Insights
Humans have probably always been surrounded by their kin – those to whom they have been
related by blood or marriage. But the size, the composition, and the functions of their families
and kinship groups have varied tremendously. People have lived not only in the “nuclear family”,
made up of just the parents and their offspring, which is standard in the West and has been
found almost everywhere, they have lived in extended families and in formal clans; they have
been “avunculocal”; they have been “ultrolateral”, they have been conscious of themselves as
heirs of lineages hundred of generations deep.
However constructed, the traditional kinship group has usually provided those who live in it with
security, identity, and indeed with their entire scheme of activities and beliefs. The nameless
billions of hunter-gatherers who have lived and died over the past several million years have
been embedded in kinship groups, and when people started to farm about ten thousand years
ago, their universe remained centered on kinship. Now that there was a durable form of wealth
which could be hoarded-grain–some families became more powerful than other; society became
stratified, and genealogy became an important means of justifying and perpetuating status.
During the past few centuries, however, in part of the world-in Europe and the countries that
have been developing along European lines-a process of fragmentation has been going on. The
ties and the demands of kinship have been weakening, the family has been getting smaller and,
some say, less influential, as the individual, with a new sense of autonomy and with new
obligations to himself (or, especially in the last decade and a half, to herself),has come to the
foreground.
A radically different mental order-self-centered and traceable not to any single historical
development as much as to the entire flow of Western history since at least the Renaissance has
taken over. The political and economic effects of this rise in individual self-consciousness have
been largely positive: civil rights are better protected and opportunities are greater in the richer,
more dynamic countries of the West; but the psychological effects have been mixed , at best.
Something has been lost: a warmth, a sanity, and a supportiveness that are apparent among
people whose family networks are still intact.
Such qualities can be found in most of the Third World and in rural pockets of the U.S., but in the
main stream of post-industrial society the individual is increasingly left to himself, to find
meaning, stability, and contentment however he can.
An indication of how far the disintegration of traditional kinship has advanced is that a surprising
number of Americans are unable to name all four of their grandparents. Such people have usually
grown up in step- families, which are dramatically on the rise. So is the single – parent family-the
mother-child unit, which some anthropologists contend is the real nucleus of kinship, having
already contracted to the relatively impoverished nuclear family, partly as an adaptation to
industrialization kinship seems to be breaking down even further. With the divorce rate in America at about fifty percent and the remarriage rate at about seventy five, the traditional
Judeo-Christian scheme of marriage to one person for life seems to be shading into a pattern of
serial monogamy, into a sort of staggered polygamy, which some anthropologists, who believe
that we aren’t naturally monogamous to begin with, see as “a return of normality”.
Still other anthropologists explain what is happening somewhat differently; we are adopting
delayed system of marriage, they say, with the length of the marriage chopped off at both ends.
But many adults aren’t getting married at all; they are putting “self-fulfillment” before marriage
and children and are having nothing further to do with kinship after leaving their parents’ home;
their family has become their work associate or their circle of best friends. This is the most
distressing trend of all; the decline in the capacity of long-term intimate bonding.
