ABSTRACT
Families in all societies pass through an irreversible but repetitive sequence of changes: a couple marry, have children and their family enlarges; the children grow to adulthood, leave and/or marry, and the elder couple die. Conventionally, this developmental cycle in the family is said to be the cause of the growth and fission of domestic groups. At one level, this thesis cannot be refuted, for without growth changes in the family there would be no need for modification in domestic and spatial organization. However, it is quite different to argue that kinship norms themselves explain the form and timing of this sequence. For example, in a seminal essay on the subject Fortes states:
We know that they [residence patterns] provide a basic index of the boundaries of the internal structure of domestic groups. But they are not a primary factor of social structure of the order of kinship, descent, marriage and citizenship. The alignments of residence are determined by the economic, affective, and jural relations that spring from these primary factors…. Residence patterns are the crystallization, at a given time, of the development process
(1958: 3).