ABSTRACT
The curious discrepancy between elite perceptions and the actual way ordinary people behave underscores the need for looking at the institution of the family through an analytical lens different from the one customarily used. Among the decision-making elite a view had come to dominate that the fallout from the modernization process had irrevocably exhausted the family's capacity to provide individuals with the sustenance and resources modern social life requires. Over time, the patterns, or ways, in which the properties of human nature and human existence interact and reinforce one another lead to the formation of an almost inexhaustible variety of distinctive family cultures, close to two thousand by the count of anthropologists. The social institution of the family not only brings order and structure to the infinite possibilities open to human beings for acting out their biologically-given endowments, it also provides purpose and meaning to their life.
