Historical Anthropology of the Family

Abstract

This historical anthropology of the family represents a new departure in family studies. Over the past ten years or so, the social scientific sociological analysis of the family has undergone a change, and has been obliged to reconsider its traditional view that industrialisation triggered a shift within society from the 'large family', which fulfilled all social functions from socialising the children to caring for the sick and the old, to the modern nuclear family, which was regarded solely as being the locus for emotional relationships. Historians have shown that in the past there was in fact a great variety of different family structures within a wide range of varying demographic, economic and cultural frameworks, distinctive for each society. At the same time, the interaction between sociology and social anthropology has led to a clearer conceptual analysis of that vague, polysemic term 'family'; and notions of dwelling-place, descent, marriage, the relative roles of husband and wife and parent-child relations, as well as the more general relations between generations, have in a variety of past and present social contexts been taken apart and analysed. In this book, Martine Segalen reviews and synthesises a rich wealth of often little-known European and North American historical and social anthropological material on the family. This results in a reversal of the frequently held view of the family as an institution in decline, showing it instead to be both dynamic and resistant.

Functional relationships in the nuclear and extended family: A 16‐culture study

“…Geographic proximity appears to be the critical dimension which differentiates "individualist" cultures from "collectivist" cultures because the greater economic opportunities of more affluent individualist cultures permit the establishment of nuclear families of the younger married parents in another community and also permits the acquisition of a home that is separate from the grandparental home. However, this does not necessarily imply that kinship ties are also severed (Segalen, 1986;Uzoka, 1979).…”

“…As Segalen (1986Segalen ( , 1996 and others have pointed out, the employment of the term "nuclear" family has been accompanied by Parson's (1943) The structural aspects of the family -nuclear and extended-were defined in this study as follows. Nuclear family referred to mother, father and their children.…”

Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures

“…(For Western Europe alone, some major works are Duby 1978;Goody 1983;Segalen 1986;Stone 1977; for anthropology one might note Levi-Strauss 1969;Murdock 1949;Whyte 1978. ) These would reveal that the degree of children's contribution to mate choice varies from null (prenatal and infant betrothal!)…”

The Anthropology of Family Business: An Imagined Ideal

“…For example, "history and anthropology are in fact closely related" (Brettell, 2002, p. S46) and many relevant works cross across these two disciplines (e.g. Goody, 1996;Jones, 2006;Kuper, 2009;McDonough, 1986;Segalen, 1986;Watson, 1985). Of course, the business disciplines are also needed, because the family business field lies at the margins of kinship and business.…”