1. Households: Changing Forms and Functions

Abstract

The word often means different things to different people. The replacement of household with is an attempt to replace a culturally defined unit with a unit based on observation. The authors try to create a cross-culturally useful definition of the household. Anthropologists confuse or fail to differentiate between what households look like as structural units (kinship composition or size) and what they do and how they function. Household organization is widely held to be different from kinship yet households are classified by the type of family lying at their core. The 1st step in redefining households involves eliminating the term in favor of activity groups or people regularly acting in a patterned association with other people. The 5 activities most often performed by households are production distribution transmission reproduction and coresidence. Production includes housekeeping and domestic labor. Households must schedule productive tasks as well as put them in sequence. Production systems are either diverse or simple. The more simultaneous that productive tasks are and the more diverse they are the larger the household. Unless there is a reason for households to be large the small remains better as a productive group. The 2nd function distribution includes consumption and pooling resources. Large households that pool resources in production and distribution tend to be stable and have continuity over generations. Households that only pool either production or distribution have less stability. When resources are restricted households may transmit rights especially in the form of inheritance. When marriage becomes a strategy for inheritance it is often controlled by parents. Reproduction is often a function of households but sexual relationships alone do not knit members together. The care feeding and socialization of children add to and modify demands for production distribution and transmission. Fertility may increase and size also if the value of children exceeds their costs at a young age. The timing factors of reproduction and marriage produce large variations in form. Household membership is often synonymous with coresidence. Food sharing common cooking the location of sleeping quarters common granaries and cooperation in production also constitute criteria for judging a group to be a household. The most important member may be a labor migrant and not even coresident. The organization of activities affects structure and morphology; morphology is a compromise between often contradictory pressures.

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