CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY- THE FAMILY

The family is one of the characteristic institutions of human society, but there is no reason to believe that all institutions are originated and explained in the family, that all relations of subordination, co-operation, solidarity have their ‘matrix’ in the relationships between parents, children, spouses, and relatives.

It is often said that the family constitutes a ‘fait social total’ (‘total social fact’). Marcel Mauss’s formula, as famous as it is obscure, has at least two meanings. The ‘totalité’ which the social fact would constitute can be understood as a closed totality. One cannot see in this case that the formula applies to the family, whose principle according to Lévi-Strauss would be supplied by the scriptural saying, ‘You will leave your father and mother’, an unbreakable rule dictated to every society so that it will be established and endure. If, on the contrary, the ‘totality’ he refers to is nothing more than the whole of the relations maintained by members of the family organization within and outside this organization, the family can confidently be called a ‘fait social total’. It constitutes indeed a system of relations between spouses, parents, and relatives and between the system they constitute and the other subsystems of society (especially economical and political ones). Therefore it is indeed an open group and in no way a closed totality.

To quote Lévi-Strauss again, the family group derives its origin from marriage. It includes the nucleus made by the husband, the wife, and the children born from their union, as well as, eventually, ‘other relatives’ who are bound to this nucleus. The family bond is a legal bond, bringing about economic, religious, or other obligations, especially ‘in the form of sexual rights and taboos’. Finally, the family bond is inseparable ‘from psychological feelings such as love, affection, respect, fear...’.

One of the most evident aspects of family organization is the set of rules it introduces in sexual life. It is no doubt in this respect that the family appears as a social fact: the bond it establishes between a certain number of adults and children of opposite sexes cannot be reduced to ‘instincts’ such as sexual desire or pleasure, or even to feelings of gratitude and tenderness. In 'Le discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité', Rousseau thus characterized the life of savages as ‘being driven by the physical side of love, their relations are peaceable’. Moved by ‘pity and commiseration’ adults and especially women give infants all the necessary solicitude so that in their first years the totally dependent creatures small children are can first survive, then become grown people. Finally, as the savage man is not yet fixed to the land and as private property does not exist yet, the group he forms with a female and his offspring is mobile and unstable.

Can we then refer to a family? This is possible neither according to Lévi-Strauss’s definition—from which we started—nor according to Rousseau’s text. The latter refers to family ('Discours', 2nd part) only after the first revolution, ‘which formed the original base of the family, and involved a form of property’. The family sensu stricto is thus missing from the state of nature; it appears only with the revolution which marks the transition to civil society and the institution of property. It is true that the sexual life of the uncivilized man is not reduced thereby to satisfaction of sexual impulses. It includes, however rudimentary they might be, the obligations tied to the rearing of children.

This interpretation seems to be confirmed by numerous ethnographic studies, and that is probably why Lévi-Strauss likes to present Rousseau as one of the fathers of modern anthropology. The Andaman, Fuegians, Nambikwara, Bushmen live a little like Rousseau’s savage man. Their small semi-nomadic groups are more or less without political organization; most of them ignore agriculture, weaving, pottery, and the construction of permanent dwellings. The family, mainly monogamic, constitutes their sole form of social organization. However these primitive people differ on one essential point from Rousseau’s natural man: they practise matrimony and are bound to the rule of exogamy.

One understands best the transition from nature to culture by comparing sexual life before and after the first ‘revolution’ referred to by Rousseau. The functionalist anthropologists, and the sociologists who followed them, have tried to interpret the presence in all known human societies of the ‘nucleus’ constituted by two individuals of opposite sex and their children as the social ‘response’ to a biological ‘need’ derived from the extreme dependence of man’s children. From this has been drawn the thesis that the ‘nuclear family’ is a universal institution—a thesis open to several criticisms. First some data invalidate the universality of the nuclear family. There are societies such as the Nayars’, where the parental couple have none of the responsibilities of rearing and training towards their children. Men make war, women make love with as many lovers as they like, children are entrusted to the wife’s brothers, at least to those discharged from their warlike duties. Neither the father nor the ‘biological’ mother exerts any influence over the education of their children left in the care of their mother’s brothers. Among the possibilities offered by nature, which has the minimal requirement of the presence of adults with infants, the Nayar culture (to use a convenient language but one tinged with an awkward realism) would have chosen a definite category of adults, the mother’s brothers. This choice would be explained by other aspects of the social structure, especially the soldierly character of the Nayar society and the great autonomy it leaves to women.

