Therefore, she sought payment for her services for cleaning and cooking and a share of the increase in value in the home he owned, resulting from work he had done while they were living together relying on theories of contract and unjust enrichment. The man sued for the child support he had provided the woman’s children. The court of appeals found sufficient evidence to sustain a jury finding that the woman was entitled to most of the money she sought, but that the man was not entitled to child support. The law has different ways of responding to societal changes and changing family forms will continue to result in changing legal responses. Any dialogue about defining the family can’t escape the reality of the diversity of American families. The next section focuses on Wisconsin and the changes that have occurred in households and families in the last three decades. 4.2.1 Socioeconomic Characteristics The social sciences include many concepts that are basic to the understanding of the subject matter. Some of these concepts are defined differently and measured differently by social researchers, such as those concerning socioeconomic status. Others are defined and measured in a fairly consistent way across studies and over time. These latter concepts usually follow previous usages either because of research tradition or because of limitations in the collection of data, race perhaps being an example. A key concept in the social sciences, and especially in demography and sociology, is that of the family. The family is generally regarded as a major social institution and a locus of much of a person's social activity. It is a social unit created by blood, marriage, or adoption, and can be described as nuclear (parents and children) or extended (encompassing other relatives). It is generally assumed today that the modern family has undergone significant transformations in its structure. We are told that societal changes have contributed to a sharp reduction in the percentage of classical \"typical\" families, principally \"nuclear\" families. Replacing these, we are made to understand, are childless families, one-parent families, other family configurations, and quasi-family units based on non-marital cohabitation. This argument of the decline has been advanced for a number of decades, but little research has been conducted to test the premise. Bane disagreed with that conclusion and pointed out that family sizes were getting smaller and mobility was splitting up some families, but the family remained as a functional social institution. The main contention of this paper is that analysis of changing family patterns is distorted by the definition of the family that is generally used and the way relevant data are collected. In support of this contention, two different approaches will be used to gauge family status, and the two will be compared. First, the standard demographic approach to defining and measuring the family concept will be reviewed. Second, the genealogical view of the family will be examined. A comparison will then be made of the two perspectives and their consequences for understanding the nature of changes in the modern family The family is generally recognized as an element of a broader kinship network that links ancestors and descendants of a person. Most published statistics on the family are based on 101 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
census or household survey questions and responses. In the United States (and, for the most part, throughout the world), the \"family\" is defined in censuses and surveys as two or more persons related by blood, marriage, or adoption, AND living in the same residence. The first part of the definition excludes non-marital cohabitation but can include extended as well as nuclear family members. However, the second part of the definition severely restricts family composition by limiting the family members to those who share living facilities under the same roof. This standard definition is basically an accommodation to requirements of data collection in censuses and surveys in which identifying population in geographic contexts down to the separate dwelling unit is necessary. Moreover, the questions needed to identify non-residential family members would be burdensome and the information costly to obtain. Persons who might be considered part of a family but do not reside at the same residential address are not included in demographic data. They may be part of a family at another address or they may be living alone or in group quarters (housing for a substantial number of unrelated individuals). This is the case even if such persons live close by (maybe even next door) and/or visit or otherwise regularly communicate with their family of origin. Additionally, because of census and survey residence rules, college students living in a college community and some long-term workers at remote places are excluded from the family group even if their intention is to return to the family's residence after school or work is completed. In other words, the family definition is controlled by the household definition, where households describe current or potential housing markets. In fact, some persons who meet the standard demographic definition of the family and are included may have little association with other family members in the same residence. For example, they may have different schedules of sleep, work, or other activities, and they may not communicate by phone or mail. Their inclusion in the family is pro forma and based only on the given family definition. These facts raise questions about the boundaries of the standard demographic definition of the family and its consequences for interpretations of how family structure might be changing over time. Genealogy is the study of family structural history, drawing basically on demographic data sources such as censuses, birth and death certificates, immigration records, and other administrative records. The aim of genealogical research is to construct a family tree of ancestors and dependents of a key person. The tree can be limited in its extension to cousins and other persons remotely related, but typically the attempt is to be inclusive of related kin. Some genealogists prefer the term \"family history\" to \"genealogy\" because the latter term implies a genetic connection that may not be real because of questionable paternity and because it would not apply to adoptive persons. Many types of information can be included in family trees, but the pattern of relationships is not dependent on residential locations. Residence can be one item of information for each individual in the tree, along with such items as dates of birth and death, place of birth, occupation, and other personal markers. One can examine a family tree and extract a family structure using a variety of family definitions, based on how extensive one wishes to consider the family. Family trees typically distinguish 102 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
between living and dead members of the family, so that several family definitions can be applied to only living members. In this sense, the genealogical approach to looking at family structure provides for a broader range of family forms than is possible from the demographic approach. Thus, one can describe a couple and their offspring, living together or not; a multi- generation family, living together or not; as well as extended family groupings. Genealogies have not been incorporated into family research very much. Smith indicates that obtaining any type of kin count or structure \"is often difficult or impossible …. Genealogical research, even when done with the aid of computers, is labour-intensive and requires extensive archival data.\" The use of genealogies in demographic research has been heavily oriented to estimating population size, as well as fertility and mortality of communities. The distinction between the demographic and genealogical approaches can be illustrated by looking at the time trend in family patterns using various family definitions. In the real, illustrative example I have chosen here, family structures are compared based on the demographic concept and three alternative genealogical concepts of the family. The time span in this example is from 1956 to 2002 and covers the years of five decennial censuses from 1960 to 2000. Initials are used to designate different family members. The first person listed is the key person. The first column describes the nuclear family composition according to census definition. The second column adds in living members of the nuclear family who are non-residents. The third column adds in living parents, parents-in-law, children's spouses, and grandchildren, whether or not living in the same residence the fourth column adds in brothers and sisters of the key person, also not necessarily in the same residence. Of course, many other variations and extensions of the family are possible. Over time, new members are added as they meet the family definition and members are deleted when they die or are divorced from a nuclear family member. In this particular example, the family begins with a 1956 marriage. Columns one and two show that both census and genealogical approaches report the nuclear family the same way. Columns three and four indicate two sets of parents and two pairs of siblings. By the time of the 1960 Census, these family patterns have remained the same. In 1961, a child is born to the couple and is the only addition to the family. In 1962, a second child joins the family and all family definitions expand similarly. This pattern continues through the time of the 1970 Census. In 1971, one of the couple’s parents dies and the extended family definitions are reduced. In 1975, another parent dies, further reducing the more extended family patterns. No change takes place through the 1980 Census period. By 1981, one of the children leaves for college away from home. Now, for the first time, census and genealogical family approaches define the nuclear family's composition differently. The following year, 1982, the other child leaves home for college and further disparity in nuclear family composition ensues. In the same year, a third parent dies, and the extended family groups become smaller. In 1983, the first child transfers to a college near home and resumes residence with his parents. In 1984, the second child completes college and returns home while awaiting marriage to someone she's engaged to. The next year, 1985, sees her departure to her own household with the newest extended family member. By 1986 103 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
the other child completes college and sets up his own residence in the community. In 1988, financial considerations bring that child back home for a considerable part of the year. The following year, 1989, he departs for professional school. In the same year, the other child has a son and thereby expands the extended family patterns. The family patterns remain the same through the 1990 Census period. In 1991, a daughter is born to complement the son of the one child; and in that same year one of the sisters of the initial couple passes away. When 1995 rolls around, the son has gotten married, adding another extended family member. In 1999, the son divorces and re-joins the couple. By the time of the 2000 Census, the son has found a new residence in town; and later that year he remarries, thus establishing the earlier extended family sizes. In 2001, the nuclear family as defined by the demographic approach comes to an end as one of the original couple dies. Then, in 2002 the remarried son has a child. A scan of the chart shows important differences in family composition according to the various definitions. First, the nuclear family independent of residence, as revealed in the second column, did not change from 1962 to 2001, a period of 39 years. In contrast, the nuclear family demographically defined remained intact from only 1962 to 1980, a period of 18 years. Second, according to the genealogical approach, there is still an existent family by 2002, a period of 46 years and counting. In contrast, based on the demographic approach, the family ceases to exist after 2000. Third, the family as defined by census or survey has been quite variable over time, and some of the changes are due to very short-term stays in the residence. In fact, in one year, 1984, the family structure that was established in 1962 and continued through 1980 is reconstructed. Fourth, the versions of the extended family shown here are at their smallest size when the family demographically-defined is at its largest size. One could reasonably argue for any of the family definitions shown here, or for other variants. A point to be made, however, is that the family as defined demographically may not be the definition of the family that most of us think of when we contemplate our own family pattern. More importantly, from the perspective of the dynamics of family changes, analysis of changing family structure using the demographic approach may overstate the fluidity and demise of the nuclear family form, whereas greater family stability is indicated by the genealogical approach. Family researchers should consider whether residential separation of family members reduces family structure even when family functions are basically maintained, especially in light of increases in the availability of travel and communication channels. Bane argued further that smaller family sizes probably led to stronger attachments of residence-based family members with their non-residence-based family members. Those who design questions related to the definition of families in censuses and surveys should consider if additional information needs to be collected to add meaningfulness to the analysis of family composition and changes in it. In any event, our analysis of changes in the family as a social unit should not be held hostage to a definition and measurement approach that may not adequately reflect its true character. 104 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
4.2.2 Family Contexts The Velo-Cardio-Facial syndrome, also known as Shprintzen syndrome, is a multiple c0ngenitaln0maly syndrome estimated to affect 1 in 4000 individuals. The originalpresenting symptoms that contributed to the clinical delineation of this entity were the association of hyper nasal speech, cardiac anomalies, a characteristic facial appearance, learning disabilities and mental federation. The discovery of a sub microscopic deletion in chromosome 22q11 in the majority 0f patients confirmed that VCFS is a specific genetic syndrome several genes are identified in this region, but which 0f them can explain the syndrome's complex physical and behavioural phenotype is not known. In most patients the deletion occurs de novo, but familial occurrence with an affected parental is noted in 10 to 150/of patients. The syndrome has a very variable clinical presumption. The clinical phenotype 0f the disorder has been broadened and includes over 180 clinical features. The cardinal features include velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI), conotruncal heart defects, atypical facial appearance (such as a broad nasal bridge, ear abnormalities, small eyes, and often a small mouth), short, stature, long and slender hands and fingers, and a hyper nasal speech in patt, related to the VP In addition to the physical abnormalities, recent evidence suggests that individuals with VCFS are also predisposed to a characteristic psychiatric and neurobehavioralphenotype. A variety of behavioural disorders and psychiatric illnesses have been rep0rted, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, separation anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social withdrawal and attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder. Kiln, Mayes, Volk mar, and Cohen labelledthe specific psychiatricentity found in VCFS children as Multiplex Developmental Disorder (MDD). MDD is described as a combinati0n of several psychiatric problems with a (pervasive) impact on the development, of basic skills during the first years of life. These problems have repercussions on the social, emotional, and cognitive development. Studies on specific behaviour problems of youngsters with VCFS, using the Child Behaviour Checklist (CBCL), have reported a great diversity of problems such as social withdrawal, shyness social problems, person- and situation-dependence, aItenti0n problems, and thought problems Recently, Prinzie et al. compared the personality profile of children with VCFS with a group of 240 non-VCFS contr0l youngsters (matched on age and gender), and in addition, with groups of youngsters with Prader-Willi (PWS), Fragile X(FXS), and Williams Syndromes (WS) using the California Child Q-set (CCQ). For Extraversion and Agreeableness no significant, differences between the VCFS group and the 0thef four groups were found. Significant differences were found among the five gr0ups for the 0thef personality scale scores. IQ was positively c0rfelated with Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and 0penness. Children with a lower IQ were found to have higher scores on Dependency. Younger children with VCFS were found t0 have higher scores 0n M0t0r Activity, on Emotional Stability and on Openness than older children with VCFS. Personality characteristics in youngsters with VCFS were n0t related t0 cardiac defects or de novo versus familial genetic origin of the 22q11 deletion. Although these studies contributed t0the 105 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
