What are Families and How Are They Structured in Different Societies?

• Families fulfill similar functions in most societies: comfort and belonging for members, a sense of identity, shared values and ideals, economic cooperation, and nurturance of children.

  • Although these functions are common, the patterns of achieving them are constructed in culturally specific and dynamic systems of kinship: the social system that organizes people in families based on descent and marriage.

• Families are not permanent entities as members come and go. Individuals may be members of multiple families in the course of a lifetime, beginning with a natal family, the family into which a person is born and (usually) raised.

  • Politicians and religious leaders in the United States often argue for “traditional” marriages, families, and values–rarely bothering to specify which traditions they’re referring to (and probably not understanding the complex diversity of traditions that have existed).

  • Many assume the model presented in 1950s sitcoms like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver: a working father, a stay-at-home mother, and dependent children.

    • Further, they assume that this “traditional” pattern existed pretty much from the beginning of time until the 1970s.

  • In reality, the idealized “tradition” presented by 1950s sitcoms isn’t much older than the sitcoms themselves. The independent American suburban family was a recent and short-lived phenomenon in the United States.

  • The Great Depression of the 1930s and the war years of the 1940s had kept birth rates low. The 1950s were a time of unprecedented economic growth, family stability, and a lot of babies—77 million “baby boomers” born in fifteen years.

• Young nuclear families spurred the development and spread of suburban housing. By the late 1950s, independent American suburban families were the norm (about 60% of Americans lived in one), if not a deeply rooted tradition.

  • Beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s, the Ozzie and Harriet norm changed in many interconnected ways:

    • More women in the workplace

    • More two-income households

    • Fewer children (one or two, rather than three or four)

    • More divorces

    • More divorced people getting remarried

  • Still, the United States and many other nations in the world, view the nuclear family as an ideal form: the family formed by a married couple and their children.

  • But many other forms exist, and this makes kinship charts particularly helpful to anthropologists: visual representations of family relationships.

    • These charts are useful for diagramming biological relationships, if not the cultural meanings associated with these relationships.

• In economics, as well as other aspects of life, families function as corporate groups: groups of real people who work together toward common ends much like a corporation does.

  • Families are also versatile enough to include non-nuclear members. We call these extended families: larger groups of relatives beyond the nuclear family, often living in the same household.

  • Extended families were common in nineteenth-century America, with households shared by nuclear relatives, grandparents, unmarried aunts or uncles, and so on.

  • Now, extended families in the United States mostly only interact at special events.

• Clans and lineages are larger descent groups that subtly differ from one another:

  • Clan: a group of relatives who claim to be descended from a single ancestor.

  • Lineage: a group composed of relatives who are directly descended from known ancestors (usually a known human ancestor).

  • Clans are most often exogamous: a social pattern in which members of a clan must marry someone from another clan, which has the effect of building political, economic, and social ties with other clans.

  • Descent is a complicated system of organization because we all have innumerable ancestors—we could conceivably trace our ancestry back to any of these people.

    • One way that societies have traditionally narrowed their ancestors down is through unilineal descent (patrilineal or matrilineal).

      • Unilineal: based on descent through a single line, either males or females

      • Patrilineal: reckoning descent through males from the same ancestors. Most clans and lineages in nonindustrial societies (Omaha Indians, the Nuer of South Sudan, societies in the central highlands of Papua New Guinea) are patrilineal.

      • Matrilineal: reckoning descent through women, who are descended from an ancestral woman. In matrilineal societies (such as the Trobriand Islanders) everyone is a member of his or her mother’s clan, and a person’s strongest identity is with relatives in the mother’s clan and lineage.

• Importantly, matrilineal societies are not necessarily matriarchal, in which women hold political power. Women may have some authority to determine clan land use, but it is usually the men who retain most control over clan resources.

• In addition to clans and lineages, anthropologists have documented cognatic (or bilateral) clans: reckoning descent through either men or women from some ancestor.

  • The main difference between a cognatic clan (e.g., Samoans) and a unilineal clan is that one can be a member of multiple cognatic clans.

• Lewis Henry Morgan (1871) identified six basic kinship terminology patterns. Like many of his time, he immediately set about ranking these on a scale of supposed sophistication.

• A.L. Kroeber (1909) continued this research, arguing that the kinship terminologies Morgan had discovered were shaped by clan organization, not by some evolutionary development that placed one kinship system above others.

  • Kroeber’s research on kinship terminologies has been highly influential for two reasons: (i) thousands of terminologies can be condensed into a few basic systems of organizing people, and (ii) kinship terms are more than labels or descriptors;

    • They indicate the specific nature of relationships, rights, and responsibilities that exist between kin.

