ADVERTISEMENTS:
Introduction to Origins of the Family:
Several sociologists hold that in older times there was nothing known as a family. Men and women did not think of any institutional control being imposed upon their desire to mate, and mating behaviour among human beings was not far different from that in animals. Incidentally, such behaviour could have remained limited among a few individuals only, instead of becoming grossly permissive, but the participants in the sex relationship never intended the establishing of a permanent relation between them.
Subscribers to this view include L.H. Morgan and R. Briffault. Even Westermarck wrote in his History of Human Marriage that the family resulted from male possessiveness and jealousy, for the dominant male claimed monopolistic rights over his women and guarded them by force, until custom established the institution of family and secured his rights. Briffault, of course, dissents and maintains that matriarchy was the rule even when the family came into being.
However, if we accept the assumptions of pre-familial permissiveness, it would follow that the family is not a universal system and that it is a mere development in a stage of the evolution of society and therefore not enduring. The assumption is based on certain observations made by them as to certain practices among human kind.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Certain tribes exchange wives or even offer wives by way of hospitality and, among some, festivals of fertility rites raise presumptions as to the strictness of moral codes of ancient times relating to sex.
Among certain tribes like central Australasians and Trobriand islanders, there is marked ignorance as to the causes of paternity, and some like the Fox and the Hopi Indians of America determine relationships not on the basis of individuals, but according to the general divisions of age and sex in society.
For example, all old people would be regarded as mother or father, certain groups will be termed as husbands or wives, and youngsters may all be children. But whatever be the nature of certain practices and the nature of social organization in primitive familial groups, one cannot say that sexual permissiveness was the rule at any time; at least, one does not get any evidence of such.
As the exception cannot prove the rule, practices that work as exceptions to our own standards of sex morality cannot establish an argument that primitive society was totally permissive. Again, classification of relationships according to sex or age merely goes to prove that there was always some idea as to organizing family or kin relationships, and not that there existed no family at all.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Even among these persons, research studies do not reveal any practice of permissive sex relationships; and wherever paternity is a very, confused idea, one does not necessarily find a total absence of familial institutions. Primitive tribes in the Andamans and in South Australia too have similar institutions, and merely because certain persons’ ideas of a family are different from ours, we need not be presumptuous enough to conclude that they live without families.
Families might therefore be regarded as groups that existed at all times, and the universal factor about all types and all variations of families is that there is a basic and common function of child-bearing and the upbringing of it jointly by certain individuals. Family in all its forms has, at all times, been the group that helped some to gratify physical needs, to beget children and to rear them up, to maintain the line of descent and to obtain a sense of economic security and security in old age.
In this regard, it is not important whether or not the family began as a patriarchal or a matriarchal system. We have already noted that while Westermarck held that society began as a patriarchal system, Briffault contended that all old societies were matriarchal in types. A number of sociologists maintain that all societies began with the matriarchal system, but McIver submits that there is no reason why one should consider that life changed from the matriarchal to patriarchal type.
He points out that while certain developed societies like the Puebes Indians are still matriarchal certain very simple and primitive societies like the Phillippine Negritos are patriarchal and patrilineal. The Veddas of Ceylon have a considerably developed social system, but their familial organization is matrilineal and matrilocal in character.
Features of a Family Organization:
The family is regarded by sociologists as the very nucleus of all primary groups. The face-to-face and the very intimate relationship that grows up among the members of a family can be the Source of such a degree of influence upon the individual that no other group can vie with it in that regard. It is the most fundamental of all primary groups, and the creature needs of human beings are best satisfied in it.
The family is the first and all-pervading factor in the child’s education at socialization and, even though other groups have their share of importance in the later stages for the development of the grown-up child, the influence of the family is not only primary but of lasting character. In the family, the child learns to discharge certain functions which, in the larger world, serve the purpose of training and education.
One learns to co-operate with other members of the family and to share ideas and interests and thereby become attuned to the demands of collective life. As it is maintained by some, ‘all culture begins at home’; with the habit of sharing food, property, thoughts and ideas in a family, an individual obtains his lessons as to matters of political, economic, moral and cultural consequences.
McIver and page have stated the .following as the essential features of a family:
(a) Universality:
No matter how much of variation one finds among peoples of different cultures, all societies have some form of the family or the other, and even some lower animals have systems that are somewhat akin to the human family system.
