The family in cross cultural perspective

I was required to take a course in sociology this term, African Social and Political Systems. The idea of it didn’t excite me. I felt like I knew the basics of the subject already (my willingness to profess “basic” knowledge on topics of which I am completely ignorant is at times a bit alarming) and I was meekly opposed to the prospect of studying “traditional” Africa or Africa as a unitary whole (perhaps a tenuous position given the fact that I’m seeking an MA in African Studies). I won’t say that all my concerns were unfounded. Most of the basic texts were written by colonial era anthropologists, who, despite being formidable intellects and earnestly desirous of accurately recording observations of African societies, were still very much embedded in the project of politically subjugating the subjects of their research. The bias isn’t too hard to point out when terms like “primitive man” are pepper the text. In any case, while I didn’t have a transcendent academic experience, the course did drive home an important point: the basic concepts we use to organize our social world are not universal concepts.

Family, for instance. If you asked me the difference between an African family and an American family a few months ago, I probably would’ve mumbled something about there being no such thing as the typical African family, and then given the same response that would go at the top of the Family Feud board: African families are larger. Far be it from me to correct popular wisdom. I think on average they probably are. A more interesting question is why. The standard response there is land abundance/labor scarcity has been a defining feature of African history; consequently the ability to mobilize labor has often translated into the capacity to accumulate wealth, acquire political power, and even to survive. Tracing who has rights to whose labor is a fast way to discern the distribution of power in any social system. Does a wife’s trading enterprise generate enough income over which she can maintain control to grant her a degree of autonomy from her husband? That example starts to take us into differences in marriage, like the fact that most married couples keep separate accounts and a large portion of Akan couples don’t live in the same household [in a matrilineal system, a person’s ties to his or her mother and siblings often take precedence over ties to a spouse], but we won’t follow that rabbit hole here.

Another way to approach the question of why the tightly circumscribed nuclear family is not the norm in Africa (again, in places in Africa it is) is to look at the terminology of kinship. I groaned and skipped this section of the course reading the first time around and only came back to it during my preparation for the final. It’s actually fairly interesting. The first point is that Americans tend to address their relatives according to their genealogical relationship. So my dad’s sister is my aunt, and my mom’s brother’s daughters are my cousins. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, though. Close friends of my parents become uncles and aunts, their children cousins.

A number of African societies employ what’s called classificatory terminology. Here the terms derive from social, rather than biological, relation. My dad’s sister might be called my mother (or even father). This reflects the fact that she’s in the generation above me [the same generational relation to me as my parents] and plays a similar role to that of my mom (or dad). In fact, I might refer to all the women in the community of my parents’ generation as mother, though our responsibilities to each other wouldn’t be the same as those existing between my biological mother and I. Just as in the example of my parents’ friends becoming kin, there are examples of establishing fictive kinship in African societies. According to my musty source penned in the 1940s, there are/were groups in the Transkei of northern South Africa which say that if a man drinks the milk of a cow belonging to a different lineage (broad family grouping), he becomes a member of that lineage and can’t marry any of its daughters. There are plenty of other interesting examples (a Shona man will refer to his mother’s brother, his mother’s brother’s sons, and their sons as his grandfathers), which may or may not apply now or ever have actually worked in the manner described by the authors. The general point, my brother/sister, is that classificatory terminology tends to broaden the scope of whom you look upon as kin and so can expand the size of your family.

For me, the real value of the course was to reinforce the pitfalls of transferring concepts willy nilly from my cultural context to another. Example: raising the income of the family breadwinner doesn’t necessarily raise the standard of living of all within the household. Needless to say, a typology sufficiently nuanced to capture the dynamics of my family remains to be articulated.