The conjugal family and the developmental cycle
Meyer Fortes's work on the developmental cycle of the domestic group shifted the discussion of the family away from function and towards comparison of structures. For Fortes, the minimal unit of kinship was the mother—child dyad, which he saw as 'demonstrable' and hence natural. Fatherhood and other kinship relations, it followed, were socially rather than obviously
biologically based, and could be organized in a variety of different ways in different cultures. Fortes's great achievement, however, was to distinguish between the domestic group and the family, and following this to recognize that any static picture of the domestic group was misleading. Following L.H. Morgan and other earlier thinkers, Fortes made a distinction between the domestic and the juro-political domain. The domestic domain was associated with the mother—child dyad, or the 'matricentral cell', and the juropolitical domain with wider, more instrumental social and economic relations:
Where the conjugal relationship and patrifiliation are jurally or ritually effective in establishing a child's jural status, the husband—father becomes a critical link between the matricentral cell and the domestic domain as a whole. In this case the nuclear family may be regarded as the ... reproductive nucleus of the domestic domain. It consists of two, and only two, successive generations bound together by the primary dependence of the child on its parents for nurture and love and of the parents on the child as the link between them and their reproductive fulfilment.
(Fortes in Goody 1971: 91)
The domestic group, on the other hand, is a 'householding and housekeeping unit organized to provide the material and cultural resources needed to maintain and bring up its members'
Thus, the family consisted of a heterosexual conjugal pair and their offspring, which formed the core but did not limit the parameters of the domestic group. Further, the domestic group went through phases, which involved different residential patterns and different personnel, beginning with the marriage of a woman and man, changing with the birth of their first child, and changing again when that child entered adulthood and set up her or his own household. The juro-political domain was implicitly organized around male relations of exchange, power and authority; the family around the mother and child and affective relations of love and nurture; while the domestic group, a residential unit based on production, reproduction and consumption, mediated the two domains through the husband—father.
While Fortes's picture added flexibility and structural variation to the notion of the universal family, it still rested on an assumption of a conjugal family based on a heterosexual conjugal unit and, further, it promoted a gendered dichotomy between the natural matricentral family at the core of the domestic domain and the social male domain of jural polity. Variation and difference were added to the model, but the variation was cyclical and to a great extent uniform, as the term 'developmental cycle' itself implies. Fortes, like Malinowski, had done path-breaking research in a matrilineal society; Ashanti children received their social identity from their mother and belonged to their mother's lineage, but their spiritual core, their ntoro, came from their father. For Fortes, as for Malinowski, two parents were therefore necessary for complete social identity. Both Fortes and Malinowski extended the idea of a socially complete person to their definitions of the family: if a person could only be complete with two legitimate parents, then the family should consist of two parents and their children, regardless of the lineage affiliation. Ironically, Fortes's own work on Ashanti family structure and the developmental cycle of the domestic group showed how transitory and fragile the conjugal family could be, particularly in relation to the more enduring matrilocal extended family. In his later writings, however, he stressed the universality of "bilateral affiliation, and by extension the conjugal family. As Raymond Smith commented, this insistence upon the importance of bilateral affiliation as a moral principle of universal significance serves to reestablish the nuclear family (or something very like it) as the universally necessary matrix for the reproduction of social beings. It also forges a strong link in the theoretical chain between domesticity and kinship, and comes dangerously close to reintroducing the confusion between biology and kinship (Smith 1973: 122).
Even some quite early ethnographic accounts, however, attested to the fact that the conjugal family was not as ubiquitous as the dominant theories maintained. Evans-Pritchard had recorded the existence of 'woman to woman'
marriages among the patrilineal Nuer, in which a woman could pay bridewealth for another woman, and by so doing attain rights over that woman's labour and the right to claim any children she bore for her own lineage, just as a man would have the right to claim for his lineage any children born to a woman for whom he had paid bridewealth. While it could be argued that in such a case the woman paying bridewealth was acting as a 'sociological male', or that the rights to which she was entitled were closer to those over a servant or slave than a marital partner, the existence of the institution cast doubt on the universal and exclusive nature of the heterosexual conjugal union as the basis of the family. Other examples were even more problematic to the universal model because they represented not a sociological anomaly but the norm. Kathleen Gough's account of the Nayar, a South Indian matrilineal group in which women underwent a ritual like marriage at puberty and afterwards took a number of lovers who fathered their children, while continuing to live with their brothers, cast doubt on the universality of the 'fit' between conjugal family and domestic group. These examples, and others like them, suggested that there was no universal natural family, nor any automatic correlation between family form and domestic group which could be taken as universal. While the assertion that two social parents give the child a complete social identity is probably correct in many if not most cultures, an automatic link between this bilateral affiliation and the practical, lived-in form of the conjugal family is less clear.
A further problematic dimension to the family in anthropological studies was its connection with an evolutionary bias in theory, and an unstated but omnipresent connection with modernity. Thus, non-industrial societies were depicted as having kinship systems, in which, á la Fortes, the family played the part of the basic building block, while Europe and middle-class North America, and at a broader level industrialized societies generally, were seen to have families rather than complex kinship systems. This harks back to the social evolutionists' idea that, with increasingly complex divisions of labour and the development of formal political institutions, the importance of wider kinship structures such as the lineage diminishes and that of the nuclear family increases. One result of this perspective was that analyses of non-industrial societies concentrated on kinship, while those of industrial societies tended almost to ignore it, and to emphasize instead the conjugal or nuclear family.
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