ABSTRACT
IT is immediately clear from popular usage of the term ‘family’— certainly an elastic term which can be stretched to fit a variety of concepts-that the contemporary emphasis is predominantly on the domestic unit of husband, wife, and children. In relation to current social attitudes, it is a significant emphasis. Consider the following common usages: family allowances, family planning, a family man, in the family way, starting a family, family doctor, family car, family size (of tomato sauce bottles or soap packets), problem families, homeless families-and so on. Here the reference is to the elementary family-or the nuclear or conjugal or immediate or primary family, as it is variously called in sociological studies. It is an ubiquitous social group which is easily identified and described, in spite of its many variations and complexities. With extremely rare exceptions, each of these elementary families is set in a context of relationships extending outwards from the domestic household to parents and grandparents (or perhaps to married sons and daughters and grandchildren) and variously to uncles and aunts and cousins, married brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews, and a mixed collection of ‘in-laws’. In this chapter, and the two which follow, we are concerned to describe these wider relationships external to the elementary family and to estimate their social significance. This is the field of ‘extrafamilial’ kinship in Britain ‘pervasive, intangible, still largely unstudied, with its significance either not appreciated or in danger of being over-estimated’, in the words of Professor Firth.1
