Household In Anthropology Research Paper

1. Problems In Defining The Household

The grounds for analytically separating families and households lie in the broader claim that kinship and locality are two distinct principles of organization (Keesing 1958). This claim, in turn, derives from the discipline’s focus in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the principles organizing social groups and relations in nonstate societies. Kinship, which was assumed to be universally defined on the basis of genealogical linkages rooted in biological reproduction, was considered the most important among these principles. As a key mode of recruiting members to (and limiting membership in) politically important groups such lineages and clans, kinship (genealogical propinquity) was distinguished from locality (spatial propinquity), which defined residential units such as hamlets and villages. As anthropologists expanded their range of ethnographic research to include peasant communities, they drew on the distinction between kinship and locality to differentiate family from household. The family as a corporate kin group was distinguished from the household as a collection of kin and sometimes nonkin who share a common residence. The corporate character of the peasant family was viewed as rooted in its jural rights to property, usually land, which its members held in common. Family members supposedly retained these rights regardless of whether they were members of the same household. Hence, family and household, it was argued, are both ‘logically distinct’ and ‘empirically different’ (Bender 1967, p. 493).

Actual usage of the term household in the anthropological literature, however, calls into question both the logical distinction and the empirical difference between families and households. For one, residential units composed of individuals who are not genealogically linked, such as orphanages, college dormitories, men’s houses (in societies where gender segregation among adults is practiced), convents, and army barracks, usually are not considered households. At the same time, however, families whose members move between residential units that are located on different continents are referred to as ‘transnational households’ (Basch et al. 1994). In other words, anthropologists attach the term household only to groups of people sharing both a common living space and activities that are identified as domestic. Domestic activities include those activities related to food production and consumption or to reproduction, including childbearing and child rearing. As these are the very same activities that are considered the functional basis of the ‘family,’ in practice, households are identified using both ‘kinship’ and ‘residence’ criteria. Thus, the claim for the logical distinction and empirical difference between family and household is not affirmed by scholarly practice.

Because ‘domestic’ activities are sometimes carried out by groups of people who do not reside together, some anthropologists (Bender 1967) have suggested that it would be better to employ alternate terms in our ethnographic descriptions. Among the alternatives that have been suggested are ‘co-residential group,’ ‘budget unit,’ and ‘domestic group.’ Less important than the terms employed, however, is the need for ethnographers to describe precisely the composition, organization, activities, and functions of these units. In addition, the cultural meanings people attach to these units need to be explicated. In the absence of this knowledge, anthropologist and others are likely to project their own cultural meanings and expectations on them.

The difficulties of identifying households are illustrated by innumerable cases (see Segalen 1984) which demonstrate that neither the boundaries nor the functions of household are easily discerned. Questions have been raised as to how to treat residential groups that move through a seasonal cycle of dispersal and concentration, how to handle the movement of people between dwelling units, whether to define as a single household the huts or houses that share a common yard or those that share a common stove, and whether to include servants, apprentices, boarders, lodgers, and nonkin in the household. More recently, studies of transnational migration (Rouse 1991, Basch et al. 1994) have raised the question as to whether residential units located in different nations and even on different continents constitute a single household. Studies of gay and lesbian kinship (Weston 1991), on the other hand, have challenged the assumption that heterosexual marriage and parenthood are the universal, natural core of families and households.

2. Problems In The Classification Of Households Types

Much of the literature on households has been concerned with explaining variations among households that are distributed over time and space. In describing this variation, most scholars have focused on the character of the genealogical links between members of the household as its defining feature. Terms such as ‘stem family household,’ ‘nuclear family household,’ and ‘patrilateral extended household’ are based on the configuration of genealogically-defined kin types included in the household—in other words, its household composition. In addition, the most genealogically ‘close’ members of the household are assumed to form its structural core. For example, if a household contains two adult brothers, their wives and children, it is labeled a fraternal-joint household. The assumption here is that the relationship between the brothers constitutes the structural core that shapes the relations of all the members of the household. Accordingly, studies of household change over time track changes in the genealogical composition of the household.

