Family

• 1. Introduction

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  Family is a group of people related either by consanguinity, meaning recognized birth, or by affinity, meaning marriage or other relationship. The word descends from the Latin familia. It forms the basis for social order. Across most of human history, societies have used the family as the primary vehicle for attachment, nurturance, and socialization. That sounds settled. Yet ask eleven different American households who counts as family, and you get strikingly different answers. Some respondents would only count heterosexual married couples and their children. Others said the mere presence of children made a family. A third group insisted it only mattered that the arrangement feel and function like a family, whatever its shape. So what actually binds people into a family, blood or something else entirely? Why does the western mind keep confusing the family with the household? And how did love, of all things, come to weaken the very institution it was supposed to hold together?

• 2. Blood Or Belonging

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  Early western cultural anthropologists assumed family and kinship were universally rooted in relations by blood. That assumption came from ideas common in their own cultures. Later research told a different story. Many societies understand family instead through living together, the sharing of food, and the giving of care and nurture. Milk kinship is one example, where the sharing of substances rather than birth makes a relation real. C. C. Harris noted that the western conception of family is ambiguous and confused with the household. Olivia Harris argued this confusion is not accidental. She read it as a sign of the familial ideology of capitalist western countries, which pass social legislation insisting members of a nuclear family should live together and that those not so related should not. Despite that ideological and legal pressure, a large percentage of families never conform to the ideal nuclear type. The recognition that kinship can be made, not just inherited, reshapes who gets to count, and one community built an entire vocabulary around exactly that idea.

• 3. Families Of Choice

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  Family of choice is a term common within the LGBT community, among veterans, among people who have suffered abuse, and among those with no contact with their biological parents. It is also called chosen family or found family. It names the group of people in a person's life who satisfy the typical role of family as a support system. The phrase draws a line between the family of origin, meaning the biological family or the one a person was raised in, and those who actively assume that ideal role. Many LGBT individuals, upon coming out, face rejection or shame from the families they were raised in. The terminology also appears in 12 step communities, where people forge close-knit family ties through the recovery process. These families carry their own burdens. Without legal safeguards, they can struggle when medical, educational, or governmental institutions refuse to recognize their legitimacy. Members disowned by their family of origin may experience what is called surrogate grief, displacing anger, loss, or anxious attachment onto their new family.

• 4. A Catalogue Of Forms

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  Anthropologists classify most family organizations into a handful of shapes. A matrifocal family is a mother and her children. A patrifocal family is a father and his children. A conjugal family, also called the nuclear family, is a married couple with children. An avuncular family is a man, his sister, and her children. An extended family may add grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins. The matrifocal form has a precise definition. A domestic group is matrifocal when it is centred on a woman and her children, with the fathers intermittently present and occupying a secondary place. The name was coined in Guiana, though it is defined differently elsewhere. Among Nayar families, the head is male, a step-father, father, or brother, rather than the mother. The single-parent family is one parent with their children, where the parent is widowed, divorced and not remarried, or never married. Roughly half of all children in the United States will live in a single-parent family at some point before the age of 18. The blended family, or stepfamily, brings children of a former family into a new one when one or both parents remarry. For adolescents, the transition from an old family to a new one can be hard, since activities once performed in the old family may not transfer well into the new.

• 5. One Wife, Many Spouses

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  Monogamy permits a person only one official partner at a time, a rule enforced in many places by bigamy laws against marrying while still legally married to another. Beyond it lies a wider field. Polygamy is a marriage that includes more than two partners. When a man has more than one wife at a time, it is called polygyny. When a woman has more than one husband, it is called polyandry. A marriage with multiple husbands and wives can be called polyamory, group, or conjoint marriage. Polygyny is practiced primarily, but not only, in parts of the Middle East and Africa, and is often associated with Islam, though Islam sets conditions that must be met. Polyandry is rarer and bound to particular geographies. Fraternal polyandry, where two or more brothers share the same wife, is a common form. It was traditionally practiced in areas of the Himalayan mountains, among Tibetans in Nepal, in parts of China, and in parts of northern India. It is most common in societies marked by high male mortality, or where men are often apart from the rest of the family for long periods.

• 6. The Arithmetic Of Relation

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  A first-degree relative shares 50 percent of your DNA through direct inheritance, such as a full sibling, parent, or child. Identical twins share 100 percent. A grandparent or grandchild shares 25 percent, an aunt or uncle the same, and a first cousin 12.5 percent. These coefficients can be calculated by counting generations up to the first common ancestor and back down again. The anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who lived from 1818 to 1881, performed the first survey of kinship terminologies in use around the world in his book Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. Morgan, a lawyer, came to his central distinction while trying to understand Seneca inheritance. A Seneca man's effects passed to his sisters' children rather than to his own. He identified six basic patterns of kinship terminology: Hawaiian, Sudanese, Eskimo, Iroquois, Crow, and Omaha. Hawaiian distinguishes relatives only by sex and generation. Sudanese gives no two relatives the same term. Crow is a matrilineal system with a skewing feature that freezes generation for some relatives, and Omaha is the same but patrilineal. Most Western societies use Eskimo terminology, which reserves highly descriptive terms for the nuclear family and grows more classificatory as relatives become more collateral.

• 7. Tracing The Line

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  Patrilineality traces an individual's family membership through their father's lineage. It is also known as the male line or agnatic kinship, and it generally governs the inheritance of property, rights, names, or titles through male kin. Matrilineality traces membership through the mother's lineage instead, a line of descent from a female ancestor in which every intervening generation is a mother. In a matrilineal system, a person belongs to the same descent group as their mother, the reverse of the more common patrilineal pattern. Bilateral descent traces membership through both the paternal and maternal sides at once. Relatives on both sides matter equally for emotional ties and for the transfer of property or wealth. It is traditionally found among some groups in West Africa, India, Australia, Indonesia, Melanesia, Malaysia, and Polynesia. Anthropologists believe a tribal structure based on bilateral descent helps members survive extreme environments, because it lets individuals rely on two sets of families dispersed over a wide area.

• 8. Haven And Its Critics

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  Lewis H. Morgan published Ancient Society in 1877, built on his theory of three stages of human progress, from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. That book became the inspiration for Friedrich Engels' work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, published in 1884. Engels, and later Karl Marx, used a theory of resource control to explain change in family structure, and that theory's popularity was largely unmatched until the 1980s, when structural functionalism gained ground. Zinn and Eitzen describe how contemporary society treats the family as a haven from the world, a place of intimacy, love, and trust where individuals escape the dehumanizing forces of modern life. They observe that the protective image has waned, and that the family today is more compensatory than protective, supplying what is missing elsewhere. Against the nostalgia for a stabler past, they answer plainly that there is no golden age of the family gleaming at us in the far back historical past. Margaret Mead saw the family as a main safeguard of human progress. Human beings, she wrote, have learned, laboriously, to be human, and we hold our present form of humanity on trust. The right to family is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which calls it the natural and fundamental group unit of society, entitled to protection by society and the State.