Ann. Rev Anthropol 1979 816I-2QSCopyright "S- ]979 by Annual Renews Inc Al! rights reserved

FAMILY A N D H O U S E H O L D : •9631T H E ANALYSIS O FD O M E S T I C G R O U P S

Sylvta Junko Yanagisako

Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305

INTRODUCTION

In 1913, Malinowski (91) introduced his disquisition on the family amongthe Australian Abongines with the contention that a careful investigationof tbe facts of family life m Australia was urgently needed He claimed thatthe confusion and contradiction m extant depictions of the Australianfamily were due to certam theoretical postulates and axioms adopted bysome ethnographers Pnncipal among these was the attnbution of Eu-ropean charactenstics to the abonginal family without adequate investiga-tion of the details of actual family relationships As an antidote to suchinclinations, Mahnowski proposed that we begin the study of the family insocieties different from our own by attaching only a vague meaning to thetenn "individual family "

For the essential features of the individual family, as of all other social institutions,depend upKtn the general structure of a given society and upon the conditions of lifetherein A careful and detailed analysis of family life and of different aspects of the familyunit m connection with other social phenomena is therefore necessary Such an analysisenables us to descnbe the said unit m a complete and exact way (91, p 6)

In the more than half-century that has passed since Malinowski ex-pounded on the procedure for amving at a "scientific, correct, and usefuldefinition of the family in Australia" (91), it has become commonplace tocharge him with having fallen far short of these goals Less often evaluatedIS the success that anthropologists in general have attained in lUuminatmg

161

162 YANAGISAKO

the dynamic structures of those umts we call famihes This review is anattempt at such an evaluation, not by way of an analysis of the histoncaldevelopments m anthropological research on tbe family, but through anexammation of a cross-section of literature published mainly within the lastdecade

A proper review of current anthropological discussions on the familymust nece^anly mclude the hterature on households as well For, over theyears, the social units which in Malmowski's day were customarily referredto as families have come to be differentiated into "famihes" and"households" To mtroduce the reader to the conventional distmctionsdrawn between these two terms and to the notions underlymg the meaningsattnbuted to them, I begm with an examination of attempts to define thefamily and household This is followed by a cntical survey of the ways mwhich anthropologists mterpret and explam observed variations in the so-cial forms included under these rubncs I then proceed to extract from thisliterature the basic conceptions and encompassmg framework shared by itsauthors My argument is that despite our repudiation of Mahnowski'sreduction of all kmship relationships to mere extensions of the emotionaland psychological correlates of intimate family associations, most of ouranalyses of domestic groups remain fundamentally rooted in his concep-tions of the family Followmg this discussion, I mtroduce alternative ana-lytic frameworks which have been apphed productively to family andhousehold relationships and evaluate their contnbutions and current limita-tions I postpone until last a discussion of the universality of the family,because this issue can be addressed adequately only after I have elucidatedthe nature of anthropological discourse on the family and household

DEFINITIONS OF FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD

Although anthropologists commonly employ the terms family andhousehold loosely without attachmg to them ngorous, formal defimtions,at the same time tnost recognize some sort of distinction between the two.The distmction that appears to be most widely accepted by anthropolc^sts(8, 9, 17, 21, 29, 45, 74, 80, 81. 108, 128) contrasts kinship and propmquityas the essential features that define membership m the family and householdrespectively Bender (8) contends that the grounds for analytically separat-mg famihes and households he in the recognition that they are both "log-ically distinct" and "empmcally different" (8, p 493) The logical distinc-tion IS apparent because the referent of the family is kmship, while thereferent of the household is geographical propmquity or common residence.Following Bohannon (17, p 86), who claims that kmship ^ld propmquity

FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD 163

"do not even belong to the same universe of discourse," and F.M Keesing(80, p 271), who views kinship and locality as two distinct pnnciples oforganization. Bender maintains that ' famihes, as kinship units, mustbe defined stnctly m terms of kinship relationships and not in terms ofco-residence" (8, p 493) For Bender, the empincal difference denves fromthe observation that in numerous societies famihes do not form households,and in even more instances, households are not composed of famihes

The contrast between kinship and locality as different pnnciples of orga-mzation also lies behind the more specific distinction between family andhousehold which prevails in studies of peasant commumties Here thefamily as a jurally defined, corporate km group is distinguished from thehousehold as a collection of kin and sometimes nonkm who share a commonresidence The corporate nature of the family denves from the jural nghtsto property, usually land, which its members hold in common (29, 51, 106,151) Accordingly, for Freedman (51, p 9) a joint family exists m Chinawhenever two or more men are coparceners of a chia (family) estate,regardless of whether these men are mamed or whether they and theirrespective wives and children live in different residences An obvious conse-quence of this jural defimtion of the family ts that in societies such as Chinaand India, men, as lnhentors of property, are placed at the core of thefamily, while women are classified as "subordinate or fnnge members" whohave lesser nghts of ownership in the estate (151)

The focus on property rights attaches to the family the specific functionof control over property, including its transmission But the more generaldistinction between the family as a kinship unit and the household as aresidential unit, which Bender carnes funher than anyone else, is an at-tempt to avoid a functionalist definition ot the family Bender asserts thatfunctional definitions of the family are inadequate because many of thefunctions that have been construed as "family functions'* are sometimesfulfilled by coresidenual groups* that are not based on kinship relationshipsand are in other instances earned out by neither families nor householdsAs an alternative, he proposes that we define the family in purely "struc-tural" terms, because in all societies people recognize kinship relationshipsand use these to form social groups, and because these relationships can beorganized in only a hmited number of logical ways Like the others whopose this distinction. Bender never makes explicit precisely what he meansby "kinship" relationships or "kinship"* units as distmct from coresidentialrelationships or relationships ansmg from propinquity Yet it is evidentfrom Bender's amplifications on the subject that by "kinship" relationshipshe means genealogically defined relationships, that is to say, relationshipsthat can be traced through one or more parent-child or marnage linkages

164 YANAGISAKO

In his attempt to formulate a universal, parsimomous definition of thefamily for comparative purposes, Goodenough (38) likewise tnes to divorcethe family from specific functions He defines the nuclear family grouppresent in all human societies as a woman and her dependent childrenWhen the woman's sexual partner is added to this group "m a functionallysignificant way" the result is an elementary conjugal family (Murdock'snuclear family) When the woman's brothers (and other close consangumes)are added to the group "m a functionally stgmficant way," the result,accordmg to Goodenough, is a consanguine family The vagueness of thephrase "in a functionally significant way" is a conscious effort by Goode-nough to avoid linkmg the family to a specified function or set of functionsIn contrast to Bender, who does not specify tbe genealogical htik or linksthat form the core of the family, Goodenough identifies the mother-childhnk as the nucleus of all family groups

That both Bender and Goodenough would try to detach the defimtion ofthe family from particular functions is not surpnsmg in light of the failureof past attempts (96, 143) to define the family on a functional basis Thereappears to be no smgle function—and certamly no set of functions—^thatIS mvanably fulfilled by a set of genealogically linked individuals In thefinal section of this paper, I will retum to this issue to argue that in spiteoftheir eschewal of a functional defimtion of the family, both Bender's andGoodenough's definitions are rooted m a functional view of the family

While all the distinctions between family and household settle on residen-tial propinquity as the cntenon for the household, there remains still thequestion of what we mean by residential propinqmty or coresidence Innu-merable problematic cases in the ethnographic hterature can be adduced toillustrate the difficulties m definmg the boundanes of households Thesecases raise questions about how to treat residential groupings that movethrough a seasonal cycle of dispersal and concentration, how to handle themovement of personnel between dwellmg umts, particularly m societieswhere there is great mobility between these units (78, 145), whether todefine as a single household the huts or houses that share a common yard,which may or may not be enclosed from other yards (39), and whether tomclude servants, apprentices, boarders, and lodgers as members of thehousehold (74, 86, 156). Certainly there are discrepancies m our usage ofthe term household if its sole referent is residential propmquity Why thendo we regard solitanes (individuals livmg alone) as constituting households,while we exclude institutions like orphanages, boarding schools, men'shouses, and army barracks''

The answer is that although the pnmary referent of the term householdIS spatial propmquity, in actual usage more is usually meant (8) Generallythe term refers to a set of mdividuals who share not only a livmg space but

FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD 165

also some set of activities These activities, moreover, are usually related tofood production and consumption or to sexual reproduction and childrear-ing, all of which are glossed under the somewhat impenetrable label of"domestic" activities Yet since all the activities implicitly or explicitlyassociated with the term household are sometimes engaged in by sets ofpeople who do not live together, several anthropologists (8,22,128) contendthat we would do better to employ alternative terms in our ethnographicdescnptions Bulmer (22), for one, questions the adequacy of the term"household" for descnbmg a situation where overlapping sets of peopleparticipate m meal shanng, gardening, and coresidence He proposes thatin these circumstances the "domestic group," m which people acknowledgecommon authonty in domestic matters, is a more salient social unit Seddon(128) offers the term "budget unit" to refer to a group of individuals havingd common "fund" and exchangmg goods among each other without reckon-ing, as distinct from individuals who live together within one homesteadIn the same vem, Bender (8) pomts out that because the term household?s always tainted by an implicit association with certam domestic functionsIt IS often misused and consequently is not useful for comparative purposesHe suggests that we substitute the term' coresidential group" for householdand that we draw a clear distinction between such groups and any functionsthey might fill In the case of a society hke the Mundurucu then. Benderidentifies two kinds of coresidentiai units one composed of adult maleshvmg in men's houses and the other composed of groups of women andchildren By labeling these units coresidential groups rather thanhouseholds, we avoid making the false assumption that either of thesecoresidential units are the most important groups for the performance ofdomestic functions in Mundurucu society We would recognize, further-more, that because domestic functions are for the most part earned outthrough reciprocal interactions between adult males as a group and adultfemales as a group, "the whole village forms the domestic unit, the sexualdivision of labor in domestic activities being at the village level'" (8, p 495)

Bender's separation of families, coresidential groups, and domestic func-tions IS useful to the extent that it prods the ethnographer to exphcate theexact nature of the social unit he is labehng a family or coresidentiai unitand to descnbe precisely the functions it performs rather than assumingthem or leaving the reader to fill m with his own cultural assumptions Inaddition, by substituting the term coresidential group for household,Bender allows for the coexistence of several types of coresidential groupsat different levels within the same society An individual may simulta-neously belong to two or more nested coresidential groups for example, anuclear family hut, in a patnlaterally extended family compound, withm apatnlmeai descent-based settlement

166 YANAGISAKO

On the other hand, Bender's termmological scheme leads us directly backto the most troublesome issue confronting defimtions of family andhousehold; namely, what are domestic functions? When exammed closely,all the above definitions can be shown to radiate from one central pomttbe notion tbat domestic functions, domesttc activities, and domestic orga-nization are wbat families and bousebolds are fundamentally all about Yet"domestic" remams a rather poorly explicated term We bave Bender's (8,p. 499) uncharacteristically imprecise defimtion of "domestic" activities astbose tbat "are concemed witb tbe day-to-day necessities of bvmg, includ-ing tbe provision and preparation of food and tbe care of cbildren " Evenmore vague is Fortes's (45, p 8) defimtion of tbe domestic group as "ahouseholdmg and housekeepmg unit organized to provide tbe matenal andcultural resources needed to mamtain and bnng up its members," and bisdefinition of tbe domestic domam as "tbe system of social relations tbrougbwbicb tbe reproductive nucleus [the family] is mtegrated with the environ-ment and with tbe structure of tbe total society " Despite tbe imprecisionof tbese defimtions, at the core of most conceptions of "domestic" (8, 45,47, 60,74,138) are two sets of functional activities those pertaming to foodproduction and consumption and tbose pertaming to social reproduction,mcluding child-beanng and child-reanng

Having arnved at what I consider to be the key to our conventionalunderstanding as well as to the ambiguities of the terms family andhousehold, I will postpone further consideration of wbat this tells us aboutthe prevaibng conceptual framework ordenng antbropological discussionsof domestic orgamzation, leaving it to be taken up agam m later sectionsof tbis article ' I want first to examine tbe manner in wbicb antbropologistsdescnbe and explam tbe diverse social forms that tbey mclude under tberubncs of family and bousehold. For tbe present, I will use tbe terms familyand bousebold as tbe autbors bemg reviewed use tbem Tbe terms "domes-tic group" and "domestic unit" will be employed to refer more generallyto botb family and bousehold, particularly wbere it is unclear wbether tbereferent corresponds more closely to tbe conventional meamng of eitberterm

VARIATIONS IN DOMESTIC ORGANIZATION

Tbe literature m wbicb vanations in domestic groups are descnbed andexplamed can be divided convemently mto two sections discussions ofcross-societal and mtrasocietal vanations and discussions of vanations overtime

'Sec Vananons m Domestic Organization An Underview, and Concltision A Retum toDefinitions and the Search for Umversals

AND HOUSEHOLD 167

Cross-societal and Intrasocietal Variations

Two related questions bave been asked of tbe vanations observed amongdomestic groups m the same society and in different societies First, wbydo we find m some societies domestic groups, whether tbese are coresiden-tial groups or dispersed families, which have a different composition andstructure from tbose in other societies'' And second, wbere the members ofa society agree that a particular household or family form is tbe ideal, whydo we so often discover that a significant percentage of the households orfamilies m that society diverge from the ldeaP Three sets of vanables havebeen adduced to explain tbese mterlinked questions demographic vanables,including the developmental cycle of domestic groups, economic vanables,and stratification vanables

DEMOGRAPHIC DETERMINANTS AND THE DEVELOPMENTAL CY-CLE OF DOMESTIC GROUPS By now it has been well estabbsbed thatdemographic processes affect the size and composition of domestic groups,tbus acting as constraints on tbe attainment of tbe culturally idealhousehold or family type (23, 89, 162) Age at marnage, life expectancy,and fertility levels all have an impact on the composition of households andfamilies in a community For example, in the case of the Yugoslavianzadruga (a joint household of either the patemal-filial or fratemal type),Hammel (72) contends that if age at marnage is early, the penod of overlapin the mamed lives of fathers and sons will be relatively great and thepossibility of patemai-filial zadrugas increases

Demograpbic processes may also bave a sigmficant impact on tbe econ-omy of the bousebold Following the Russian economist Chayanov (25),Sablins (120) claims that among peasants, where the household is tbe unitof production, changes in the demographic structure of tbe bousebold asIt moves through the developmental cycle will entail cbanges in tbe ratioof consumers to workers As tbe number of dependent cbildren mcreaseswhile the number of adult workers remains constant, eacb family workermust farm a greater amount of land and work longer hours Thus, tbeamount of time a family member works will be proponional to tbe depen-dency ratio (tbe number of consumers divided by the number of workers)of the household Moreover, in a society wbere tbe household is the unitof production, some percentage of the households will not be able to supponthemselves because of an unfavorable dependency ratio (120, p 74)

