Dictionary Definition
family
Noun
1 a social unit living together; "he moved his
family to Virginia"; "It was a good Christian household"; "I waited
until the whole house was asleep"; "the teacher asked how many
people made up his home" [syn: household, house, home, menage]
2 primary social group; parents and children; "he
wanted to have a good job before starting a family" [syn: family
unit]
3 people descended from a common ancestor; "his
family has lived in Massachusetts since the Mayflower" [syn:
family
line, folk, kinfolk, kinsfolk, sept, phratry]
4 a collection of things sharing a common
attribute; "there are two classes of detergents" [syn: class, category]
5 an association of people who share common
beliefs or activities; "the message was addressed not just to
employees but to every member of the company family"; "the church
welcomed new members into its fellowship" [syn: fellowship]
6 (biology) a taxonomic group containing one or
more genera; "sharks belong to the fish family"
7 a person having kinship with another or others;
"he's kin"; "he's family" [syn: kin, kinsperson]
8 a loose affiliation of gangsters in charge of
organized criminal activities [syn: syndicate, crime
syndicate, mob]
User Contributed Dictionary
English
Etymology
familia, from famula.Pronunciation
- /ˈfæməli/, /"f
Extensive Definition
- This article deals with relations among humans. For other use, see Family (disambiguation)
A conjugal family consists of
one or more mothers and their children, and/or one or more spouses,
usually husbands. The most common form of this family in the
western world is regularly referred to as a nuclear
family.
A consanguineal family
consists of a mother and her children, and other people —
usually the family of the mother, like her husband. This kind of
family is common where mothers do not have the resources to rear
their children on their own, and especially where property is
inherited. When important property is owned by men, consanguineal
families commonly consist of a husband and wife, their children and
other members of the husband's family.
A matrifocal family consists
of a mother and her children. Generally, these children are her
biological offspring, although adoption of children is a practice
in nearly every society. This kind of family is common where women
have the resources to rear their children by themselves, or where
men are more mobile than women.
Economic functions
Anthropologists have often
supposed that the family in a traditional society forms the primary
economic unit. This economic role has gradually diminished in
modern times, and in societies like the United
States it has become much smaller — except in certain sectors
such as agriculture and in a few upper class
families. In China the family as
an economic unit still plays a strong role in the countryside.
However, the relations between the economic role of the family, its
socio-economic mode of production and cultural values remain highly
complex.
Political functions
On the other hand family structures or its internal relationships may affect both state and religious institutions. J.F. del Giorgio in The Oldest Europeans points that the high status of women among the descendants of the post-glacial Paleolithic European population was coherent with the fierce love of freedom of pre-Indo-European tribes. He believes that the extraordinary respect for women in those families made that children raised in such atmosphere tended to distrust strong, authoritarian leaders. According to del Giorgio, European democracies have their roots in those ancient ancestors.Kinship terminology
Anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) performed the first survey of kinship terminologies in use around the world. Though much of his work is now considered dated, he argued that kinship terminologies reflect different sets of distinctions. For example, most kinship terminologies distinguish between sexes (the difference between a brother and a sister) and between generations (the difference between a child and a parent). Moreover, he argued, kinship terminologies distinguish between relatives by blood and marriage (although recently some anthropologists have argued that many societies define kinship in terms other than "blood").Morgan made a distinction
between kinship systems that use classificatory terminology and
those that use descriptive terminology. Morgan's distinction is
widely misunderstood, even by contemporary anthropologists.
Classificatory systems are generally and erroneously understood to
be those that "class together" with a single term relatives who
actually do not have the same type of relationship to ego. (What
defines "same type of relationship" under such definitions seems to
be genealogical relationship. This is more than a bit problematic
given that any genealogical description, no matter how
standardized, employs words originating in a folk understanding of
kinship.) What Morgan's terminology actually differentiates are
those (classificatory) kinship systems that do not distinguish
lineal and collateral relationships and those (descriptive) kinship
systems which do. Morgan, a lawyer, came to make this distinction
in an effort to understand Seneca inheritance practices. A Seneca
man's effects were inherited by his sisters' children rather than
by his own children. Morgan identified six basic patterns of
kinship terminologies:
- Hawaiian: only distinguishes relatives based upon sex and generation.
- Sudanese: no two relatives share the same term.
- Eskimo: in addition to distinguishing relatives based upon sex and generation, also distinguishes between lineal relatives and collateral relatives.
- Iroquois: in addition to sex and generation, also distinguishes between siblings of opposite sexes in the parental generation.
- Crow: a matrilineal system with some features of an Iroquois system, but with a "skewing" feature in which generation is "frozen" for some relatives.
- Omaha: like a Crow system but patrilineal.
