ABSTRACT
A family is all that the textbooks say. A man and a woman create it to serve their personal interests. It is also created by a society, the husband and wife serving as agents of that larger social order. It is a household: a special form of localized community (Netting, Wilk, & Amould, 1984; Parsons, 1959) in which participants’ biological requirements—as in eating, sleeping, defecating, copulating, recovering from illness, resting, and motility—are met through a spatial-technological pattern and a moral order. It is the great center of biosocial reproduction. It is, at one and the same time, an interpersonal relationship (in Ernest Burgess’ [1926] famous phrase, “a unity of interacting personalities”), a group, a face-to-face group, and a primary group (one in which people have diffusely supportive and personalized relations). It is a center of institutional activities, including those of kinship, and is a focus of interinstitutional relations. Like all social relations, it exists as long as its members continuously recreate and use it. It is constantly adapting to changing circumstances and adapting them to its requirements. And a family is often vastly consequential: both for its members and for the people and groups they encounter.
