Family, Marriage and Kinship

No social arrangement feels more 'natural' than the family we grow up in, and it is tempting to assume every family everywhere resembles our own. Decades of sociological and anthropological fieldwork across cultures show the opposite: family, marriage and kinship are found in every known society, yet their form differs sharply from one society to another, and the private world of the family is closely tied to the public spheres of economy, politics and culture. The functionalist view that the modern nuclear family -- with the husband earning the family's livelihood and the wife in an emotional, domestic role -- is the form best suited to industrial society turns out not to hold universally; Indian evidence in particular complicates this picture. …