Western kinship
seealso Cousin chart Most Western societies employ Eskimo kinship terminology. This kinship terminology commonly occurs in societies based on conjugal (or nuclear) families, where nuclear families have a degree of relatively mobility.Members of the nuclear family
(or immediate family) use descriptive kinship terms:
- Mother: a female parent
- Father: a male parent
- Son: a male child of the parent(s)
- Daughter: a female child of the parent(s)
- Brother: a male child of the same parent(s)
- Sister: a female child of the same parent(s)
- Grandfather: father of a father or mother
- Grandmother: mother of a father or mother
Such systems generally assume
that the mother's husband has also served as the biological father.
In some families, a woman may have children with more than one man
or a man may have children with more than one woman. The system
refers to a child who shares only one parent with another child as
a "half-brother" or "half-sister". For children who do not share
biological or adoptive parents in common, English-speakers use the
term "stepbrother" or "stepsister" to refer to their new
relationship with each other when one of their biological parents
marries one of the other child's biological parents. Any person
(other than the biological parent of a child) who marries the
parent of that child becomes the "stepparent" of the child, either
the "stepmother" or "stepfather". The same terms generally apply to
children adopted into a family as to children born into the
family.
Typically, societies with
conjugal families also favor neolocal residence; thus upon
marriage a person separates from the nuclear family of their
childhood (family of orientation) and forms a new nuclear family
(family of procreation). This practice means that members of one's
own nuclear family once functioned as members of another nuclear
family, or may one day become members of another nuclear
family.
Members of the nuclear
families of members of one's own (former) nuclear family may class
as lineal or as collateral. Kin who regard them as lineal refer to
them in terms that build on the terms used within the nuclear
family:
- Grandparent
- Grandfather: a parent's father
- Grandmother: a parent's mother
- Grandson: a child's son
- Granddaughter: a child's daughter
For collateral relatives, more
classificatory terms come into play, terms that do not build on the
terms used within the nuclear family:
- Uncle: father's brother, mother's brother, father's/mother's sister's husband
- Aunt: father's sister, mother's sister, father's/mother's brother's wife
- Nephew: sister's son, brother's son, wife's brother's son, wife's sister's son, husband's brother's son, husband's sister's son
- Niece: sister's daughter, brother's daughter, wife's brother's daughter, wife's sister's daughter, husband's brother's daughter, husband's sister's daughter
Most collateral relatives have
never had membership of the nuclear family of the members of one's
own nuclear family.
- Cousin: the most classificatory term; the children of aunts or uncles. One can further distinguish cousins by degrees of collaterality and by generation. Two persons of the same generation who share a grandparent count as "first cousins" (one degree of collaterality); if they share a great-grandparent they count as "second cousins" (two degrees of collaterality) and so on. If two persons share an ancestor, one as a grandchild and the other as a great-grandchild of that individual, then the two descendants class as "first cousins once removed" (removed by one generation); if the shared ancestor figures as the grandparent of one individual and the great-great-grandparent of the other, the individuals class as "first cousins twice removed" (removed by two generations), and so on. Similarly, if the shared ancestor figures as the great-grandparent of one person and the great-great-grandparent of the other, the individuals class as "second cousins once removed". Hence the phrase "third cousin once removed upwards".
Distant cousins of an older
generation (in other words, one's parents' first cousins), though
technically first cousins once removed, often get classified with
"aunts" and "uncles".
Similarly, a person may refer
to close friends of one's parents as "aunt" or "uncle", or may
refer to close friends as "brother" or "sister", using the practice
of fictive
kinship.
English-speakers mark
relationships by marriage (except for wife/husband) with the tag
"-in-law". The mother and father of one's spouse become one's
mother-in-law and father-in-law; the female spouse of one's child
becomes one's daughter-in-law and the male spouse of one's child
becomes one's son-in-law. The term "Sister-in-law"
refers to three essentially different relationships, either the
wife of one's sibling, or the sister of one's spouse, or the wife
of one's spouse's sibling. "Brother-in-law"
expresses a similar ambiguity. No special terms exist for the rest
of one's spouse's family.
The terms "half-brother" and
"half-sister" indicate siblings who share only one biological or
adoptive parent.
Family in the West
The different types of families occur in a wide variety of settings, and their specific functions and meanings depend largely on their relationship to other social institutions. Sociologists have a special interest in the function and status of these forms in stratified (especially capitalist) societies.The term "nuclear
family" is commonly used, especially in the United States and
Europe, to refer to conjugal families. Sociologists distinguish
between conjugal families (relatively independent of the kindreds
of the parents and of other families in general) and nuclear
families (which maintain relatively close ties with their
kindreds).
