‘Family’ is one of the words most commonly used in anthropological writings and discussion, and yet its meaning is neither always clear nor a matter of consensus. This is partly because in everyday use in Euro-American culture, the word covers a multitude of senses of relatedness and connection. It may for instance refer to the domestic group or *household, to close kin who are not co-resident, such as parents and adult offspring, or to a much wider network or deeper genealogy of *kinship, as in ‘the entire family attended the funeral’, or ‘the house has been in the family for seven generations’.
People know what they mean when they use the word family, and the meaning is usually made clear to others by the context in which it is used, but most would find it difficult to define precisely what sorts and range of relationships the word covers. The same complexity of meaning often exists within anthropological writing and, further-more, the way in which the concept is used, and the sets of assumptions it embraces, have changed radically as new theories of kinship, *gender, and *social structure have been developed.
A related point is the fact that in Euro-American discourse the concept of the family is politically and ideologically ‘loaded’, or imbued with sets of politically and culturally contested ideas about the correct or moral ways in which people should conduct their lives, and the people with whom they should conduct them. In the postmodern intellectual climate of the 1980s and 1990s, the term has been increasingly subjected to re-analysis, deconstruction, and radical redefinition: as is the case with many other cultural and social categories, emphasis has shifted from one meaning to a plurality of meanings. ‘Families’ have increasingly replaced ‘the family’ as an analytic concept, and the family itself, singular or plural, has come to be seen less and less as a ‘natural’ form of human social organization, and more and more as a culturally and historically specific symbolic system, or *ideology.
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