e2’s most wanted

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 03:16:00 +0100

Feminist Golden Age

Filed under: The Evolving Family, The Origin
It is true that in some matrilineal societies, such as the Hopi of Arizona or the Ashanti of Ghana, men exert little authority over their wives. In some, such as the Nayars of South India or the Minangkabau of Sumatra, men may even live separately from their wives and children, that is, in different families. In such societies, however, the fact that women and children fall under greater or lesser authority from the women’s kinsmen – their eldest brothers, mother’s brothers, or even their grown-up sons.
 
In matrilineal societies, where property, rank, office, and group membership are inherited through the female line, it is true that women tend to have greater independence than in patrilineal societies. This is especially so in the matrilineal tribal societies where residence is matrilocal – that is, men come to live in the homes or villages of their wives. Even so, in all matrilineal societies for which adequate descriptions are available, the ultimate headship of households, lineages, and local groups is usually with men.
 
There is in fact no true “matriarchal,” as distinct from “matrilineal,” society in existence or known from literature, and the chances are there never has been. This does not mean that women and men have never had relations that were dignified and creative for both sexes, appropriate to the knowledge, skills, and technology of their names. Nor does it mean that the sexes can not be equal in the future or that the sexual division of labor can not be abolished. Some of us believe that it can be and must be. But it is not necessary to believe myths of a feminist Golden Age in order to plan for parity in the future.

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:58:42 +0100

Social Fatherhood

Filed under: The Evolving Family, The Origin
The family implies several other universals:
 
(1) Rules forbid sexual relations and marriage between close relatives. Which relatives are forbidden varies, but all societies forbid mother-son mating, and most, father-daughter and brother-sister. Some societies allow sex relations but forbid marriage between certain degrees of kin.
 
(2) The men and women of a family cooperate through a division of labor based on gender. Again, the sexual division of labor varies in rigidity and in the tasks performed. But in no human society to date is it wholly absent. Child care, household tasks, and crafts closely connected with the household tend to be done by women; war, hunting, and government, by men.
 
(3) Marriage exists as a socially recognized, durable, although not necessarily lifelong relationship between individual men and women. From it springs social fatherhood, some kind of special bond between a man and the child of his wife, whether or not they are his own children physiologically.
 
Even in polyandrous societies, where women have several husbands, or in matrilineal societies, where group membership and property pass through women, each child has one or more designated “fathers” with whom he has a special social, and often religious, relationship. This bond of social fatherhood is recognized among people who do not know about the male role in procreation or where, for various reasons, it is not clear who the physiological father of a particular infant is. Social fatherhood seems to come from the division and interdependence of male and female tasks, especially in relation to children, rather than directly from physiological fatherhood, although in most societies, the social father of a child is usually presumed to be its physiological father as well. Contrary to the beliefs of some feminists, in no human society do men, as a whole category, have only the role of insemination and no other social or economic role in relation to women and children.
 
(4) Men in general have higher status and authority over the women of their families, although older women may have influence, even some authority, over junior men. The omnipresence of male authority, too, goes contrary to the belief of some feminists that in “matriarchal” societies, women were either completely equal to or had paramount authority over men, either in the home or in society at large.

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 04:49:23 +0100

Defining the Family

Filed under: The Evolving Family, The Origin
To discuss the origin of something we must first decide what it is. Let us define the family as “a married couple or other group of adult kinsfolk who cooperate economically and in the upbringing of children, and all or most of whom share a common dwelling”.
 
This includes all forms of kin-based household. Some are extended families containing three generations of married brothers or sisters. Some are “grand families” descended from a single pair of grandparents. Some are matrilineage households, in which brothers and sisters share a house with the sisters’ children, and men merely visit their wives in other homes.
 
Some are compound families, in which one men has several wives, or one woman, several husbands. Others are nuclear families composed of a father, mother, and children. Some kind of family exists in all known human societies, although it is not found in every segment or class of all stratified, state societies. Greek and American slaves, for example, were prevented from forming legal families, and their social families were often disrupted by sale, forced labor, or sexual exploitation. Even so, the family was an ideal which all classes and most people attained when they could.

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 13:46:09 +0100

The Origin of the Family

Filed under: The Evolving Family, The Origin
The trouble with the origin of the family is that no one really knows. Since Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in 1884, a great deal of new evidence has come in. Yet the gaps are still enormous. It is not known when the family originated, although it was probably between 2 million and 100.000 years ago.
 
It is not known whether it developed once or in separate times and places. It is not known whether some kind of embryonic family came before, with, or after the origin of language. Since language is the accepted criterion of humanness, this means that we do not even know whether our ancestors acquired the basics of family life before or after they were human. The chances are that language and the family developed together over a long period, but the evidence is sketchy.
 