The term "extended
family" is also common, especially in the United States and
Europe. This term has two distinct meanings. First, it serves as a
synonym of "consanguinal family". Second, in societies dominated by
the conjugal family, it refers to kindred
(an egocentric network of relatives that extends beyond the
domestic group) who do not belong to the conjugal
family.
These types refer to ideal or
normative structures found in particular societies. Any society
will exhibit some variation in the actual composition and
conception of families. Much sociological, historical and anthropological
research dedicates itself to the understanding of this variation,
and of changes in the family form over time. Thus, some speak of
the bourgeois family, a family structure arising out of
16th-century and 17th-century European households, in which the
family centers on a marriage between a man and woman, with
strictly-defined gender-roles. The man typically has responsibility
for income and support, the woman for home and family
matters.
Philosophers and psychiatrists
like Deleuze,
Guattari,
Laing,
Reich,
explained that the patriarchal-family conceived
in the West tradition (husband-wife-children isolated from the
outside) serves the purpose of perpetuating a propertarian and authoritarian society. The
child grows according to the Oedipal
model typical of capitalist societies and he becomes in turn
owner of submissive
children and protector of the woman.
According to the analysis of
Michel
Foucault, in the west: According to the work of scholars
Max
Weber, Alan
Macfarlane, Steven
Ozment, Jack Goody and
Peter
Laslett, the huge transformation that led to modern marriage in
Western democracies was "fueled by the religio-cultural value
system provided by elements of Judaism, early Christianity, Roman
Catholic canon law and the Protestant Reformation".
In contemporary Europe and the
United States, people in academic, political and civil sectors have
called attention to single-father-headed households, and families
headed by same-sex couples,
although academics point out that these forms exist in other
societies. Also the term blended family or stepfamily describes families
with mixed parents: one or both parents remarried, bringing
children of the former family into the new family.
Contemporary views of the family
Contemporary society generally views family as a haven from the world, supplying absolute fulfillment. The family is considered to encourage "intimacy, love and trust where individuals may escape the competition of dehumanizing forces in modern society from the rough and tumble industrialized world, and as a place where warmth, tenderness and understanding can be expected from a loving mother, and protection from the world can be expected from the father. However, the idea of protection is declining as civil society faces less internal conflict combined with increased civil rights and protection from the state. To many, the ideal of personal or family fulfillment has replaced protection as the major role of the family. The family now supplies what is “vitally needed but missing from other social arrangements”.Social
conservatives often express concern over a purported decay of
the family and see this as a sign of the crumbling of contemporary
society. They feel that the family structures of the past were
superior to those today and believe that families were more stable
and happier at a time when they did not have to contend with
problems such as illegitimate children and divorce. Others dispute
this theory, claiming “there is no golden age of the family
gleaming at us in the far back historical past”.
A study performed by
scientists from Iceland found that mating with a relative can
significantly increase the number of children in a family. A lot of
societies consider inbreeding unacceptable. Scientists warn that
inbreeding may rise the chances of a child getting two copies of
disease-causing recessive genes and in such a way it may lead to
genetic disorders and higher infant mortality.
Scientists found that couples
formed of relatives had more children and grandchildren than
unrelated couples. The study revealed that when a husband and wife
were third cousins, they had an average of 4.0 children and 9.2
grandchildren. If a woman was in relationship with her eight
cousin, then the number of children declined, showing an average of
3,3 children and 7,3 grandchildren .
Size
Natalism is the belief that human reproduction is the basis for individual existence, and therefore promotes having large families.Many religions, e.g., Judaism, encourage
their followers to procreate and have many children.
In recent times, there has
been an increasing amount of family
planning and a following decrease in total
fertility rate in many parts of the world, in part due to
concerns of overpopulation.
Many countries with population
decline offer incentives for people to have large families as a
means of
national efforts to reverse declining populations.
See also
References
- American Kinship, David M. Schneider
- A Natural History of Families, Scott Forbes, Princeton University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-691-09482-9
- Foucault, Michel (1978). The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. New York Vintage Books. ISBN-13: 978-0679724698
- More Than Kin and Less Than Kind, Douglas W. Mock, Belknap Press, 2004, ISBN 0-674-01285-2
- Denis Chevallier, « Famille et parenté : une bibliographie », Terrain, Numéro 4 - Famille et parenté (mars 1985) , [En ligne], mis en ligne le 17 juillet 2005. URL : http://terrain.revues.org/document2874.html. Consulté le 15 juin 2007.