The relativity of sexual and parental roles has struck anthropologists. The inversion of the relation of authority between the biological father and the mother’s brother, according to whether the rule of descent is patri- or matri-lineal, has been the object of endless comments. Moreover, in many matrilineal societies, the one we call the father is not for the native the child’s ‘procreator’ in the sense we give this word. As, on the other hand, the child belongs to his mother’s lineage, he is brought up near and by his uncles. The disciplinary responsibilities being exerted by the mother’s brother, the role of the ‘big brother’ falls to the biological father, who has only casual and occasional relations with his natural children.

Even if the persistence over a possibly very short period of a ‘nucleus’ formed by the mother and her youngest children is practically universal (except for a few cases regarding populations of limited size), the composition of the ‘nucleus’ is as important as its own existence. Therefore alliance and marriage throw more light on the functioning of the family than do the biology of reproduction or the psychology of feelings. Such at least is the thesis developed with remarkable continuity by French sociologists who, from Durkheim to Lévi-Strauss, place in the centre of their analysis the prohibition of incest, and exogamy.

These two rules have an obvious social character. Let us admit that the prohibition of incest is a universal rule. The content of the rule, the degrees of kinship prohibited vary with societies. These define the rule, specifying its content and penalizing infractions. A prohibited spouse in one society can be allowed in another. The sexual relationship which is tabooed here is tolerated or even prescribed elsewhere.

The diversity of the rules about matrimonial union furnish inexhaustible repertory to ethnological relativism. In the medley of rules one can look for some principles which introduce order and simplicity in a diversity inextricable at first sight. The famous case of parallel cousins (prohibited spouses) and cross-cousins (prescribed spouses), which constitutes one of the great purple passages of structuralist anthropology, illustrates the application of some of these principles. First, the role of exogamy does not reveal itself here only as an interdiction, it is paired with a counterpart: by renouncing my parallel cousin, I acquire a cross-cousin. Indeed, I cannot remain a bachelor without incurring the hardships, humiliations, and servitudes attached to the pitiable condition of the man without a brother-in-law. This very elementary pattern, which rests, in addition to the rule of exogamy, on the assimilation (incidentally fictitious according to biology) between half-relatives and parallel relatives, can be complicated by taking into consideration a certain number of other independent variables regarding the system of descent (patri- and matrilineal, uni- or bilateral), of residence (patri- or matrilineal), the number of exogamic groups (parity or disparity of these groups), the direct or indirect, immediate or deferred character of the exchange.

By reflecting on the rules governing the union, even in the case where they not only prohibit certain spouses to the individual but go as far as prescribing him others, one sees that the family is subject to a law of fission which obliges us to ook for a wife outside the family ‘nucleus’ where we were born. This almost universal feature is especially visible in our societies where the prohibition of incest is paired with the freedom formally recognized as ours to choose as spouse and individual of the opposite sex who is not related to us in a prohibited degree. But, even in the societies where the individual is strictly assigned his spouse, marriage shows, with the mutual dependence of the families, the impossibility of any one family constituting a closed unity, because it is an alliance between groups giving and taking women. In no case therefore is it possible to consider the family ‘nucleus’ as a self-maintained totality: each generation, with the obligation to exchange women, is obliged to set up new families with the ‘remains’ of the old families which have broken through the effect of the exogamic principle (Lévi-Strauss).

Through the rules of alliance, society and its organization appear to come first regarding the family organization. In comparison with this interpretation, any attempt to make the ‘family cell’ the primitive social fact seems eminently suspicious. Aristotle had already challenged with very sound arguments the thesis which confuses family and city. The latter is of another nature than the family and the village. A common order, which could be imposed on all citizens, cannot be based on domestic activities (including both family activities such as reproduction and the education of children, but also economic activities in the modern sense). Hegel in 'The Philosophy of Right' has the same argument. It is in relation to the particularity of domestic ties and interests at work in civil society that he stresses, no doubt excessively, the ‘concrete universality’ of the State.

In modern societies, two features are generally attributed to the family organization, which, although seemingly opposite, contribute one and the other to complicating functioning. With the conservative tradition one can deplore the weakening of the family tie. In a ‘normal’ regime, the family should establish, according to Auguste Comte, a subordination of ages and sexes. This double subordination is strongly threatened today. Indeed young people leave their fathers’ homes earlier. More and more they pursue different activities from those he used to pursue. Moreover, the inheritance laws, which since the French Revolution have radically limited the freedom to make one’s will and have instituted equal sharing between heirs, have changed the meaning of the family patrimony.