description 0fthe behaviouralphenotype of VCFS patients, the impact of contextual factors has yet t0 be provided. There is a broad consensus that parent-child interactions provide a directcriticalcontext for children's development. The relationship between the quality of parent-child interactions and developmental outcomes has been broadly established in normal, no syndrome families. In general, family interaction patterns that appear to support, 0ptimal development include sensitive responding in a contingent way; establishing reciprocity; providing affectionate, warm, and nonintrusive interactions ; structuring and scaffolding the environment appropriately; enc0uraging discourse-based interaction ; and ensuring developmentally sensitive patterns of caregiver-child interactions. The background for the study of additional indirect effects or parent reactions toetiologic-related child behaviours arises from Bell's classic n0ti0n 0f interaction. Just as parents affect children, so too do children affect their parents the child's particular type of genetic disorder - and the behaviours and/or physical characteristics generally associated with that etiology - affects parents and families. Given that different disorders predispose children t0 0ne 0r another setof behaviours, the in-depth study 0f specific genetic syndromes may lead t0 additional information about theassociationsbetween different, specific behaviours on the one hand and parental and family functioning on theother hand. This was clearly illustrated by Van Lie shout, deMeyer, Curfs, and Fryns who compared parent and family functioning of children with Prader-Willi syndrome, fragile X syndrome, and Williams’s syndrome. To our knowledge, no studies have provided information on parenting and family c0ntexls in relation to the specific personality and behaviour profiles of children with VCFS. 'the first aim of this study was to explore, parenting and family contextrepresent a continuum of variables from those more proximal, directly experienced by the child and therefore closely associated with the child's personality, t0 th0se more dismal, experienced indirectly by the child, and therefore less closely associated with the child's personality. Bronfenbrenner and Cecil hypothesized that genetic p0tentials for effective psychological functioning are actualized thr0ugh direct proximal processes. The family context variables that we investigated were: family stress (i.e., me intensity and duration of the cumulative stress experienced from a diversity of sources such as the family's socioeconomic and health status); marital conflict (i.e., the frequency and intensity of Marital conflicts); and 3) parental consistency vs. inconsistency of both parents in relation t0 the child. The parenting variables were: warmth, anger, and respect for the child's autonomy, limit setting, and quality of information provided to the child. These parenting behaviours exemplify the more direct role of proximal parental behaviour whereas family stress and marital conflict exemplify the more indirect role of the distal family context. Current societal dynamics are putting family relations, especially those along the generational lineage, squarely on the political and scientific agenda. Contemporary ageing societies are age-graded and to a large extent age-segregated societies. Their institutions tend to be age- homogeneous. Exchange and support among generations is critical for maintaining age integration. In this respect the family plays a special role—it is the prototypical institution of 106 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
age-heterogeneity. The family links lives far beyond the co-residing nuclear unit, most prominently along the generational lineage. Moreover, the demographics of ageing societies—especially the increasing longevity and proportions of elderly people—address new demands to the family and its functions, e.g., in terms of support and care for the elderly. For societal welfare and welfare policy it becomes vital to assess the current state of the family and its likely evolution. Common Themes and National Differences Families in Europe today present many features common to all countries as well as massive differences among them. As to commonalties, we expect to find a weakening of marriage with increasing age but stability of intergenerational bonds. As to differences, we expect to find patterns of “weak” and “strong” family regimes. Research on these themes is sometimes like fighting against windmills: raising empirical arguments against myths that seem to remain untouched by them. It is widely assumed that the modern welfare state has undermined family solidarity and the family itself. Increasing childlessness and fewer births, decreasing marriage and increasing divorce rates, increasing numbers of singles and the decrease of multigenerational co-residence—to name just a few widely known facts—may indeed indicate a weakening of the family and its functions. But despite the high intuitive plausibility of such interpretations in which large parts of the social sciences meet with common sense, it may turn out that the family has in fact changed but not diminished its role. Speculation about the future of the family has been a regular feature of modernisation, mostly with the assumption of a general decline of family bonds. This restrictive view was first transcended by research on the emotional and support relations between adult family generations. But it is only during the last decade that we have discovered again the full extent of the family as a kinship and especially a generational system beyond the nuclear household which ranges across several different types of “solidarity”: spatial and emotional closeness, frequent contact, personal and instrumental support as well as massive flows of money and goods. SHARE provides the first possibility to chart the family generations on a European level. The Ambivalence of Marriage We first examine to what extent elderly Europeans are living together in bonds of marriage. In recent decades, the institution of marriage has been weakened by diminishing rates of ever getting married and increasing rates of divorce. Our findings show that the current elderly have not yet been strongly touched by this evolution. Among the 50-59-year-olds 76 percent of the men and 71 percent of the women live as a married couple. There is a rise of divorce in the younger cohorts but with ten percent of the 50-59-year-olds currently divorced it is still far below the levels of those now in their 30’s or 40’s. Some of them may remarry in the future, so that the proportion of, e.g., divorced 60-69-year olds ten years from now cannot be predicted solely on the basis of the evolution of divorce rates. There is also a rising proportion of never-married men, while among women the opposite patterns holds, with the 107 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
oldest group having the largest proportion of never-married (12 percent), mainly due to the specific historical constellation of WWII and its aftermath. But the most drastic pattern is that associated with the death of the marriage partner. The higher longevity of women—for life expectancy at birth it is currently about 7 years—and the fact that men in couples are on average about 3-4 years older than their wives translate into highly divergent trajectories for the two sexes as they grow older. The proportion of widowed men increases from 2 percent (50-59) to 30 percent (80 and older), that of widowed women from 8 to 69 percent. As a result, 63 percent of men but only 16 percent of women over 80 still live with a (married or registered) spouse. In some countries this loss of the marital bond is even more marked; among the women over 80 in Greece almost nine tenths are widowed, and only one tenth still live in marriage The Power of Generations The family nucleus thus loses its impact with increasing age, especially among women. This is not the case, however, for the generational structure. Even after several decades of low fertility most European elderly still have a family that spans several generations. Only 11 percent have no other generation alive. The proportion rises somewhat in the older groups, but is below 15 percent except for the women above 80 where—due to the specific burdens mentioned above—it rises to 25 percent. The most frequent constellation—between 50 percent in Germany and 59 percent in Spain—is that of three generations. Four-generation families have a share of 16 percent, while five generation families remain at a fraction of a percent. Even among the youngest group, the mean number of living children in all countries remains above or close to 2; Germany has the lowest number with 1.68. The ‘second demographic transition’ to low fertility in Europe thus has not yet left its mark on parenthood among our cohorts. It does show in grandparenthood, with very low numbers among the youngest age group in some countries such as Greece, Spain, and Italy, even though it is unclear how many of the ‘missing’ grandchildren will still be born. How does this translate into actual exchange and support? The first question here is about co-residence with and geographical proximity to these other generations. This is the one piece of evidence that seems to support the ‘modernisation’ claim: In all Western societies, co-residence among adult family generations has decreased massively. Today, among the Europeans above 70 who have at least one living child, only 15 percent live together with a child in the same household. But by extending the boundaries of „togetherness“the situation turns out to be very different. If one includes parents and children living not only in the same household but also in the same house, the proportion rises from 15 to 29 percent, and by including the neighbourhood less than 1 km away, to 49 percent. 84 percent have a child living not farther away than 25 km. The preference now seems to be for ‘intimacy at a (small) distance’, small enough so that relations of exchange and support may function easily across the boundaries of the separate households. Thus, even the living arrangements are not very good evidence 108 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
for the claim of a dissociation between parents and adult children. A similar result applies to the frequency of contact. Weak and Strong Family Countries In these dimensions, however, it is the variation among countries that comes into focus. At the European level, there are considerable differences between Scandinavia, Central And Western Continental countries, and those of the Mediterranean. The latter are often grouped together as ‘strong family countries’, and contrasted with the ‘weak family countries’ of the Centre and North of Europe and of North America. The strength or weakness refers to cultural patterns of family loyalties, allegiances, and authority but also to demographic patterns of co-residence with adult children and older family members and to organising support for the latter. The ‘strong family countries’ have had high fertility in the past but today, paradoxically, are those with the lowest fertility, a state of affairs that is directly linked to the strength of their family tradition. While they have evolved, in conjunction with the other advanced countries, towards higher gender equity in education and the labour market, gender equity in the family and in public provisions for the family remains low. The dominant model, both culturally and in terms of welfare state incentives, is still that of the male breadwinner. The ensuing cultural lag in gender equity between the ‘individual- centred’ and the ‘family-centred’ worlds increasingly turns women away from motherhood. As mentioned above, these trends have mostly not yet directly affected the SHARE cohorts. For them—and therefore also for the elderly in the near future—the pattern remains one of comparatively high marriage rates and low rates of childlessness. But they are affected in an indirect way, through the decreasing prevalence of marriage and childbearing among their children. Our data demonstrate that there is not only a ‘weak’-‘strong’ dichotomy but a North South gradient, with the Scandinavian countries generally having the least traditional family structure, the Mediterranean countries (Spain and Italy more so than Greece) the most traditional one, and the other continental countries lying somewhere in-between. This already shows for the variation in marital status, e.g., divorce. Denmark and Sweden are at the top with 13 and 12 percent currently divorced, followed by Germany, Austria, France and Switzerland with 9 percent, the Netherlands with 6 percent, Greece with 4 percent, and Italy and Spain with 2 percent. Massive differences occur with respect to co-residence. The Mediterranean countries are characterised by very late (and increasing) ages of leaving the parental home among adult children. This is often interpreted solely as an effect of opportunity structures, but the variation among countries may also be explained by a cultural tendency towards closer intergenerational ties. While we are not able at this point to differentiate between those who have never left the parental home and those who have moved back later or have had their parents moving closer, the overall proportions are striking. In Denmark and Sweden, 13 and 15 percent of our respondents who have at least one living child live with a child in the same household, in the ‘centre’ countries this amounts to between 20 and 27 percent, but in Italy and Spain to 49 and 52 percent. Moving beyond the 109 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