The classification of households on the basis of their genealogical composition rests on the shaky assumption that people who are similarly linked genealogically will have the same or greatly similar social relations. In other words, it is assumed that the labeling of a household as a ‘stem-family household’ captures its organizational structure and function. But a stemfamily household found at one time and place does not necessarily share the same organizational dynamics as a stem-family household at another time and place. A household, or any social unit, is much more than the sum of its genealogical links. It is the negotiated outcome of the culturally meaningful actions and relations of its members. The actions and relations of household members with identical genealogically defined links can differ radically. Even households with the same genealogical composition in the same community may have significantly different structures of authority and divisions of labor (Yanagisako 1984).

3. What Explains Variation Among Households?

A key question that has fueled comparative studies of households by anthropologists, historians, demographers, and other social scientists is what explains variations among them. Two related questions have been asked of variations observed in household composition. First, why do a significant proportion of the households in a society differ from what people report to be the ideal type of household? Second, irrespective of these ideals, what explains the distribution of household types within and between societies? Three types of variables have been offered to answer both these questions: demographic variables, economic variables, and social stratification variables.

3.1 Demographic Variables

Demographic variables affect the size and composition of households, thus acting as constraints on the attainment of the culturally ideal household type. Age at marriage, life expectancy, and fertility shape the composition of households at any given time in a population. The economy of the household is also shaped by demographic processes. Among peasants for whom the household is the unit of production, changes in the demographic structure of the household as it moves through the developmental cycle entail changes in the ratio of consumers to workers (Chayanov 1966).

Fortes’s (1958) model of the developmental cycle of domestic groups draws on these demographic processes to explain the varieties of domestic groups found in a society. Fortes hypothesized that the variety of household types found in a community or society at any point in time are merely different phases in the developmental cycle of a ‘single general form.’ As all households pass through different stages of the developmental cycle at different times, a census taken at a particular point in time will catch only a few in the ideal, complete phase. Hence, an ideal household type such as the patrilineal stem family household of Japan (which includes a married couple, their adult son and his wife and children) is better regarded as ‘a transitory state in the development of the household, rather than as a form’ (Hammel 1975, p. 142).

Fortes’s model has been useful in helping us understand the impact of events such as birth, marriage, and death on the composition of households. It cannot account for all the observed variation in households, however, because other cultural and social forces (see below) are also involved. Fortes himself later (1978, p. 18) conceded that a model of a uniform developmental cycle could not explain why the actual histories of different families entail different developmental sequences. The model may also blind us to historical shifts wherein more recently formed households embark on a different trajectory than older ones. In addition, while demographic factors undoubtedly shape households, it is a mistake to treat them as exogenous, biological constraints on the composition and economy of households. To do so confuses social replacement with biological reproduction and overlooks the strategies people actively employ to control household size and composition, including their ‘kinship’ practices of marriage, fosterage, adoption, timing and spacing of births, and timing of family division. The collection of longitudinal data on households, whether by utilizing historical sources or through retrospective oral histories, is necessary for understanding both continuity and change. Cohort analysis is an effective tool for helping ascertain similarities and differences in the household histories of members of successive cohorts, defined on the basis of year of birth, marriage, or other historically significant events experienced by the members of a community.

