Anthropology Of Family Research Paper

1. The Family In Western Society

The significance of the family in Western societies is obvious in daily life. Children in primary school are asked to describe their families as a writing exercise and politicians vie with one another to be ‘the party of the family.’ Christianity, the majority religion of Western society, celebrates the Holy Family and its priests proclaim the duty of Christians to emulate it in their domestic life. The terms used by members of a family for one another are not applied to any other relatives and the relationships they designate are seen as unique. The family encloses the private life of individuals and, as the building block of society, is given equal weight with the public institutions of the state, since the division into public and private is one of the fundamental social distinctions in Western culture. Yet this important institution is also the subject of controversy. There are arguments over the past and future of the family, over whether it is universal or merely an adaptation to the modern world, over the possibility of its decline and the effect on it of political and economic measures. The family is not taken for granted.

Despite its importance, the word ‘family’ has no clearly defined meaning. In twentieth century England, for example, in ordinary speech it may evoke any one of a cluster of meanings, depending on context (Harris 1983, p. 31). As well as parents and children, ‘family’ can mean: a network of kin (‘all the family’); a succession of related people (‘the family has lived here for 400 years’); children (‘they have not brought the family with them’); birth status (‘he comes from a good family’); household (‘children leave the family as they grow up’); relatives generally (‘she has no family in London’); etc. It is difficult to claim that any of these meanings is the ‘true’ meaning and others merely metaphorical usages, although some people might claim that the unit of parents and children is the primary sense of the term. However, there is evidence to show that this narrower meaning is relatively recent in English history. Davidoff and Hall (1987) trace its importance to the rise of the industrially based middleclass in the nineteenth century.

Three elements are interrelated in complex ways in the various uses of the word family: marriage, relatedness, or kinship and domestic or household organization. Each usage of the term carries different combinations of these elements. The ‘elementary’ or ‘nuclear’ family, as social scientists label parents and children, combines all three and it is this form that carries such symbolic weight in twentieth-century Western culture. At some point in the history of anthropology each of these three features has been used separately, and effectively, in cross-cultural comparison. The three principles are quite distinct in the abstract but separating them in analysis is not easy. However, it is the confusion between, for example, kinship and residence or marriage and parentage that causes problems in using ‘the family’ as a technical term.

In the West marriage is the foundation of ‘the family.’ As a legally established relationship the marital tie may be contrasted with the ‘biological’ links between parents and children or between siblings, which are referred to as blood ties. In Western societies marriage entails co-residence, although this is not a universal consequence of marriage (e.g., Fortes 1949). Where the norm is for a newly-married couple to set up their own household as in much of North America and Western Europe, this qualifies the newly-married couple to be referred to as a ‘family’ in anticipation of the children that are expected to follow. The death of a spouse or a divorce are individual breaks in the expected pattern but remarriage ‘reconstitutes’ the family once more.

The centrality of relatedness to the notion of family can be seen in the fact that not all residential units qualify to be called families. Individuals living on their own, boarding schools, prisons, and colleges are never referred to as families, nor are groups of unrelated people sharing a flat. In the case of the last three, this may indicate that children are essential to a family, but children’s residential homes are not considered families either. It is the nature of the ties among them that qualifies people who live together to be called a family.

The relationships internal to a family are thought of as emotional bonds, permanent ties that reflect ideals of sharing and altruism by contrast with the short-lived rational contracts of the market or the self-serving nature of political alliances. The authority of parents over children and the role of the father as ‘head of the family’ are believed to derive from the reproductive functions of the family and to reflect the ‘natural’ differences of generation and gender within it. The assumption that living together is necessary for the family to fulfill its reproductive function underlies the interchangeability of ‘family’ and ‘household.’

However, Western cultures also make implicit distinctions between families and households. Where children are expected to leave the parental household at adulthood, this may, like the death or divorce of parents, be said to ‘break up’ the original family. Nevertheless, married adults continue to be related to their parents and siblings by genealogical ties that may be referred to collectively as belonging to a ‘family,’ although one which is not a household. Husband and wife belong, as offspring, to distinct ‘families’ that the marriage can be seen as linking. Individuals are thus members of at least two ‘families’: one in which they are children and (usually) siblings and one in which they are parents and spouses. Sociologists have labeled these the family of origin and the family of procreation, which emphasizes the different methods by which the focal individuals are recruited, birth and marriage; the labels incorporate the folk view. From a more analytical perspective the network of genealogical ties linking individuals can be seen as cross-cut by living arrangements that group them into different households.