In attending to demographic factors, however, we must avoid treatmgobserved demographic processes as exogenous, biologically given con-stramts which determine the composition and economy of households Todo so would be to confuse social replacement with biological replacement(122, 123) and to overlook the strategies that people employ to exercise

168 YANAGISAKO

control over household size and composition, many of wbicb are embeddedm "kinship" customs such as marnage and adoption practices and tbetuning of family division. For instance, in a remarkable piece of detectivework m bistoncal demography, T C Smitb (140) discloses bow m at leastone village m eigbteentb century Japan, peasants were able to prolong tbefamily's pbase of "maximum farmmg efficiency" by postponing tbe lnbent-mg son's mamage as long as possible and m tbe meantime detainmg thedeparture of bis siblings from tbe bousebold Furtbermore, we cannotassume, as do Cbayanov and Sablms, that because wage-labor is absent,households have access only to their own labor As Donham (37, 38)convincingly argues, there may be other institutional contexts in whicblabor IS transferred from one household to another Accordingly, tbe mem-bers of bousebolds among the Malle of soutbwestem Etbiopia work abouttbe same lengtbs of time regardless of tbe bousebold's dependency ratio andstage in tbe developmental cycle Ratber tban workmg longer hours, mid-dle-aged men sponsor more work parties tbrough which tbey are able togain in tbe net transfer of labor between bousebolds (37)

Fortes's (45) model of tbe developmental cycle of domestic groups alsorelies on demograpbic processes to explam tbe vaneties of domestic groupsfound in a community Accordmg to Fortes, " wben it is recognized tbattbese so-called types are m fact phases in the developmental cycle of a smglegeneral form for eacb society, the confusion vamshes" (45, p 3) Thevanous domestic groups observed at one pomt m time can be ordered intoa single developmentfj sequence, as in the case of matnfocat families m(formerly) Bntish Guiana (136) Hence, the developmental cycle may ex-plain wby a census sbows only a small percentage of tbe households in acommunity conformmg to the ideal type (10, 72) As all domestic groupspass tbrough different stages of the developmental cycle at different times,a census will catch only a few in tbe ideal, complete pbase For tbis reason,an ideal bousebold type such as the Eastem European zadruga is betterregarded " not as a form, but as a transitory state m the developmentof the bousehold" (72, p 142)

While tbe developmental cycle must be reckoned witb m any analysis ofbousehold or family form, m most cases it cannot explain all the observedvanation because factors other than tbose stemmmg from tbe process ofsocial reproduction may operate to produce a diversity of domestic groups(29, 59, 141) E N Goody's study (59), for example, reveals tbat tbedevelopmental cycles of compounds are charactensucally different amongtbe tbree estates (commoner, Muslim, and rulmg) m tbe divisional capitalsof central Gonja Hence, as Fortes (47, p 18) now concedes, a model of aumform developmental cycle cannot explam wby the actual bistones ofdifferent families entail different developmental sequences

FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD 169

The limitations of Fortes's mitial (45) concept of tbe developmental cycledenve from his attachment of the successive phases of the cycle to tbemdividuaPs passage through the life cycle (29, 139) But cbanges m familystructure can be kept distmct from change in family personnel (29) Fami-lies can replenish their membership without undergoing changes in struc-ture, and they can spawn other families that pass tbrough divergentsequences

Fortes's former assumption that in eacb society there is a single, uniformdevelopmental sequence through which all domestic groups pass may alsoblmd us to histoncal cbanges in domestic organization If we order all tbedifferent housebold forms we observe at one pomt m time along a singledevelopmental sequence, we may well fail to reahze that more recentlyformed households are embarking on a different sequence than olderhouseholds To recognize histoncal change we must collect longitudinaldata on domestic groups by utilizing histoncal sources, such as householdregisters, or by reconstructing the histones of individuals and familiesthrough retrospective accounts By using the techmque of cohort analysisdeveloped by demographers, we can discern whether members of successivecobons (whether these are birth cohorts, marnage cohorts, or whateverotber cohorts emerge as histoncally significant m a particular population)have the same or different domestic histones

Despite these limitations, the concept of the developmental cycle ofdom^tic groups has been extremely useful in displaying the impact ofevents such as marnage, birth, death, and division of property on thecomposition of families and households Although the timing and sequenc-ing of tbese events have been shown to be complexly shaped by a wide rangeof cultural, political, and economic processes, these events clearly mediatebetween the complex causal factors and the shape of domestic groups

ECONOMIC DETERMINANTS Economic vanables are predominantamong those adduced to explain family and housebold structure At timesa diverse mix of "economic" or "ecological" factors, including labor needsin production, defensive needs, care of children, taxation, and conscnptionpractices of the state, are cited as the "underlying functional reasons" forthe presence of a particular type of domestic group (72, p 142) As often,however, one economic factor is singled out as the pnmary or causally pnordeterminant of domestic group structure

Property is a common focus in discussions of family form, although itmay be approached in different ways One approach, wbich I have alreadytouched upon in my discussion of definitions, views property relationshipsfrom a jural perspective and therefore does not cast it as an economicdeterminant A second approach treats property as a resource and goal

170 YANAGISAKO

wbicb sbapes tbe actions of maximizmg mdividuals Tbe two views are wellillustrated in tbe hterature on Cbmese famibes, wbere most researcbers (1,28,29,51,158) appear to agree on tbe pivotal role of property, but disagreeover tbe manner by wbich property ngbts are transmitted from one genera-tion to tbe next and, consequently, over wbat detennmes tbe ttmmg ofproperty division Accordmg to Freedman (50, 51) and Abem (I), tbeCbmese fatber bas jural autbonty over tbe family property until his deatb.Coben (28, 29), in contrast, mamtams tbat as soon as a son mames bebecomes bis fatber's jural equal and can demand divmon of tbe familyestate For Freedman. tbe greater tbe autbonty of tbe fatber, tbat is, tbemore his autbonty is buttressed by his pobtical and economic position inextradomestic spberes, the longer be can delay division of tbe estate by bissons For Coben, what detennmes the timmg of division is not tbe extentof tbe fatber's autbonty over sons wbo wisb to be free of it, but tbe economicself-mterest of the sons. The pursuit of this disagreement, which may denvein part from actual regional differences, would hardly seem to be productiveas It would lead only to further rafymg the faulty dichotomy of jural andeconomic spheres which muddles discussions of property relationships Toview property eitber as the mere vehicle of jural relationships (46) or as aneconomic relationsbip between people and tbmgs (29) is to misconstruewbat IS more correctly an "entire system of rules, ngbts, and expectationsof role" (73, p 207) or a "system of social relationsbips" (16, p 204) wbichmust be explamed rather tban adduced as explanation

In tbe same bght, we must eschew narrow conceptions of property rela-tionsbips as man-land relationsbips determined by "ecological factors " Tbelimitations of a narrow ecological framework are well documented m G AColber's (30) study of family orgamzation and land tenure m six Mayacommumties Although be began witb a cultural ecological frameworkempbasizmg tbe local adaptation of people to resources. Collier becamemcreasmgly aware tbat an adequate explanation of tbe relation betweenfamily orgamzation and land tenure required an understandmg of tbe re-gion-wide system of lnteretbnic and lnterclass relationsbips linkmg famibesto hamlet, townsbip, state, and nationai processes Goldscbmidt & Kunkel(55) reacb a similar conclusion in tbeir cross-cultural survey of the relation-ship between degree of land scarcity, pattem of land lnbentance, and "fam-ily stmcture" (by wbich they mean bousehold composition) m 46 peasantcommumties Tbey find that the "ecological context" suggested by E RWolf (159) cannot explam tbe different pattems of land inhentance in tbesecommunities because there is no conclusive pattem of association betweenland scarcity and eitber residence or mbentance pattems Consequently,tbey direct our attention to Wolfs (159) "bierarchical social context" bysuggesting several ways m wbicb the relationship between peasants and the

FAMILY A.ND HOUSEHOLD 171

ebtes who control state organization (and thereby land tenure pattems)shapes tbe form of mbentance and, consequently, peasant family structure

Goody's (61, 62) grand theory of tbe evolution of domestic organizationalso focusses on tbe transmission of property as a key feature of the domes-tic domain Goody proposes to explam not just the structure of domesticgroups, but a whole cluster of interlinked elements, includmg mamagetransactions, mbentance pattems, descent groups, form of mamage, do-mestic roles, and kinship terminology Central to his theory is tbe contrastbe draws between African bndewealth societies and European and Asiandowry societies, in wbicb two ver>' different forms of mamage transactionsgenerate far-reacbing consequences for domestic organization Bndewealtb,as a transaction between tbe km of the groom and tbe kin of the bnde, formspart of a circulatmg societal fund which has a leveling effect on wealthdifferences In contrast, dowry, as a type of premortem inhentance of thebnde, sets up a conjugal fund for a marned couple, thereby reproducingwealth differences As different mechanisms for redistnbutmg property,tbese mamage transactions are linked by Goody (61) to other aspects ofsocial organization Dowry systems are seen as inherently bilateral, becausetbey distnbute ngbts m a manner tbat does not link property to sexFurtbermore, as a form of "diverging devolution," dowry entails tbe trans-mission of property outside the unilineal descent group, thus weakenmg thecorporate nature of these descent groups In companson, mhentance witbmtbe unilmeal descent group in Afncan bndewealtb societies strengtbenstbeir corporate nature Finally, bndewealth and dowry have different conse-quences for the "domestic role compendia" (62, p 41) The status of womenas heirs to sigmficant property in a dowry system leads to monogamy(sometimes accompamed by concubinage), the concept of conjugal love,and the mdividuabzation of the mother (61, p 37, 62, pp 42, 51) Incontrast, bndewealtb is associated with polygyny, diffuse domwtic relation-ships, and tbe classificatory role of mother

There can be bttle doubt that Goody's typological scbeme deserves to bea major focus of discussion and researcb on marnage transactions anddomestic organization for some time to come Most provocative are tbequestions raised about bow the transmission of property—whether in tbeform of mamage payments, premortem inhentance, or postmortem mben-tance—shapes both the internal structure of domestic units and economicitnd political processes usually construed as extemal to tbe domestic do-main What remains to be debberated and funher researched is tbe empin-cal generality and analytic utility of his typology For example, there isample evidence in tbe ethnograpbic literature on bndewealtb transactionsin cognatic societies (e g 6) and in the more "loosely structured" umhnealdescent societies of highlands New Gumea fe g 149), wbich does not appear

172 YANAGISAKO

to fit well with bis African bndewealth model Indeed, one wonders whetherwe are due for another round of debate over tbe utibty of "Afncan models"as was our fate m the case of umhneal descent systems

Even more disputable is Goody's characterization of dowry m Europeanand Asian societies Accounts of dowry transactions in Japan (140), south-ern Italy (33), and Cbma (93) do not sustain Goody's claim tbat dowry isbest seen as a form of female mbentance of "male property " Even Goody'scoeditor Tambiab (151) cites cntical differences among tbe Soutb Asiansocieties of nortbem India, soutbem India, Ceylon, and Burma in juralconceptions of female ngbts to property, in tbe manner m wbicb propertyIS actually transmitted to women, and in tbe consequences of tbese trans-missions for domestic organization These recalcitrant cases, of wbich Isuspect we will hear more m the future, are ample remmders tbat the taskawaiting us is to "decompose the property of tbe family or tbe conjugalestate into its exphcitly recognized components and see what ngbts hus-band and wife enjoy m relation to them at mamage and divorce" (151, p153)

Although It reqmres refinement. Goody's contrast between bndewealthand dowry, at least as two ideal types, provides a promismg msigbt into tbeimpact of mamage and its accompanying transactions in tbe sbaping ofdomestic relationships. His causal model in which technological factors ofproduction are tbe pnmary movers in the evolution of domestic organiza-tion probably will not stand so well agamst the test of time His attempt todenve bistoncal inferences from cross-sectional data by subjecting correla-tions between mode of property transmission and societal institutions topatb analysis does little justice to tbe complexity of histoncal developmentsthat bave led to tbe kind of dowry system he descnbes [see Stone (146, 147)for a discussion of the sigmficant cbanges tbat occurred in early modemEngland witb regard to tbe control of property by family beads and wom-en's legal ngbts to property] Tbe problem, of course, is inberent in anyevolutionary scbeme that rests on a crude succession of types For boweversophisticated the quantitative hardware, one cannot denve bistoncal pro-cess from abistoncal, cross-sectional data

There is a final issue tbat I fear will be overlooked in the debate overGoody's typology and evolutionary scheme, because it is so embeddedwithm Goody's discussion that it is likely to go unnoticed In Goody'sevolutionary account of the shift from a bndewealtb to a dowry system,radical transformations occur in mode of production, division of labor,stratification, property relations, centralization of political autbonty, mar-nage forms, km terminology, and domestic role relationsbips Yet one tbingremams constant the nuclear family is the basic productive unit of society(62, p 20) Because he sees the nuclear family as everywhere and for all time

FA^MILY AND HOUSEHOLD 173

tbe basic and natural unit of society. Goody never feels compelled to explainwby, when intensive agriculture created greater production surpluses anddifferences in styles of life, people became concemed to reproduce theselife-styles in their own progeny as agatnst the members of tbe lineage orotber kinship or locality grouping For Goody, there is no need to explaintbe emergence of the nuclear family as a socially and culturally significantunit because it was already, and always, present In the final section of thispaper, I will retum to a cntical commentary of this assumption, which isheld by many more antbropologists than just Goody

A second productive resource cited as a determinant of household struc-ture IS labor Labor requirements are singled out by Pasternak, Ember &Ember (108) as the most powerful determinant of the formation of extendedfamily households Usmg a randomly selected sample of 60 societies, theytest their hypothesis that

extended family households are likely to emerge and prevail in a society when (inthe absence of slave or hired labor) work outside the home makes it difficult for a motherto tend children and/or perform her other regular nme-consummg domestic tasks, orwhen the outside activities of a father make u difficult for him to perform his subsistencework (108 p 121)

