When American politicians proclaim that “the family is the backbone of our nation” and that their own

policies promote “family values,” they can hardly go wrong. After all, how many voters see themselves as
antifamily? Certainly, the bonds of marriage and family are among the central social relationships of most
societies. For one thing, a married couple, aided by some kind of extended family, is usually the social
group that nourishes and socializes new generations. For another, family ties are the basis of residential
groups that not only live together but often own property together, play together, work together, and
worship together. Families, we all recognize, do a lot of things that are helpful to their members and to
society at large. So, when studies show that American divorce rates hover around 50 percent and that
about 30 percent of American children live in households with only one parent present, we believe that
something is amiss. We fear that broken homes and single-parent families will cause harm to children,
communities, and the whole nation. Worrying that marriage between people of the same sex will erode
the “sacred institution” of marriage, in 2004 the American president and some members of Congress
attempted (unsuccessfully) to include the one man–one-woman marital norm in the Constitution. Many
states passed defense of marriage acts to “protect” the American family from marriage between lesbians
and gays. Ethnographic studies and anthropological ideas have a lot to contribute to such contemporary
issues. We look at some of the main ways cultures differ in their marriage practices and in the organization
of their families and households. Before doing so, though, we need to define some terms used in this and
later chapters.

Some Definitions

Anthropologists distinguish between two kinds of relatives. Consanguine are “blood” relatives—people
related by birth. Affine are “in-laws”—people related by marriage. Among your consanguineous relatives
are your parents, siblings, grandparents, parents’ siblings, and cousins. Your affine include your sister’s
husband, wife’s mother, and father’s sister’s husband. Both consanguineous and affinal relationships can,
in theory, serve as the basis for all kinds of social groups. When people form an organized, cooperative
group based on their kinship relationships, anthropologists call it a kin group. The nuclear family, which
consists of a married couple together with their unmarried children, is one kind of kin group. Typically, its
members live together, share the use of family wealth and property, rely on one another for emotional
support, pool their labor and resources to support the family, and so on. Among their many functions,
nuclear families usually have primary responsibility for nurturing and enculturating children. North
Americans usually think of each nuclear family as living in its own dwelling such as an apartment, condo,
townhouse, or their own house. In fact, immigrants from Latin America, Africa, and southeast Asia are
often vilified by their Euro-American neighbors for housing too many nuclear families in one “single-
family” dwelling. Larger groups can be formed out of kinship relationships. People everywhere keep track
of distant relatives who are part of their extended family. North Americans recognize extended family ties,
if only when cousins, aunts, and uncles, and other distant relatives gather for holidays, family reunions,
weddings, and funerals. Theoretically, the number of people who make up your extended family could go
on “forever” to include third cousins and beyond. Extended families do not have clear social boundaries;
rather, peoples’ recognition of relationships withers and disappear as relatives become more and more
distant. You may know and occasionally interact with your first and second cousins, but beyond that range,
whether you even know their names depends mostly on circumstances such as whether they live in your
town or state. In contrast, in more traditional societies, most of the important relationships in the lives of
individuals are defined by extended kinship ties. Commonly, most of a person’s relationships with other
people depend on whether, and precisely how, they are related. Extended families are far more important
in the lives of individuals. They live in the same household, they rely on one another for economic support
and access to resources, they share religious duties, and so forth. In such societies, nuclear families are
embedded in larger, more inclusive kin groups. Some of these groups are enormously large, consisting of
hundreds of members, as we see in the next chapter. In this chapter, we focus mainly on households,
especially on nuclear and extended families and the ties that create and bind them. A household (or
domestic group) refers to people who reside in the same physical space. In the United States, most people
continue to believe that normal households consist of a married couple and their children. In 2008,
however, only 49.5 percent of households were lived in by the “traditional” nuclear family. A third of
American households were nonfamily households. In some other societies, the nuclear families live in
separate dwellings on land they own jointly with related families. So long as the families use common
property like land and tools, cooperate in work, share income or wealth, and recognize themselves as
having distinctive identities, they belong to a single household even though they live in separate houses.
We will consider types of households later. The preceding terms referring to groupings based on family
and kinship seem simple enough. But it is easy to use one term when technically you mean another, which
can lead to confusion. The Concept Review may provide some help. Households are not always formed
exclusively by family or marital ties, as gay and lesbian couples, heterosexual unmarried couples living
together, and various other roommates and housemates illustrate. In fact, in a great many societies,
people incorporate unrelated people into their family and household, acting and feeling toward them in
the same way as they do consanguineous relatives. This practice is widespread enough that there is a
phrase for it: fictive kinship, in which individuals who are not actually biological relatives act toward one
another as if they were kin. Adoption is the most familiar example. In many islands of the Pacific, it is very
common for a couple to adopt (or foster) one or more children, whether they have parented children
themselves. Unlike in most Western nations, adopted children usually keep up ties with their biological
parents, who are often relatives of their adopted parents. For many purposes, such children in effect have
two sets of parents to support them emotionally and economically. This chapter mainly concerns the
diversity in marriage and family among humanity. We begin with the point that every person has rules that
govern who may and may not marry. The most universal of these rules is the incest taboo, which is so basic
that we discuss it first.