By Douglas Anele

The concept expressed by the word ‘family’ and its diverse manifestations in various societies throughout history have been discussed for a long time from different perspectives by anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, historians, philosophers and educators. Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary provides the lexical meaning of ‘family’ which we shall adopt as a working definition.

It says that a family is “the household, or all those living in one house (as parents, children, servants; children and their parents…a group of people related to one another or otherwise connected… .” Hence, if we ignore the inclusion of servants who are not related to a collection of persons that constitutes a family, we can say that the word ‘family’ denotes those who are biologically connected either as parents and children or who can trace their bloodline to a common progenitor.

It follows that a family can have different sizes and structure, depending on the number of people included in it and the criteria used in deciding family ties or belongingness in a culture. For instance, a nuclear family consisting of parents and their children (whether biological, adopted or produced through modern artificial reproductive procedures), constitute a family.

This nuclear family structure is emphasised more in Western countries, unlike the extended family system that obtains in most autochthonous African communities in which, aside from parents and children, cousins, nephews, nieces and anyone who could reliably trace his or her bloodline to a common ancestor are considered part and parcel of the family.

As humans, an overwhelming proportion of our actions takes place in a social context and is, accordingly in one way or another, dependent on the existence of others and their relevant actions, social institutions, conventions and personalities. A human being is basically a social being, because, as Aristotle correctly claims, it is within the society of others that human beings can actualise their potentials.

Left completely alone, a human being is completely helpless, since no single person is self-sufficient – the person can never be fully human. The Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, reiterates the essential social nature of humanity in his influential book, I and Thou. Evolution of both the family and phylogenetically-programmed disposition for language usage, for example, points clearly in the direction of the social character of our humanity.

The history of the family as a mode of social organisation could be traced back to remote antiquity, although its scholarly investigation is a relatively recent development. Families are created by relationships between men and women, and between each gender as well, considering the fact that nowadays same-sex marriages are allowed in some countries. This implies that familyhood is determined by the form of marriage accepted with a given community.

Therefore, the history of the family is, by and large, the history of marriage and its corollaries in terms of the relationships that arise from it. Now, Friedrich Engels in his work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, asserts that serious studies of the historical evolution of the human family can be traced to 1861 when Mother Right, written by a Swiss jurist and historian, J. J. Bachofen, was published.

Bachofen’s pioneering research was furthered by E. B. Taylor’s Researches into the Early History of Mankind and Development of Civilisation (1865), J. F. McLennan’s Studies in Ancient History (1886), J. Lubbock’s Origin of Civilisation and The Primitive Condition of Man: Mental and Social Condition of Savages (1870), and L. H. Morgan’s Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity (1871).

These studies establish that various forms of marriage and consanguinity have been tried and tested in various human communities from prehistory down to the emergence of civilisation. Thus, there have been, in a quasi-historical order or evolution, group marriage (in which a group of men possessed a group of women in common), polygamy, polyandry, and monogamy.

Of course, there are intermediate types between these forms, and the last three existed side-by-side and became predominant after the collapse of group marriages in antiquity. These days, although monogamous marriage is the dominant mode of marriage, polygamy is practiced in many communities across the world while polyandrous marriage might still be found in some remote parts of India, Tibet and a few other places.

The accepted form of marriage in a given society is a function of the dynamic economic and social conditions present in that society. But then, these conditions give rise to, and are also crucially influenced by, the prevailing religious ideas and worldview of the people. On a general note, evolution of the family from prehistoric times to the present is characterised by the continuous narrowing of the marriage circle, starting from the tribe down to the present monogamous arrangement.

As Engels remarks: “By the successive exclusion, first of closer, then of even remoter relatives, and finally even of those merely related by marriage, every kind of group marriage was rendered practically impossible: and in the end there remained only the one, for the moment still loosely united, couple, the molecule, with the dissolution of which marriage itself completely ceases.”

From the background given above, it is clear that the family is a complex form of human relations which arose as a result of the social nature of human beings. We have also seen that marriage is the most widely-accepted form for creating families. When marriage rites are completed in accordance with the customs and traditions of a society, it is expected that the couple would produce children.

Throughout the world, in both polygamous and monogamous marriages, the emergence of children is usually received with joy and gladness, because it enlarges and consolidates the family by ensuring continuation of the bloodline, irrespective of whether the society is matrilineal or patrilineal. In matrilineal societies, the female line is predominant; in patrilineal ones status and inheritance is determined by the male line.

Typically, as already indicated, the nuclear monogamous family consists of a woman, her husband and children (if any), while an extended family set-up embraces, apart from the nuclear family, cousins, nieces, nephews, and all those connected by blood to an ancestor.

Many African families are gerontocratic, meaning that one’s position in the family hierarchy is determined by age. Members of a family feel a sense of belonging among themselves, and they depend on one another to cope with the challenges of life.
TO BE CONTINUED.