They assume that in the absence of such activity requirements, extendedfamily households would not emerge in any society because tbey would beplagued by the ''ordinar>' difficulties of extended family dynamics," includ-ing jealousies and problems of autbonty (108, p 121) Having shown thatthe statistical association between presence of "incompatible activity re-quirements" and presence of "extended family households" is stronger thantbat predicted by Nimkoff & Middleton's (103) hypothesis (which attnbutesextended family households to agncultural subsistence), they conclude thatlabor requirements per se are better predictors of extended familyhouseholds tban type of subsistence activity The problem with this conclu-sion, as the authors themselves point out (108, p 121), is that they have nojustification for positing a causal relationship between the purported inde-pendent variable (incompatible activity requirements) and the purporteddependent vanable (presence of extended family households) on the basisof correlational evidence Hence, they must resort to insisting that it is moreplausible that incompatible activity requirements cause extended familyhouseholds rather tban vice versa But it is jusi as reasonable to argue thatextended family households encourage women to work outside the home,particularly if we accept Pasternak, Ember & Ember's charactenzation ofsuch households as nddled witb tensions and confiicts Even more dubiousIS tbeir construction of arbitrar>. crude measures such as tbe presence of"incompatible activity requirements," which they define for women as

174 YANAGISAKO

"work away from tbe home for more tban balf tbe day for at least (cumula-tively) 30 days of the year" (108, p 118)

Tbe most vexatious issue tbat Pasternak, Ember & Ember and tbe otbers(55, 62) wbo attempt statistical cross-soaetal compansons encounter iswbetber tbe units tbey have selected are appropnate for comparative pur-poses Tbe evidence tbat societies contam different frequencies of a rangeof bousebold types surely cballenges tbe classification of wbole societies mtotwo categones of tbose witb "extended family bousebolds" versus thosewitb "mdependent family bousebolds " Our goal of understandmg andexplaining domestic orgamzation may be better achieved by investigationsof tbe diversity of domestic umts m societies and tbe articulation of tbesedomestic umts witb one anotber, ratber tban by compansons tbat reducewbole societies to a smgle bousebold type, family structure, or mamagetransaction

Just as labor reqmrements are used to explam cross-societal vanations indomestic groups, so a large number of researcbers bave used it to explaintbe frequency witb wbicb a particular housebold type appears m a societyor segment of a society In reviewmg ecological studies, Nettmg (102) citesseveral studies whicb purportedly sbow that bousebold composition amonghorticultunsts and agnculturalists vanes with tbe type and amount of laborreqmred for effective crop production In his own study, for example, heattnbutes tbe differences between tbe large, extended famibes of sbiftingcultivators and tbe nuclear family bousebolds of mtensive agnculturalistsm the same Nigenan plateau environment to diffenng labor reqmrements(100,101). Along tbe same lines. Sabbns (119) argues tbat under conditionsof widely dispersed resources tbe extended family provides a more efficientproductive unit. Nakane (97) attnbutes tbe larger-tban-average meanbousehold size in two Japanese commumties to tbe labor requirements oftbeir productive activities (fisbmg m one, silk cultivation m tbe otber), andDorjabn (39) cites labor demands of upland nee farmmg as the pnme factorm bousebold size and type among tbe Mayoso Temne In tbe case of tbeCbmese family, botb Pastemak (107) and Coben (29) stress tbe need for tbeefficient allocation of labor as a primary determinant of family form

In all these studies, the authors assume tbat once baving identified tbeproductive activity of tbe bousehold, tbey can ascertain tbe technologicallydetermmed labor reqmrements of tbat activity and proceed to sbow that tbehousehold efficiently meets these labor requirements They fail to explainadequately, however, tbat it is not merely tbe tecbnological requirementsof production wbicb necessitate a particular bousebold type, but tbe entiremanner in which production is socially orgamzed In otber words, a produc-tive activity can be accompbsbed by a vanety of bousehold types dependingon how tbat production is socially organized, includmg tbe division of laborby sex and age, tbe use of hired labor, cooperation in productive tasks

FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD 175

among households, and the exchange of labor between households LikeChayanov and Sablms, tbese authors are inclined to assume that thehousehold is a self-contained labor unit, and so they fail to mvestigatesufficiently tbe existence of other forms of productive organization Yet tbesalient units engaged in production may not be the same at different phasesof the productive cycle, for example, different social groups may engage inthe transplanting, weeding, and harvesting of nee (32) Once we realize thatA panicular productive enterpnse can be accomplished by a vanety ofproductive units, depending on how production is orgamzed, it becomesapparent that to attnbute household composition to labor requirements isto beg the question, because to do so we have to assume tbe pnor existenceof an entire institutional framework for production (38) To overcome tbis(Overly restncted focus on technologically denved factors of production weneed to investigate a wider range of social, pohtical, and economic forcesshaping productive relationships botb within and between domestic groups

SOCIAL STRATIFICATION AND THE DIVERSITY OF DOMESTICGROUPS Our past tendency to neglect stratification in the analysis ofdomestic organization seems to have denved from our notion of tbe basichomogeneity of the communities we have studied In the case of peasantcommunities, for example, the contrast between the peasants we have stud-ied and the landlords whom we generally have not bas made the peasantslook rather uniform Hence, even though Freedman (50, 51) suggests tbatIt was among the landed gentry in Cbma that one found a significantproportion of joint families, while among the peasantry one found onlynuclear and stem famihes, Cohen (29) finds it easy to dismiss stratificationas a significant factor in his village because it contains only "dirt farmers."none of whom could be construed as members of an ehte gentry Cohen islight that wealth differences among the villages of Yen-liao are small int;ompanson to wealth differences between peasants and landed gentry Buthis own data (29, pp 239-42) mdicate that per capita landholdings areconsistently larger among the tobacco-growmg households, many of whomalso have diversified mto capitalized, nonagncultural enterprises, tbanamong tbe nce-growmg households whose members appear to provide thehired labor for the larger, tobacco-growing households

Tbe failure to take adequate account of the intemal differentiation amongtbe peasanti-y has been redressed ma number of recent studies (95, 129, 130,140, 156) As Mintz states, ' peasamnes nowhere form a homogeneousmass or agglomerate, but are always and everywhere typified themselves byintemal differentiation along many hnes" (95, p 3)

Part of the difficulty in recognizing significant wealth differences whichgenerate structural differences in the households of a peasant communitystems from their social mobility Since peasant households function as small

176 YANAGISAKO

production units witb extremely limited resources and are greatly subjectto the forces of nature, the market, and the state, they expenence somedegree of random oscillation m social mobibty (129, p 112) Among theRussian peasantry in tbe early twentietb century, for example, tbere wasconsiderable multidirectional and cycbcal mobibty of bousebolds (129) TC Smitb (140) also cbaractenzes tbe situation in Tokugawa Japan as onein wbicb farm famihes were not likely to enjoy an economic advantage overtbeir neigbbors for many years On the other band, it would be wrong toconclude that because of this mobility observed differences m wealtb aremere transitory advantages that have no consequence for domestic orga-nization Despite the mobibty in Smith's village, tbe highest probabibty wasfor a family to remam in the same landholdmg category from one taxregister to another—an average interval of 12 years (140, p 119)

Sigmficant differences in wealth among peasants also may be overlookedbecause tbey are so often obscured by kinship relationsbips wbicb bind tbelanded to the landless and the land-ncb to tbe land-poor (95, 129, 130)Consequential wealth differences may exist between tbe smaller coresiden-tial units of a single kin-based compound (54) or between brotbers wbo beadthe main and branch bouseholds of a family (140)

Tbe complexity of tbe intemal differentiation of tbe peasantry, or of anykmd of community, sbould not deter us from investigating its relation tothe vanations we observe in tbe composition and mtemal structure ofdomestic groups, as well as in their extemal relationships Indeed, it is thisvery complexity—the fluctuations in size and wealtb, tbe social mobility,and tbe kin ties tbat bind togetber bousebolds in different strata—thatunderlines our need to mvestigate the economic and social interdependenceof different sectors of society

Variations over TtmeIn considermg recent publications which address the topic of change infamily and bousebold structure, I have gone beyond the boundanes of ourown disciplme to include the burgeomng bterature bemg produced by fam-ily histonans Given tbe limitations of space and my acquaintance witb tbishterature, I bave not attempted a broadly inclusive review of tbe bistory oftbe family My purpose instead is to evaluate some of tbe btstoncal studiestbat speak directly to our tbeoretical interest in changmg domestic orga-mzation Of course, as anthropologists become increasingly immersed m thestudy of literate societies witb recorded pasts, an acquaintance and facilitywitb tbe histonan's methods of analyzmg documentary matenals becomesa necessity My review of tbe work of bistonans, however, is intended partlyas a didactic exercise directed toward exhibiting the predominant concep-tions and tbeoretical onentations gmdmg our own analyses of family and

FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD 177

kmship change as much as theirs, since many of their notions bave beenborrowed from anthropology and sociology Indeed, the common guidingframeworks may be more easily discemed m the context of a newly develop-ing field of inquiry such as the historj^ of the family After I discuss themethods and analytical strategies employed by family histonans, I move onto d review of anthropological studies of family and kinship change

THE HISTORY OF THE FAMILY The emergence of histonans' interest inthe family is properly placed within the context of a more general trend mhistoncal research, the shift away from a history focused pnmanly on tbedescnption and interpretation of particular histoncal events—a history tbathas been dominated by the ideas and actions of a few—to a historj' con-cemed with the everyday lives of the many (118) The "new social history"necessanly has been accompamed by a change in the kinds of data sourcesand methods of analysis histonans employ The social histonan siftsthrough records of births, marnages, deaths, and household lists containedm censuses, pansh registers, and government reports, rather than tbrougbpolitical treatises, autobiographies, and philosophical tracts Given tbekinds of events in the lives of the commonfolk which get recorded, muchof the new social history has been directed toward reconstructing the familyexpenence of histoncal populations '

To utilize quantifiable enumerative matenals, histonans of tbe familyhave added two methods of analysis to cheir more traditional tool kit Theseiire (a) the method of family reconstitution developed by the Frencb histor-ical demographer Louis Henr\, which entails reconstruction of tbe demo-grapbic histor}^ of individual famihes from entnes m pansh registers (64,161, 162), (b) aggregate data analysis, which uses nominal census lists orsurveys taken at different points in time to construct a picture of statisticaltrends over time (10, 69, 86. 132, 133) Histoncal demographers employthese methods to discern demographic changes in death, birth, and illegiti-macy rates, age at marnage and other events that have consequences forfamily size and composition By supplementing the quantitative resultsachieved by these methods of analysis with qualitative source matenals,family histonans attempt to describe and analyze family and householdpattems in different time penods and different locales, although pnmanlym Westem Europe and the United States

An emphasis on quantitative analysis is reflected in the work of theCambndge Group for the Historv of Population and Social Structure co-

^ A review of the Journal of Family History the History of Childhood Quarterly, the Journalof Interdisciplinary History, the 4inale'i (Trance), and Pasi and Present (England) confirmsihis concern with the familv

178 YANAGISAKO

directed by Laslett Tbe main tbmst of Laslett's work (85-87) is tbe refuta-tion of the theory tbat a shift from an extended family system to a nuclearfamily system accompamed European mdustnabzation His discovery thatearly census matenals sbow tbe small, nuclear family bousehold to bavepredominated m England before the mdustnal revolution is ample evidenceof tbe contnbution tbat bistoncal demograpby can make to the construc-tion and revision of bypotbeses about tbe bistory of tbe family Havingfound similar evidence of tbe predominance of small bouseholds elsewberein premdustnal Westem Europe and even m Tokugawa Japan (76), bow-ever, Laslett boldly extends his thesis to assert tbat "bttle vanation in familyorgamzation can be found m buman bistory" (86, p. lx) Wbile he is awareof tbe distmction between bousehold size and family organization, at timesLaslett lapses mto the unfortunate practice of confusmg family organizationwith residence pattems Because be relies pnmanly on aggregate data onbousebold size and composition, Laslett's work suffers from a narrownessas well as a pletbora of metbodological and conceptual problems [see (12)for an excellent cntique of Laslett's work] A few of tbese problems arewortb bstmg bere because tbey plague tbe work of otber quantitative bis-tonans of tbe family equating residence pattems with family structure andeven kinship organization, paymg httle heed to relationsbips between resi-dential units, failing to consider regional diversity, failmg to take intoconsideration the developmental cycle of domestic groups, and makmgunwarranted assumptions about tbe common cntena for definmgbouseholds used by census takers in different societies

Tbese conceptual and metbodological muddles are well illustrated by thehterature on tbe history of the black family m the United States In reassess-ing the slave expenence tbrougb reconstructmg tbe bistory of black fami-lies, scbolars bke Gutman (69, 70) assert tbat, contrary to received wisdom,blacks in tbe Umted States lived predommantly in two-parent bouseboldsbotb before and after emancipation Gutman's figures certainly attest to tbeneed for a reassessment of popular notions of tbe black family But be andotber family bistonans (53) muddle the issue by assuming that if husbandsare present m the bousebold, tbey play a central role m tbe family and,tberefore, tbat tbese cannot be "matnfocal," "matnarcbal," or female-beaded bousebolds Yet tbe pomt tbat presence or absence m a bouseboldIS qmte a different tbmg from an mdividual's structural role m tbe familywas made convincingly clear 20 years ago by R T Smitb (136)

Fortunately, not all family bistonans wbo rely on quantitative methodssuffer from tbese faibngs. Some bistonans of tbe black family (77, 131) arequite cognizant of the distinction between household composition and fam-ily structure, and tbose antbropologists wbose works appear m bistoncalantbologies bave tned to dnve home this distinction (60, 71) Tbe most

F-VMILY AND HOUSEHOLD 179

analytically refined works seem to come from bistonans wbo use a broaderrange of source matenals in conducting intensive researcb on a specificlocality at a single point in time, tbus avoidmg an unbealtby rehance onaggregate figures wbicb obscure substantial differences among strata, re-gions, and etbmc groups In some histoncal studies of the family, theauthors take into account tbe developmental cycle of domestic groups, evenin using aggregate data (10, 13), place the household withm its properkinship context (82, 156), attend to locai vanations (65, 142), and pay heedto the influence of other cultural domains, such as rebgion, on familyideology (7, 88) Greven (67,68), for example, utilizes botb tbe genealogicalbistones of specific famili^ and aggregate data on tbe entire population inhis case study of population, land, and family in a seventeentb-century NewEngland town His reconstruction of the household and kinship networksm the community enables bim to mterpret the organizational stmcture ofindividual households within the context of tbeir relationships with otherhouseholds Similarly, Kent's study (82) of fifteenth-century anstocraticfamilies in Florence shows tbe relations among the individual, housebold,and bneage to be more subtle tban is suggested by overly dicbotomizedconceptual frameworks which portray the household and lineage as mber-ently antagonistic structures Finally, histoncal researcb on mbentancesystems in different regions of Westem Europe (14. 153) promises toprovide us with useful analyses of the interplay between the inhentance lawsof the state, local customs, and the actual mbentance practices of differentsectors of society

Like anthropologists, social histonans are searching for analytically pro-ductive ways to identify and descnbe family change Stone's (146, 14"?)efforts to display tbe cbanges in English family structure in tbe early mod-em penod lead bim to the construction of a typology of three successivefamily types While there is much that can be objected to in his mterpreta-tion of evidence (154), his attention to pubbc ideologies of tbe family as wellas to family functions contnbutes much ncher matenal for an analysisof histoncal change than the absorption with surface level similanties ofdemographic statistics can offer

The most formidable problem which confronts histonans of tbe familyIS the matching of data sources with the ngbt kinds of questions Wberethey are least successful m their endeavors is when, like Laslett (86) andGutman (69, 70), they attempt to answer questions about family stmcturefor which their quantitative sources are ill suited, or wben, like Shorter (132,133), they try to "extract emotional motivations from unwillmg statistics"(C Daniels, unpublished paper) Tbey are most successful wben, bke T CSmitb (140), they make creative but judicious use of quantitative matenalsto calculate measures of age-specific mortality and fertility, life expectancy.