  • For example, in some Native American societies, a boy may refer to his father, father’s brothers, and even men of his father’s generations as “father.” This is not just an arbitrary term as being called “father” comes with all the rights and responsibilities of biological fatherhood.

• Given our innumerable ancestors and relations, individuals and societies reach a point where some must be “forgotten.” This is called genealogical amnesia: structural process of forgetting whole groups of relatives, usually because they are not currently significant in a person’s active social life.

  • See “Thinking Like an Anthropologist: Genealogical Amnesia in Bali, Indonesia, and the United States”

• In the culture and personality movement, anthropologist Margaret Mead examined childrearing practices cross-culturally.

  • She and other anthropologists demonstrated that differences in childrearing practices make a profound difference on how children experience development and how they imagine their futures.

How Do Families Control Power and Wealth?

• One cross-cultural function of families is managing their members’ wealth. In this sense, wealth is broader than just currency, including resources, the work and reproductive capacity of family members, and inheritance rights when a member dies.

• Anthropologists studying nonindustrial societies in early to mid-twentieth-century Africa, South America, and the Pacific quickly realized that women’s labor in the fields and gardens in horticultural, agricultural, and pastoral communities was extremely important to the family.

• When a woman in these cultures married (leaving her natal family), it represented a loss of both of her labor and her reproductive potential for the family.

• Compensation for this loss is called bride price: the exchange of gifts or money to compensate another clan or family for the loss of one of its women along with her productive and reproductive abilities in marriage.

  • For example, in patrilineal Zulu tribes, cattle are paid as bride price. When a man decides whom he would like to marry, his male relatives begin negotiating bride price with the potential bride’s family.

  • The South African government attempted to force young men to work in mines, disrupting traditional Zulu patterns of marriage.

  • Bridewealth may take many forms, including wild game in Amazon communities, pigs and shell valuables in New Guinea societies, or a young man’s work as “bride service” for his wife’s family for a set period of time.

• Childprice, intended to buy rights in a woman’s children, is most typical in societies with patrilineal clans. In those with matrilineal clans, the children belong to their mother’s clan and typically live with her.

• Another form of marriage payment, common in India, is dowry: a large sum of money or in-kind gifts given to a daughter to insure her well-being in her husband’s family.

• The practice of dowry has been illegal in India since 1961, but these laws are not observed in many parts of the country. In recent years, abuses of dowry (sometimes called “dowry deaths”) have outraged international human rights groups.

  • Husbands’ families have effectively held wives as ransom for more dowry money, even threatening and killing women in some cases.

• Families also control wealth, property, and power through inheritance rules. A death in the family can be a time of crisis. Rules of inheritance create an orderly process and serve to keep wealth and property in the family.

• Inheritance rules have been codified as law in Western countries for centuries. For example, Great Britain has long followed primogeniture, in which the eldest son inherited a man’s entire estate.

• Nonindustrial societies, even those without legal codes, also have inheritance rules. In such societies, inherited property might include land, livestock, other foods, or any locally recognized valuables.

• In any society, inheritance goes to legitimate heirs. Often, but not always, these are the children of a socially recognized married couple.

Why Do People Get Married?

• Although many Americans feel that people should marry for love, in fact, in most societies most people marry for a wide variety of other reasons, and romantic love is rarely one of these reasons.

• Marriage creates formally recognized ties between the marriage partners and their respective families, and any children resulting from the union are considered “legitimate.”

• If there is a discernible global trend in marriage, it is toward two partners of any gender. As same-sex unions gain widespread acceptance, polygamy is decreasing in many parts of the world.

  • Polygamy: any form of plural marriage; previously far more common in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific than they are today. More specifically, anthropologists divide polygamy into the following:

    • Polygyny: when a man is simultaneously married to more than one woman. In Africa and Melanesia having more than one wife indicates an important man with greater wealth, higher social status, or more importance in the community.

    • Polyandry: when a woman has two or more husbands at one time—significantly rarer than polygyny. The best-known examples are the Toda of India and the Nepalese Sherpa, who relied on polyandry to keep large estates from splitting up. In both cases, brothers marry the same woman, a practice known as fraternal polyandry.

• All cultures have rules regarding sex and marriage. In the case of arranged marriages, parents may select partners from specific socioeconomic, religious, educational, or ethnic backgrounds.

• In addition, there are universal cultural rules against marriage between people who are too closely related. (How close is too close varies.) These are referred to as incest taboos: the prohibition on sexual relations between close family members.