3.2 Economic Variables

Economic variables are also adduced to explain cross societal variation in household composition and organization. In some cases a mix of ‘economic’ and ‘ecological’ factors, including labor needs of production, defensive needs, care of children, taxation, and conscription practices of the state, are identified as the functional basis for the prevalence of certain household types. In others, the labor requirements of a particular productive activity are singled out as the primary determinant of household type. In their cross societal analysis of 60 randomly selected societies, Pasternak et al. (1976) conclude that labor requirements are the most powerful determinant of the formation of extended family households. They hypothesize that in societies where work outside the home makes it difficult for a mother to tend to children and other domestic tasks or when the outside activities of the father make it difficult for him to perform his subsistence work, extended family households will prevail. Although they are able to demonstrate a correlation between activity requirements and presence of extended family households, they lack diachronic data to support the hypothesized causal relation between their independent variable (activity requirements) and their dependent variable (presence of extended family households). Consequently, they must resort to arguing that it is more plausible that activity requirements cause extended family households rather than vice versa. However, it is even more plausible that household composition and productive activities do not lie in a simple, unidirectional causal relation but rather shape each other.

Attempts like that of Pasternak et al. to identify the determinants of household composition and structure through statistical analysis of cross-societal comparisons have declined significantly over the past 30 years as the inherent problems and limitations of such studies have been increasingly recognized. Among these problems is that of discerning whether the units that have been selected for comparison are appropriate. As all societies contain different frequencies of a range of household types, it is misleading to classify entire societies into those with ‘extended family households’ vs. those with ‘independent family households.’ A better understanding of the relation between household composition and ‘economic’ factors may be gained by investigating the ways in which diverse types of households in a society articulate with one another, rather than by reducing the entire society to a single household type.

Labor requirements are often used to explain the frequency with which a particular household type appears in a society or section of society. Netting (1974) cites several ecological studies as demonstrating that household composition among horticulturalists and agriculturalists varies with the type and amount of labor required for effective crop production. His own study attributes the differences between the large, extended families of shifting cultivators and the nuclear family households of intensive agriculturalists in the same Nigerian plateau environment to different labor requirements (Netting 1965).

A shaky assumption underlies both cross-societal and intrasocietal studies that seek the determinants of household variation in productive labor requirements. In all of them, it is assumed that once having identified the subsistence activity or primary productive activity of the household, researchers can ascertain the labor requirements of that activity and proceed to show how the household efficiently meets them. In doing so, however, they overlook the fact that it is not simply technological requirements that necessitate a household type, but the entire manner in which production is socially organized. In other words, a productive activity can be accomplished by a variety of household types depending on how that production is socially organized, including the division of labor by sex and age, the use of hired labor, cooperation between households in productive tasks, and the exchange of labor between households. In assuming that the household is a self-contained labor unit, researchers fail to sufficiently investigate the existence of other forms of labor organization. But the social units engaged in production may not be the same at different phases of the productive cycle. For example, different social units may work together in the planting, weeding, and harvesting of crops. To attribute household composition to labor requirements begs the question, because it assumes the prior existence of an entire social organization of production. In order to overcome this narrow focus on technical requirements of production, the interplay of a wider range of cultural, political, and economic forces shaping productive relations within and between households needs to be considered.

3.3 Social Stratification

Differential access to resources, in particular differences in ownership and control of the means of production, also shape household variation in both peasant communities and among urban, industrial populations. A past tendency to neglect inequality in studies of households and other domestic groups can be attributed to the assumption that the communities studied by ethnographers were basically homogeneous. When anthropologists have studied peasant communities, for example, the implicit contrast with the landowners—who were generally not studied—led them to overlook significant differences among the peasants. Consequently, there has been a tendency to dismiss stratification as a significant factor in the analysis of household variation among peasants. Yet peasant communities are nowhere homogeneous, but are always internally differentiated. Differences in wealth among peasants are also overlooked because they are often obscured by idioms of kinship that bind the landed to the landless and the land-rich to the landpoor. Significant wealth differences may exist, however, between the smaller co-residential units of a single kin-based compound or between brothers who head the main and branch households of a family. In other words, ideas and ideologies of family and kinship may obscure stratification among kin.

