October 24, 2023

Nuclear families

There are a lot of ways to organise a family. Anthropological research has offered us myriad structures through which people understand their relations to each other - through their mother's family, through their father's, through both; and there are even more ways to cohabit or raise children. These are culturally and temporally contingent - different people at different times, prefer one or the other. Sometimes different family structures co-exist or norms (preferred by the majority) are ignored or transgressed by a substantial minority. That's true for just about any human practice, honestly.

In this newsletter, I want to talk about nuclear families as one form of domestic unit (by which I mean both a relationship structure and a cohabiting collective).

Cover of Nuclear Family #01 from Aftershock Comics.

So, what is a 'nuclear family'? There are a few ways to define this, but essentially it's a cohabiting group consisting of parents and children with no (or few) extended family members and often neolocal (i.e. living apart from both maternal and paternal residences). Colloquially, we tend to use it to mean a family consisting of parents in a monogamous relationship and their children. So the term implies (a) kinship structure, (b) residence patterns, and (c) sexual practices.¹

Although now debunked, for a time in the 20th century, the emergence of the nuclear family (or the somewhat more expansive "stem families" that also include grand parents - often just paternal) was linked to the rise of industrialisation.² Certainly, as historian Daniel Scott Smith outlines, the economic and political work done by different family units and the emergence of the western European family structure, have been the focus of considerable attention from theorists and scholars from Adam Smith to Friedrich Engles to Max Weber.³

There is also an ideological aspect to the normative nuclear family. Historical research tells us that the model of indepenent, disconnected households was an ideal rather than a practical reality, even in 19th century England.⁴ Yet Engles drew on early anthropological work (by Morgan and others) to place family structure and kin relations into broader social evolutionary schema, putting monogamous nuclear family units squarely into the more sophisticate or advanced forms of social structure.⁵ Part of the colonial genocides in North America include the imposition (by force) of nuclear family models onto Indigenous social units, cutting extensive kin networks and transforming practices of care into the generation of capital.⁶

Family, parentage, relatedness - all of these are terms with considerable emotional and ideological heft in our world. We're starting to develop the tools to speak to elements of them in the past as well which is exciting, but it also opens us up to making mistakes that erase whole classes of people (those whose sexual practices or biological realities precluded them from parentage, for example) from meaningful analysis.

All of this is to say that I think we need to be extremely careful in how we describe groups of biologically related individuals in the deep past. I've seen the term nuclear family used more than once to describe biological parents and offspring identified in the same cemetery or grave (I'm not citing any examples here - no need to call anyone out); and it's not always clear what the authors mean: They literally cannot be describing the residential practices of the individuals, though neolocal residence is a core part of the the nuclear family model. The sexual norms of these very ancient people are equally unknowable - especially as rules around parentage or sexual difference may shape the funerary assemblage, excluding some people or requiring different funerary treatments for their remains. Here, using a colloquial term (likely without much deeper consideration) actually makes inferences about social practices that the data available cannot illuminate.

Perhaps breaking these structures down into their constituent parts - in this case, residential patterns plus sexual practices plus kin structure - might help all of us have a somewhat firmer ground on which to construct models of past people's worlds. But while we do that, can we please retire "nuclear families" from our archaeological vocabulary?