(b) Emotional:
ADVERTISEMENTS:
The family as an institution does not rest merely on sexual urges felt by human beings, but on their desire to procreate and maintain the line of descent by using sex as an instrument. Hence, the family rests on an emotional basis. The emotional tendencies of co-habiting and procreating bring persons together, and at later stages the love for the offspring and other allied interests stabilize the family. The very basis of emotions differentiates it from mere sex relationships.
(c) Formative Influence:
The family shapes the individual in several ways and in I several stages. The child that is born into the family must necessarily take after the ways of its parents, and the influence of the family upon him in this regard is immense. Next, when the adult grows up and enters the larger world, he is able to make his choice as to his association with other individuals, and secondary groups will be conditioned by the standards established by his family.
Finally, when he takes a partner and engages in the task of procreation, he is physically as well as mentally moulded by the demands of the family life into which he has entered.
(d) Limited Size:
The family is perhaps the smallest unit in society and, compared with other social associations, its limited size is its distinctive feature. It comprises of the husband and the wife, and the offspring, though there are variations as to the size of this unit. There are conjugal or nuclear families which take into account the parents and the children only, while there are joint families that are accommodative of wider social contacts.
(e) Nuclear position:
The family is the very nucleus of all social organization, and the reasons why it has been so regarded have been discussed above.
(f) Responsibility of the Members:
While other social organizations may at times succeed in evoking lofty sentiments under the influence of which individuals may perform strange functions and make noble sacrifices, as in cases of laying down one’s life in a battle, the family gives the utmost training to human beings as to close and collective living and its demands.
In a family, an individual learns to work hard for the benefit not only of himself but of the group as a whole. He learns it spontaneously and less ungrudgingly than under specific circumstances. A parent willfully undertakes heavy responsibilities for rearing the child and the child, when he grows up, is found to be willing to make sacrifices rather for the parents than for other persons. The bonds between family members are so close and so enduring that no other organization can think of vying with it or becoming its substitute.
(g) Regulations of the Society:
Familial life is not a phenomenon that can exist without the sanctions of society. The law regulates the family not only by prescribing the standards of valid marriages but also by bringing in the element of recognition to the child that is born of the marriage and by prescribing sex relationships among members of the same family.
These rules and regulations may be different in different societies, as in encouraging polygamy or frowning upon it, but a family without social sanctions is not a very edifying affair. In the United States, practices of ‘living together’ or ‘living sexually’ in communes by applying the principle or rotation or otherwise may be adventurous ideas but no society, not even the American one, regards them in very palatable terms.
(h) Its Permanent and Temporary Character:
McIver and Page observe that while the family as an institute is enduring and a permanent feature in human society, a particular family is only temporary. When a man and a woman come together and live in marriage for procreation, they begin a family; but as life itself is ephemeral, the same progenitor cannot continue forever, and the family undergoes several changes through generations as it maintains the continuity of tradition. Yet it cannot be said that any given family is continuing. Parents die and so end their families, and their children open out into new families, each one of them temporary, with the genealogical tree tending to remain permanent.
Types of Family:
Families are constituted by several factors coming together into play and. according to the consideration of each of these factors, one may determine the type of the family that one may find in different societies and in different parts of the world.
These factors relate to:
(i) The choice of the mate and the mate’s identity,
(ii) the number of mates that a person can lawfully take,
(iii) the place of co-habitation,
(iv) the location of authority with one or the other partner,
(v) the line of descent and
(vi) the accommodation of immediate relatives and the distant ones.
A survey of familial institutions presents to us the following categorization of families:
(1) Monogamous and Polygamous Families:
Prescribed sexual relations in a family may be such that a man may be permitted to co-habit with more than one woman for the purpose of discharging familial functions, or he may be allowed to have a single wife only. Similarly, a woman may have only one husband or her social institutions may consider it to be quite legitimate for her to have many husbands. The system that permits a person to have one spouse only is known as the ‘monogamous’ marriage system.
When a man lawfully takes many wives, he lives in ‘polygyny’ and if a woman has more than one husband, she follows the system of ‘polyandry’. Murdock’s survey on societies shows that the monogamous system had prevailed at all times, with or without any minor modification, and the belief that monogamy is a Christian concept is not entirely correct. In India, until recently polygamous institutions were recognized except in cases of Christians, and even now Muslim men can lawfully practise polygyny. Eskimo men practise polygyny and for obvious reasons too.