Although the origin of the family is speculative, it is better to speculate with than without evidence. The evidence comes from three sources. One is the social and physical lives of nonhuman primates – especially the New and Old World monkeys and , still more, the great apes, humanity’s closest relatives. The second source is the tools and home lives of hunters and gatherers of wild provender who have been studied in modern times.
 
Each of these sources is imperfect: monkeys and apes, because they are not prehuman ancestors, although they are our cousins; fossil hominids, because they left so little vestige of their social life; hunters and gatherers, because none of them has, in historic times, possessed a technology and society as primitive as those of early humans. All show the results of long endeavor in specialized, marginal environments. But together, these sources give valuable clues.

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 04:01:13 +0100

The Family Grabs Us Where We live

Filed under: The Evolving Family, The Origin
Only in the past decades or so have family scholars come to recognize how problematic a subject “the family” is and how hard it is to answer basic questions: Is there a definition of family that can apply to all places and times? What is the relationship between the family as an abstraction and particular families with their own idiosyncrasies and differences from each other? What “test” can we apply to distinguish between a family and a group that is not a family?
 
There is the enormous variation that is possible in family structure and family organization through time and its accompanying economic and social conditions. Moreover, a careful examination of every family system reveals deeply embedded notions of propriety, health, legality, sex, and age role assignments. Only one thing seems constant through time and place with respect to relations among men, women, and children – everyone feels strongly about these.
 
Furthermore, prevailing family forms and norms tend to be idealized as the right and proper ones. Perhaps that is because, although the family is scarcely the building block of society claimed by early functional sociologists, it is without doubt the institution possessing the most emotional significance in society. If you believe in a woman’s right to medical abortion, or if you do not, and if you have an egalitarian or subordinate vision of the roles of men, women, and children, you probably feel strongly about these – even more strongly than you feel about inflation and unemployment.
 
The family grabs us where we live. Not only do we become excited about it, but it seems more than any other institution to generate controversy and moral indignation.

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 03:06:26 +0100

Scientific Paradigms of Family

Filed under: The Evolving Family, The Origin
Interdisciplinary subjects present other characteristic problems. Each discipline has its own assumptions and views of the world, which may not directly transfer into another field. For example, some biologists and physically oriented anthropologists analyze human affairs in terms of individual motives and instincts; for them, society is a shadowy presence, serving mainly as the setting for biologically motivated individual action. Many sociologists and cultural anthropologists, in contrast, perceive the individual as an actor playing a role written by culture and society; according to this view, the individual has no wholly autonomous thoughts and impulses.
 
An important school of psychologists sees people neither as passive recipients of social pressures nor as creatures driven by powerful lusts, but as information processors trying to make sense of their environment. There is no easy way to reconcile such perspectives. Scientific paradigms – characteristic ways of looking at the world – determine not only what answers will be found, but what questions will be asked. This fact has perhaps created special confusion in the study of the family.
 
We speak of families as though we know what families are. We identify, as families, networks of people who live together over time, who have ties of marriage or kinship to one another. Yet, the more one studies the emotional dynamics of groups presently called “families”, the less clear it becomes how these differ from groups not designated “families”. Further, contemporary family patterns and emotional dynamics may not appear in other places and times.
 
As an object of study, the family is thus plagued with a unique set of problems. There is the assumption that family life, so familiar a part of everyday experience, is easily understood. But familiarity may breed a sense of destiny – what we experience is transformed into the “natural”. In other word, one difficulty in the psychological sciences lies in the familiarity of the phenomena with which they deal. A certain intellectual effort is required to see how such phenomena can pose serious problems or call for intricate explanatory theories. One is inclined to take them for granted as necessary or somehow “natural”.

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 02:58:17 +0100

Study of the family

Filed under: The Evolving Family, The Origin
The study of the family does not fit neatly within the boundaries of any single scholarly field; genetics, physiology, archeology, history, anthropology, sociology, and psychology all touch upon it. Religious and ethical authorities claim a stake in the family. Also, troubled individuals and families generate therapeutic demands on family scholarship. In short, the study of the family is interdisciplinary, controversial, and necessary for the formulation of social policy and practices.
 
Interdisciplinary subjects demand competence in more than one field. At a time when competent scholars find it difficult to master even one corner of a field – say the terminology of kinship, or the history of feminism, or the physiology of sexual arousal – intellectual demands on students of the family become vast.
 
Although writers on the family confront many issues, their professional competence is usually limited. Thus a biologist may cite articles in psychology to support a position, without comprehending the tentativeness with which psychologists regard the researcher and his work. Similarly, a psychologist or sociologist may draw upon controversial biological studies.
 
Professional competence means more than the ability to read technical journals; it includes informal knowledge – being “tuned in” to verbal understandings and evaluations of research validity. Usually a major theory or line of research is viewed more critically in its own field than outsiders realize.





















Get free blog up and running in minutes with Blogsome
Theme designed by Naoko M