children have surnames based on the given name of the father. So it can be hard explaining that they are married and that these are their children despite all of them having different surnames.

Notice anything peculiar?

Yes, it’s only in three of Switzerland’s four official languages.

To cover all bases: Icelandic men also keep their surnames after marriage (why take that for granted?). Oh, and some Icelandic children (and adults) have surnames derived from the given name of their *mother*.

As a married Icelandic woman with three children, I can’t say I’ve run into name-related trouble at hotels. However, that could be because we haven’t, as a family, traveled much to countries in which hotel staff is concerned with marital status. But while living in the US all of us became quite accustomed to being somewhat randomly assigned one or the other of the four different surnames in the family.

Regarding the hotel form in Switzerland, I’d be tempted to fill it out and cross over “wife” and replace with “husband” (or some other word striking my fancy at the moment).

Is there some technical definition of “head of household” that applies universally? What if the couple want to be considered co-equal? I’m not just talking about Switzerland here. It’s always struck me as a bizarrely outdated concept.

I’m thinking right now about why the nation state tolerates families and individuals but no other social units, so this is much on my mind.

What happened to the company form? Or the school? Or the club? The Department of Conservation has always been able to deal with tramping clubs as units when it comes to huts on conservation land.

As a married woman, I also kept “my own” name. The name I got from my father. Which he got from his father, who got it from his father, and so on back through the mists of time. Which doesn’t quite do the trick of smashing the patriarchy, after all. I suppose I could have given myself an entirely new name, but I’ll confess I was not prepared to make such a radical departure.

I understand what everyone finds so objectionable about this head of household business, and I share those objections. At the same time, there’s something about the tendency of this discussion that irks me a little bit. The assumption of radically autonomous individuality, maybe, which expresses itself as an intolerance for any sort of acknowledgement of social embeddedness.

As I understand it, the US Census form is now fully up-to-date in these matters. No more assumptions about gender and family and household economy. It’s Person 1, followed by Persons 2, 3, and etc. Which is as it should be, of course, and I certainly can’t think of a better alternative. But there’s something curiously bloodless and disembodied about that numbering of Persons. Also, it makes me think of Thing 1 and Thing 2.

In the future, of course, we shall all have double-barrelled surnames: [sequence of mitochondrial DNA]-[sequence of father’s Y chromosome].

Spaniards might wish to reverse the order.

Switzerland is the toughest country in europe to become a citizen of. Switz. is proposing a law whereby the families of minors who commit crimes can be automatically deported. Yes, group punishment.

So, the fact that one card is incompetently written (and probably hasn’t been changed since the turn of the last century), is a minor crime by comparison.

Ve haf vays of making you fill ze hotel kart. Ja.

abb1, for Geneva that should be “carte” and “oui.”

I just filled out a similar card in Luzern. Same problem, although I was more concerned with whether my traveling companion / recently-ex-girlfriend counted as “family member”.

(Oddly, no such card in Lausanne, though possibly the staff filled it out themselves.)

Eszter @36,

you’re right, the proposed law would impose Sippenhaft only on foreigners (of which Switzerland has many). And the absolutely disgusting poster you link to makes it clear that the Blocherites are not thinking primarily of the Norwegian expat community.

Eszter @40,

the figures are pretty easy to come up with, as foreigners are required to register (and not only in CH).

Yes, the ex-Yugoslav expats are “white”, whatever that means. The Blocherites’ stock in trade, though, isn’t anything rational. It is fear of the Dark Other. Serbs etc. are quite dark enough for their purposes. If there were no Serbs available, I have no doubt the Swiss klansmen would press the Germans into service, for all that there is essentially no genetic difference between Deutschschwyzer (the primary vector of the illness) and, say, Swabians.

(For those unfamiliar with the history of the Germanic peoples: the German-speaking Swiss and the Swabians descend from the same early Germanic group. As a result, of course, they hate each other. The standard German Swiss expression for a German — any German, even the unrelated Prussians — is “chaibe Schwob” — or, very roughly, “Swabian shite”.)