Hypothesis on the Origins of the Communal Family System

Abstract

This article is the result of collaboration between a linguist and an anthropologist. In La Troisième planète. Structures familiales et systèmes idéologiques (The Third Planet: Family Structures and Ideologies) (Todd, 1983), anthropologist Emmanuel Todd provided a world map of family types, which he used to explain the distribution of major political philosophies around the world. However, this did not explain the distribution of the family types themselves. Indeed, a concluding chapter entitled &dquo;Le Hazard&dquo; (The Effects of Chance) stated that the distribution of family types did not seem to be the result of any particular economic or ecological factor and was therefore a prime example of the uncertainty principle at work. However, Laurent Sagart, a linguist specializing in Chinese dialects, noticed that this map of family types exhibited a structure well known to experts in historical linguistics and dialectology, contrasting a large, continuous zone in the center with a number of small, independent zones located around the periphery of the central zone or in isolated enclaves within it. When such maps appear in linguistic atlases, dialectologists usually conclude that the central zone was the innovative area while the peripheral and isolated zones conserved the original features. The same analysis, if applied to the map of family types, would lead to the conclusion that the communal family system in the center of the map represented a more recent innovation than the systems around the periphery.The map in La Z'roisienae ptanete was intended to explain the modern political philosophies that developed after the breakup of the great agricultural civilizations. In the entire Old World it distinguished only about 60 different human groups, excluding numerically small peoples and nomadic populations. Since this map was intended to reflect a hypothesis about the history of family systems in the Old World (that is, the entire world as we understand it

Average Happiness and Dominant Family Type in Regions in Western Europe around 2000

“…Comparative research on family systems, initiated by Le Play (1871) has shown considerable differences in family systems around the world, such as the difference between stem families and the nuclear family and between matrifocal families and patrifocal patterns. Various consequences of prevalence of one family type or another have been considered, such as effects on economic growth (Sagart, Todd, & Little, 1992). Todd (1990) defines families according to two main characteristics: the relationship between parents and children and the equality between children.…”

“…Nuclear and stem cycles, in particular, appear among both very developed and very primitive groups." (Sagart, Todd, & Little, 1992).…”