- Jack Goody (1983) The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese. review:
External links
- Cousins: http://www.tedpack.org/cousins.html
- Family Research Laboratory
- Family Facts: Social Science Research on Family, Society & Religion (a Heritage Foundation site)
- One Plus One
- Families Australia - independent peak not-for-profit organisation
- United Families International International organisation
- UN - Families and Development
- Wiktionary entries for Western kinship terminology providing multilingual translations
- Family, marriage and "de facto" unions - vatican.va
- Family blog
- - Online Family Resources
family in Tosk Albanian:
Familie (Verwandtschaft)
family in Arabic:
أسرة
family in Azerbaijani:
Ailə
family in Bambara:
Somɔgɔw
family in Bengali:
পরিবার
family in Bosnian:
Porodica
family in Bulgarian:
Семейство
family in Catalan:
Família
family in Czech:
Rodina
family in Danish: Familie
(menneske)
family in German:
Familie
family in Estonian:
Perekond
family in Modern Greek
(1453-): Οικογένεια
family in Spanish:
Familia
family in Esperanto:
Familio
family in Basque:
Familia
family in Extremaduran:
Família
family in Persian:
خویشاوندی
family in French:
Famille
family in Friulian:
Famee
family in Irish:
Teaghlach
family in Korean:
가족
family in Croatian:
Obitelj
family in Ido:
Familio
family in Icelandic:
Fjölskylda
family in Italian:
Famiglia
family in Hebrew:
משפחה
family in Kinyarwanda:
Miryango
family in Lao:
ຄອບຄົວ
family in Latin:
Familia
family in Luxembourgish:
Famill
family in Lithuanian: Šeima
(sociologija)
family in Lojban:
lanzu
family in Hungarian:
Család
family in Malay
(macrolanguage): Keluarga
family in Mongolian: Гэр
бүл
family in Dutch: Familie
(verwanten)
family in Dutch Low Saxon:
Femilie (verwanten)
family in Japanese:
家族
family in Norwegian:
Familie
family in Norwegian Nynorsk:
Familie
family in Occitan (post
1500): Familha (parentala)
family in Polish: Rodzina
(socjologia)
family in Portuguese:
Família
family in Romanian: Familie
(societate)
family in Quechua:
Ayllu
family in Russian:
Семья
family in Scots:
Faimlie
family in Albanian:
Familja
family in Simple English:
Family
family in Swati:
Umndeni
family in Slovak:
Rodina
family in Slovenian:
Družina
family in Serbian:
Породица
family in Serbo-Croatian:
Porodica
family in Finnish:
Perhe
family in Swedish:
Familj
family in Tagalog:
Pamilya
family in Vietnamese: Gia
đình
family in Turkish:
Aile
family in Ukrainian:
Сім'я
family in Yiddish:
פאמיליע
family in Chinese:
家族
Synonyms, Antonyms and Related Words
affiliation, agnate, ancestors, ancestry, animal kingdom,
antonomasia,
apparentation,
ashram, binomial
nomenclature, biosystematics, biosystematy, biotype, birth, blood, blood relation, blood
relative, bloodline,
body, branch, breed, brood, caste, children, clan, clannish, clansman, class, classification, cognate, collateral, collateral
relative, colony, common
ancestry, commonwealth, commune, community, connections, consanguinean, consanguinity, deme, derivation, descendants, descent, diphyletic, direct, direct line, distaff
side, distant relation, division, dynasty, economic class,
enate, endogamous group,
ethnic, extended family,
extraction, family
tree, female line, filiation, flesh, flesh and blood, folk, folks, forebears, forefathers, fruit, genealogical, genealogy, genetic, genotype, genre, gens, gentile, gentilic, genus, german, get, glossology, grandchildren,
great-grandchildren, group, hearth, heirs, home, homefolks, hostages to
fortune, house, household, inheritors, issue, kids, kin, kind, kindred, kinfolk, kingdom, kinnery, kinsfolk, kinship group,
kinsman, kinsmen, kinswoman, kith and kin,
line, line of descent,
lineage, lineal, little ones, male line,
matriclan, menage, moiety, nation, national, near relation, new
generation, next of kin, nomenclature, nuclear
family, offspring,
onomastics, onomatology, order, orismology, parentage, patriclan, pedigree, people, phratria, phratry, phyle, phyletic, phylogenetic, phylum, place-names,
place-naming, plant kingdom, polyonymy, posterity, progenitors, progeny, race, racial, relations, relatives, rising generation,
section, seed, sept, series, set, settlement, sib, sibling, side, social class, society, sons, spear kin, spear side,
species, spindle kin,
spindle side, stem,
stirp, stirps, stock, strain, subcaste, subclass, subdivision, subfamily, subgenus, subkingdom, suborder, subspecies, subtribe, succession, superclass, superfamily, superorder, superspecies, sword side,
systematics,
taxonomy, terminology, toponymy, totem, totemic, treasures, tribal, tribe, tribesman, trinomialism, type, uterine kin, variety, younglings, youngsters