boundaries of the household yields a similar picture. Among the 50-59-year-old Mediterranean’s, more than three quarters still have a child living at home with them. Among the oldest age group, the proportions are smaller but the differences between countries even larger: only 1 percent of the oldest Swedes and 4 percent of Danes live with a child, compared to 23 percent of Italians and 34 percent of Spaniards. As in all such comparisons, differences should of course not be examined at the level of nation states only; there are important regional differences as well. In Italy and Spain, differences between North and South in terms of variables such as co-residence may be equally large as between countries, to the point where, e.g., northern Italy demographically may have more in common with other Western European countries than with the mezzogiorno. Another case in point are differences between native and migrant populations. In Germany, the mean number of grandchildren for our respondents is 2.05 among those who on November 1, 1989, lived in West Germany, 2.96 among those who lived in the GDR, and 3.78 among those who lived abroad and have migrated to Germany since then 4.3 DEFINITION In the social sciences too, it is discussed about man from their awn point of view. Psychology considers man as a affected creature by biological drives. Psycho condition, basic instincts, feelings, emotions, motives, psycho habits and drives etc., are studied in human sciences. It also studies various aspects of conscious, unconscious and sub conscious parts of human mind and personality making too. The principle of Biological drives considers man as antisocial element. It considers man as a nature can anytime express antisocial behaviour. The economical point of view looks man as an economic creature. It is subject of economics, to view and study the role of a man in production, consuming, exchange and distribution. It considers, money in human life as main object. How do prosperity and poverty affect man, is also studied here. The political science studies man on the basic of ruling, power and state etc., it also discusses relations between man and state. History considers man as the result of part and studies his social emerging, primitive life, society and culture. Human science studies all the aspects of human physical emerging his society, culture, the role of culture in personality developing, his primitive life, economy, political, life, art language, species, religion etc. Sociologists considers man a social animal instead of a lave of basic instincts or illogical creature. They consider him as such a creation whose basic instincts can be timed and changed by socialization process. Man presents himself in such a way that he fulfils the expectations of the society. Man, by socialization, acts according to them, learning social norms. The human sociological concept considers that in the society, crimes, child crimes, suicides and deviations are not den to basic instincts of man but are the result of social environment and social structure. The sociologists considers that, to change antisocial man, first of all we will have to change those social conditions which make him a criminal and 110 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
inspire him to do anti-social activities. They believe that the selfish and anti-social instincts of man can be controlled and they can be turned in the direction of human welfare. They also believe that social- life provides man more freedom for development and self-expression instead of his unsocial nature. What is a man or thinking about the Concept of man in sociology, keeps on changing with the development of sociology? Initially when sociology was close to philosophy, the concept of man was viewed in the philosophical and moral sense. Sociologist like when velar can’t and due him tried to liberate the sociology from the effects of philosophy and tried to bring close to science and kept in the category of science, the scientific temperament was development. In the sociology, the difference in thought in found about relation between man and society, in the historical journey from birth till late. In the sociology, the concept of man has been seen from two viewpoints- historical and theoretical. In the historical context it has been tried to see that in the changing social scenario, what sociology has contributed in understanding the human problems. In the theoretical context, in sociology, how the prevailing theories and approaches are viewed, is studied. Sociology was born in western countries. Therefore, it is affected by western culture, vales, social structure; standards etc. Sociological world view has been naturally western in place of universal. Therefore, the human concept in sociology has been affected by western civilization and culture in place of theoretical understanding. We will discuss here, in the sociology, the theoretical context of human context to change the ant- social man, initially his social. 4.4 TYPES A social institution is a network or organized pattern of social relationships and actions which are relatively permanent and comes into existence to fulfil social needs (or to satisfy basic human needs) and therefore, they can be seen as an indispensable part of the large society or community. In other words, social institutions are complex sets of statuses, roles, organizations, norms, and beliefs that meet people’s basic needs within society. Institution refers to the organized way of doing things. It represents common procedures. Horton and Hunt define it as “social institution is a system of norms to achieve some goal or activity that People feel is important, or more formally an organized cluster of folkways and mores centered around a major human activity. Durkheim has gone to the extent of defining sociology as the science of social institutions. Giddings regards institutions as the organs that conserve what is best in the past of the human race.” Institutions are structured processes through which people carry out their activities. To fulfil his self-interest man forms different types of associations. These organizations and associations have their own working methods practiced method in society to satisfy Thor procedures to achieve their present goals. To fulfils different interests and different objectives man gets help from rules working system, methods, tools, procedures, etc. are used. 111 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
Therefore it is a useful method in society to meet needs. E.g., if we see the campus as a collection of campus chiefs, professors, lecturers, and other staff, the campus is an organization or association and it has some objectives. To fulfil those objectives campus has to adopt a specific method of education, prepares time table, rules, and regulations, adopt an examination system. These all things make the campus an institution. Primary Social Institutions: The most basic institutions which are found even in primitive societies like religion, family, marriage, property, some kind of political system, as primary in character, primary institutions are evolved or developed naturally, unconsciously, and even spontaneously. Secondary Social Institutions: As societies, grow in size and complexities institutions become progressive and more differentiated. These institutions are established to satisfy the secondary needs of people. E.g. education, examination, law, legislation, constitution, parliamentary procedures, business, etc. Secondary institutions are established consciously, purposefully, and in a planned way. 4.5 STRUCTURE AND FUNCTIONS A social institution is a complex, integrated set of social norms organized around the preservation of a basic societal value. Obviously, the sociologist does not define institutions in the same way, as does the person on the street. Laypersons are likely to use the term \"institution\" very loosely, for churches, hospitals, jails, and many other things as institutions. According to Sumner and Keller institution is a vital interest or activity that is surrounded by a cluster of mores and folkways. Sumner conceived of the institution not only of the concept, idea or interest but of an institution as well. By structure he meant an apparatus or a group of functionaries. Lester F Ward regarded an institution as the means for the control and utilization of the social energy Hobhouse describe institution as the whole or any part of the established and recognized apparatus of social life. Robert Maclver regarded institution as established forms or conditions of procedure characteristic of group activity. Sociologists agree that institutions arise and persist because of a definite felt need of the members of the society. While there is essential agreement on the general origin of institutions, sociologists have differed about the specific motivating factors. Sumner and Keller maintained that institutions come into existence to satisfy vital interests of man. Ward believed that they arise because of social demand or social necessity. Lewis H Morgan ascribed the basis of every institution to what he called a perpetual want. For any individual or group to survive it is important that certain human functions are kept in mind. Like the function of controlling the process of reproduction. For the society to exist it’s important that the members of this society itself keep supplying societal members with a nurturing environment. And this is possible only through reproduction. 112 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
And these reproduced members exist as a part of the institution of the family which again is a part of the larger institution which is the society. Other functions include law and order because these are what guide the families to live in an orderly fashion. To make sure that the members of the family and society can support theirs and their family’s financial requirements, the economic institution is created. This depends on the education of the person for which education is supplied through the educational institution. In this way, many institutions exist with the aim of providing the specific details required to live. Institutions are established ways of doing things. It refers to those rules and regulations which in their abstractness focus on the practicality of them by maintaining social interaction and regulated behaviour pattern. It involves discipline and curbing human emotions and behaviour. Recognized usage and procedures are known as institutions of Sociology. There are norms set for and by every society. Even though these norms differ from society to society, the members of a particular society stick to their norms. Only then can the institution prosper. If each one will focus only on themselves then the essence of the institution will be lost and there could be chaos. Say the parents need steady support without which they cannot look after their children because the institution of a family does not teach one that it is their responsibility to look after their children. It is a natural drive and instinct. This is what makes the generation and institution forward else it might collapse. Everyone had to understand their role, reversal of which may alter the peace of the society and its members in general. Because of the presence of organized ways of livelihood, there’s not much competition else many people would have found difficult to survive. In a way, society is helped by the institutions in order to function and are the pillars of society. Without one the other cannot function properly. It is a combined supplication so they are interdependent. If the economic condition is good, automatically a good family can be established. Similarly for a good family to live in a good way, financial strength is necessary. How well the family will run, depends on how educated its members are. Thus the concept of Institution is important to study many social sciences. Every person might have their own idea of an institution. Functions of Social Institution Social institutions have manifest and latent functions attending to make the balance and setting up of complicated relations in the society. These functions are explained as: Continuity of the human race: Family as a social institution functions to preserve the human race and its growth by socially approved way of conjugal relations (marriage), provides food, shelter, and cloth for the survival of life. The political institution provides security, the educational institutions provide knowledge and religious 113 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
institutions foster kindness and morality for better relations in society, keeping the existence of society. Transmission of cultural heritage: Social institutions such as family education, religion, etc. transmits culture to the next generations. The family teaches norms, values, traditions, language, and morality to the individuals. The educational institution imparts knowledge. The religious institution teaches morality, kindness, and the virtues of life. Fulfilment of basic needs: All social institutions strive to meet basic human needs. E.g. marriage satisfies the sexual needs and continuity of the human race. The economic institution gives food and the political institution gives security to life and property. Religion institution provides moral training. Family and school provide education of children, teaches different skills. Social solidarity: Social institution contributes to unity in society. The family institution teaches the value of a sense of belonging to a family as a group and to be loyal, teaches children the norms, values, and traditions of the society. The religious institution teaches people to help others, we feel and gather for a good purpose. The political institution plays role in maintaining security by maintaining law and order. Social welfare and development: Social institutions are for satisfying social needs i.e. human needs the jobs of the welfare of the society. Family provides economic and social security of children, the state (political institution) establishes orphan houses, old aged homes, facilities for the disabled, unemployment allowances, etc. for the welfare of the people. Provision of recreational activities: Social institutions are also°, source of recreation for people. E.g. the family organizes feats all, festivals to provide recreation to its members. The education institutions do this through plays, games, speech contests, and extra-curricular activities. Similarly, the state (political institution) organizes national athletic games competitions to provide entertainment to its people. Mental and physical security: Social institution provides relief to the individuals in trouble and worry and provides mental peace and security. E.g. religion soothes people’s emotions and instils hopes during failures and worries. Family provides a sense of security to the old and children by providing emotional, social and physical, and physical support. The political institution establishes departments of Police, judiciary, and jails to provide security of life, property, honour, and Prestige. Control and direct human behaviour: Social institutions like religion, morality, state, government, law, legislation, etc. control the behaviour of men through the formulation of various no and regulations. E.g. marriage regulates the sexual behaviour of men. 114 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