Other usages of the term ‘family’ used in a variety of contexts show different combinations of kinship and residence. The term extended family may be used to refer to all individuals linked genealogically but not living together, giving this use of the term ‘family’ a purely kinship connotation, unlike its use to mean close kin who do live together. Alternatively, a large number of related households in one community may be referred to as an extended family, making their common locality a significant factor. Finally, ‘extended family’ may mean large households containing three or more generations, which can still be found in some rural communities in Europe. All these uses of the term are also current in academic works (e.g., Janssens 1993, 1fn).

The range of meanings that attach to the concept of the family make clear its great importance in Western culture. However, its complexity also raises a series of problems when it is used to analyze other societies. Simplifying the concept by identifying one or other of its component elements as fundamental has not solved the problems in cross-cultural analysis but has preserved the idea that ‘the family’ is a useful concept.

2. The Family In Anthropological Analysis

The issues with which the anthropology of the family have been associated reflect Western notions. At the outset the focus was on marriage. In the nineteenth century, the scholars who developed anthropology regarded monogamous lifelong marriage as characteristic of ‘civilization,’ the culmination of human evolution. The Western family was a late development not to be found among peoples who represented earlier stages of the evolutionary process. These latter were characterized by plural marriage and a failure to understand the nature and significance of biological links. Nineteenth century evolutionism has long been recognized as lacking a sound empirical basis for its conjectures, but the idea that the present form of ‘the family’ is a product of social changes over time was not entirely abandoned. It survived in modified form in the view that the present form of ‘the family’ is a product of modernization, of capitalism, or of industrial society and in the myth that Europe’s peasant forebears all lived in extended families.

By the middle of the twentieth century, some anthropologists argued instead that the family could be said to be universal. The basis for this contrary view was the assumption that ‘the family,’ so far from being associated with marriage in a particular cultural form, was based on a universal, natural function: reproduction. It was this biological ‘fact’ that formed the basis of the family, a view widespread in the societies from which anthropologists came. ‘The family,’ a couple with their children, might be incorporated in various different domestic arrangements, but was itself a biological ‘given.’ Whether any individual society recognized this or not depended on their culture, a view not unlike that of the evolutionists. Malinowski, an early proponent of this functional view, nevertheless cautioned that ‘… the essential features of the individual family … depend upon the general structure of a given society …’ (1913, p. 6). More boldly, Murdock (1949) proclaimed the nuclear family to be universal, a co-residential unit with ‘sexual, economic, reproductive, and educational’ functions. His conclusions depended on the application of the label ‘family’ to a wide variety of social units that were not strictly comparable. The procedure showed all too clearly the looseness of the term.

Anthropological arguments over the incest taboo paralleled those over whether the family was a biological or social entity (La Fontaine 1990, pp. 20–43). The view that the incest taboo reflected a natural avoidance of sexual relations between related people assumed that incest referred to sexual relations within the ‘nuclear family’; these relationships were such that sexual attraction naturally did not arise. Other anthropologists pointed to documented cases of sexual prohibitions of an identical nature involving relationships outside the ‘nuclear family,’ as was also the case in Western society. Incest taboos, considered as total systems of prohibitions, varied widely cross-culturally, and could not therefore be considered biologically determined or ‘natural’ (Goody 1956). The later development of sociobiology resulted in claims that the taboo could also be observed to exist among the higher primates and was therefore genetic, rather than a feature of human family relations. This and other forms of biological determinism were vigorously contested (Schneider 1965, Sahlins 1976); in particular it was pointed out that paternity cannot be identified among higher primates and among human beings it is always socially determined. Few social or cultural anthropologists now accept that the incest taboo is universal, but the ideas that among close kin it is only rarely broken and that incest is ‘unnatural’ remains. At the end of the twentieth century, evidence that breaches of the incest taboo were infrequent but not rare in Western societies became public knowledge there. This offered proof that the ‘taboo’ was neither genetic nor unbroken. The reality of incest was not easily accepted, whether by the public at large or by social scientists, showing that the assumptions underlying it and also entailed in the concept of the family were deeply rooted in Western culture.

Knowledge of the variation in incest prohibitions came from the study of kinship systems that expanded rapidly in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The development had a further impact on views of the family. A solution to the theoretical problems raised by the data on domestic organization was to distinguish between ‘the family’ as a reproductive unit and the household or domestic group. One of the earliest to do this was Fortes (1958) who used the term domestic group, referring to the ‘family’ as the reproductive nucleus within it. His distinction emphasized a number of contrasts between the concepts: ‘the family’ consists of parents and children, whereas the domestic group might include more than two generations; the family is recruited through marriage and kinship ties, whereas many different kinds of tie may draw individuals into living together. The family is concerned with social and physical reproduction, the domestic group ‘is essentially a householding and housekeeping unit’ (Fortes 1958, p. 8). According to Fortes, the changes in the size and structure of domestic groups that can be observed in a particular society do not reflect breaches of any ‘rule of residence’ as had previously been thought, but derive partly from the effect on household constitution of the political and economic structure but also from the developmental cycle of growth and maturation in the reproductive nucleus. These processes and the cultural reactions that they entail are the driving force behind household changes.