180 YANAGISAKO

nuptiality, and birth spacing, and supplementmg these with literary andlegal records, amve at conclusions about population growth, infanticide,and tbe dynamics of tbe bousebold in a specific locality

Altbougb tbe research of histonans has certainly yielded much of sub-stantive mterest and sigmficance for discussions of the bistory of tbe West-em family, tbe imphcations of tbese results for our understanding of familycbange are obscured by tbe absence of a coberent tbeoretical frameworkA ratber odd grab-bag of conceptual tools and analytic strategies bas beenhfted from tbe social sciences by bistonans Perhaps most lU-advised is tbeproclivity of some social bistonans (86, 87, 132, 133) to infer changes insentiments and cultural conceptions from alterations in demographic pat-tems Because the illiterate masses leave behind mainly vital statistics wbicbdo not speak of attitudes and behefs, they are particularly vulnerable to thiskind of interpretation Given tbe available source matenals, tbe adoptionof psycboanalytic models to speculate about tbe histoncal consequences ofchildhood expenences in different penods also seems particularly lnappro-pnate Few histonans go as far as deMause (35) to propose a "psychogenictheory of bistory" which applies Freudian and neo-Freudian tbeones to thehistory of cbildbood, but an emphasis on socialization and an lmphcit, ifundeveloped, theory of the importance of early cbildbood expenence insbapmg personabty and culture is present m tbe works of otber familybistonans (86, 87) It is because of this socialization bias tbat Laslettcbooses as tbe predominant famibal type in a society tbe form in which thelargest percentage of children have grown up "in their most impressionableyears" (86, p 67) This remvention of personality and culture tbeory leadsbistonans like Laslett to place an inordinate empbasis on a single familyfunction to tbe detriment of otber, no less important, functions (12, 156)

The most popular import from tbe social sciences, bowever, has been asomewhat loosely conceptualized, Parsonian eqmbbnum model of societyIn general, family structure and function are seen as adjustmg to tbe shiftingextemal conditions of tbe economy and political orgamzation (11, 118, 146,147) Economic factors may be singled out as having a major causal influ-ence on the family, as in Greven's study (67) wbere tbe control of land bytbe town's foundmg fatbers leads to tbe estabbsbment of "extended patnar-cbal famibes " In any event, alterations m family form and functions areportrayed as attempts to make domestic relationsbips more congment witbtbe outside social environment I include withm tbe general category of aParsonian equihbnum framework tbe "actor-onented" approacbes (4, 5,118) wbicb purport to explain particular family structures by reconstruct-ing tbe social options open to maximizing mdividuals For despite tbeinterest of histonans such as Anderson (4, 5) in decision-making processes

h \MILY AND HOUSEHOLD 181

and the inclusion of formalist premises such as "all actors have a numberof goals, tbe attainment of which would maximize tbeir satisfactions orpsycbic rewards" (4, p 8), in the end the explanation of family relationshipsIS a functionalist one Hence to explam the high incidence of coresidenceof mamed children and parents in the early mdustnal English town ofPreston, Anderson (4) cites the economic benefits for both tbe marnedcouple and parents Much rarer are the histonans like N Z Davis wborecognize tbe conflicts and tensions as well as the consistencies betweenfamily life and political, economic, and religious institutions Davis's discus-sion (34) of tbe disjuncture between "pnvatistic family values" and tbe"more corporate values" held by the same families in early modem Franceconveys a more refined notion of cultural systems than do the analyses offamily histonans who are inclined toward tightly integrated functionalistschemes

Several family histonans (e g 63. 133) have been attracted to the simpledichotomies of traditional vs modem, rural vs urban, mechanical solidantyvs organic solidanty and instrumental vs affective families While this ishardly tbe place to review tbe sbortcomings of a modemization framework,suffice It to say that it is somewhat ironic that histonans would find a staticfunctionalist perspective so appealing just at a time wben anthropologistsand sociologists are searching for more dynamic models of society

As I implied m the beginning of this section, the answer to the questionof why histonans have not been more successful in integrating their findingsinto a unified theory of family change lies, at least in pan, in the shortcom-ings of our own discipline It is to this body of literature that I now tum

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES Oh CHANGE IN FAMILY ANDHOUSEHOLD A good deal of anthropological publications of family andhousehold change can be categorized as refutations or at least refinementsof a Pareons-Redfield-Durkheim model ot the evolution of tbe family mlndustnal-urban society Hammel & Yarbrough (75) summanze well thereceived hypothesis of family breakdown and the contrasting view of thefamily as a durable institution

a conservative and often romannc view has prevailed, begmnmg perhaps with LePlayand Durkhemi, that upheaval, social change, and lncreasmg division of labor destroyfundamental values, divide the pnmary group, and disrupt the relationships between itsmeinbers The family, m particular, has been seen as a victim, reduced from a sobdar>'fortress protectmg the social and psychic welfare of its members to a temporary abodefor transient seekers of self-interest, losing its function as the mcubator of social virtueto the market place and the peer group More recent, and it is probably fair to say, moreempincal research has suggested that the family is an extraordinarily durable institution,even under condition'i of extreme social change and social mobility (75, p 145)

182 YANAGISAKO

Hammel (71) concludes that mdustnalization, urbamzation, and integra-tion into a money economy have not weakened the Balkan extended family,but ratber have strengthened it Similarly, Carlos & Sellers (24), m review-ing publications on tbe family in Latin Amenca, contend that "the modem-ization process is being molded to existing family and kmship institutionsand areas of traditional family function" (24, p 113) Tbey suggest thatGoode's (57) propositions about mdustnalization and family change bemodified because studies in Latin Amenca disclose tbat geographic mobilityand class differential mobility do not weaken mtimacy and contact in thekm network and tbat mdustnalization does not create a new value stmctureemphasizing achievement over ascnption Otber researchers (150) reporttbat kmsbip ties endure under conditions of social cbange and tbat newfunctions are assumed by kmsbip units Still otbers (106, 135) find tbat mdeveloping nations sucb as India it is particularly entrepreneurs and tbeleaders of modem industry who are members of joint families Hence, tbemost "well-adjusted" and financially successful sectors of society have afamily structure tbat modemization tbeory would charactenze as "tradi-tional " At the same time, research in rural areas confirms that imgrationand increasing integration into a market economy do not inevitably spelldeclme in family unity Urban migration may mcrease family sobdantyand widen kin ties in tbe rural community (19), and wage-labor migrationmay contnbute to the maintenance of extended family households (104,105)

The above studies provide a necessary corrective to tbe excessively broadhypothesis that witb "modernization" kinship stmctures decbne At tbesame time, however, they often replicate the shoncomings of those whomthey cnticize by using the same problematic terms, like "modernization"(24, p 114) At other times, the argumMit over whether extended familiesdetenorate in the face of mdustnal cbange seems little more tban an out-come of the inconsistent usage of tbe term "extended family " Firth, Hubert& Forge (44) point out that there is no inherent contradiction between theview that modem mdustnal society favors the development of the nuclearfamily at the expense of the extended family and the view that the extendedfamily remains important They suggest that it all depends on what wemean by tbe extended family To resolve wbat they see as a needless debate,Firth, Hubert & Forge suggest that we distinguish between two uses of tbeterm by asking wbere authonty bes In extended famihes, authonty nor-mally resides witb the senior male, m a set of extrafamthal km, author-ity IS dispersed Havmg made this distinction, they concur with Parsonson the relative isolation of the nuclear family in urban-mdustnal society,because

FA.MILY AND HOUSEHOLD 183

except for family firms and some control ot joint property, decisions m the set ofextra-familtal km in a modern Western urban society are made in nuclear family units,however influenced they mav be by kin ties outside (44, p 456)

Finh, Huben & Forge are nght that some of the debate is created byresearchers who tend to overstate the significance of km ties But in additionto Its androcentric bias, tbeir distinction gives undue weight to centrahzedauthonty as the defining feature of the extended family Kin groups canmake decisions and take cooperative action without a central authontyAnd even when a dispersed family is not specifically a political or economicgroup, this does not mean that it cannot be used for pohtical or economicpurposes (15) It is wrong, therefore, to accept the absence of km groupsresembling those found in lineage societies as evidence of a decline in thelmponance of tbe extended family

If we are to refine our analysis of family and housebold change, we mustbegm to ask new questions of our data Questions as to whether or not theextended family or kinship in general has declined in industnal-urban soci-ety or whether the family has endured even under conditions of rapid socialchange have impeded our progress toward a more refined analysis ofcbange After all, structural cbange and structural continuity in family andkinship institutions are not mutually exclusive phenomena (135, 163) Oneway to move toward a more refined analysis of change in family and kmshipIS to examine the relationship between change in the ideology of family andkinship and change in actual institutional arrangements In the case of theBalkan zadmga, Hammel (71) concludes that recent changes can be at-tnbuted largely to alterations in demographic rates and extemal constraintswhile the underlying kinship pnnciples (e g vinfocality, agnatic bias, pa-tnfocality, and lineage organization) have remained relatively unmodifiedBrown (20) suggests similarly that we cannot assume tbat mdustnal-urbani-zation in Japan has necessanly resulted m the demise of tbe dozoku (a groupof households related in a network of mam and branch ties) even thoughthe classic type of dozoku with its economic correlates is no longer viableThe ideology which has yielded dozoku organization can persist despitealterations m the observable organizational forms

Tbe cntical question which anses when we employ this analytical strat-egy IS how do we identify the underlying, ideological pnnciples of forms hkethe Balkan zadruga and the Japanese dozoku to discem whether ideologicalchange has occurred"* For the zadruga, the underlying kinship pnnciplesextracted by Hammel (71) consist of an assortment of things, some of whichappear to be normative ruies or preferences (patnfocality), other of whichare observable behavioral tendencies (agnatic bias), and still otbers of which(vinfocalitv) are ambiguously either obser^-able pattems or normative rules

184 YANAGISAKO

As some of tbe basic pnnciples are outcomes of other pnnciples wben tbeyare combined with certam demograpbic and social constraints, tbe meamngof "ideological pnnciples" is equivocal

Tbe assessment of ideological cbange. of course, is difficult where tbeantbropologist, hke tbe bistonan, does not have direct evidence of formercultural ideals, values, and meanmgs Most commonly, the anthropologistIS forced to reconstmct past ideologies from contemporary accounts. If betben compares tbis abstracted ideology of the past with tbe more ncblycontextualized contemporary ideology, his evaluation of cbange may belimited by tbe vagueness of bis constmcted model of tbe past If we are tobnng to our analysis tbe knowledge tbat cbange m observable behavior doesnot necessanly mean tbat cultural ideologies bave altered, we need a con-ceptual framework tbat can belp us to systematically differentiate anddisplay tbe mteraction between tbese aspects of family and kinsbip Tbegreat promise of sucb an analytic strategy lies m its capacity to identify tbedynamic tension between ideology and action as a possible source of cbange(163), thereby transcending the bmitations of an analytic framework thatlnvanably attnbutes cbange to tbe constramts imposed by factors extemalto family, bousehold, and kmsbip

Vanations in Domestic Organization: An Undervtew

Havmg surveyed the recent literature on vanations in domestic groupsacross societies, withm societies, and over time, I want to pause here toaddress the question of wbat holds all these works togetber Do tbesediverse mquines into the structure and function of domestic groups sbareany mutual conceptions or analytic categones"? Tbe answer, I contend, isyes, however, to unearth tbis common ground we must first tum the ques-tion around and ask not what we see m common in the explanations, butwbat we see in common in the depictions of the phenomena bemg explamedIn otber words, wben antbropologists treat the family and bousebold as tbetbing to be explained, tbe dependent vanable, bow do tbey descnbe itsfeatures''^

My preceding commentary by now must bave made it apparent tbatwben diey attempt to explam vanations m domestic groups most autborssettle on the genealogical composition of tbe domestic group as its mostsalient feature Terms sucb as "nuclear family" and "nuclear familybousebold," or "stem family" and "stem family bousebold" classify a do-

I should pomt out here that there are anthropological studies which treat the family orhousehold as an independent variable, that is, as the explanation for such thmgs as child-reanng practices and personahty structure I have not mcluded these studies m this review

FA.MILY AND HOUSEHOLD 185

mestic unit on the basis of the genealogically defined km types containedwithin It, regardless of whether the unit is a coresidential group or a spa-tially dispersed family In addition, the group is usually labeled accordingto the tie between its most genealogically "close" members, because it ispresumed that this relationship forms its structural core If it contains twoadult brothers, their wives and children, it is labeled a fratemal-jomt familyor household In other words, for a fratemal-joint household, the assump-tion IS that the brother-brother relationship is the structurally dominantrelationship which binds together the rest of the membere of the householdFurthermore, in studies that consider the developmental cycle ofthe domes-tic group, what is usually descnbed as changing over the course of time isthe genealogical composition ofthe group (10, 48, 72, 129)

The classification of households and famihes on the basis of their genea-logical makeup conveys the implicit notion that there is a fundamentalsimilanty in the structures of the units which share the same label Incross-socjetal comparisons or histoncal investigations, the presumption isthat a stem family at one time and place has the same organizationalstructure as a stem family at another time and place Yet obviously thereIS more to "family structure"' than genealogical composition The structureof a family, household, or any other social unit is not merely the sum of itsgenealogical ties, but the total configuration of social relationships amongIts members There is a plethora of early and recent ethnographies (29, 59,136, 144, 145, 149) which provide nch accounts ofthe continually shiftingrelationships of authonty. influence, emotional solidarity, and conflictwhich charactenze families and households And yet when explanations ofthese vanations in domestic relationships are attempted, the tendency is todivest them of their interactional and meaningful dimensions, leaving onlythe genealogical dimension as the salient feature to be compared and ex-plained Aside from companng the configuration of actual domestic re-lationships, comparative studies might alternatively treat the family as a" normative system composed of those interrelated norms which definethe proper modes of interactions between persons performing familialroles" (137, pp 59) Unfortunately, when a term is proposed as a label fora djTiamic system of normative role relationships, as m the case of the term"matnfocal family structure" (136), it is often mistaken for a descnptionof household composition (83)

The failure to bnng into our comparative analyses the dynamic configura-tion of role relationships of families and households extends to relationshipsbetween domestic groups As I explained in my cntique of explanations thatcenter on the labor requirements of households, to focus on households asself-contained units which fulfill some ser of specified domestic functions

186 YANAGISAKO

may be altogether the wrong strategy This is tme of sets of households thatshare a corporate identity as well as those that do not, but which may haveother Significant relationships It is too often thought that by labeUing adomestic umt a "stem-family" we have adequately descnbed both its inter-nal organizational structure and the relationships that articulate it withgroups and mdividuals outside it But if we compare, for example, stemfamily households m eighteenth century Austna (10) with stem familyhouseholds m eighteenth century Japan (140), the economic relationshipsbetween households in these two societies are clearly different

One kind of analytic advance we can make is illustrated by Cohen's (29)dissection of Chmese family organization He observes that while the Chi-nese family (chia) is a discrete kin group.