Assign roles and statuses to the individual: Social institution is a functional entity where the individuals are assigned status and roles to play to achieve the aim of social welfare. 4.6 CHANGING TRENDS. Civil Society Organisations are undergoing major changes and interviewees for the World Economic Forum’s report on the future role of civil society identified a number of trends shaping civil society roles and relationships with other stakeholders. Some of these factors are working in favour of an enhanced role for civil society; others challenge this community to define more sharply its responsibilities and contributions. A subset of the trends identified in interviews, workshops and desk research are worth highlighting, as they were prioritized by interviewees. Global institutions are no longer fit for purpose Members of civil society and business have noted the decline of traditional institutions that have been in place since the end of World War II, and their guiding rules of engagement. Business, government and civil society leaders now want more socially inclusive models of governance and economic policy. The world is becoming hyper connected Through increasing access to the internet, social media and mobile phone technology, the power of the individual as a virtual citizen is on the rise. The scale of social networks has shifted the paradigm of citizen expression. Non-hierarchical communication structures are one result. Civil society, along with business, government and international organizations, are challenged to respond to, represent, and engage this proliferation of voices online in a way that leverages the power of connectivity. Governments are using such connectivity to experiment with different forms of public engagement and consultation: for example, both Egypt and Iceland have employed online technologies to “crowd-source” input into their new constitutions. According to Charles Lead beater in his paper, The Civic Long Tail, “decades after the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the web is creating a parallel but arguably more effective universal set of expectations among citizens.” He continues, “even if social media does not become a platform for overtly political activity, it is already changing how citizens expect to be treated and so what they expect of government.” Interest is growing in the role of faith and religious culture in society Individuals within government, business and civil society are exploring new ways to leverage the strengths of on-the-ground faith-based actors within the context of local community development, as well as in overseas aid and economic development. Faith is also seen as a source of ethical principles and values within business models. Appropriate mechanisms need 115 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
to be defined for engagement with leaders of religious institutions and faith-based organizations. There is profound public pressure – and increasingly an economic argument – for responding to pressing challenges of inequality The extremes of wealth and the depths of poverty that have arisen globally in recent decades provide a stark reality for leaders of government, business and civil society. The power of the internet to vividly project this phenomenon puts each sector under the spotlight to respond swiftly and convincingly. Significant demographic shifts are under way which have yet to be factored into our economic, political or social systems The demographic distribution of young vs. older national populations is having and will continue to have a profound effect on how civil society, business and government position their strategic approaches to deliver job opportunities, health care and mechanisms for responding to citizen needs. The generation of youth that is presently emerging only knows a world that is wired and, significantly, is using social media to address its concerns, exert rights and create positive societal change. Planning for the development of mechanisms to “deliver” in a world forecast to have a population of 9 billion people by 2050 – many of whom will live within emerging economies and in cities – represents a significant challenge. There is reduced certainty of funding size, sources and modes from traditional donors and a rise of new socially driven financial actors Civil Society Organisations have witnessed traditional funding streams shrink. Modifications have been made to donor criteria, including diversification of funding sources, requirements for private sector partners, and more stringent requirements to demonstrate impact. Simultaneously, new sources of finance are emerging, such as the rise of emerging market philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, and social investment products. New mechanisms to access finance are also emerging, such as crowd-sourced funding and models like KIVA, an online lending platform connecting lenders and entrepreneurs. Member organizations of Interaction, an alliance of US-based NGOs, report that whereas they relied on official aid for 70% of their operations 20 years ago, today they raise 70% of their budgets from private sources. There is a widening trust deficit towards institutions and between sectors The rise of citizen protest and the confirming evidence by research firm Edelman and others, reveal a reduction in level of trust by the general public in institutions around the world such as business and government. Trust in governments and the financial sector has particularly been affected. Interviewees also pointed to the ongoing challenge of low levels of trust between certain elements of civil society and the business and government sectors in specific regional and national contexts. 116 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
Governments facing fiscal pressures are scaling back social service provision Recent concerns over government debt and attempts to restore competitiveness after the global financial crisis of 2008 have resulted in austerity measures that cut public spending on social services. Private sector players are increasingly developing strategies to address social and environmental challenges A number of leading businesses are today reorienting their activities with the objective of bringing positive impact to complex societal challenges as a core part of their business and organizational strategies. Alongside major multinationals, this shift is taking place in emerging markets, through the leadership of “Sustainability Champions” such as Florida Ice and Farm Company S.A., based in Costa Rica, which employs strategies for “triple-bottom line performance” (economic, ecological and societal impact) and aims to increase access to their products for poor rural communities and thereby address malnutrition. Such strategies have come to be known as pursuit of “shared value” – which involves creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges. As a result, businesses employing these strategies do not see themselves standing outside civil society but rather as part of an emerging group of leaders acting in the common interest. Civil society is consistently trusted far more than government, business and the media at a time when trust is by far the most valuable currency. Ingrid Srinath, Former Secretary General of CIVICUS In 2011, the Global Impact Investing Network and JPMorgan predicted nearly $4bn of impact investments in 2012, and as much as $1trillion in the coming decade. New patterns of economic and political power are creating a shift in the axis of development The traditional North-South development dynamic is being challenged by geopolitical and economic shifts, including foreign direct investment of emerging economies such as China’s outward investment in Africa; changing focus of donor countries from aid to trade with key emerging market economies; and the new map of the fastest-growing economies in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In response, many international civil society organizations are looking to “internationalize” their funding and management structures. 4.6.1 Family Life Cycle Stage Each family passes through a cycle that begins with the marriage of two young people grows with the coming of children and then again becomes a home of two persons. A view of the family’s life cycle, from its beginning to its end, assuming there are no breaks, reveals definite and discernible stages. Each stage has its own clearly defined situations and problems. 117 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
If the adults will develop knowledge on time, energy and money adjustment then problems of each stage can be easily resolved. The family life cycle may be divided into three major stages, the beginning family, the expanding family and the contracting family. The eminent scholar of home science. Bigelow adds eight sub stages to these three major stages. Most families with children go through all these sub stages. If college sub stage is omitted, a family goes directly from the high school sub stage to the period of vocational adjustment. The beginning family The first sub stage of the family life cycle is the period of establishment. It begins with marriage and continues until the first child is born. It is also called “getting acquainted” stage, when two partners try to know each other’s psychology and behavioural prospects. Both the partners should learn to manage the resources of time, energy and income properly to achieve their long term goal in their married life. The expanding family The expanding family stage covers a longer period than the beginning family stage and includes a number of sub stages. It begins with the birth of the first child and ends when the last child leaves home. The first sub stage is known as child bearing and per school and is also marked by the accumulation of goods. This in turn brings about the development of attitudes that influence future family living. During this period parents take necessary steps to make adjustments with their relations and new child as well. The parents have to shoulder different responsibilities to keep pace with rapid change of the situation. The elementary school period begins a series of overlapping experiences that cover the time when the children are about 6 to 12 years of age. During this sub stage the children begin their formal education and make their first independent contacts with the outside world. In this sub stage parents are primarily concerned with the educational and health needs of the children, creating an environment in which the children will have a feeling of belongingness. Parents will provide nutritious food, suitable clothing and adequate housing to children for physical development as well as provides opportunity to them for social contacts outside the home for social and emotional development. It includes the teen age period of children i.e., within 12 to 18 years of age. Parents will assist to their children whole heartedly in their high school or vocational education to solve their educational, social, recreational and vocational problems by which the children become independent and self-reliant individual. It covers the college period of children. The chief parental duties now-are helping them in choosing a suitable college and financing their education. So during this period a lot of financial adjustment is 118 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
needed by parents. They have to spend more from their savings for college expenses. The parents have to carry out all activity with planned budget during their period. The contracting family Stage This stage begins when the first child leaves home as a young adult and ends when the last child leaves home for a life of his or her own. It is marked by the departure of young adult for service or marriage. It is a period of adjustment for parents and children. The parent’s financial assistance may be needed for the establishment of children. The period of financial recovery begins after the children leave home and become self- supporting. Current expenses drop rapidly’ Debts that have accumulated over the previous stages are paid off and saving for the future takes a large share of the income. Some persons develop their former professional interests like writing, painting, music, teaching etc.; some persons develop their creative interest to get financial benefit. Some may spend money for travel. So the period of financial recovery calls for social and vocational adjustments that look toward retirement. People must plan regarding their time, money and energy to feel independence in their later life. They must make time plan to spend their leisure time for watching the television, reading the spiritual and story books, so that they can develop feeling of fulfilment and adequacy despite their age. The last sub stage is the time of retirement. The wants of individuals during this stage usually grow less intense and the need for care and protection increases. It is the period of adjustment to physical changes, to changes in environmental conditions, to changes in human relations, and often to changes in income. For those who can make the necessary adjustments and who have health and strength, human relations will continue to be satisfying even though the physical setting of the home may change. This is the period not only a vocational art but also management of time energy and money are important both to the family and to the aging person. 4.7 SUMMARY What are the implications of a distributive conception of institutional emergence and change for the ways in which we think about social institutions? In the remaining pages I want to consider this question as a way of summarizing my analysis and arguments. We started out with a set of questions about the social institutions in our everyday lives. Why do we have so many of them? Why does their basic structure differ across communities and societies? How do they develop and change? These questions are important for many reasons, but two are central here. First, their answers are crucial to our understanding of what happens in social life. And second, they are crucial to our assessments of what kinds of institutions we ought to have and whether or not our 119 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
institutions manifest the goals and benefits by which we justify them. These are issues of explanation and justification, issues at the heart of our debates over the nature of the society in which we live. Social structure and social change are general concepts used by social scientists, particularly in the fields of sociology and social and cultural anthropology. They are often conceived of as polarized concepts, with social structure referring to basic characteristics of social life—those demonstrating a lasting and permanent quality— and social change reflecting the opposite. However, the relationship between the two concepts is more complicated. Social structure, for example, cannot be conceptualized adequately without some recognition of actual or potential change, just as social change, as a more or less regular process, is structured over time and is inconceivable without the notion of continuity. Both concepts, in the end, can contribute to a fuller understanding of society, its patterns, and patterns of change. The causes of social change are diverse, and the processes of change can be identified as either short-term trends or long-term developments. Change can be either cyclic or one-directional. The mechanisms of social change can be varied and interconnected. Several mechanisms may be combined in one explanatory model of social change. For example, innovation by business might be stimulated by competition and by government regulation. To the degree that change processes are regular and interconnected, social change itself is structured. Change on different levels—social dynamics in everyday life and short-term transformations and long-term developments in society at large—has been the focus of much attention in the study of society. Social institutions influence an individual’s development as well as life in general when it comes to society and socializing. The three most important social institutions are family, religion, and education. Family institutions help you become the adult you are today and also helps and individual find there place in society. My family values and principles have influenced the person I am today, and the adults my children will become one day. Religion helps guide an individual to see the diversity in society and accept that not everyone is the same and that it is okay to be different. My church has taught me not to judge others that is not my place in life. Education is the most important because it gives you knowledge, skills, and values. My current education has helped prepare me to better understand my role as a leader in my job. I continually incorporate things I have learned in my business classes to better my job performance. Context gives meaning to phenomena. The external and internal world can only be understood by framing it in a simple but convincing way. Institutions are rules that 120 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