Fortes’ distinction also drew attention to production as a household activity. Property rights and labor needs were shown to influence the form of the domestic group as much as the developmental cycle of the reproductive core. Households were shaped by the demands for different kinds of labor associated with their subsistence activities and the association of related people within different households concerned economic viability as well as kinship obligations. Goody went further and showed that interpersonal relations in the ‘reproductive core’ were also affected by these factors (Goody 1956). Marxist anthropology subsequently attempted to construct different modes of domestic production and reveal the power structures entailed in them, but these largely ignored reproductive processes.

Distinguishing ‘family’ from ‘household’ avoided rather than solved the problems inherent in the concept of the family (La Fontaine 1985). The notion of the family as a reproductive unit conflates childbearing and child-rearing with co-residence so that in effect the family is actually defined by residence, a return to the Western folk concept (Smith 1973). It is not surprising that some anthropologists have subsequently reverted to using family and household indistinguishably. The distinction also maintained the segregation of domestic kinship from the network of kin as a whole, which was particularly misleading where spouses were chosen from among them.

The French anthropologist Levi-Strauss’ revolutionary approach to kinship disposed of some of these questions. He argued that exchange of goods and of women, not biological reproduction, was the basis of social life. Hence, marriage rules are integral to the wider social structure, not merely the basis of the family or a means of recruitment to households. Systems where marriage with relatives was the ideal showed how the patterns of distribution of women in marriage constituted social structures. His ‘atom of kinship’ (1958 (1963)) contained the same elements as ‘the nuclear family,’ but rearranged so as to emphasize the relation between a man and his wife’s brother created by marriage. Moreover its elements, pairs of opposites, reflected the oppositions in systems of thought, the deep structure of culture.

Under the rather more materialist influence of feminism, anthropologists in the 1970s showed how the ‘natural’ processes of childbirth seemed to be very widely used to symbolize women and legitimize their subordination to men. Within the domestic sphere, also associated with women, the division of labor was seen as reflecting the natural capabilities of men and women; the products of their labor were shared with their children. However, the distribution of goods and the allocation of labor within the household actually reflected its internal power structure rather than a pooling of family resources or a ‘natural’ division of family labor. The realities of power were presented as unquestionable by being associated with the natures of men and women. Concepts of nature were thus shown to be more than mental constructs; they were also intimately bound up with the social distribution of power and authority, which they helped to reproduce. The ‘family’ was revealed as a similar social representation legitimizing household organization (Harris 1981).

Both of these approaches stimulated research into the meanings of folk concepts and into local systems of knowledge (Barnes 1973, Harris 1981, Carsten 1997). The social constructions of the person in folk theories made it clear that whatever the common physical nature of human beings, it is perceived through these culturally variable understandings. The image of shared blood or common physical substance are only two among many ways of representing relatedness and the concept of the family is a folk concept among others.

While Levi-Strauss’ structuralist approach undoubtedly revealed the significance of cultural understandings of the world, he was not interested in distinguishing between the meanings drawn from the analysts’ own Western culture and those of the societies they were studying. Recognition of this ethnocentricity led to a wholesale rejection of such oppositions as domestic and political, natural, and social that underpinned the notion of the family and kinship (Schneider 1984, Carsten 1997, p. 20). Others accepted that certain distinctions might be culturally specific, but argued that the topic of relatedness could be approached through the folk concepts of the society studied (Carsten 1995, p. 225). This left ‘the family’ as a Western folk concept, limited in its usefulness to an understanding of the West.

A final strand in late twentieth century anthropological thinking on ‘the family’ has been contributed by research in Europe and on issues of public concern (La Fontaine 1990, Simpson 1998). While there is a general acceptance that the concept of the family is analytically unhelpful, the term continues to be used. Thus, Segalen and Zonabend, having noted that under the influence of anthropology the ‘overfluid’ concept of the family has been replaced by analytical concepts such as household and kinship (1987, p. 112), then use ‘family’ unreflectively and do not discuss why or in what sense. Rather than refer to kinship networks established after divorce, Simpson retains the term family, though qualifying it as ‘the unclear family.’ He argues for the study of divorce, not as a social problem or a symptom of general breakdown, but as the reorganization of interpersonal relationships in new forms of kindred. His rejection of ‘the family’ as a theoretical model is explicit, but his continued use of the term implies, as does that of Segalen and Zonabend, an attachment to certain connotations of it that have yet to be explored. The concept of the family may have been discarded from the repertoire of many anthropologists but it is too soon to regard its relegation to the scrap-heap as final.

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