The tendency to polygamy becomes prominent when the sex ratio tends to show aberrations. Of course, such maladjustment in the sex ratio may be ignored by law which may impose the constraints of monogamy for the furtherance of distinct social interests. When a woman takes more than one man as her husband, these men may be either brothers or strangers.
When several brothers are married to the same woman, as in some regions of Sikkim, Ladakh and Tibet, the system is known as ‘fraternal’ polyandry. When the husbands of a woman are not related to each other, the ‘non-fraternal’ system of polyandry comes into existence and instances of such can be found in the Malabar region of India.
(2) The Endogamous and the Exogamous System:
Among people of primitive tribes, xenophobia existed in rather a serious measure and many societies prescribed that no member of the tribe shall marry into another tribe; and any person who violated the principle had to pay the penalty of ostracism or some other severe sanctions.
This was the ‘endogamous’ system and it aimed at securing a homogeneity and continuity in the social system. ‘Exogamy’ permits marriage outside one’s own class or tribe or even caste. In India, among the Hindus there is a strong feeling in favour of endogamy and penalties for those violating the norms can be harsh.
(3) Patrilocal and Matrilocal Families:
The place of cohabitation by married [couples determines whether a family will be ‘patrilocal’ or ‘matrilocal’. If the couple settles down in the residence of the husband, that is, in the groom’s household, the family system is patrilocal; and in the matrilocal system, the family resides in the household of the bride.
Among the Veddas of Ceylon, the groom comes to stay with the members of the bride s family, but in most of the modern societies the patrilocal system is followed. The bride comes to live either in the groom’s household among his relatives, or in the groom’s house but not with his relatives.
(4) The Patriarchal and the Matriarchal Families:
We have already noted that no convincing evidence allows us to decide either for or against the belief that social life began either as the matriarchal or as the patriarchal system. When the male has the authority in the family and is in a position of dominance over the wife and the children, the family is ‘patriarchal’.
In Roman times, an excess of authority with the male head of the family had been noticed in his power of life and death over family members; and in different societies, including the major parts of Indian society, the patriarchal system prevails though not with such brute authority. The ‘matriarchal’ system envisages the authority of the female who devises the ways and means of conducting the affairs of the family.
The male partner in such a family is given certain duties, no doubt, but authority does not rest in him. Yet one cannot find instances of true matriarchal systems anywhere; what passes as the matriarchal system is one in which the female head of the family looks after child-breeding and other domestic duties, while matters affecting security of the tribe and discipline rest with a senior male relative of the woman, usually her mother’s brother. Of course, one does admit of variations in the practice of matriarchy.
(5) Patrilineal and Matrilineal Families:
Families are made for breeding and rearing up children and this is an important function of a family. However, the line of descent may be from the mother or from the father. Usually, in most of the modern societies, descent is taken from the father’s line, and these families may be regarded as ‘patrilineal’.
If descent is counted from the mother’s side, the family will be ‘matrilineal’. Matriarchal societies tend to be at the same time matrilineal in character, and the patriarch considers it necessary to take linear descent from his side. In India, barring a few small communities, the patrilineal form is predominant as also in most of the Western, Middle Eastern and African countries.
(6) The Nuclear and the Joint Families:
When a family comprises of the spouses and their unwedded children, it is regarded as a conjugal or a ‘nuclear’ family. When, on the other hand, the married children continue to live with their respective spouses under the same roof with the parents, a ‘joint’ family comes into existence. After the death of the parents also, the different units that each child and his spouse form may continue to live collectively and in the joint family pattern.
In India, China, Italy as also in many other countries of Southern Europe and the Middle East, the joint family has been the rule in past times, and even in the present times it continues in some shape or the other.
The individualistic West European countries and the American States favour the nuclear family which is also known as the conjugal family. In India, too, a disposition in favour of the conjugal family is growing much to the peril of the joint familial institution. A discussion upon the matter is being taken up later.
The Functions of the Family:
While considering the process of socialization of a child, we considered the importance of a family to every individual. The standards and norms of the society are grasped and comprehended by an individual through the teachings of a family. The individual’s considerations as to morals and social rights and obligations are all a reflection of the kind of training that he has received in his childhood and the importance of his family to him is not confined to matters that merely cater to his creature needs. The form of a family may have undergone a change in the recent years,, but some of its basic functions continue to have importance.
They are as follows:
(a) Biological or Creature Needs:
One of the important functions of a family is to cater to its members’ biological or creature needs. The family is the only association that allows breeding of children so that not only sexual functions are performed, but continuity in the line of descent is maintained.
