3.3 Family dissolution and reformation
Anthropology has no overarching theory of what determines levels of marital dissolution. Along with other comparativists, anthropologists emphasise that divorce is tied up with other aspects of the specific family system, and that local context matters a great deal.
This specificity is illustrated by the dramatic fall in divorce levels in Islamic Southeast Asia (Jones 1997). In the West, industrialisation, urbanisation, and women’s entry into the labour force have coincided with rising divorce rates, leading some scholars to claim connections between divorce and modernisation. The case of Islamic Southeast Asia (Malays in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand) is a striking exception to such claims. Since the 1950s, Islamic Southeast Asia has undergone an extraordinarily rapid process of modernisation. Divorce rates have, however, fallen from a level several times higher than those in the contemporary West to an even lower level.
The decline in divorce rates in Islamic Southeast Asia appears to have a number of different roots. Part of the decline was due to a dramatic reduction in divorce among teenagers. Divorce among teenagers had been a product of combining an Islamic tradition of arranged married at young ages with a long-standing Southeast Asian tolerance of divorce: parents hurried their children into early marriages, but did little to prevent a divorce if the couple proved incompatible. For reasons not fully understood, early, arranged marriages disappeared very quickly after the 1950s. Another reason for the fall in divorce rates was the campaigns by both women’s groups and Islamicists to strengthen the institution of marriage. These campaigns succeeded in increasing legal obstacles to divorce and reducing community tolerance for it. Yet another reason was the decline in polygamy, which had been “an irritant and source of suspicion in many marriages, and a direct cause of many divorces initiated by wives who learned of their husband’s intention to take another wife” (Jones 1997: 105). As Jones notes, trends such as rising labour force participation may have had countervailing effects on the divorce rate, but the historically specific ones swamped these effects.
Divorce started from such difference situations—a formerly stable, high-divorce system in Islamic Southeast Asia and a relatively low-divorce system, constrained by social conventions and legal restrictions, in the West—that the changes in each system when confronted by economic and ideational change really have to be explained in their own terms; attempts to compare them according to some universalist theory of divorce are necessarily contrived
(Jones 1997: 109)
3.4 Family behaviour
3.4.1 Responsibility for children
In ethnic groups originating from Europe, such as Pakeha in New Zealand, most of the rights and obligations associated with childcare lie with the children’s parents. Parents have primary responsibility for providing discipline, emotional support, and the necessities of living[RAU8] . Children are expected to reside with one or both parents. Most models of the family in the Western economic and sociological literature start from the assumption that parents are the main or only caregivers.
Anthropologists have shown, however, that people in some cultures disperse responsibilities for childcare across a wider range of kin than people in the West. In describing Maori family life during the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, Metge (1995) repeatedly emphasises that kin other than parents assumed much greater responsibilities than was typical for Pakeha. Aunts, uncles, and grandparents were expected to administer discipline freely, without the need to consult the children’s parents. Kin other than parents were often the main providers of praise, because a parent who praised a child could be seen as boastful. Children ate and slept at the houses of kin other than parents much more often than occurred than among Pakeha. Grandparents rather than parents often took major decisions about children’s upbringing, such as whom they would live with.
The contrast between Pakeha and Maori assumptions about responsibilities for childcare was particularly apparent in the case of adoption. The Pakeha model, legally enforced through measures such as the 1955 Adoption Act, concentrated all rights and obligations in the hands of the adoptive parents. The Maori model shared rights and obligations more evenly among adoptive parents, biological parents, and the wider kin network (Metge 1995: Part IV).
3.4.2 Gender roles
Anthropologists have documented that women are universally associated with the childrearing and with the “domestic” sphere, though there is an enduring technical debate on how to define “domestic” in a way that is valid across different cultures (Yanagisako 1979). Something that distinguishes anthropological research about gender roles from, for instance, economic research is that anthropologists are interested in why societies accord different status and value to the roles of men and women. Anthropologists sometimes question the conventional wisdom that women’s contributions are universally devalued compared with men. A few anthropologists have claimed, for instance, that there are some societies without capitalist economies and modern states in which women and men are “separate but equal” (Leacock 1978).
