ABSTRACT
WE have, in the part of the book which is here to be ended, moved successively outwards from the married couple to the extended family, from the extended family to the kinship network, and from there to certain of the relations between the family and the outside world. We shall now turn from the economic to the social, and consider whether, outside the workplace, people in this particular local community unrelated either by marriage or blood are related in any other way. Since family life is so embracing in Bethnal Green, one might perhaps expect it would be all-embracing. The attachment to relatives would then be at the expense of attachment to others. But in practice this is not what seems to happen. Far from the family excluding ties to outsiders, it acts as an important means of promoting them. When a person has relatives in the borough, as most people do, each of these relatives is a go-between with other people in the district. His brother's friends are his acquaintances, if not his friends; his grandmother's neighbours so well known as almost to be his own. The kindred are, if we understand their function aright, a bridge between the individual and the community: this will be the main theme of the chapter.