It can display a great deal of vanation in residential arrangements and in the economicties of its members For purposes of analysis the chia estate, economy, and group canbe considered as three basic components in chia organization (29, p S8)

The chia estate is "that body of holdings to which the process of familydivision IS applicable," the chia group is "made up of persons who havenghts of one sort or another to the chia estate at the time of family division,"and the chia economy "refers to the exploitation of the chia estate as wellas to other mcome-producing activities lmked to its exploitation throughremittances and a common budgetary arrangement" (29, p 59) Byexamm-ing vanations in the connections between chia components, Cohen succeedsin clanfying some of the problems encountered when the Chinese family isdescnbed m terms that wrongly assume an ideal chia m which the estate,group, and economy are umfied

An analytic framework such as Cohen's, of course, is useful only whenapplied where the common ownership of property is the key element bmd-lng together domestic units Where this is not the case, as among landlesspeasants, hunter-gatherers, or wage-laborers, we may usefully identify othersignificant components of family organization, including the commensalgroup, the production group, and the budget group m which reciprocalexchange occurs without accounting (cf 90, 128) However, as I have al-ready remarked, the aggregate of people engaged in any of these activitiesmay change throughout the production cycle, the exchange cycle, or theindividual's hfe cycle Consequently, it seems more analytically strategic tobegm With an investigation of the activities that are central to the domesticrelationships m each particular society, rather than with its domesticgroups If we start by ldentifj^ng the important productive, ntual, political,and exchange transactions m a society and only then proceed to ask whatkinds of kmship or locality-based units engage in these activities, and in

FAMILY A.ND HOUSEHOLD 187

what manner, we decrease the likelihood of overlooking some of thesesaUent units, particularly those that do not fit our conventional notion ofa household

A consideration of the second area of common ground in the hteraturereviewed takes us back to the conception of the "domestic'' which I saidlies at the heart of definitions of the family and household I observed thatm spite of their imprecision, definitions of "domestic" activities, "domestic"groups, and the "domestic" domain coverge on two sets of functionalactivities food production and consumption and social reproduction Nowthat we have seen how anthropologists descnbe and explain the structuresof social units which engage in these activities, we can elicit a furthercomponent in the conception of the domestic This facet denves from theconceptual opposition drawn between the "domestic" domain and the''pohtico-jural" domain The most ardent advocate of the heunstic advan-tages of this distinction is Fortes, who views human social organizationeverywhere as "a balance, stable or not. between the political order—Anstotle's polis—and the familial or domestic order—the oikos—a balancebetween polity and kinship"' (47, p 14) For Fortes, the two domains canbe "analytically and indeed empmcally distinguished even where the twoorders appear to be fused together m a single kinship polity, as among theAustralian abongines" (47, p 15)

In unilineal descent societies like Ashanti, the family and interpersonalrelations among kin and affines belong to the domestic domain, while thelineage belongs to the politico-jural domain The cntical feature differentiat-ing the two domains is the type of normative premise which regulates eachdomain Underlying the politico-jural domain are jural norms guaranteedby "external" or "pubhc"' sanctions which may ultimately entail force Incontrast, the domestic or familial domain is constrained by "pnvate," affec-tive and moral norms, at the root of which is the fundamental axiom ofprescnptive altruism (46, pp 89, 250-51)

Fones wams against the reification of this methodological and analyticdistinction by stating that "the actualities of kinship relations and kinshipbehaviors are compounded of elements denved from both domains" (46, p251) But when the distinction is used by other anthropologists, his caveatsoften fall by the wayside There is, in tact, d tendency for the terms to beemployed to refer to whole social relations (rather than to their contexts andimplications) and to entire social institutions (rather than to facets of socialinstitutions) Moreover, as Bender perspicaciously notes, most social scien-tists employ the term "domestic" as an unmodified folk concept to refer to"those activities associated with the household or home" and to "femaleactivities more than male activities"' !8. p 498)

188 YANAGISAKO

The pervasive and unreflective usage of this distinction m anthropologicalstudies has had an important and as yet httle recognized consequence forresearch on families and households Two studies by anthropologists whootherwise represent divergent conceptual approaches will illustrate thisconsequence

Pasternak's (107) study of family and lineage orgamzation in two Taiwa-nese villages exhibits a common unevenness found m many ethnographiesof family and lmeage orgamzation In separate sections of his book, heproposes to explain differences in the strength of agnatic ties in the lineagesofthe two villages and differences m the frequency of jomt famihes m thesame two villages If we compare his two discussions, we notice a markedcontrast between his analysis of agnatic organization and his analysis offamily form In the case of hneage organization, Pasternak considers severalpossible sources of vanabihty m the strength of agnatic ties, lncludmgurbanization, mdustnalization, ethmcity, Japanese colomal pohcy, and theconditions of initial settlement In the case of differences in family form, heconsiders only ethmcity and productive labor needs, rqectmg the former(for good reason) and settUng on the latter as the explanatory variable Fora researcher who handles causal complexity with great sophistication, as hedoes m his discussion of lmeage orgamzation, Pasternak is surpnsmglycontent to have found a smgle determinant of family form Moreover, thetwo features of kmship orgamzation—agnatic orgamzation and family form—are treated as if they were rather isolated features of social structuremstead of facets of an integrated kinship system requmng a unified explana-tion

Geertz & Geertz's (54) analysis of Balmese kmship suffers from the usageof a similar dichotomy In this case, the authors are quite explicit abouttheir reasons for dividmg their discussion of kmship institutions and prac-tices mto two domains the pnvate or domestic domam versus the publicor civil domam The reason is that the Balmese themselves make thisdistmction with great clanty The domestic affairs conducted withm thehouseyard walls of Bah are considered fundamentally different from theaffairs of the society at large (54, p 46) While there is thus ample justifica-tion for elucidatmg this cultural (hstinction of Balmese kmship, the distmc-tion has Its drawbacks as an analytic frame A companson of Geertz andGeertz's chapter on kinship in the pnvate domain with their chapters onkmship in the public domam shows the former to be uncharactensticallythm and unreveaUng Furthermore, whereas they discuss kinship in thepublic domam for the gentry and kmship m the pubhc domam for thecommoners m separate chapters, the two strata are considered together ma smgle chapter on kinship m the pnvate domam because the authors viewit as essentially the same for commoners and gentry (54, p 47) One won-

FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD 189

ders if this is really the case or whether their unifiwi treatment stems morefrom their approach to the domestic domain Their discussion ofthe politicsof mamage among the gentry (54, p 131) makes it clear that there is muchmore complexity m mamage relationships among the gentry than amongcommoners and consequently greater status distmction among gentry sib-lmgs If this iS the case, we would expect to find some salient differencesbetween commoner and gentry sibling relationships and in the relationshipsbetween households within a common houseyard which are linked by asibhng tie These matters are never discussed, however, and we are led tobelieve that despite significant differences between the two status groups inthe operation of public kmship institutions, kinship in the pnvate domamIS essentially the same for both

This kmd of oversight occurs, it seems, because Geertz and Geertz begintheir analysis of kinship with a discussion of the domestic domain and thennever retum to it after they have extensively analyzed the public domainAs a result, their analysis of interpersonal relationships m the domesticdomain does not benefit from their exposition ofthe complex forces shapingthe public domain of kmship Ind^d one wonders whether the thinnerof our descnptions of domestic relationship^ is partly an artifact of ourhabit of beginning with the domestic and then moving to the pohtico-lural—a habit that we may have unthinkingly inhented from Malinow-ski

The distinction between the domwtic and politico-jural domains (or thepnvate and public domains) calls for stnct scnitmy not just because of itsanalytical consequences, but because it is the encompassing framework fora cluster of notions which pervade anthropological studies on the family andhousehold Included within this dense conceptu^ network is the convictionthat the core of dom«tic relations is the mother-child bond While theremay be differences in the manner in which the mother-child unit is hnkedto larger orgamzational structures, the bond itself is perceived as essentiallythe same everywhere and denved from the biological facts of procreationand nurturance (45, p 8, 46, pp 251, 255-56. 47, p 21, 49, p 37, 58, p18) Closely tied to this notion is the idea that the mother-child relationshipIS constrained by affective and moral convictions generated by the expen-ence of "mothering" necessary for the biological survival of human off-spnng These affective and moral constraints permeate the entire domainof domestic relationships, thereby distingmshing them from those relation-ships which are ordered by political and jural prmciples Finally, as wasseen in the attempts to define family and household, there is the belief thatreproduction—that iS, the provision of properly enculturated personnel tofill social positions necessary for the perpetuation ofthe social order—is thepnmary activity of the domestic domain

190 YANAGISAKO

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON DOMESTICORGANIZATION

Withm the past decade, alternative perspectives on domestic groups havebeen generated pnmanly by anthropologists concemed with a set of issueswhich have consequential lmphcations for our conceptualization of domes-tic relationships Although they overlap to some degree, these explorationscan be loosely categonzed mto three groups the study of gender andsex-role systems, particularly women's roles in domestic groups, the studyof kmship as a symbolic system, and the study of social inequahty

Women in Domestic GroupsAnthropologists interested in gender and sex roles have had to confront theissue of women's status and roles m domestic groups In their efforts totranscend the limitations of previous analyses of gender and sex roles, manyresearchers have come to question the utility of extant analytic categones,including the domestic versus pubhc (political) dichotomy There now ap-pears to be a growing consensus among these anthropologists that pastresearch tended to overlook the political consequences and motivations ofwomen's actions in domestic groups (31, 36, 84, 112,160) M Wolfs (160)portrayal of Taiwanese families reveals that family division is as much aresult of women's attempts to advance their own interests and those of their"utenne family" as it is an outcome of conflicts of interest between brothersJ F Colher (31) and Lamphere (84) suggest that this IS a general phenome-non m societies where men gam pohtical power by having large, cohesivebodies of coresident km, but where women (particularly young women) gampower by breaking up these units These authors note that the pohticalnature of these conflicts is usually obfuscated by cultural perceptions ofwomen as quarrelsome, selfish, and irresponsible by nature Folk explana-tions of the division of patnlaterally extended joint famihes, for example,commonly stress women's petty jealousies, thereby maskmg the extent towhich women's actions are politically motivated rather than generated byemotional predispositions Rogers (112) attnbutes some of our past failureto recognize the political nature of women's actions in domestic groups toour attentiveness to authonty visible in formal power structures (legiti-mized power) rather than to informal power However, by viewing womenas political actors and by viewing the developmental cycle of domesticgroups from a female-ego's perspective, we enlarge our undei^tanding ofthedynamic tensions operant within domestic groups Such an approach en-ables us to recognize that vinlocal extended households are as much facedwith the problem of incorporating outsiders as are uxonlocal extendedhouseholds (36)

FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD 191

Inquines mto women's relationships with people outside their own do-mestic group refute the notion that it is lnvanably men who link mother-child umts to larger institutional structures in society Women'sinvolvements m exchange transactions (149, 155), in informal women'scommumties (99, 111, 160), and in urban kin networks (164) are nowmterpreted as having significance for extradomestic arrangements ratherthan as mere extensions of women's domestic onentation [see for example(56)] Moreover, domestic relationships are often so lnextncably lnter-meshed with relationships of political alliance that to separate the domesticaspects from the political aspects is to misconstrue these relationships MStrathem's (149) discussion of divorce and the attnbution of blame fordivorce on women's "will" by Mt Hageners is a particularly telling demon-stration that "domestic" aspects of the conjugal relationship sometimescannot be usefully separated from the alliance aspects of the relationship

Taken together, these studies push beyond the recognition that domesticrelationships are influenced by extradomestic, politico-jural considerationsto the realization that domestic relationships are pan and parcel of thepolitical stmcture of a society Although some initial explorations on sexroles may have been guided by a domestic versus public distinction (52,113,121), more recently there appears to be an emerging consensus that thisdichotomy is analytically unproductive and empmcally unfounded (109,110, 114) Too many studies of women's "domestic" activities have dis-closed that these have pohtical as well as reproductive consequences for usto continue to accept the domestic/public dichotomy as a descnption ofsocial reality It now seems more productive to mterpret the dichotomy as"a cultural statement masking relations which are highly problematic"(110)

As research on women has taken a closer look at gender ideologies, it hasalso begun to dispute the notion that the biological facts of reproductionproduce an immutable mother-child relationship "Motherhood," it tumsout, IS not everywhere construed in the same manner, nor do all genderideologies place equal emphasis on "motherhood"' as an aspect of woman-hood (115, 116) Revelations about nannies, wet nurses, and other "surro-gate" mothers disclose that even in our own Euro-Amencan history onecannot assume that "motherhood" has always entailed the same functionalcomponents or the same components of meamng (18, 40)

Symbolic Approaches to the Family and Kinship

The analysis of kmship as a system of symbols and meanings has likewiseshown that relationships diagrammed similarly on genealogical charts donot necessanly have the same meanings across cultures Schneider (122,124, 126) contends that the study of kmship as a symbolic system must be