The family has to look after the needs of the growing child and it has been admitted that no other institution or association can perform this task as well and as spontaneously as the family does. Psychiatrists have also not failed to observe that the effects of handing over the child to others for his upbringing, because both the parents are engaged in an occupation have not been edifying. The mother in this respect enjoys the position of supreme importance in the family.
(b) Economic Needs:
The helpless child that is born into a family cannot forthwith look after itself, and the obligations of the members of his family to provide him with means of living are of primary importance. If the mother looks after the household, the father bears the responsibility of earning, and in present times, the fact of both the parents being engaged in earning efforts is not quite unknown.
In olden times, rural communities were the centres of all economic activities, and a rural family would not only make efforts at producing the food that it needed, but also weave clothes for wearing, make furniture and utensils and build the houses in which its members would live. The family was more self-contained than it is today, when mills, factories and shops have taken over quite a few of these economic functions.
(c) Educational Functions:
In the olden times, rural families took the responsibility of educating the child in a number of cases even though schools for the better-off in financial standing were not absent. In present times, the first few years are spent by the child at home when he gathers the first impressions of social life.
The formative years in the family are of great importance, and modern psychiatry has located in the family the cause of the malady of deliquency, malad-justment and neurosis. The parents directly impress the child as to the adult type, and his ideas about adult men and women are those that fit with his impressions of his parents when the stage of education in a school arrives, the child has already formed certain ideas about social relations and, if these ideas are healthy, he is helped in educating and rationalizing his mental processes in the true sense of the word.
(d) Protective Functions:
The family has, as one of the essential functions, the obligation of protecting the young. In the old rural community the patriarch commanded obedience by giving protection in return. Today, however, several agencies have taken up a chunk of these obligations to themselves, and the family is relieved of the pressure of these functions.
The police, the national health services and measures like old age pensions and doles to the unemployed have diversified the protective functions of a family, and the growing interest that the state is taking as regards family welfare has made family life more secure.
(e) Religious Functions:
Every family in rural societies undertook the responsibility of inculcating religious ideas upon its members, and simple gatherings in the evening over the recital of some religious chant have had their elevating effects. In our country, religiosity is ingrained in the population and, at least in rural communities, the population remains religion oriented to a large extent. Urban centres, however, have minimized the influence of religion upon life but, wherever the family still adopts a religious attitude, the home continues to be the chief instructor as to the human understanding of the ways of God.
(f) Other Functions:
Among the other functions of a family, one may mention primarily those that generate tender feelings among its members. Psychiatrists maintain that if the child does not get enough of love and affection, he feels insecure and the feeling of insecurity can cause such a trauma in him that it may disbalance him for the rest of his life.
Parents must give to the child an adequate sense of security and this can be done by showering upon him in early stages an unstinted flow of love and affection. The child will then develop his personality in the normal manner and learn to reciprocate feelings with other members of the family.
Another aspect of family life is the status that it grants to its members. It is of primary importance to the child that he has consciousness of a socially recognized status which he enjoys. The prestige of the family brings pride to its members and the lack of it frustrates and disappoints them.
Although now-a-days family members disperse and live in different places, the consciousness of their family status binds them together with a common bond of principles and heritage which become very important for its stability. If the family itself does not enjoy the sanction of the society, the children in it cannot enjoy any status and they grow up as problematic individuals.
The family was also once the centre of all recreation and entertainment. Even now in the distant villages that have not felt the impact of industrialization and urbanization, family members recreate in each other’s company and find entertainment in the display of their respective talents.
One can well envisage the evening scene in a family when the daughter sits down to sing for the family, the members of which do not feel the urge to look for entertainment elsewhere. Today, there are sports clubs, cinemas and other forms of public entertainment which provide entertainment easily and without much of expenses.
The family has to a considerable extent lost its importance in this regard; and not only has it conceded to other agencies this function, but its troubles and anxieties over the desirability and the ethics of these forms of entertainments have increased. Since outside the home, the elder is not in a position to supervise the mode of entertainment, and since the element of commercialism in entertainment has converted it into a somewhat crude exercise, which in Certain cases runs counter to education, the control of the family over its members sense of ethics, and the very composition of society is threatened with instability.
The extent to which the family has lost its authority particularly over the younger members is the exact measure of the harm that has been caused to this group as an effective social organization and as the very nucleus of society.