shape human behaviour, thereby making life simpler and easier to understand. In this way the world becomes more controllable, which diminishes uncertainty and the existential fear that is created by it. In this paper the context of institutions is the integrated psychic-economic-social world, in which the moral and the political mechanisms are responsible for optimal behaviour. In the economic world institutions are meant to channel the economic force; they are economic-efficiency enhancing devices. In the social world institutions are meant to channel the social force; they are minimising the costs of the status battle and hold society together. In the psychic world institutions are meant to channel the psychic force; they are framing the mind, and help the true-self to develop will-power. Then passions can be controlled in such a way that long term interest of the self is enhanced and personalities integrated. These institutions must be embedded in a cultural context, which constitutes the basic views and goals of the people. On the basis of these cultural properties people can specify coherent sets of rules of behaviour: institutions. These rules are solutions to economic scarcities, social status battles and lack of self- control. The mechanism of institutional change takes place as follows: an unexpected and undesirable economic development takes place. This creates a social conflict. People involved in the conflict are imperfectly rational and imperfectly social. They are inclined to increase their self-respect by means of masculine behaviour, for instance and to increase their social status by being a tough fighter. The long term common interest is at stake, but that is less relevant for them, compared with the level of self-respect and status. If they are more rational and social the reaction to the conflict will be moderate. They listen to the argumentation of the opponents, and take their interests into account. The consensus that exists among rational and social people, namely that all parties must, at least to a certain extent, participate in society and able to live a decent life, leads to the preparedness to accept compromises. The agreements that are concluded also concern the institutional framework. In the case of the Dutch welfare state we see a slow evolution in the framework that increasingly expresses the ideas of the typical Dutch culture. A last point to be made is the question of what is the antonym of the concept of institution. When we want to know what is a male it makes sense to clarify what we mean by a female. If we want to know what is a junior it makes sense to clarify what is a senior. In case of institution it makes sense to find out what is the opposite of rule following behaviour. It has to do with discretion: room for a decision maker to do whatever he desires. He can act emotionally or rationally; but he is at least free to decide, and not bound to a rule that must be applied. Again, the meaning of the term discretion depends on its context. If a boss commands his subordinate to do A in case of B, he requires rule-led 121 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
behaviour. Suppose that a boss says to the subordinate that he is free to decide what to do in case B, but that the outcome must be C. Now there is some room for discretion but the room is limited. In this case the limitation is reflected by the necessary output. In general a world that is perfectly free from any institution, offers people a maximum of discretion. Moreover, in this world people can offer their selves maximum room to behave rule- free; not any rule is established to get control over the self. It means that all people behave on the basis of their passions, including the passion to be rational, ignoring any opportunity to learn and institutionalise successful strategies. We can call this world perfect anarchy: immediate desires are satisfied as much as possible. Ideal- typical anarchists expect natural processes to be responsible for deep satisfaction rather than maximum frustration, and social harmony will be the result of an anarchic structure. The opposite of perfect anarchy is the perfectly institutionalised world. Given the two extremes, completely ruled versus completely rule-free, there must be an optimal institutional framework; a framework that channels people drives and behaviour most effectively towards the realisation of goals that are considered desirable and feasible in the long run. 4.8 KEYWORDS Constitutional Monarchy - A monarchy in which the reigning member of the royal family is the symbolic head of state but elected officials actually do the governing Control Theory- Walter Reckless’s theory that posits that when a person is tempted to engage in deviance, inner controls and outer controls can prevent him or her from doing so. Degradation Ceremony - Garfinkel’s term for the process whereby an individual with a spoiled identity is expelled from a group and stripped of his or her group membership Deviant Subculture- A way of living that differs from the dominant culture, in which members share a particular form of deviance. Divine Right of Kings- An ideology developed by the nobility during the Middle Ages that posited that the authority of the nobility came directly from God. 4.9 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. Create a session on Socioeconomic Characteristics. ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 122 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
2. Create a survey on Structure and Functions of Social Institutions. ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 4.10 UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions Short Questions 1. Define the term Socioeconomic? 2. Describeabout the Family Contexts? 3. Write the first type of Life Cycle Stage? 4. What is meaning of Primary Social Institutions? 5. What is Secondary Social Institutions? Long Questions 1. Discuss the different forms of Family Contexts. 2. Explain the Characteristics of Socioeconomic. 3. Describe the function of Social Institutions. 4. Illustrate the Structure of Social Institutions. 5. Examine the different forms of changing trends in Social Institutions. B. Multiple Choice Questions 1. Who among the following is classical sociologists? a. Foucault and Derrida b. Merton and Karl Mannheim c. Comte and Durkheim d. Morris and Hobhouse 2. Who is the author of the book “the Social Order: An Introduction to Sociology?” a. Robert Bierstadt b. Robert K Merton c. E B Tylor d. Malinowski 3. What is rationalism is a school of thought? 123 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
a. Experience b. Words c. Thought d. Reason 4. What is the Empiricism on which school of thought is based on? a. Theory b. Reason c. Experience d. Thought 5. Which country does George Simmel sociologist belongs? a. Austrian b. French c. British d. German Answers 1-c, 2-a, 3-d, 4-c, 5-d 4.11 REFERENCE References book Chappell, N. L., Funk, L. M., & Allan, D. (2006). Defining Community Boundaries in Health Promotion Research. American Journal of Health Promotion. Charles, N. & Crow, G. (2012). Community re-studies and social change. The Sociological Review. Charles, N. & Davies, C. A. (2005). Studying the particular, illuminating the general: community studies and community in Wales. The Sociological Review. Textbook references Collins, J. (2015). From hospital to home: the drive to support people with intellectual disabilities in the community. International Journal of Developmental Disabilities. Collins, P. H. (2009). The new politics of community. American Sociological Review. 124 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
Colombo, M., &Senator, A. (2005).The Discursive Construction of Community Identity. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology. Website https://tyonote.com/social_institution/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/08/10-trends-shaping-the-future-of-civil- society/ https://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/family/family-life-cycle-3-main-stages/47660 125 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
UNIT 5 – SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS PART III STRUCTURE 5.0 Learning Objectives 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Kinship 5.3 Meaning 5.4 Significance and a Brief Understanding of Incest 5.5 Consanguinity 5.6 Affinity 5.6.1 Heritability and Resemblance 5.6.2 Intangible and Ethereal Affinities 5.7 Clan 5.8 Lineage 5.9 Summary 5.10 Keywords 5.11 Learning Activity 5.12 Unit End Questions 5.13 References 5.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, you will be able to: Define the termKinship. Illustrate the concept of Consanguinity. Explain about Affinity. 5.1 INTRODUCTION In pre-modern forms of society most people worked in the field or cared for the livestock. In the industrially developed society only a tiny proportion of the population works in agriculture, and farming itself has become industrialised — it is carried on largely by means of machines rather in pre-modern forms of society most people worked in the field or cared for the livestock. In the industrially developed society only a tiny proportion of the 126 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
population works in agriculture, and farming itself has become industrialised — it is carried on largely by means of machines rather Modern society also witnesses a shift in the location of work. Before industrialisation, most work took place at home and was completed collectively by all members of the household. Advances in industrial technology, such as machinery operating on electricity and coal, contributed to the separation of work and home. Factories owned by capitalist entrepreneurs became the focal point of industrial development. People seeking jobs in factories were trained to perform a specialised task and receive a wage for this work. Managers supervised the work, for their task was to enhance worker productivity and discipline. One of the main features of modern societies is an enormous expansion of economic interdependence. We are all dependent on an immense number of other workers-stretching right across the world- for the products and services that sustain our lives. With few exceptions, the vast majority of people in modern societies do not produce the food they eat, the houses they live in or the material goods they consume. Industrial processes were broken down into simple operations that could be precisely timed, organised and monitored. Mass production demands mass markets. One of the most significant innovations was the construction of a moving assembly line. Modern industrial production needed expensive equipment and continuous monitoring of employees through monitoring or surveillance systems. Over the last decades there has been a shift to what is often called ‘flexible production’ and ‘decentralisation of work’. It is argued that in this period of globalisation, it is the growing competition between firms and countries that makes it essential for firms to organise production suiting the changing market conditions. To illustrate how this new system operates and what the implications may be for the workers, read the quote from a study of the garment industry in Bangalore. The industry is essentially part of a long supply chain, and the freedom of manufacturers is to that extent extremely limited. There are, in fact more than a hundred operations between the designer and the final consumer. In this chain, only 15 are in the hands of the manufacturer. Any serious agitation for a rise in wages would lead manufacturers to shift their operations to other localities, beyond the reach of unionists... whether it is the payment of the existing minimum wage, or its substantial revision upwards, what is important is to enlist the support of the retailer in order to create the necessary pressure upon the government and local agencies for a higher wage structure and its effective implementation. Thus the vision here is that of the creation of an international opinion forum The economic institution, often simply referred to as “the economy” is responsible for the production, exchange, distribution and consumption of goods and services in society. It could also be called economic system, a term which refers to the social institution through which goods and services are produced, distributed and consumed in society. The ultimate aim is the satisfaction of economic and bio-social needs of society through rational use of limited 127 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
resources available. Basic among the economic needs of society are food, clothing and shelter. The economic institution has strong link with other institutions of society. Its character impact on social behaviour and influences the nature of other social institutions. Goods, services and fund from the economic sector are indeed essential for survival of society and its institutions. In recognition of the immense importance of economic institution, Marx described it as the foundation or ‘infrastructure’ upon which other social institutions which he collectively defined as ‘superstructures’ revolve. It is noteworthy however, that the economic institution is in turn influenced by other social institutions. There are a variety of forms which the economic institution or system have taken in history across societies. Such diverse modes of economic organization practiced over the years by different societies were influenced by several factors including the level of technology at their disposal for tasks of production and distribution. Man is a political animal; hence sociologists see politics, government or political system as a cardinal feature of every society. Irrespective of their size, all social groups have members with powers to control others and to entrench order in their domain. There were forms of political organization even among stateless societies that cut-across kin-group meetings, age- set command, gerontocracy, royal court, women groups etc. All these constitute aspects of political systems. A political system refer to a set of rules and some apparatus for keeping social order, distributing power and allowing decisions to be made in a society. The ultimate aim of the system is the achievement of set goals of the group. The issues of ‘power’ and ‘authority’ are central to all political systems. While power is the ability to manipulate others with or without their consent, authority is the formally recognized right to exercise power. Weber distinguished between traditional authority conferred by custom and accepted practice; legal-rational authority made legitimate by law, and charismatic authority which is power legitimized by the charisma of the individual. Among traditional societies of Africa, two major types of political systems – centralized and centralized models were distinguished. While centralized political system had identifiable centralized authority, including administrative and judicial structures, the centralized arrangements of hunting and gathering societies or some segmentary lineage groups lacked them. Contemporary modern societies operate political systems like democracy, totalitarianism, monarchy, parliamentary system etc. In democracy, participation of the masses, equality, justice, accountability, free and fair election are emphasized. This is unlike in monarchy 128 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