192 YANAGISAKO

undertaken if we are to produce cross-culiural compansons of kinshiprather than cross-societal compansons which divorce components of behav-ior from their symbohc meanings In a cultural (symbolic) analysis ofkinship, one does not define the domam of kinship

a pnon by the bio-genetic premises of the genealogically-defined gnd [m contrastto Morgan and his followers who] take it as a matter of definition that the invariant pomtsof reference provided by the facts of sexual mtercoursc, concepaon, pregnancy andpartuntion constitute the dotnam of "kinship" (126, p 37)

Instead one asks what the defimtion of the domain of kinship is for eachculture studied By abstractmg normative mles from concrete, observableactions (which mcludes verbal statements), the anthropologist denves thesystem of symbols and meanmgs pertainmg to kmship relationships (126,P 38)

Because it directs us to conduct thorough investigations of native concep-tual categones, symbohc analysis produces ncher and more precise ethno-graphic accounts than do analyses that fail to mterpret social umts andactions Within their relevant contexts of meanmg The advantages of sym-bohc analysis as an analytic tool for the comparative study of family andkinship are attested to by studies (79, 127, 134, 157, 165) that employSchneider's approach For example, Inden & Nicholas (79) demonstratethat a Bengah kinship umt, which from a purely genealogical perspectiveappears to be identical to the Euro-Amencan "nuclear" family, is con-structed out of very different cultural meanmgs and normative expectationsthan are Euro-Amencan families In addition, symbohc analysis enables usto see that native km categories, including family and household, are oftenpolysemic, that is, they encompass a range of different meanmgs (26,40,98,117, 134, 165) R I Rosaldo's analysis (117) reveals that the Ilongotcategory name "be.rtan" is used in a number of different senses that cannotbe conveyed adequately by any smgle, reduced anthropological concept,such as the deme or nonunihneal descent group By mtroducmg a dia-chronic perspective, he is able to show that these category nam^ are bestinterpreted as "a means of identifymg bounded groups at different phasesin a single histoncal process" (117, p 18) In my analysis of Japanese-Amencan kmship (165), I conclude similarly that the category "relative"has different meamngs and is composed of different types of umts dependmgupon the cultural context Hence, if we are to imderstand the nature ofkinship categones in a society, we must investigate the diverse meanmgsattached to them in actual usage And contrary to the claim that this kindof ethnographic specificity makes comparative studies unfeasible, Needham(98) and others (117, 124) argue persuasively that it puts us m a betterposition to make compansons because it allows us to "see the social factsm a less distorted way " (98, p 70)

FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD 193

Symbolic approaches to kmship also have contnbuted to our under-standing of the mterpenetration of kinship and other cultural domainsAlthough "kinship" relationships may have symbolic meanings that are notreducible to other relationships (e g economic relationships), at the sametime several studies (2, 3, 26, 125, 127, 165) demonstrate that "kinship" isnot a discrete, isolable domain of meaning Rather, the meamngs attnbutedto the relationships and actions of kmsmen are drawn from a range ofcultural domams, mcluding rehgion, nationality, ethniaty. gender, and folkconcepts of the "person " One cannot, for example, explain why Japanese-Amencans evaluate the actions of parents and children differently in spe-cific contexts unless one understands their histoncally denved system ofethnic constructs (165)

A further advantage of analyzing kinship as a symbolic system hes m itsability to help us make sense of the diversity m family and kinship organiza-tion within a Single society Geertz & Geertz (54) employ the analyticstrategy of differentiating the cultural dimension of kmship from its socialstmctural dimension to bnng together "as aspects of a single stmcture ofmeaning" what seem to be "puzzlingly irregular and contradictory" Bali-nese kinship customs and practices (54, p 3) They conclude that thediversity of kin groups observed in Bah are all "vanations on a set ofcommon ldeational themes which permeate and inform the whole ofBalmese life" (54, p 3)

Caution must be exercised, however, lest we assume that all vanabihtyin domestic arrangements is produced by diverse extemal (l e economic,political, ecological) constraints rather than by differences in cultural valuesand meanings Efforts to encompass ail the sectors of a complex society,including the Umted States, within a unitary^ model of the cultural systemof kinship may undermine the very strengths of a symbolic approach (165)The question of whether our discovery of cultural uniformity in the midstof social diversity is an artifact of our relative lack of facility in recognizingdiversity in symbolic systems can only be answered by further research andby the refinement of our conceptual armature for eliciting and displayingthe symbolic components of family and kinship

Social Inequality and Domestic OrganizationOne of the lacunae m past studies of the family and household has been theinvestigation of social inequality both within and between the domesticunits of a society Although factors such as wealth and property have beenconsidered as vanable constraints impinging on different segments of soci-ety, researchers generally have failed to focus on relations of inequalitythemselves as determinants of the total configuration of domestic groupsThree recent works illustrate provocative new ways of brmging relations ofinequality mto the heart of our analysis of domestic orgamzation

194 YANAGISAKO

At the core of J F Collier's analysis^ of the political-economy of threenmeteenth century Plains Indian tnbes is her investigation of the relationsof mequahty within households Colher examines the inequahties betweenmen and women and between seniors and juniors which underhe householdproduction units and discloses how the socially created norms of kmshipstructure the social relations of production Followmg Meillasoux's (94)and Terray's (152) concem for matnmonial pohcy, she looks carefully atthe connection between bndewealth and social inequality, because " itIS through bndewealth exchanges that the matenal products of economicactivity are converted into kinship relations which determme the nature andorgamzation of those groups which cooperate in production" (J F. Collier,unpublished manuscnpt, p 86) For example, in discussmg Cheyenne soci-ety with its uxonlocal extended households, she mamtains that propertyexchanges occumng at mamage "contnbuted to the subordination of theyoung within production umts by ensunng the dependence of all youths"and at the same time "contnbuted to the creation of unequal relationsbetween production umts by giving the nch an opportunity to accumulatekm at the expense of the poor" (J F Collier, unpublished manuscnpt, p27) A major advantage of Collier's analysis is its tying together of the twoends of the stratification spectmm m Cheyenne society by showing howlarge, wealthy households required the simultaneous existence of small,poor households Her use of a political-economy perspective, moreover,enables her to break through the domestic/pohtico-jural dichotomy andplace domestic relationships at the core of the pohtical and economic pro-cesses of society

Martmez-Alier (92) also focuses on mamage as a key element in herinquiry into the color/class stratified society of nineteenth century CubaBy way ofher analysis ofthe mamage practices ofthe upper class and lowerclass, she amves at a compelling histoncal interpretation of matnfocahtyin Cuba She contends that

the existence of slavery produced a social order which assigned to the colouredpeople, whether slave or free, the lowest rank m the social hierarchy to perpetuatethis hierarchy it was essential to proscnbe mamage between the dominant and thedominated groups Yet, partly for demographic reasons, white men had to resort to thecoloured community for women By virtue of the hierarchical nature of the soaety theseunions as a rule took on the form of sporadic or stable concubinage Both the free menand the slave women aquiesced m this mfenor form of mating because, due to the racialovertones of the system, it was a most effective means of social advance to them andparticularly to their ofisprmg The pnnciple of hypergeneration applies as well to mtrara-cial unions (92, p 124)

*J F Colher "Women's Work, Mamage, and Stratification in Three Nmeteenth CenturyPlains Tnbes " Unpublished manuscnpt, Stanford Umversity

FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD 195

Hence, it was the hierarchical nature of the social order that produced the'sexual margmahzation" of colored women, and this m tum produced

concubmage and matnfocahtyAs R T Smith (139) perceptively notes, Martinez-Aher's analysis

eclipses other explanations of matnfocahty m the Canbbean because it doesnot focus on isolated 'economic factors" like income or occupation, whichcannot adequately account for the diverse types of domestic union observedBy focusing on relations of inequality, includmg conjugal umons, betweenmembers of different strata, she casts light onto the marnage relations andforms of domestic union within each stratum

A third study that bnngs social inequality into a discussion of domesticorgamzation is Gough's (66) reanalysis of Nuer society as a society inTransition rather than in timel^s equilibrium Gough's reexamination ofEvans-Pntchard's (41, 42) data on Nuer domestic relations uncovers thefact that a large proportion of the population did not conform to the• 'agnatic pnnciple " By presenting evidence ofthe differences between Nueranstocratic lineages and Dinka or Nuer commoner lmeages in forms ofdomestic umon, postmantal residence, and the tracing of descent, GoughIS able to argue persuasively that Evans-Pntchard overlooked a marked"skewing" in the operation of the agnatic pnnciple among different seg-ments of the population Having recognized this unevenness in the opera-tion of the agnatic pnnciple. she offers a compelling histoncal explanationof this vanability

What IS particularly notable m Gough's analysis is that she draws on twodifferent sets of matenais, each of which Evans-Pntchard presented m aseparate monograph (41, 42) Evans-Pntchard, of course, was committedto the idea that " the relations between the sexes and between childrenand adults belong rather to an account of domestic relations than to a studyof pohtical institutions" (41, p 178) Consequently, he excluded such rela-tions from his analysis of Nuer social structure and relegated them insteadto a second volume in which he discussed incest prohibitions, mamage,types of domestic unions, and interpersonal kinship relationships Gough'screative contnbution denves from her unwilhngness to accept this separa-tion of the domestic and political spheres By bnnging together in a singleanalysis what Evans-Pntchard separated into two, she elucidates the work-ings of a social system that is as much produced by relations between thesexes and between children and adults as it is produced by relations betweenmen Her reanalysis should lay to its final rest the false notion (cf 49, p 22)that one can descnbe the political system of a society without taking mtoaccount the web of interpersonal relationships of kinship

All three of these works show marnage to be central to the creation ofdifferent types of domestic groups Ail three are able to display the lnterrela-

196 YANAGISAKO

tionship between the domestic structures of different segments of society.Together they demonstrate the necessity of bnngmg relations of mequalitywithm and among domestic groups into our analysis of the political andeconomic processes of society

CONCLUSION: A RETURN TO DEFINITIONSAND THE SEARCH FOR UNIVERSALS

At the outset of this review, I stated that it was my intention to save forthe very last the question that most systematic reviews of the family begmby addressmg, namely, is the family universal To answer the question ofwhether the family (or the household) is umversal, one must obviously beable to define it Not every definition of the family, of course, need be anattempt to dehneate an invariant social umt We might instead propose adefimtion which could be used to assess the presence or absence of thefamily in each society The fact that anthropologists have not been lnclmedto proceed in this manner with regard to the family, whereas they have beenwiUmg to do so m the case of the hneage, the clan, the state, and a host ofother mstitutions, includmg the household, attests to the firmness of ourbehef in the functional necessity of the family for human survival Giventhis conviction and the consequent intertwmmg of the issues of defimtionand universality, the question we mevitably encounter is whether there isa defimtion of the family that can stand the test of all ethnographic casesThere are, in essence, three candidates for the universal defimtion of thefamily

The first of these candidates can be rather readily dismissed By now mostanthropologists (21, 27,43,46,49, 58) acknowledge that the nuclear familyor the elementary family as Murdock (96) defined it is not umversal Ac-cordmg to Goodenough (58), exceptions like the Nayar castes of southwest-ern India, the kibbutz communities in Israel, and the matnfocal families inthe Caribbean testify to our ethnocentnsm m *' taking a functionallysignificant unit in our society and treating the nearest functional equiva-lent elsewhere as if it were, m some fundamental way, the same thing" (58,P 5)

Goodenough himself, along with Bohannan (17, p 73), Fox (49, pp37-40), and Fortes (46, pp 251-56, 47, p 21), designates a woman and herdependent children as the nuclear familial group m human societies AsI related earlier, Goodenough consciously avoids specifymg the func-tions which the family fulfills Yet behind the studied ambiguity of hisdefinition of the family as a "woman and her dependent children pluswhomever else they are joined to through mamage or consanguimty in ammimal functionmg group, whatever the group's functions may be" (58, p

FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD 197

19) IS the behef that the vital function of the family is the beanng andreanng of children Otherwise there would be no reason for choosing moth-ers and children as the atom of the family Goodenough's definition, there-fore, lromcally suffers from the same ethnocentnsm that he attnbutes toMurdock's definition By assummg that wherever we find mothers andchildren (a biological given) they form the core of the family, he has himselftaken a functionally significant unit in our society and treated units thatresemble it elsewhere as if they were fundamentally the same things Whilehe IS undoubtedly right that in every human society mothers and childrencan be found, to view their relationshtp as the universal nucleus of thefamily is to attnbute to it a social and cultural significance that is lackingin some cases Merely because one can identify a relationship that bears agenealogical resemblance to our own mother-child relationship does notprove that people everywhere attach to this relationship the same culturalmeanmgs and social functions, nor that it forms the structural core of largerkinship groups We do not, after all, insist that unilineal descent groups arepresent everywhere just because in every society we can ferret out ofgenealogies a set of umhneal descent relationships Just as a unilineal de-scent group requires the attachment of concrete functions and a culturallyrecogmzed identity, so any unit designated as the nuclear family must beshown to engage in some socially significant activity and to be imbued withsome consequential meaning Goodenough does not feel compelled topresent us with proof that the mother-child dyad everywhere has a centralfunctional and meaningful role, because he assumes that nurturance by themother is required for the biological survival of human oflfspnng and that,consequently, all people must attnbute cultural import to this fact But, asI indicated in the preceding section, closer scrutiny of the functional andmeanmgful entailments of "motherhood" does not sustain these assump-tions (18. 40, 115, 116) We should no more infer that mothers and theirdependent children are the irreducible core of the family, because every-where they have some kmd of socidUy recognized tie, than we shouldconclude that the sibhng tie is the core o*" the family because it is likewisemvanably recognized

As the final candidate for a umversal definition of the family. Bender's(8) charactenzation of the family as a strictly kinship phenomenon poses aslightly difierent set of problems As people everywhere recogmze "kinship"relationships. Bender might seem to have hit upon the sole lnvanant aspectof the family Yet if we define the family in what has been disclosed to bestnctly genealogical terms, how then do we recognize us boundanes'' If wecompletely divorce the family from any functional considerations, there isbut one way to decide who are the members of a family in a panicular casethat IS hy asking the natives to identify the tulturally meaningful ''kinship"

