This historical anthropology of the family represents a new departure in
family studies. Over the past ten years or so, the social scientific
sociological analysis of the family has undergone a change, and has been
obliged to reconsider its traditional view that industrialisation
triggered a shift within society from the 'large family', which
fulfilled all social functions from socialising the children to caring
for the sick and the old, to the modern nuclear family, which was
regarded solely as being the locus for emotional relationships.
Historians have shown that in the past there was in fact a great variety
of different family structures within a wide range of varying
demographic, economic and cultural frameworks, distinctive for each
society. At the same time, the interaction between sociology and social
anthropology has led to a clearer conceptual analysis of that vague,
polysemic term 'family'; and notions of dwelling-place, descent,
marriage, the relative roles of husband and wife and parent-child
relations, as well as the more general relations between generations,
have in a variety of past and present social contexts been taken apart
and analysed. In this book, Martine Segalen reviews and synthesises a
rich wealth of often little-known European and North American historical
and social anthropological material on the family. This results in a
reversal of the frequently held view of the family as an institution in
decline, showing it instead to be both dynamic and resistant.