where a family rules for generations. Totalitarianism on its part is a restrictive political form that estranges the people from governance. 5.2 KINSHIP Kinship is a universal of human societies, built around systems of self-centric, reciprocal social relations. In all societies, societal members are conceptually organized, to one degree or another, through structured, reciprocal systems of relations. Kinship systems are broad in their scope and interdigitate with religious, economic, political and other social systems. The kinship relations that are part of a kinship system include, in their cultural meaning, the rights and obligations of kin, including expected (through not always realized) mutually supportive behaviour by kin. The system of kin-term relations provides a kinship framework within which individuals formulate how they interact with their kin and a basis for interpreting the meaning and implications of the behaviour of their kin to them. The kinship framework may also involve a culturally formulated ideology regarding the role and nature of the respective contribution of a male and of a female to the formation of an offspring and to its emotional and mental make-up. Despite a biological mode of reproduction being a constant for all humans, local ideologies and accounts of reproduction vary extensively across human societies; hence these idea systems cannot simply be reduced to epiphenomena of biological reproduction. A group’s ideas about procreation, along with its ideas about kinship relations in general, provide for the social identity of a new born offspring through the family social unit (ranging in form from single parent to extended family) into which it is born and to its position in an already-existing network of kinship relations into which it is entering through kinship relations recognized at birth. Kinship relations also provide an idiom through which forms of social organization are expressed in human societies—especially in pre-state societies—whether the society be a small, hunter-gatherer group or a large, modern industrial state. Birth, in all societies, is culturally marked as a social event during which the kinship relations a new born will have to other persons are activated and identified, usually as part of a ritual or ceremony. The ceremony serves to announce publicly the birth of a new born child to the members of the social unit in which the new born will be raised and to identify and/or reaffirm the primary person(s) responsible for the care and nurturing of a new born. Though kinship relations are formed through birth in accordance with the kinship ideas and ideology of the society in question, they may also be established by other, culturally recognized, means. This includes, in addition to affinal and consanguineal relations, a form of kinship labelled as “sponsorship” by anthropologist Fadwa El Guindi. Sponsorship includes the widespread practice of adopting a child, the god parenthood relationship recognized in Catholicism, and the practice in some societies of forming a kin relation when a woman with milk suckles a child other than her own. Other ways for establishing kin relations include a formal name-giving–name-receiving relation created when the name of one person is given as 129 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
the name of a new born of the same sex. In addition, kinship relations may be established by acts of nurturance or co-residence. In some societies, kinship relations can be changed (outside of marriage) during one’s lifetime through actions and behaviours engaged in by the relevant individuals. Forms of kinship relations Through biological birth, a parent–child relation may be recognized by reference to cultural criteria regarding who is considered to be a parent of whom. Female parentage is generally built around (but is not reducible to) the biological fact of giving birth in coordination with the social fact of marriage. Thus the mother–child relation is identified for the relevant community through cultural recognition of her birth act; otherwise, the new born may be considered illegitimate according to local criteria determining when a biological birth will be recognized as a culturally accepted event. For males, the cultural criteria for being recognized as father are less certain and need not be coupled with a man’s sexual role in reproduction. In addition, there may be uncertainty in knowing what male, if any, should be culturally recognized as the father according to local ideas about what constitutes fatherhood. Together, the mother–child and the father–child relations provide the conceptual basis, in conjunction with the spouse relation established through marriage, for tracing a genealogical connection of one person to another through parent–child and marriage links. Though the presence of a kinship relation between two persons can, in principle, be indicated through tracing a genealogical connection between them, the needed information for determining whether a genealogical connection exists may neither be known to the parties involved nor culturally marked as being of importance, thus kinship, as it is practiced, is not expressed solely through genealogical and marriage connections. Instead, who is akin to whom is identified linguistically through a system of conceptually interconnected kin terms referred to, technically, as a “kinship terminology?” Kinship relations can be computed directly by culture bearers using the kin terms that identify the kinship relations connecting the individuals in question without first referring to, or establishing the presence of, a genealogical connection between them. Kin terms are analytically divided into terms of address, namely the terms used when addressing one’s kin—as when a child says “Mommy, may I go outside and play?”—or terms of reference used to identify the kinship relation of the reference person to speaker—as in a statement like “He is my uncle”—for an English-speaker. Address terms are more variable in their linguistic form than reference terms because they express not only the kinship relation between speaker and listener but also emotional and other characteristics involved in the relationship. For English-speakers, each of the address terms “father,” “dad,” “daddy,” “pop,” and so on, has a different connotation regarding the relationship between speaker and the reference person who is the subject of the term of address. In contrast to address terms, a term of reference explicitly indicates the kinship relation connecting speaker to another person. Collectively, the reference terms constitute the kinship terminology for societal members and 130 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
the terms in the kinship terminology linguistically define and express the kinship-term relations recognized in that society’s kinship system. For English-speakers, the reference terms include father, mother, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, cousin, wife, husband, mother-in- law, father-in-law, and so on. The kinship terminology is a logically structured system of interconnected terms that make it possible to compute the kinship relation between two persons by reference to a third person whose kinship relation to each of the two persons is already known. For English-speakers, if speaker refers to a person as “uncle” and that person refers to yet another person as “child,” then speaker knows to refer to the latter person as “my cousin” even if the actual genealogical connection among the three individuals is unknown to them, as may be the case with adoption. Computations like this are commonly made by two culture bearers to determine the kin-term relation between them by referring to their respective kin-term relations to a third person and making use of the (implicit) structural logic of their kinship terminology. Technically, the computation being made is the kin-term product of (in this case) the reference kin terms child and uncle, with (for English-speakers) the reference kin term cousin being the kin term resulting from taking the kin-term product of child and uncle. From the time of American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, kin relations have been assumed to begin with procreation and are expanded through marriage, so genealogical connections have been taken analytically as the primary way to express the meaning and definition of kin terms for a particular society. However, precisely what is meant by genealogical connections has been subject to different interpretations in kinship studies, with these interpretations ranging from the purely biological to the purely cultural. The biological interpretation was extensively critiqued by David Schneider, thereby leading to his assertion that kinship, at least as it has been studied by anthropologists who make this biological interpretation, does not exist, a claim that parallels the British anthropologist Rodney Needham’s similar assertion regarding kinship as a no subject. Subsequently, a “new kinship” based on the idea of culturally constructed and recognized forms of relationship, in place of kin relations presumed to be established biologically through procreation, has gained traction. While rejection of the idea that kinship is essentially a biological phenomenon is supported by extensive ethnographic data on what constitutes kinship relations from the perspective of culture bearers, not recognized, though, in this proposed paradigm shift is the fact that including procreation as central to kinship systems does not require assuming the primacy of biology for recognizing kin relations. Instead, the process of tracing genealogical connections by culture bearers only requires the idea that parent–child relations, however these may be defined culturally, apply in principle to all persons, not that these relations can be reduced to biological relations. Similarly, the kin terms making up a kinship terminology are organized in a logically coherent manner without any need to first presume a biological foundation. Further, there is no society that fails to have a kinship terminology system expressing, for culture bearers, the conceptual 131 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
organization of their system of kinship relations recognized and linguistically expressed through kin terms. Where substantial differences arise, though, is in the cultural meaning assigned to procreation, including the local understanding of the respective roles of a male and a female (and possibly others) in the formation of an offspring through procreation. This includes how a kinship system, through its terminology viewed as a system of symbols, expresses the kinship relations through which the social/kinship identity of the offspring-to- be being created biologically and born socially is enacted. In effect, though not stated precisely in this manner, what Schneider was criticizing is the presumption (in his reading of the literature on kinship systems) that procreation, even from a cultural perspective, is essentially a biological act having sociological prerequisites. However, rather than being subsumable under biological reductionism, procreation, as viewed by culture bearers, is a social act with biological prerequisites. This leaves open, from an empirical perspective, the scope and kind of relationships that can be included in local ideas about kinship and does not require the unwarranted rejection of a century of rigorous and insightful scholarship on the nature of kinship systems in human societies. Instead of rejection, the domain of kinship can be divided usefully into three aspects: behaviour—what people actually do, rules—what people say are the rules or jural restrictions on behaviour, and categories and relations among categories. These divisions have content varying from less to more abstract and the third has been the focus of theorizing about the categories of kin making up kinship systems and it has been the basis for the formal modelling of kinship terminology systems. Regardless of the structural form that marriage takes on, marriage is not just a cultural tie established between a male and a female but also incorporates, to one degree or another, relations involving the social units in which the bride and groom were members before marriage. In unilineal societies, marriage is normally exogamous with respect to the lineage and may be enacted through a contract between the involved lineages regarding transfer of service, goods, land, or other forms of wealth, thus making marriage an economic as well as a social event. In its simplest form, within patrilineal societies the wealth transfer, often referred to technically as “bride wealth,” is normally from the groom’s lineage through his kin to the bride’s lineage in exchange for her becoming a provider of new members for the groom’s lineage through her reproduction, since her children will be members of her husband’s lineage. In effect, through marriage she is being alienated (to one degree or another, depending on the society) from her lineage and the contract provides compensation to her lineage for her alienation, especially the transfer of her services and reproduction to the groom’s lineage. In matrilineal societies, there is no alienation of a man from his lineage on marriage and wealth transfer may, instead, take the form of a dowry provided by the bride’s father for his daughter upon her marriage, with control of the dowry after marriage being variable from one society to another regarding whether it remains under the control of the bride or comes under the control of the groom after marriage. The inclusion of a dowry as 132 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
part of the marriage act is not limited to matrilineal societies as it provides, more broadly speaking, a way for economic resources to be transferred from the bride’s family to the bride, whether as a means to make a daughter more desirable as a potential wife through the dowry she will bring to the marriage or as a means to help ensure her economic wellbeing after marriage, with the latter typically exogamous at the level of social units within the society of which she is a member. 5.3 MEANING In anthropology, kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of all humans in all societies, although its exact meanings even within this discipline are often debated. Anthropologist Robin Fox states that \"the study of kinship is the study of what man does with these basic facts of life – mating, gestation, parenthood, socialization, sibling ship etc.\" Human society is unique, he argues, in that we are \"working with the same raw material as exists in the animal world, but can conceptualize and categorize it to serve social ends.\" These social ends include the socialization of children and the formation of basic economic, political and religious groups. Kinship can refer both to the patterns of social relationships themselves, or it can refer to the study of the patterns of social relationships in one or more human cultures (i.e. kinship studies). Further, even within these two broad usages of the term, there are different theoretical approaches. Broadly, kinship patterns may be considered to include people related by both descent – i.e. social relations during development – and by marriage. Human kinship relations through marriage are commonly called \"affinity\" in contrast to the relationships that arise in one's group of origin, which may be called one's descent group. In some cultures, kinship relationships may be considered to extend out to people an individual has economic or political relationships with, or other forms of social connections. Within a culture, some descent groups may be considered to lead back to gods or animal ancestors (totems). This may be conceived of on a more or less literal basis. Kinship can also refer to a principle by which individuals or groups of individuals are organized into social groups, roles, categories and genealogy by means of kinship terminologies. Family relations can be represented concretely (mother, brother, grandfather) or abstractly by degrees of relationship (kinship distance). A relationship may be relative (e.g. a father in relation to a child) or reflect an absolute (e.g. the difference between a mother and a childless woman). Degrees of relationship are not identical to heirship or legal succession. Many codes of ethics consider the bond of kinship as creating obligations between the related persons stronger than those between strangers, as in Confucian filial piety. 133 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