198 YANAGISAKO

umts in their society The mescapable outcome of this procedure must bethe discovery of many kinds of families, but no umversal family Althoughm part Bender adopts this procedure, he stops just short of its inevitableconclusion While he discloses that in some societies, as among the Yonibakmgdom of Ondo, the idea of a distinctive family unit is not a culturalemphasis and that there are no terms used to designate particular forms offamihes or families in general, he concludes that here there are defactofamihes (9) Thus, even though there are no Ondo social groupmgs basedexclusively or pnmanly on kmship relationships, he still holds tha t" therelationships of which families are composed are nearly universal" (9,p 238) There is no uncertainty that what Bender means here by familyrelationships are really genealogical relatiomhips and not role relationships,either normative or actual Hence, because he equates genealogical relation-ships with "famihal relationships" which have normative role entailments.Bender fails to recognize that a de facto family is no family at all

Bender's methodical examination of the family, furthermore, suffers fromthe false premise that the family and household are always logically distmct,if not always empmcally different, phenomena. In the face of contraryethnographic examples (e g the Burmese am-daung) where the "pnnciplesof propmquity and kinship are combined to form what are frequentlydesignated as household groups" (8, p 498), and where coresidence is notmerely epiphenomenal to kmship pnnciples, but is as much the basis for theexistence of the group, he fails to see the fallacy m the statement that kmshipand propmquity always belong to two different umverses of discourse Yetthe Bxirmese am-daung, along with numerous other ethnographic examples[for two panicularly lUuminatmg cases, see (117, 148)] afi&rms that m somecultural systems kinship and propinquity not only belong to the sameuniverse of discourse, but are so lntermeshed that to separate them wouldbe to undermine the mtegnty of cultural pnnciples

The concentration of genealogical relationships, the equation of thesewith role relationships, and the unstated focus on the nuclear family m hisdiscussion of de facto famihes, display Bender's commitment to reproduc-tion as the essential function of the family This commitment is most clearlyrefiected in his statement that

the legitumzation of children, nghts m children and exchange of sexual and othernghts are nearly everywhere associated with unions between men and women It followsfrom the umversahty of kinship and the near umversality of mamage that, by definition,family relationships are nearly umversal (9, p 238)

A similar commitment to the reproductive functions of the family under-lies Goody's conclusion that the "domestic family was never extended toany degree" and that there are "basic similanties in the way that domestic

FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD 199

groups are organized throughout the whole range of human societies" (60,pp 118, 124) This minimization of dom^tic vanability spnngs forth fromGoody's assumptions about the way m which the physiological and psycho-logical concomitants of childbeanng, childreanng, and food preparationstructure the activities of domestic units (139) The reluctance to recognizethat in different societies widely varying and shifting assemblages of peopleparticipate in these activities bespeaks of an unstated absorption with thebiological requirements of sexual reproduction

To commence a search for "the family." whether general or panicular,by seeking out genealogical relationships is to begin with the assumptionthat reproduction is the pnmary function of the family For if our investiga-tion begins with the identification of affinal and filial links and then proceedsto discover the groupings formed out of these bonds, parenthood and mar-nage and, inevitably, reproduction must by definition emerge as the irreduc-ible core of the family As Schneider (126) rightly argues, the use of thegenealogical gnd in kinship studies commits us to the position that thebiological facts of reproduction are what kmship is all about

The conviction that the reproduction of society's members is the essentialfunction of the family reveals that we have not progressed as far past aMahnowskian conception of the family as we would like to claim We mayhave recognized the error in Mahnowski's reduction of all kinship institu-tions to extensions of relationships within the elementary family, but wecontinue to accept many of his notions about the nature of the family itselfOur placement of the family withm the domestic domain with its moral andaffective constraints, our fixation on genealogical definitions of the family,and, underlying all, our emphasis on reproduction as the core of the family'sactivities all betray our Mahnowskian hentage

The belief that the facts of procreation and the intense emotional bondsthat grow out of it generate an lnvanant core to the family is what sustamsour search for universals But the units we label as families are undeniablyabout more than procreation and socialization They are as much aboutproduction, exchange, power, inequality, and status When we fully ac-knowledge that the family is as much an mtegral pan of the political andeconomic structures of society as it is a reproductive unit we will finally freeourselves from an unwarranted preoccupation with its procreative functionsand all the consequent notions embodied within such a stance There isnothing wrong, of course, with a functional analysis of the family, for if thefamily is a salient unit m any society it must have attached to it somefunctions—whether these are symbolic functions, activity functions, orboth What is wrong is to decide a pnon that the diverse array of social unitswe call families fulfill the same set of functions or that their pnmaryfunction IS always the same If we are to cast aside this premise and instead

200 YANAGISAKO

seek out the functions of the family in each society, we must at the sametime abandon our search for the irreducible core of the family and itsuniversal defimtion Our usage of the terms "family" and "household" willthen reflect an awareness that they are, like "nuirruige" and "kinship,"merely "odd-job" words, which are useful m descnptive statements butunproductive as tools for analysis and companson (98, p 44) The dilemmaswe encounter in cross-cultural compansons of the family and householdstem not from our want of unambiguous, formal definitions of these units,but from the conviction that we can construct a precise, reduced definitionfor what are inherently complex, multifunctional institutions imbued witha diverse array of cultural pnnciples and meamngs Indeed, the only thmgthat has thus far proved to be unvarying in our search for the umversalfamily is our willingness to reduce this diversity to the flatness of a genealog-ical gnd

ACKNOWLEDOMENTS

I am grateful to Ruth Borkner, George Collier, Jane Collier, Danny Maltz,Bngette O'Laughlin, Rayna Rapp, Michelle Rosaldo, Renato Rosaldo, GWilham Skinner, Raymond T Smith, Arthur Wolf, and Margery Wolf fortheir suggestions and comments at vanous stages m the development of thispaper I am particularly indebted to Jane Colher and Michelle Rosaldo forsuggestmg the relevance of Malinowski's conception of the family withinthe context oftheir research semmar on sex roles among Australian Abong-ines

Literature Cited

1 Ahem, E M 1973 The Cult of the Cognatic Social Structure, ed G NDead m a Chinese Village Stanford A{^>ell, pp 66-86 Washington DCStanford Umv Press 280 pp Am Anttm>pol Assoc 160 pp

2 Alexander, J 1977 The role of the male 7 Auwers, L 1978 Fathers, sons, andin the tmddle-ctass Jamaican family / wealth m colonial Wmdsor, Connecti-Comp. Fam. Stud 8 369-89 cut / Fam. HisL 3 136-49

3 Alexander, J 1978 The cultural do- 8 Bender, D R 1967 A refinement of themam of mamMc Am. EthnoL 5 5-14 concept of household families, co-resi-

4 Anderson,M 1971 Family Structure tn dence, and dcmiestic functions Am. An-Nmeteenth Century Lancashtre Cam- thropoL 69 493-504bndge, England Cambndge Umv 9 Bender, D R 1971 De facto familiesPress 230 pp and de jure households m Ondo Am.

5 Anderson, M 1972 Household stnic- AnthropoL 73 223-41ture and the mdustnal revolution mid- 10 Berkner, L K 1973 The stem familynmeteenth-century Preston m compara- and the developmental cycle of thetive perspective In Household and peasant household an 18 coitury Aus-Family tn Past lime, ed P Laslett, R tnan example. In The American FamilyWall, m) 215-36 London Cambndge in Social-Histortcal Perspective, ed MUmv Press, 623 pp Gordon, pp 34-58 New York St Mar-

6 AppeU,G N 1976 The Rui^jis social tm's 428 ppstructure in a cognatic society and its 11 Berkner, L K 1973 Recent researchntual symbohzation In 71ie pieties of on the lustory of the fomily in WesternBorneo Explorations tn the Theory of Europe / Marriage Fam 35 395-405

FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD 201

12 Berkner, L K. 1975 The use and mis-use of census data for the histoncalanalysis of family structure / Interdis-ctp. His. 5 721--38

13 Berkner, L K 1976 Infaentance, landtenure, and peasant family structure aGerman regional companson In Fam-ily and Inheritance. Rural Society inWestern Europe, 1200-1800, ed J RGoody, J Thtrsk, E P Thompson, pp71-95 Cambndge, England Cam-bndge Univ Press 421 pp

14 Berkner, L K , Shaffer. J W 1978 Thejoint family in the Nivemais J FamHist 3 150-62

15 Bloch, M 1971 Placing the DeadTombs, Ancestral Villages and KinshipOrganization tn Madagascar LondonSeminar 241 pp

16 Bloch, M 1975 Property and the end ofaffinity In Marxist Analyses and SocialAnthropology, ed M Bloch, pp 203 -28 New York Wiley 240 pp

17 Bohannan, P 1963 Social An-thropology New York Holt. Rinehart& Winston 421 pp

18 Boon, J A 1974 Anthropology andnarmies Man 9 13''-4O

19 Brandes, S 1975 Migration, Kinshipand Community Tradition and Transi-tion in a Spanish Village New YorkAcademic 220 pp

20 Brown, K 1968 The content of dozokurelationships in Japan Ethnology1 113-38

21 Buchler. I R , Selby, H A 1968 Kmship and Social Organization NewYork Macmillan 366 pp

22 Bulmer, R N H 1960 Leadership andsocial structure among the Kyaka peopleof the western highlands district of NewGuinea. PhD thesis Australian Na-tional Univ, Canberra, Aust

23 Burch, T K 1972 Some demographii.determinants of average household sizean analytic approach See Ref 5 pp91-102

24 Carlos, M L , SeUers, L 1972 FamUy,kinship structure, and modernization inLatin Amenca Lai Am Res. Rev1 95-124

25 Chayanov, A V 1966 The Theory ofPeasant Economy ed D Thomer. BKerblay, R E F Smith Homewood111 Irwm 317 pp

26 Chock, P P 1974 Time, nature andspint a symbolic analysis of Greek-Amencan spintual kmship 4m Eth-nol 133-46

27 Ciignel, R 1970 Many fVtves, ManyPowers 4uthority and Power m Po-'vg}--

nous Families Evanston NorthwestemUmv Press 380 pp

28 Cohen, M L 1970 Developmental pro-cess in the Chinese domestic group InFamily and Kinship in Chinese Society,ed M Freedman, pp 21-36 StanfordStanford Uiuv Press 269 pp

29 Cohen, M L 1976 House United,House Divided the Chinese Family tnTaiwan New York Columbia UnivPress 267 pp

30 Colher, G A 1975 Fields of the TzotztlThe Ecological Bases of Tradition inHighland Chiapas Austin Univ TexasPress 255 pp

3! Colher, J F 1974 Women m politicsIn Woman, Culture and Society, ed MZ Rosaldo, L Lamphere, pp 89-96Stanford Stanford Univ Press 352 pp

32 Cram, J B 1976 Ngenifan ntual pro-cess m a Bomean nee harvest In Stud-ies in Borneo Societies, ed G N Appell,pp 51-63 Northern Illinois Umv Cen-ter for Southeast Asian Studies SpecRep 12 DeKalb Center for SoutheastAsian Studies, Northem Illinois Umv157 pp

33 Davis. J H 1973 Land and Family inPisticci London Athlone 200 pp

34 Davis, N Z 1977 Ghosts, km andprogeny some features of family life inearly modem France Daedalus 10687-i14

35 deMause, L 1974 The evoluaon ofchildhood In The History of Childhood,ed L deMause, pp 1-73 New YorkPsychohistory Press 450 pp

36 Deiuch, B S 1974 Sex and power inthe Balkans See Ref 31, pp 243-62

37 Donham, D L 1977 A field theory ofhousehold production. Presented atA.nn Meet Am Anthropol Assoc,76th, Houston

38 Donham, D L 1978 Production in aMalle community, Southwestem Ethi-opia. 1974-75 PhD thesis StanfordUmv, Stanford, Calif 309 pp

39 Doqahn, V R 1977 Temne householdsize and composition rural changesover time and rural-urban differencesEthnology 16 105-28

40 Dnimmond, L 1978 The transatlanticnanny notes on a comparative sermot-lcs of the family m Enghsh-speaking so-cieties Am Ethnol 5 30-43

41 Evans-Pntchard, E E 1940 The NuerOxford Clarendon 271 pp

42 Evans-Pntchard, E E 1951 Kinshipand Marriage among the Nuer OxfordClarendon 183 pp

i3 Fallers, L A , Levy, M J Jr 1959 The

202 YANAGISAKO

family some comparative consider-ations Am. AnthropoL 61 647-51

44 Futh, R W, Hubert, J , Forge, A1969 Families and their Relatives. Kin-ship in a Middle-Class Sector of Londonan Anthropological Study LondonRoutledge & Kegan Paul 476 pp

45 Fortes, M 1958 Introduction InTTte Developmental Cycle in DomesticGroups, ed J R Goody, pp 1-14Cambndge, England Cambndge UmvPress 145 pp

46 Fortes, M 1969 Kinship and the SocialOrder Chicago Aldme 347 pp

47 Fortes, M 1978 An anthropologist'sapprenticeship Ann. Rev Anthropol7 1-30

48 Foster, B L 1975 Contmmty andchange m rural Thai family stmctureJ Anthropol Res. 31 34-50

49 Fox, R 1967 Kinship and Mar-riage Middlesex, England Penguin271 pp

50 Freedman, M 1958 Lineage Organiza-tion in Southeastern China. LondonAthlone 151 pp

51 Freedman, M 1970 Introduction SeeRef 28, pp 1-20

52 Fnedl, E 1975 Women and Men. anAnthropologist's View New York Holt,Rmehart & Winston 148 pp

53 Furstenberg, F F J r , Hershberg, T ,Modell, J 1975 The ongins of thefemale-headed black family the impactof the urban expenence / InterdiscipHist 6 211-34

54 Geenz, H , Geertz, C 1975 Kinship mBaL Chicago Univ Chicago Press213 pp

55 Goldschmidt, W , Kunkel, E J 1971The structure of the peasant familyAm. AnthropoL 73 1058-76

56 Gonzalez, N L 1970 Toward a defim-tion of matnfocahty In Afro-AmencanAnthropology Contemporary Perspec-tives, ed N E Whitten J r , J F Szwed,pp 231-44 New York Free Press468 pp

57 Goode, W J 1963 World Revolutionand Family Pattems. New York FreePress 432 pp

58 Goodenou^, W H 1970 Descnptionand Companson tn Cultural An-thropology Chicago Aldine 173 pp

59 Goody, E N 1973 Contexts of Kin-ship an Essay in the Family Sociologyof the Gonja of Northem Ghana.Cambndge, England Cambndge UmvPress 335 pp

60 Goody, J R 1972 Theevolutoonof thefamily See Ref 5, pp 103-24

61 Goody, J R 1973 Bndeweatth anddowry in Afnca and Eurasia. In Bnde-wealth and Dowry, ed J R Goody, SJ Tambiah, pp 1-58 Cambndge UnivPress 169 pp