  • Two “exceptions that prove the rule” are ancient Egypt and Hawaii before European contact, where a monarch was expected to marry his sister. Of course, not everyone in these societies could engage in incest—only rulers, as “living gods,” were required to marry a sibling.

  • Some cultures prohibit marriage between cousins (at least, specific types of cousins), while others do not.

• Why do incest taboos exist, and why do they exist nearly everywhere?

  • Evolutionary explanations view taboos as an adaptive measure to avoid the birth defects associated with incest. However, first-cousin marriages, especially in populations of three hundred to five hundred people, don’t cause significantly higher rates of birth defects.

  • Another evolutionary explanation is the Westermarck effect, favored by Steven Pinker (1997). According to this explanation, natural selection has selected genes that cause us to lack sexual attraction toward people in and around our natal families. Both explanations link incest taboos to evolutionary biology since, in contrast to specific cultural rules, basic anatomy and physiology are shared by all people.

  • The weakness of Pinker’s argument is that

    • (i) no gene or combination of genes has been identified as linked to this revulsion,

    • (ii) the range of relatives prohibited by the incest taboo varies too widely from society to society to be explained by natural selection, and

    • (iii) there is no reason to assume that the revulsion is the cause of the taboo since it could just as easily be that the incest taboo itself has generated the revulsion.

  • Some anthropologists counter that taboos can be explained socially, citing the research of Melford Spiro (1958). Spiro’s work showed that adolescents in Israeli kibbutzes rarely dated or married, despite there not being a prohibition against it.

How Are Social and Technological Changes Reshaping How People Think About Family?

• In the 1960s, birth control pills gave women in Western countries greater control of their sexuality, ultimately leading to a “sexual revolution.”

• In the 1980s, technology shifted from trying to prevent pregnancy to trying to increase the odds of pregnancy for infertile couples.

• Contemporary anthropologists are increasingly aware of the ways that technology has complicated societal ideas about kinship.

  • International adoption has posed political and cultural implications between countries and has raised important questions for adoptees about their cultural identities.

• Modern medical practices like in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and sperm donation can involve multiple people (more than two) biologically and socially in the conception of a child.

  • Categories like “mother” and “father” do not transfer easily onto the social relationships involved in these scenarios, since who provides the biological material may differ from who raises the child or provides the womb to nurture it during pregnancy.

• Reproductive technologies have become a normal part of life in industrialized norms. We’ve adjusted to advances that would have been seen as science fiction a generation ago.

  • But even as the technological and biological aspects have become familiar, the cultural issues of paternal rights remain.

• After several decades of viewing these reproductive technologies, anthropologists have seen how paternal rights are not about biology but about how people in different cultures choose to interpret and emphasize some biological claims over others.

Key Terms

1. Bride price - gifts or money given by the groom’s clan or family to compensate the bride’s clan or family for the loss of one of its women along with her productive and reproductive abilities

2. Clan - a group of relatives who claim to be descended from a single ancestor

3. Cognatic - reckoning descent through either men or women from some ancestor

4. Corporate groups - groups of people who work together toward common ends, much as a corporation does

5. Culture and personality movement - a school of thought in early and mid-twentieth-century American anthropology that studied how patterns of childrearing, social institutions, and cultural ideologies shaped individual experience, personality characteristics, and thought patterns

6. Dowry - a large sum of money or in-kind gifts given to a daughter to ensure her well-being in her husband’s family

7. Exogamous - a social pattern in which members of a clan must marry someone from another clan, which has the effect of building political, economic, and social ties with other clans

8. Extended families - larger groups of relatives beyond the nuclear family, often living in the same household

9. Genealogical amnesia - the structral process of forgetting whole groups of relatives, usually because they are not currently significant in social life

10. Incest taboo - the prohibition on sexual relations between close family members

11. Kinship - the social system that organizes people in families based on descent and marriage

12. Kinship chart - a visual representation of family relationships

13. Lineage - a group composed of relatives who are directly descended from known ancestors

14. Matrilineal - reckoning descent through women, who are descended from an ancestral woman

15. Natal family - the family into which a person is born and in which she or he is (usually) raised

16. Nuclear family - the family formed by a married couple and their children

17. Patrilineal - reckoning descent through males from the same ancestors

18. Polyandry - when a woman has two or more husbands at one time

19. Polygamy - any form of plural marriage

20. Polygyny - when a man is simultaneously married to more than one woman

21. Teknonymy - a system of naming parents by the names of their children

22. Unilineal - based on descent through a single descent line, either males or females

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