In a more general sense, kinship may refer to a similarity or affinity between entities on the basis of some or all of their characteristics that are under focus. This may be due to a shared ontological origin, a shared historical or cultural connection, or some other perceived shared features that connect the two entities. For example, a person studying the ontological roots of human languages (etymology) might ask whether there is kinship between the English word seven and the German word Sieben. It can be used in a more diffuse sense as in, for example, the news headline \"Madonna feels kinship with vilified Wallis Simpson\", to imply a felt similarity or empathy between two or more entities. In biology, \"kinship\" typically refers to the degree of genetic relatedness or coefficient of relationship between individual members of a species (e.g. as in kin selection theory). It may also be used in this specific sense when applied to human relationships, in which case its meaning is closer to consanguinity or genealogy. Kinship is one of the main organizing principles of society. It is one of the basic social institutions found in every society. This institution establishes relationships between individuals and groups. People in all societies are bound together by various kinds of bonds. The most basic bonds are those based on marriage and reproduction. Kinship refers to these bonds, and all other relationships resulting from them. Thus, the institution of kinship refers to a set of relationships and relatives formed thereof, based on blood relationships (consanguineal), or marriage (affinal). ‘Kinship is the socially recognized relationships between people in a culture, who are either held to be biologically related or given the status of relatives by marriage, adoption, or other rituals. Kinship is a broad-ranging term for all the relationships that people are born into or create later in life that are considered binding in the eyes of their society. Although customs vary as to which bonds are accorded more weight, their very acknowledgement defines individuals and roles that society expects them to play.’ ‘Kinship is the recognition of relationships between persons based on descent or marriage. If the relationship between one person and another is considered by them to involve descent, the two are consanguine (“blood”) relatives. If the relationship has been established through marriage, it is affinal.’ ‘Kinship is a system of social relationships that is expressed in biological idiom using terms like “mother”, “son”, and so on. It is best visualized as a mass of networks of related- ness, not two of which are identical, that radiate from each individual. Kinship is the basic organizing principle in small-scale societies like those of the Aborigines and provides a model for interpersonal behaviour.’ 5.4 SIGNIFICANCE AND A BRIEF UNDERSTANDING OF INCEST An incest taboo is any cultural rule or norm that prohibits sexual relations between certain members of the same family, mainly between individuals related by blood. All human 134 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
cultures have norms that exclude certain close relatives from those considered suitable or permissible sexual or marriage partners, making such relationships taboo. However, different norms exist among cultures as to which blood relations are permissible as sexual partners and which are not. Sexual relations between related persons which are subject to the taboo are called incestuous relationships. Some cultures proscribe sexual relations between clan-members, even when no traceable biological relationship exists, while members of other clans are permissible irrespective of the existence of a biological relationship. In many cultures, certain types of cousin relations are preferred as sexual and marital partners, whereas in others these are taboo. Some cultures permit sexual and marital relations between aunts/uncles and nephews/nieces. In some instances, brother–sister marriages have been practised by the elites with some regularity. Parent–child and sibling–sibling unions are almost universally taboo. Debate about the origin of the incest taboo has often been framed as a question of whether it is based in nature or nurture. One explanation sees the incest taboo as a cultural implementation of a biologically evolved preference for sexual partners with whom one is unlikely to share genes, since inbreeding may have detrimental outcomes. The most widely held hypothesis proposes that the so-called Westermarck effect discourages adults from engaging in sexual relations with individuals with whom they grew up. The existence of the Westermarck effect has achieved some empirical support. Another school argues that the incest prohibition is a cultural construct which arises as a side effect of a general human preference for group exogamy, which arises because intermarriage between groups construct valuable alliances that improve the ability for both groups to thrive. According to this view, the incest taboo is not necessarily universal, but is likely to arise and become stricter under cultural circumstances that favour exogamy over endogamy, and likely to become laxer under circumstances that favour endogamy. This hypothesis has also achieved some empirical support. Punishing both parties in an incestuous relation cannot even be beneficial for the genes of individuals punishing a somewhat more distant relative for mating with a closer relative, since punishing the closer relative as well is counterproductive to any function of protecting the closer relative and the health of its offspring. Genetic sexual attraction theory is also incompatible with the theory of smell being a significant factor in avoiding inbreeding. Incest is sexual intercourse between individuals related in certain prohibited degrees of kinship. In every society there are rules prohibiting incestuous unions, both as to sexual intercourse and recognized marriage. The two prohibitions do not necessarily coincide. There is no uniformity as to which degrees are involved in the prohibitions. The rules regulating incest must be investigated in every society by means of the genealogical method. The prohibition may be so narrow as to include only one type of parent–child relationship (though 135 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
this is very rare), or those within the elementary family; or so wide as to include all with whom genealogical or classificatory kinship can be traced. The more usual practice is that unions with certain relatives only are considered incestuous, the relationships being regulated by the type of descent emphasized. In some societies unions with certain persons related by affinity are also considered incestuous. What penalties fall on the individuals concerned; the community as a whole? Are such penalties enforced by authority, or are they believed to ensure automatically by all action of supernatural force? Is there any correlation between the severity of the penalty and the nearness of the blood-tie of the partners in guilt? Should children be born as the result of incestuous unions, how are they treated? Are there any methods, ritual or legal, by which persons who fall within the prohibited degrees and wish to marry can break the relationship and become free to marry? As this excerpt suggests, anthropologists distinguish between social norms and actual social behaviour; much social theory explores the difference and relationship between the two. For example, what is the purpose of prohibitions that are routinely violated (as for example when people claim that incest is taboo yet engage in incestuous behaviour)? It should be further noted that in these theories anthropologists are generally concerned solely with brother–sister incest, and are not claiming that all sexual relations among family members are taboo or even necessarily considered incestuous by that society. These theories are further complicated by the fact that in many societies’ people related to one another in different ways, and sometimes distantly, are classified together as siblings, and others who are just as closely related genetically are not considered family members. Moreover, the definition restricts itself to sexual intercourse; this does not mean that other forms of sexual contact do not occur, or are proscribed, or prescribed. For example, in some Inuit societies in the Arctic, and traditionally in Bali, mothers would routinely stroke the penises of their infant sons; such behaviour was considered no more sexual than breast- feeding. It should also be noted that, in these theories, anthropologists are primarily concerned with marriage rules and not actual sexual behaviour. In short, anthropologists were not studying \"incest\" per se; they were asking informants what they meant by \"incest\", and what the consequences of \"incest\" were, in order to map out social relationships within the community. This excerpt also suggests that the relationship between sexual and marriage practices is complex, and that societies distinguish between different sorts of prohibitions. In other words, although an individual may be prohibited from marrying or having sexual relations with many people, different sexual relations may be prohibited for different reasons, and with different penalties. For example, Trobriand Islanders prohibit both sexual relations between a woman and her brother,and between a woman and her father,but they describe these prohibitions in very 136 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
different ways: relations between a woman and her brother fall within the category of forbidden relations among members of the same clan; relations between a woman and her father do not.This is because the Trobriander’s are matrilineal; children belong to the clan of their mother and not of their father. Thus, sexual relations between a man and his mother's sister (and mother's sister's daughter) are also considered incestuous, but relations between a man and his father's sister are not.A man and his father's sister will often have a flirtatious relationship, and, far from being taboo, Trobriand society encourages a man and his father's sister or the daughter of his father's sister to have sexual relations or marry. The incest taboo is one of the most widespread of all cultural taboos, both in present and in past societies. Most modern societies have laws regarding incest or social restrictions on closely consanguineous marriages. In societies where it is illegal, consensual adult incest is seen by some as a victimless crime. Some cultures extend the incest taboo to relatives with no consanguinity such as milk-siblings, step-siblings, and adoptive siblings, albeit sometimes with less intensity. Third-degree relatives (such as half-aunt, half-nephew, and first cousin) on average have 12.5% common genetic heritage, and sexual relations between them are viewed differently in various cultures, from being discouraged to being socially acceptable. Children of incestuous relationships have been regarded as illegitimate, and are still so regarded in some societies today. In most cases, the parents did not have the option to marry to remove that status, as incestuous marriages were, and are, normally also prohibited. A common justification for prohibiting incest is avoiding inbreeding: a collection of genetic disorders suffered by the children of parents with a close genetic relationship. Such children are at greater risk for congenital disorders, death, and developmental and physical disability, and that risk is proportional to their parents' coefficient of relationship—a measure of how closely the parents are related genetically. But cultural anthropologists have noted that inbreeding avoidance cannot form the sole basis for the incest taboo because the boundaries of the incest prohibition vary widely between cultures, and not necessarily in ways that maximize the avoidance of inbreeding. In some societies, such as those of Ancient Egypt, brother–sister, father–daughter, mother– son, cousin–cousin, aunt–nephew, uncle–niece, and other combinations of relations within a royal family were married as a means of perpetuating the royal lineage. Some societies have different views about what constitutes illegal or immoral incest. For example, in Ancient Egypt, as in Samoa, marriage between a brother and an older sister was allowed, while marriage between a brother and a younger sister was declared as unethical. However, sexual relations with a first-degree relative (meaning a parent, sibling or child) are almost universally forbidden. In ancient China, first cousins with the same surnames (i.e., those born to the father's brothers) were not permitted to marry, while those with different surnames could marry (i.e., maternal cousins and paternal cousins born to the father's sisters). 137 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
Several of the Egyptian Pharaohs married their siblings and had several children with them. For example, Tutankhamun married his half-sister Ankhesenamun, and was himself the child of an incestuous union between Akhenaten and an unidentified sister-wife. Several scholars, such as Frier et al., state that sibling marriages were widespread among all classes in Egypt during the Graeco-Roman period. Numerous papyri and the Roman census declarations attest to many husbands and wives being brother and sister, of the same father and mother. However, it has also been argued that available evidence does not support the view such relations were common. The most famous of these relationships were in the Ptolemaic royal family; Cleopatra VII was married to her younger brother, Ptolemy XIII, while her mother and father, Cleopatra V and Ptolemy XII, had also been brother and sister. Arsinoe II and her younger brother, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, were the first in the family to participate in a full-sibling marriage, a departure from custom. A union between children of the same parents was very common in both Greek and Macedonian tradition so it evidently caused some degree of astonishment: the Alexandrian poet States was put to death for criticizing the \"wicked\" nature of the marriage, while his contemporary Theocritus more politically compared it to the relationship of Zeus with his older sister, Hera. Ptolemy and his sister-wife, Arsinoe, put emphasis on their incestuous union through their mutual adoption of the epithet Philadelphus (\"Sibling-Lover\"). They were the first full-sibling royal couple in the kingdom's known history to produce a child, Ptolemy V, and for the subsequent century and more, the Ptolemies participated in full- sibling unions wherever possible. It may have been observation of their next-door Ptolemaic competitors that guided the Seleucids to their own experimentations with sibling unions. The daughter of Antiochus III and Laodice III, Laodice IV, married her two full-blooded older brothers, Antiochus and Seleucus IV, and also her younger brother, Antiochus IV. Her second and third brother- husbands ruled as king one after the other, making her the queen in both her marriages. She bore children to all three of her brothers from her union with them. One of them was her son, Demetrius I, who also took the throne at one point and married a full-sister of his own, Laodice V. Laodice V bore her brother-husband three children, and their marriage is the last known sibling marriage in the kingdom's history. The fable of Oedipus, with a theme of inadvertent incest between a mother and son, ends in disaster and shows ancient taboos against incest as Oedipus blinds himself in disgust and shame after his incestuous actions. In the \"sequel\" to Oedipus, Antigone, his four children are also punished for their parents' incestuous Ness. Incest appears in the commonly accepted version of the birth of Adonis, when his mother, Myrrha has sex with her father Cinyras during a festival, disguised as a prostitute. In ancient Greece, Spartan King Leonidas I, hero of the legendary Battle of Thermopylae, was married to his niece Gorgo, daughter of his half-brother Cleomenes I. Greek law allowed 138 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
