What is Family

Family, though has a broad variety of understanding and defination, at least involves one of these characteristics: blood relationship; emotional attachments,raising up children and sexual relatinship bewteen husband and wife.

The definitin of family is cultural determined, though with great diversities, all societies use marriage and family to establish pattern of inheritance, authority, lines of descents and mate selection.
Family can be classified by the difference in family orientation and procreation :

• Nuclear family


• Extended family

by inheriance pattern:

• Bilateral


• Patrilineal


• Matrinlineal

by Authority:

• Patriarchy
• Matriarchy
• Egalitarian

by Martial residence arrangment:

• Parilocal
• Matrilocal
• neolocal
• biolocal

by Mate selection:

• Parental arranged marriage
• Individual selected marriage

Accetpable mate:

• Endogamy, the practice of marring within one's own group


• Exogamy, the practice of marrying outside one's group

Monogamy vs polygamy

Within polygamy, there are different varities:

Sororal polygyny refers to a man marries a set of sisters;
Fraternal ployandry refers to a womon marries a set of brothers;

Against common assupmtion, most of times, polyandry, a woman has more than one husbands, happenes in the setting of patriarchal society, where women have little choices about their spouses.

However fraternal polyandry often happenes in matrineal society, where women side inherit the property. This practice results low fertility rate and keeps the property intact.

Functional theory of Family:

Family fulfills six basic human needs:

1. economic production
2. socialization of children
3. welfare for the sick and the eldly
4. recreation and emotional attachment
5. sexual relationship regulation
6. reproduction

Incest Taboo, is an example of norms of exogamy, it is rule that prohibits sex and marriage among designated relatives.

Functional view of family suggests that allowing incest is to confuse role among member of society, distube the normal social interaction. Thus, regardless of potential genetic defects close link marriage might bring in, all societies have incest taboo.