62 Goody, J R 1976 Production and Re-production A Comparative Study of theDomestic Domain. Cambndge, En-gland Cambndge Umv Press 157 pp

63 Gordon, M 1973 Introduction SeeRef 10, pp 1-16

64 Goubert, P 1970 Histoncai demogra-phy and the remterpretation of earlymodem French history a research re-view / Interdiscip. Hist 1 37-48

65 Goubert, P 1977 Family and provincea contnbution to the knowledge of fam-ily stmctures in early modem France/ Fam Hist 2 179-95

66 Gough, K 1971 Nuer kmship a re-examination In The Translation of Cul-ture Essays to E E Evans-Pntchard,ed T O Beidelman, pp 79-121 Lon-don Tavistock 440 pp

67 Greven, P J Jr 1970 Four Genera-tions Population, Land and Familyin Colonial Andover, Massachusetts.Ithaca Comell Umv Press 329 pp

68 Greven, P J Jr 1973 Family structurem seventeenth-century Andover, Mas-sachusetts See Ref 10, pp 77-99

69 Gutman, H G 1975 Persistent mythsabout the Afro-Amencan family / In-terdiscip. Hist. 6 181-210

70 Gutman, H G 1976 The Black Familym Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925New York Pantheon 664 pp

71 Hammel, E A 1972 The zadmga asprocess See Ref 5, pp 335-74

72 Hammel, E A 1975 Reflections on thezadmga Ethnol Slav 1141-51

73 Hammel, E A 1978 Review of familyand mhentance, ed J Goody, J Thirsk,E P Thompson / Fam, Hist. 3203-10

74 Hammel, E A , Laslett, P 1974 Com-panng household stmcture over timeand twtween cidtures Comp Stud. SocHist 16 73-109

75 Hammel, E A , Yarbrough. C 1973Social mobility and the durability offamily ties / AnthropoL Res. 29145-63

76 Hayami, A , Uchida, N 1972 Size ofhousehold in a Japanese countythroughout the Tokugawa penod SeeRef 5, pp 473-516

77 Higman, B W 1975 The slave familyand household m Bntish West Indies,1800-1834 / Interdiscip. Hist 6261-88

FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD 203

78 Howard, A 1971 Households, familiesand fnends m a Hawaiian-Amencancommunity Work. Pap East-WestPopul Inst No 19 Honolulu East-West Center 117 pp

79 Inden, R B , Nicholas, R W 1977Kinship in Bengali Culture ChicagoUmv Chicago Press 139 pp

80 Keesmg, F M 1958 Cultural An-thropology New York Rinehan477 pp

81 Keesing, R M 1973 Kinship studies incurrent and future anthropology Pre-sented at 9th Int Congr \nthropo!Ethnol Sci, Chicago

82 Kent, F W 1977 Household and Lin-eage in Renaissance Florence the Fam-ily Life of the Cappont, Ginori, andRucellai Pnnceton Pnnceton UnnPress 325 pp

83 Kundstadter, P 1963 Asun-eyoftheconsanguine or matnfocal familv 4mAnthropol 65 56-66

84 Lamphere, L 1974 Strategies, cooper-ation, and conflict among women in do-mestic groups See Ref 31, pp 97-112

85 Lasletl, P 1971 The World We Ha-^Lost London Methuen 2nd ed

86 Laslett, P 1972 Introduction the his-tory of the family See Ref 5, pp 1-90

87 Laslett, P 1977 Family Life and IllicitLove in Earlier Generations. Cam-bndge. England Cambndge UnivPress 270 pp

88 Levy, B 1978 Tender plants " Quakerfarmers and children in the DelawareValley 1681-1735 J Fam Hist ^116-35

89 Levy, M J Jr 1965 Aspects o*' theanalysis of family structure In Aspectsof the Analysis of Family Structure, edA J Coale, L A Fallers, J J Levy Jr .D M Schneider, S S Tomkins, pp1-64 Pnnceton Pnnceton Lniv Pre* s248 pp

90 Lommtz, L A 1977 Networks andMargtnaltty Life in a Mexican Shanty-town. Transl C Lomnitz New YorkAcademic 230 pp

91 Malinowski. B 1963 The familyamong the Australian Abongines A So-ciological Studv New York Schocken322 pp Ongin'al publ 1913

<>2 Martmez-Alier V 1974 Marriage.Class and Colour in Nineteenth-CenturyCuba A Study of Ractal 4ttitudes andSexuai Values tn a Slave Society Lon-don Cambndge Univ Press 202 pp

93 McCreery, J L 1976 Women's prop-erty nghts and dowry in China andSouth ^sia E'hnology 15 163-74

94 MeiUasoux, C 1972 From reproduc-tion to production Econ Soc 193-105

95 Mintz, S 1973 A note on the definitionof peasantnes / Peasant Stud 1 9 1 -106

96 Murdock, G P 1949 Social StructureNew York Macmillan 387 pp

'57 Nakane, C 1972 An interpretation ofthe size and stmcture of the householdin Japan over three centunes See Ref5. pp 517-44

98 Needham, R 1974 Remarks and In-ventions Skepttcal Essays about Kin-ship London Tavistock 181 pp

99 Nelson. C 1974 Public and pnvate pol-itics women tn the Middle Eastemworld Am Ethnol 1 551-64

500 Netting, R McC 1965 Household or-ganization and mtensive agnculturethe Kofyar case Africa 35 422-29

501 Netting, R McC 1968 Hill Farmers ofNigeria Cultural Ecology of the Kofyarof'he Jos Plateau Seattle Umv Wash-ington Press 259 pp

102 Netting, R McC 1974 Agrananecology 4nn Rev Anthropol 3 21^56

103 Nimkoff, M F , Middleton, R 1960Types of family and types of economyAm J Sociol 68 215-25

104 Nutini, H G 1968 San BernadinoContla Marriage and Family Structurein a Tlaxcalan Municipio PittsburghUniv Pittsburgh Press

!05 Nutini, H G , Murphy, T D 1970 La-bor-migration and family stmcture mthe Tlaxcala-Pueblan area, Mexico InThe Social Anthropology of Latin Amer-ica Essays in Honor of Ralph LeonBeals ed W Goldschmidt, H Hoijer,pp 80-103 Los Angeles Lat AmCent, Univ Calif, Los Angeles369 pp

106 Owens, R 1971 [ndustnahzation andthe Indian joint familv Ethnology10 223-50

107 Pastemak, B 1972 Kinship and Com-munity in Two Chinese Villages. Stan-ford Stanford Univ Press 174 pp

!08 Pastemak, B , Ember, C R , Ember, M1976 On the conditions favonng ex-tended family households J 4nthropolRes 32 109-23

109 Rapp. R 1978 Family and class in con-temporary Amenca notes toward anunderstandmg of ideology' Set. Soc42 278-300

110 Rapp. R 1979 Review essay an-thropology Signs Journal of Women inCulture and Society In press

U l Reiter, R R 1975 Men and women inthe south of France public and pnvate

In Towards an Anthropology

204 YANAGISAKO

of Women, ed R R Reiter, pp 252-82New York Monthly Review Press416 pp

112 Rogers, S C 1975 Female forms ofpower and the myth of m^le dominancea model of female/male mteraction mpeasant society Am. EthnoL 2 727-56

113 Rosaldo, M Z 1974 Woman, culture,and society a theoretical overview SeeRef 31. pp 17-42

114 Rosaldo, M Z 1978 Thoughts ondomestic/public Presented at Rocke-feller Found Conf Women, Family,Work, New York

115 RDsaldo, M Z , Atkmson, J M 1975Man the hunter and woman In The In-terpretation of Symbolism, ed R Wtlhs,pp 43-76 London Malaby, 181 pp

116 Rosaldo,M Z,Colher,J F 1979 Poh-tics and gender m "simple" societies InSexual Meaning ed S Ortner, HWhitehead Submitted for pubhcation

117 Rosaldo, R I 1975 Where precisionhes See Ref 115, pp 1-22

118 Rosenberg, C E 1975 Introduction InThe Family in History, ed C E Rosen-berg, pp 1-12 Ptuladelphia UnivPennsylvania Press 210 pp

119 Sahhns, M D 1957 Land use and theextended family in Moala, Fiji Arru An-thropoL 59 449-62

120 Sahlins, M D 1972 Stone-Age Eco-nomics. Chicago Aldme-Atherton 348

121 Sanday, P R. 1974 Female status in thepubhc domam See Ref 31, 189-206

122 Schneider, D M 1964 The nature ofkmship Man 64 180-81

123 Schneuder, D M 1965 ICinship andbiology See Ref 89, pp 83-101

124 Schneider, D M 1968 American Kin-ship A Cultural Account EnglewoodCMs Prentice-Hall H 7 p p

125 Schneider, D M 1969 Kinship, reli-gion, and nationahty In Fonns ofSym-IMIIC Action, ed V Turner, pp 116-25Seattle Univ Washmgton Press

126 Schnader,D M 1972 What is kinshipall about? In Kinship Studies in the Mor-gan Centennial Year, ed. P Reinmg,pp 32-63 Washmgton DC AnthropolSoc Washmgton 190 pp

127 Schneider, D M . Smith, R T 1973Class Differences and Sex Roles inAmencan Kinship and Family Struc-ture Englewood Clifl% Prentice-Hall132 pp

128 Seddon, D 1976 Aspects of kmshipand famAy structure among the UladStut of ^ o rural commune, Nador«t>vmce, Morocco In MediterraneanFamily Structures, ed J G Poistiany,

pp 173-94 Cambndge, England Cam-bndge Umv Press 414 pp

129 Shamn,T 1972 The Akward Class. Po-litical Sociology of Peasantry in a Devel-oping Society Russia 1910-1925 Lon-don Oxford Umv Press. 253 pp

130 Shanm,T 1973 The nature and logic ofthe peasant economy, 1 a generahza-Uon J Peasant Stud 1 63-80

131 ShifBett, C A 1975 The householdcomposition of rural black famihesLouua County, Virginia, 1880 / Inter-discip.Hist 6 2 3 5 - ^

132 Shorter, E 1973 Female emancipation,birth control and fertility m Europeanhistory Am. Hist Rev 78 605-40

133 Shorter, E 1975 The Mahng of theModem Family New York BasteBooks 369 pp

134 Silverman, M G 1971 DisconcertingIssue Meaning and Struggle in a Reset-tled Pacific Community Chicago UnivChicago Press 362 pp

135 Smger, M 1968 The Indian jomt fam-lW m modem industry la. Structure andChange in Indian Society, Ed MSmger, B S Cohen, pp 423-54Chicago Aldme 507 pp

136 Smith, R T 1956 Uie Negro Family inBntish Guiana. London Routledge &Kegan Paul 282 pp

137 Smith, R T 1970 The nuclear familym Afro-Amencan kinship / Comp.Fam. Stud 1 55-70

138 Smith, R T 1973 The matnfocal fam-ily In TTte Character of Kinship, ed JR Goody, pp 121-44 London Cam-bndge Umv Press 251 pp

139 SmiUi, R T 1978 The famUy and themodem world system some observa-tions from the Canbbean / Fam. Hist3 337-60

140 Smith, T C 1977 Nakahara. FamilyFarming and Population in a JapaneseVillage, 1717-1830. Stanford StanfordUmv Press 183 pp

141 Sohm de Gonz^ez, N 1965 The con-sangumeal household and matnfoeal-lty Am. Anthropol 67 1541-49

142 Spagnoh, P G 1977 Pt^mlation his-tory from pansh monographs the prob-lem of local danoor^ribic variations /Interdiscip. Hist, 7 427-52

143 Spiro, M E 1954 Is the family univer-sal? Am. AnthropoL 56 839-46

144 Spiro, M E 1977 Kin^ip and Mar-nage m Burma. A Cultural and Psycho-dynamic Analysis. Berkeley UmvCahf Press

145 Stack, C B 1974 All Our Kin. Strate-^esfor Survival in a Black CommunityNew York Harper & Row 175 pp

FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD 205

146 Stone, L 1975 The nse of the nuclearfamily in early modem England SeeRef 118, pp 13-58

147 Stone, L 1977 The Family Sex, andMamage in England 1500-1800 Lon-don Weidenfeld & Nicolson 800 pp

148 Strathem, A 1973 Kinship, descentand locahty some New Guinea exam-ples See Ref 138, pp 21-34

149 Strathem, M 1972 W^omen in BetweenFemale Roles in a Male World MountHagen. New Guinea London Seminar372 pp

150 Talmon-Garber, Y 1970 Social changeand kinship ties In Families in East andWest Socialization Process and KinshipTies ed R Hill, R Konig, pp 504-24The Hague Mouton 630 pp

15! Tambiah, S J 1973 Dowr\'and bndewealth and the property nghts ofwomen in South Asia See Ref 61. pp59-169

152 Terray, E 1972 Marxism and Primi-tive" Societies. Transl M KtopperNew York Monthly Rev Press 186pp

t53 Thirsk, J 1976 The European debateon customs of inhentance. 1500-1700See Ref 13, pp 177-91

154 Thomas, K 1977 The changing famihTimes Lit SuppL 3943 1226-27

155 Weiner A B 1976 Women of ValueMen of Renown New Perspectives inTrobriand Exchange A.ustin l^nivTexas Press 299 pp

156 Wheaton. R 1975 Farmly and kinshipm Westem Europe the problem of thejoint family household / InterdiscipHist 5 601-28

157 Witherspoon, G 1975 Navaho Kinshipand Mamage Chicago Univ ChicagoPress 137 pp

158 Wolf, A P 1976 Chinese domestic or-ganization the view from Taiwan. Pre-sented at Conf Anthrop in Taiwan,Portsmouth. New Hampshire

159 Wolf, E R 1966 Peasants. EnglewoodCliffs Prentice-Hall 116 pp

160 Wolf, M 1972 Women and the Familym Rural Taiwan. Stanford StanfordUniv Press 229 pp

161 Wngley, E A 1966 Family reconstitu-tion In An Introduction to English His-torical Demography, ed E A Wngley,pp 96-^159 London Weidenfeld &Nicoison 283 pp

162 Wngley, E A 1969 Population andHistory New York McGraw-Hill256 pp

163 Yanagisako, S J 3975 Two processesnf change m Japanese-Amencan kin-ship J Anthropol Res. 31 196-224

164 Yanagisako, S J 1977 Women-cen-tered kin networks in urban bilateralkinship Am Ethnol 4 207-26

165 Yanagisako, S J 1978 Vanance inAmencan kinship implications for cul-tural analvsis 4m. Ethnol 5 15-29