Ch 9 - Marriage and Family

• Family: people who consider themselves related by blood, marriage, or adoption

• Household: consists of people who occupy the same housing unit

• Nuclear family: Immediate family in which there are no disruptions in the family dynamic. Consists of a couple and children

• Extended family: A whole network of relatives who are part of a family unit, such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins

• Marriage is a group’s approved mating arrangements, usually marked by a ritual of some sort

→ this depends on the bride and groom’s culture

• Monogamy: practice in which a two significant others remain faithful to only each other. Also known as traditional marriages since it is the most popular

Many cultures have different forms of unorthodox families, such as:

• Polygyny: men having more than one wife

• Polyandry: women having more than one husband

Mate selection:

Each human group establishes norms to govern who marries whom

1. Endogamy: specifies that its members must marry within their group

→ Interracial marriage is prohibited

→ In some societies, these norms are written into law, in others, they are informal

2. Exogamy: people marry outside their group

• System of descent: the way people trace kinship over generations

• Bilineal system: tracing descent to both the mother’s and father’s sides of the family

• Patrilineal system: tracing descent only on the father’s side

• Matrilineal system: tracing descent on only the mother’s side

• Although the form of marriage and family varies from one group to the other, the family is universal. Family fulfils six basic needs that are basic to the survival of the society:

1. Economic production

2. Socialisation of children

3. Care of the sick and aged

4. Recreation

5. Sexual control

6. Reproduction

• Conflict theory interrupts the family as a system of power relations that reinforces and reflects the inequalities in society

  → they are interested in how families are affected by class, race, and gender inequality