Anthropological Concepts Of Family Essay

Topic 1

- Examine the readings and reflect on how the authors’ analyses challenge traditional anthropological concepts of the family or household.

Introduction

Family is known as a basic social unit which consists of one parent or parents and their children, they are also considered as a group; whether dwelling together or not. Family is also known to be a primary group responsible for raising children and to ensure that the children are taught about the culture they are following with the parents or born in. Children do not necessarily have to be biological to be a part of the family, that is what adoption is for – to be able to take children who are not your own and treat and care for them as if they were your very own.

Sub-headings

Understanding

Family defines the obligations which the members have to one another. It is generally thought that a family should or they do live together, but this is not always the case; because there are different types of families.

The nuclear family; this family consists of the married partners and their children. They are also known as the conjugal family, the nuclear family is one of the most common type of family which one finds. Joint families are made up of sets of siblings, their spouses and their children who are dependent on them. The extended family is also one of the most common families which could be found in the world, because it simply includes at least three generations; the grandparents, their children, and their grandchildren. Blended families are becoming more common in industrial societies, it is formed when divorced or widowed parents who both have children decide to get

According to anthropologist Kathleen Gough, she describes it as ‘not a unitary group but a named category of castes’. She describes marriages as a relationship established between a woman and one or more men, which provides that a child born to the woman under circumstances not prohibited by rules of the relationship is accorded. The nair people live and continue to live in the area which is now the Indian state of Kerala. Lineage was something very important to the Nayar people, each of these lineages where connected to two or three other lineages in their neighbourhood with whom they would exchange goods and services to one another.

Nayar Marriage

The Nayar people have a different way of getting married, they involve other lineages who play a very important part in the hosting of the pre-puberty marriage rites. Here, girls are to get married to a ritual husband, from before the onset of starting their menstruation. After the ceremony, the ritual husband would have no further contact with his bride and he would not father any of her children.

However, after the ceremony she would receive a number of visiting husbands. When she does find herself impregnated she would need one or more of these visiting husbands to claim that they are the father of her child or children, testifying that the child did not violate caste rules. This has to be done so that the union knows that none of their rules have been violated,