Other anthropologists argue that the devaluation of women’s roles is in fact universal, and look for ways to explain it. A common thread in many explanations is that women and men are universally identified with opposite sides of fundamental dichotomies such as “nature” versus “culture,” or “private” versus “public,” with women attached to the less valued side, such as “nature” or “private.” A great deal of ethnographic material on topics ranging from creation myths to the seclusion of women has been produced in support of these views. There has also, however, been extensive criticism. Some writers have argued, for instance, that the “nature” is not always devalued relative to “culture.” Others have claimed that distinctions such as public versus private that make sense in modern industrialised societies can not be applied to very different societies such as those of hunter gatherers (Yanagisako and Collier 1987).
3.5 Family pathology
Family systems can have a powerful influence on how individuals behave within families. An example of a family pathology on which anthropology has important insights to offer is the “missing” females of Asia. As Sen (1989, 1990) has pointed out, the ratio of males to females in South Asia and East Asia is far higher than elsewhere in the world. This high ratio suggests the existence of abnormally high female mortality, whether through neglect or deliberate infanticide, or the existence of sex-selective abortions. Calculations of the number of females who would be alive if the sex ratio at birth and the ratio of female to male mortality been close to that of Europe or sub-Saharan Africa produces figures of tens of million “missing” females.
There are conflicting claims about the extent to which geographic variation in sex ratios is explained by variation in standard socio-economic indices such as labour force participation, education, and income (Croll 2002, Klasen and Wink 2002). There is little disagreement, however, about the central importance of family systems. Essentially, family systems like those of most of East and South Asia make daughters much less valuable than sons. In East and South Asia, descent lines typically run from fathers to sons; daughters leave home at marriage while sons remain; and sons (with their wives) have primary responsibility for old-age support. If, because of government policy or the heavy costs of childrearing, couples are forced to limit themselves to one or two children, and if at least one of these children must be a son, then parents may not wish to leave the gender composition of their offspring to chance. This interpretation is amply supported by testimony from parents collected by anthropologists all over the region (Croll 2002). In contrast, in Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand where the family systems place no special premium on males, the problems of “missing” females seems to be entirely absent.
Scholars have drawn other links between family systems and family pathologies. Margery Wolf (1972) describes how rules governing co-residence, property transition, and authority in traditional Chinese families make conflicts between mothers and daughters-in-law virtually inevitable. Dyson and Murphy (1983) describe how differences in the family systems of northern and southern India affect the vulnerability of women. Northern women move typically marry strangers from different villages, while southern women often marry cousins who they have known since childhood. Northern women typically have no one to turn to if their husbands abuse them; southern women never cut the links binding them to the larger family.
3.6 The changing family
One of the central truisms of contemporary anthropology is that family systems change over time. These changes have been the focus of a great deal of interdisciplinary research. The typical conclusion from such studies is that significant features of the family change, but that underlying principles remain fairly intact. An example is the study organised by Thornton and Lin (1994) of changes in the Chinese family in Taiwan over the 20th century that drew on a large body of ethnographic research and a long time series of data. It turned out that many things had changed: people married later, parents no longer arranged marriages, and less economic production took place within the family. Much else, however, had remained the same: couples continued to reside with husbands’ rather than wives’ parents, sons provided support to their aged parents, and people placed a high value on continuation of the descent line. The authors suggest that the reason other dimensions of the family had changed was that they were “less central to the historical Chinese value of filial piety” (Thornton and Lin 1994: 403).
Recognition that families around the world are changing raises the question of whether family systems are converging. Mid-twentieth century modernisation theorists argued that they were: that industrialisation had brought about a shift from extended to nuclear families in the West and would do so elsewhere in the world. This argument lost much of its force when historians demonstrated that in much of Northwest Europe, nuclear families had predominated even before industrialisation (see Section 2.1.) Most scholars now acknowledge that family systems around the world have undergone similar changes. These changes include an increase in socialisation by non-family institutions such as schools and factories, which have exposed children to new ideas, given them competing loyalties, and helped them to escape supervision by kin. As children have acquired skills lacked by their parents, and as opportunities for work outside the household economy have appeared, there has been a shift favouring the young in the generational balance of power. But they also argue that many distinctive institutions such as filial piety in Chinese families and arranged marriages in Indian families have survived these homogenizing pressures (McDonald 1992, Thornton and Fricke 1987).