This no longer constitutes a value which incarnates the status and honour of the family taken jointly from generation to generation. The equal share, ensuring the heir’s independence, reduces their solidarity. At the same time as the subordination of children to parents weakens so the solidarity of children among themselves grows less. The notion of head of the family tends to disappear, whether it is the father or the ‘associated heir’ (Le Play).

Women’s ‘liberation’ contributes too to weakening the hierarchic aspect of the family organization. This emancipation arises from multiple causes: the less and less unequal access of women to various orders and forms of education, the divorce legislation, the development of family planning. At all events, the subordination between sexes is also threatened today by the subordination between generations. Should we make the assumption, as some feminists believe, that women, presented by anthropologists as the medium of matrimonial exchange, will eventually be replaced in this role by men, who, in a kind of sexual bimetallism, will become alternately with women the ‘most precious goods’, the circulation of which ensures the regularity of the main social operations?

The slackening of the bond between spouses, parents, and children and a certain devaluation of patrimonial values do not prevent the status of an individual’s family from constituting for him a highly important capital and a fairly reliable indicator of his present and future position in the stratification system. The most recent data attest that we choose our spouse not among all the eligible sexual partners (that is to say lawful with respect to the taboo of incest), but in a restricted subgroup of individuals invested with status equivalent or congruent to ours. The family status of my future spouse, that is to say the status of the family from which he/she is descended, constitutes for him/her an ‘asset’ which he/she is bound to use in his/her matrimonial strategies. The pretension to hypergamy is justified by the advantages offered to his/her eventual spouse by the fact of marrying a person ‘descended from a good family’. This pretension is the more understandable as such a person is likely already to hold a ‘good situation’ or to have the greatest expectations of reaching one at the time of his marriage.

Another reason influences us to choose our spouse from a given category rather than in an aleatory way. It is that the family remains for many of our contemporaries a place of contacts and interactions. It is not only spouses who remain for one another privileged interlocutors, even if the separation of their place of work and their communal place of residence reduces the time they spend together; the parents-in-law, the brothers- and sisters-in-law, possibly some cousins, are also relations and contacts. Thus the status of each individual is affected not only by the status of the spouse, but also by the status of the spouse’s relatives, which he cannot, even if he would like to, repudiate or ignore. It is in my interest, if I have ambitions of mobility, to choose my spouse well, that is, to choose someone of my rank or of a superior rank.

It is thus false to say that in our societies the choice of a spouse is entirely free—subject to the prohibitions of incest only. Marriage is not a market of pure and perfect competition, and individuals with the advantage of a status derived from belonging to their family of origin (where they have been brought up) and a procreation family (where they will bring up their children) will endeavour to preserve or improve this advantage by marrying ‘well’ or giving ‘good’ spouses to their own children—if they can.

It is indeed right to consider with some scepticism the conservative theses about ‘social reform’ through the regeneration of the ‘family cell’. Le Play himself seems to have seen their problems. Indeed, the ‘moralization’ of relations between sexes and generations can be accomplished only providing that the old conception of patrimony and ‘family honour’ is given back its full strength. Now, the idea of a stem-family becoming established around the head of the family by the institution of an ‘associated heir’supposes a patrimony structure not easily compatible with the essentially fiduciary character of the financial assets which are given such a high position in the composition of modern wealth. There is a tendency for capital to be resistant to longlasting immobilization; it is unlikely to become ‘frozen,’ as was the case with inherited property, especially when it was managed in order to ensure the perpetuation of the patrimony and not with a view to the best profit from the invested funds.

The ideological followers of Le Play see in the ‘extended family’ a kind of Gemeinschaft which would ensure to men ‘the privilege of living amongst themselves’ (Lévi-Strauss). But this intimacy is frustrated by the rule of exogamy, which, for each generation, obliges the boys to take a wife outside their father’s home, and the girls to marry boys who are not their kin. But as do all ideologists, the theorists of the family Gemeinschaft generalize and push undeniable observations to absurd lengths. The family, even if it imposes on grown children departure and dispersion, or at least alliance with strangers, establishes between parents and children a tie the strength of which has no equivalent in any other social relationship.

Moreover, there are grounds to call the theorists of the ‘extended family’ ideologists. The expression of ‘nuclear family’ is understood in different ways by anthropologists and sociologists. Among the former, the nuclear family is said to designate the cell constituted in the most primitive relations system by both parents and their infants. One can question the universality of this situation and wonder whether it admits variants, when, for example, the biological father is substituted in his social role by the mother’s brother. When sociologists refer to the nuclear family, they refer to a completely different situation. They do think of the parental couple and their children, but they take their stand in the context of industrial societies where the extended family has broken up into a number of more or less important autonomous homes.