4. Changes In Households Over Time

Anthropological studies of household and family change over time have focused generally on the effects of industrialization, urbanization, and the increasing integration of communities into capitalist market relations. Many of these studies challenge or argue for the refinement of the prevailing sociological theory that family, household, and kinship decline in importance as a society ‘modernizes’ and becomes increasingly urbanized and industrialized. They demonstrate that in some cases urbanization and industrialization have strengthened the extended family rather than weakened it and that new functions are assumed by extended families and extended family households. For example, urban migration may contribute to the maintenance of extended family households. While these studies provide an important correction to the theory of modernization and kinship decline, they are marred by the inconsistent use of ambiguous terms, including ‘extended family household.’ The argument over whether extended families have declined with urban-industrialization is in part the result of differences in the way in which researchers define and conceptualize household type. Quite often it is assumed that people who live in extended family households pursue common strategies and cooperative actions under the direction of a central authority—the head of the household. This not only gives undue weight to centralized authority as the defining feature of the extended family, but it also overlooks the heterogeneity in the goals and strategies of the members of a household.

5. Recent Critical Approaches To Household

The adaptationist, utilitarian approach to households that prevailed in much of the anthropological literature up until the 1980s has been challenged by new theoretical approaches that have had an important impact on the discipline in general. Among these perhaps the most significant has been feminist theories of gender.

In the 1970s, one of the first questions feminist anthropologists raised in rethinking the anthropological analysis of women’s status and roles was whether ethnographers had overlooked women’s goals, strategies, and forms of action, especially in the ‘domestic sphere.’ M. Wolf’s (1972) study of Taiwanese joint family households, for example, revealed that family and household division was brought about as much by women’s attempts to advance their own goals and those of their ‘uterine family’ as it was by conflicts among brothers. Collier (1974) argued that this process occurs commonly in societies where men gain power by holding together large bodies of co-resident kin, but where women (especially younger women) gain power by breaking up such units. By attending to the informal power women often wield in societies where men are granted formal authority, feminist anthropologists alerted us to the tensions and conflicts and, therefore, the complex processes shaping households and other domestic groups. Likewise, investigations of women’s relations with kin and others outside their household demonstrated that it is not just men who link mother–child units to larger institutional structures. The involvement of women in informal exchange networks between families and households had been overlooked by androcentric studies that had equated male relations with the ‘public sphere.’ Once studies showed that the female and male members of households—as well as the young and the old, those born in the household and those who had married into it—often do not share the same goals and strategies, it was no longer possible to retain the naive concept of a unified ‘household strategy.’ Finally, by calling into question the presumed universality and immutability of gender identities and the gender division of labor, feminist anthropologists denaturalized gender systems and called for the study of its historical and cultural production. They revealed the gender assumptions embedded in concepts of the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres (Reiter 1975), in definitions of the ‘domestic sphere’ and ‘domestic groups,’ including family and household (Yanagisako 1979) and in theories of kinship (Yanagisako and Collier 1987).

6. Rethinking Households

Functionalist analyses of ‘household adaptation’ reified the household, treating it as a social actor endowed with human consciousness and motives. Households were described as having goals, fashioning strategies, and adapting to the changing pressures of a modernizing society. Such language demonstrates the ease with which an analytic construct can be made into a social actor. The imputation of consciousness and will to households is rooted in the assumption that those who live together share a collective motive and will—in other words, a unified household strategy. It obscures the complex social processes through which people negotiate the relations that produce households, despite different and sometimes conflicting goals, strategies, and ideas about what it means to ‘live together.’

Neither the composition nor the dynamic structure of households can be understood without a thorough understanding of the cultural meanings and sentiments that shape the social actions and relations of the people who live in them. This does not mean that households cannot be compared across societies, but rather that the comparative study of households must include an explication of the culturally specific and heterogeneous meanings and motives shaping peoples’ residential preferences and relations. Such an expanded strategy of research and analysis will enable anthropologists to move beyond crude comparisons of distributions of genealogically defined household types within and across societies to understanding households as the negotiated outcomes of culturally meaningful action.

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