It is easy to draw excessive consequences from these observations about the decline of the extended family. First, one will exaggerate the freedom of spouses in their choice of partners. Then, one will over-emphasize the slackening of solidarities between blood relatives and relatives by marriage. Finally, one will idealize the nuclear family by seeing in it an imperative condition for the cultural and economic development of society. The nuclear family would be the stage of perfection of human civilization regarding the relations between ages and sexes. This conception is adhered to by Auguste Comte and opposed by Frederic Engels. In the high days of the sociology of development, the nuclear family was seen as a strict condition of economic ‘modernization’. Indeed, it make individuals, their resources, and their talents more mobile, at the same time as it ensured the anchoring of the younger generations within those of the traditional values which remained compatible with the new state of modernized society.

By making the family the authority of socialization above all, one is led to consider the sometimes difficult relations between school and the family institution. Moreover, the analysis of modernization by sociologists has proved to be fallible on two points. First, the relation between the nuclear family and economic modernization is doubtful. The case of Japan, but also that of the Chinese of the diaspora in south-east Asia, suggests that traditional bonds and extended family can coexist with fast development and an excellent control of economic mechanisms.

But it does not follow that one can, on the contrary, present the persistence of the extended family as a condition particularly favourable to the primitive stage of capitalist accumulation. The support of parents and relatives, which can be relied upon by an individual exposed to the risks of poverty, unemployment, and underqualification, contributes to reducing some of the stresses generated by industrialization and urbanization. But other tensions can arise from them: the extended family can in the political order lead to factionalism and regionalism, as we see in the Arab world.

The thesis according to which the family (in its ‘nuclear’ form) constitutes a reserve of cultural traditions has been highly respected for a long time. It is drawn from Freud’s teaching (in 'Totem and Taboo', but also in 'Civilization and its Discontents'). It understands culture in a clearly psychological sense, since it is interested above all by attitudes, especially towards authority, co-operation, and competition, which it asserts have been learnt and fixed during the very first years of life as a consequence of conflicts experienced by the young child with his father, mother, brothers, and sisters. The stock of attitudes constituting a culture would also be reproduced through the socialization of successive generations.

Robert Bellah has fully demonstrated the weakness of this thesis. It was enough that he should recall the fact that it assumes a correlation between social structures and cultural contents. This correlation is, however, not proved because the aggregates between which correlations are sought are residual categories. Let us take, for example, the diversity of cultural contents, religious beliefs and symbols, and let us wonder what relations they maintain with the social rules of which they are at first sight the impressions and reflections. Let us take the case of the fatherson relation: Christians refer to God as a father. Jesus is called God’s son. We are brothers in Jesus Christ and Jesus himself is our brother. However, our society is far less paternalist than that of the Chinese for whom the father-son relation is at the centre of social life, while it is very toned down in the religious symbolism of the Chinese, for whom the submission to a transcendent principle is far less stressed than the relation of immanence and fusion of the individual in a universe which supports him while absorbing him. We can no longer treat authoritarian ideologies such as Fascism as simple projections in the symbolic imagination of the relations of authority learnt from infancy in the nuclear family.

As for the possibility of making of authoritarian ideology the projection on to political society of the relations of authority in the extended family, it constitutes a scarcely more satisfactory answer. Indeed, the family thus understood includes a great variety of activities. It is almost confused with the whole of society in an undifferentiated Gemeinschaft. Is it any better, then, to say that culture, religion, politics are only projections of social relations as a whole? No more than that God or the king is an image of the father.

Are we trying to identify a type of family organization (nuclear, extended, patriarchal) which would be the most favourable to economic ‘development’, demographic expansion, political ‘stability’? For all that one should start by saying what one means by such terms and which particular features of the family organization one is retaining. One would then perceive that recourse to this ‘structure’, taken as a whole, even if one tries to prop it up with a rudimentary typology, does not have a great explanatory value. One would fall down again on some holistic difficulties pointed out many times. It is no more reasonable to make of the family the ‘primary institution’ from which one can render an account of the genesis and the functioning of all the other institutions than it is to treat the ‘relations of production’ as the highest authority from which would derive all intelligibility.

By Raymond Boudon and François Bourricaud (texts selected and translated by Peter Hamilton) in "A Critical Dictionary of Sociology", Routledge, UK, 1989,excerpts pp.169-176. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.