marriage between a brother and sister if they had different mothers. For example, some accounts say that Epinine was for a time married to her half-brother Cimon. Incest was sometimes acknowledged as a positive sign of tyranny in ancient Greece. Herodotus recounts a dream of Hippias, son of Pesistratus, in which he \"slept with his own mother,\" and this dream gave him assurance that he would regain power over Athens. Suetonius attributes this omen to a dream of Julius Caesar, explaining the symbolism of dreaming of sexual intercourse with one's own mother. 5.5 CONSANGUINITY In none of the hospitals visited had any information on consanguinity previously been recorded on the case-sheets of the patients. When discussing what information could be elicited accurately for the purposes of the study the physicians in several of the hospitals felt that the full coding proposed was too elaborate. Accordingly in these centres some simpler system was agreed, that most frequently adopted being: no consanguinity, first cousins, and less closely related than first cousins. The coding adopted for each centre are set out in the appropriate Table IX in the Basic Tabulations by Centres booklet. It is, however, possible to regroup the data where necessary from all centres into the simple three classes mentioned above. Cross-checks on accuracy of recording could not be arranged and there are, judging from past experience, likely to be some inaccuracies in the data. In particular there may be under recording resulting from unwillingness of mothers to admit to what is thought, in greater or lesser degree, to be undesirable in many communities. There is no reason to believe that there were any systematic biases in recording. The possibility of such errors arising were discussed with those in the hospitals visited and in particular, whenever possible, it was arranged that the mother should be questioned before the child was born. The possible association of consanguinity with conservatism about marrying relatives in the lowest income groups in rapidly developing societies where inbreeding is decreasing raises problems, if there should also be a higher frequency of certain malformations in the lowest income groups. This is mentioned later as a possible contribution to some of the association of consanguinity with anencephalous in Alexandria. Data from Belfast and Mexico 2 are not included in the main tabulations in this section. In both cases, after consultation with the organizers it was agreed that the data were not complete. As will be seen from Table 19.4, in the 22 centres there were in all 14 000 mothers recorded as related to their husbands in 369 472 marriages for which records of consanguinity were made, i.e., in 3.7 % of all marriages. However, the frequency of consanguinity varied very considerably from about 33 % in Alexandria to less than 0.1 % in Zagreb. As consanguinity might be expected to be associated with stillbirths and early deaths and with increased malformation frequency it seemed advisable to ensure that any effect of consanguinity on mortality did not merely reflect higher mortality in malformed infants. In 139 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
Table 19. 1, therefore, the frequency of consanguinity is shown in single-born infants who failed to survive, excluding those who were malformed. It will be seen that over-all the mortality in the offspring of consanguineous parents (855/13 736, or 62.1 per 1000 total births) was considerably higher than in those of unrelated parents (12 779/355 710, or 35.9 per 1000). Table 19.2, part a, sets out the data in convenient form for comparison of the effects of consanguinity and mortality in individual centres. Such comparisons were made both using exact X2 tests and by calculating an expected number of LBD and SB infants in the offspring of related parents based on the experience of the unrelated parents. As the populations of births are relatively large and the numbers of stillbirths and hospital deaths small, it seems appropriate where possible to use the latter method as the more valid, to treat the ratios as Poisson variables and to test for significance of the differences on that assumption. By reason of the nature of the data a 1 % level of significance seems to be appropriate in order to have confidence in the validity of differences. On such a basis the observed numbers of LBDs and SBs in the offspring were higher where the parents were related than where they were not in Bombay, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. In Czechoslovakia, Hong Kong and Zagreb, where no deaths were observed in the offspring of related parents, comparisons could be made only by exact X2 tests. The difference was significant at a 5 % level in Hong Kong As will be seen, there is considerable variation between centres in the ratio of observed to expected and it is less than unity in a number of centres so that if an expressed inbreeding \" load \" was calculated it would be negative, a phenomenon pointed out by Neel Nevertheless, that consanguinity is the main determinant of the observed excess mortality in the offspring of related parents is strongly suggested by the summed data. The frequency in the offspring of marriages of those related as first cousins or closer was 692/10 492 while that in those of less closely related parents was 163/3271; this difference is highly significant In recent years elaborate approaches to analysis of such consanguinity data have been developed and there has recently been a comprehensive review by Schull & Neel. Use of such analyses, however, requires a confident identification of the degree of each consanguineous marriage and use of appropriate coefficients of inbreeding to enable the detriment to the offspring to be expressed in terms of lethal equivalents. The data on which such calculations could be based are set out fully in the Basic Tabulations by Centres booklet. The authors may set out such an analysis later when a number of further inquiries to centres have been answered and they are satisfied that the data are sufficiently accurate to justify more sophisticated numerical treatment. When all major malformations are considered it will be seen from Tables 19.2, part B, and 19.4 that a higher proportion of the parents of malformed children than of normal infants were consanguineous and that there is a considerable variation in contribution to the total proportions from different centres. Of the 237 malformed infants born to related parents, the major contributors are Alexandria (48 cases), Bombay (52 cases), Singapore (25 cases), 140 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
Bogota (14 cases), Medellin (21 cases), Panama (13 cases) and Pretoria (11 cases). These are all centres where the parental consanguinity rate for all births is high. In contrast, six centres, all with low over-all consanguinity rates, contributed none or a single case. Over-all, there is no material difference in the malformation frequency in the offspring of FC & CFC and LFC parents although in both Alexandria and Bombay the frequencies are significantly higher in the offspring of the former than of the latter. Part B, sets out the data for comparison, part A, for mortality. The numbers of malformations are relatively small and again the comparisons are made either on the assumption that the ratios may be treated as Poisson variables or by exact X2 tests. There appear to be significantly higher malformation frequencies in children born to related parents in Medellin, Czechoslovakia, Alexandria, Bombay and Panama. In all the other centres the ratio of observed to expected is greater than unity with the notable exception of Johannesburg, where there is a relative excess of malformed in the offspring of unrelated parents which, on a basis of exact probability, is unlikely to have occurred by chance. Consanguinity and specific groups of malformations little can be learned from consideration of the numbers of related parents of all malformed. These defects are very heterogeneous in etiologic and, a number of them are really the expression of homozygosity for a single gene mutation. It is therefore necessary to look at the associations of consanguinity with specific groups of malformations. It would be preferable, of course, to look at those of individual malformations, but in very few are the numbers sufficiently large to permit of meaningful comparisons. The percentage of consanguineous parents of all infants who were not malformed was 3.7%. As may be seen from Table 19.5, this proportion is exceeded in the B, G, J, K, M and N groups and the contribution from each of these groups therefore appears to merit some consideration. Consideration of the data in Table 19.5 shows that much the largest contribution to the number of related parents who had a child with a neural tube defect comes from Alexandria. In that centre the frequencies of all neural tube defects in children of parents of the different types were, first cousins and closer, 30/2109 (14.2 per 1000); related in less degree than first cousins, 9/1046 (8.6 per 1000); and unrelated 37/6431 (5.7 per 1000). This pattern strongly suggests a real influence of consanguinity. As can be calculated from the figures, even if the Alexandria data are omitted there is still a significantly higher frequency in the other centres in the offspring of consanguineous marriages (P > 0.001). The other major contributing centre is Bombay. If the data from that centre are also removed there still remains an excess of consanguinity in remaining related parents of children with neural tube defects relative to those unrelated. However, after both the Bombay and Alexandria data have been removed the difference is no longer technically significant. If we ignore neural tube defects there remain 3816 malformed children and, of these, 162 (4.2%) had consanguineous parents. The frequency of these malformations in the offspring of consanguineous marriages was 162/13 925 (11.6 per 1000) and their frequency in the offspring of unrelated marriages was 3816/352 866 (10.8 per 1000), a difference which is not 141 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
significant. It is clear, therefore, that in these data by far the most important contribution to any association between malformations and consanguinity is from the neural tube defects and further, that the two centres mainly contributing are Alexandria and Bombay. This is rather unexpected and a significant increase in the offspring having neural tube defects born to related parents has not been shown in any other data. However, in the only large series of cases where consanguinity of parents has been known to have been analysed, either the frequency of neural tube defects or that of consanguinity of parents has been low so that the data have not been very informative. Polman and Penrose have suggested that some cases of anencephalous are determined by single recessive genes but the evidence has not been very impressive. It is not uncommon for women to give birth to two or more anencephalic in different pregnancies but this is usually attributed to unfavourable intra-uterine environmental influences and to support a predominantly maternal determination there is the well-known case of a woman who, having had three anencephalic foetuses by her husband, subsequently had a fourth following artificial insemination by donor. No morphological differences have been demonstrated in cases suspected of being determined by single recessive genes, although from other experience it would be expected that a difference would be detectable between a single-gene manifestation and a “phenocopy \". These and other considerations mentioned in section 4, particularly the high correlations between countries of frequencies of neural tube defects, suggest that any single-gene contribution, if present, must be very small and contribute very little to the association between neural tube and consanguinity frequencies in the present data. Consanguinity, kinship characterized by the sharing of common ancestors. The word is derived from the Latin consanguineous, “of common blood,” which implied that Roman individuals were of the same father and thus shared in the right to his inheritance. Kin are of two basic kinds: consanguineous (sharing common ancestors) and affinal (related by marriage). In some societies other pairs of individuals also treat each other as relatives— for example, the wives of a pair of brothers, relatives by adoption, and godparents who have special kinlike relationships (fictive kin). Consanguineous kinship is a universal type; it includes those with common ancestors and excludes individuals who lack ancestors in common. In the modern sense, consanguinity is a genetic concept. From a strictly biological point of view, the term is inappropriate (as are the terms mixed blood and good blood), because the genetic contributions of ancestors are not passed on to their descendants as blood but through genes contained in the chromosomes located in cell nuclei. Chromosomes are composed of nucleic acids (DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid) and proteins. DNA is the constituent portion of the chromosome that carries genes, and it is coded in specific ways to produce and control protein synthesis, with parts of each parent’s genetic message transmitted to the offspring. From a genetic perspective, consanguinity influences the probabilities of specific combinations of genetic characteristics called genotypes. 142 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
Consanguinity results in the inheritance, from common ancestors of both parents, of transmissible capacities to synthesize and control nucleic acids and proteins, the essential substances of all organisms. A major application of data on consanguinity reflects the probability that two individuals of known degree of consanguinity to another individual will share the traits of that person. This probability depends on the mode of inheritance and the degree of penetrance or expressivity of the causative genes. The mode of inheritance may, for example, be dominant or recessive. A pair of genes occupying the same relative position in a set of two chromosomes in the cell nucleus (these genes are called alleles) can code for two alternative traits, such as greenness and yellowness in peas. Both alleles may encode only one trait, or each may specify a different trait. When the alleles differ, both the trait that is observed and its mode of inheritance are described as dominant. Conversely, if the trait is observed only when both alleles are identical, it is recessive. A third mode of inheritance is termed sex-linked. Genes for haemophilia, for example, are present in both males and females, but it is males who are much more commonly affected with the disease. The degree of penetrance is the frequency with which any trait or effect is shown in a group or population that has the gene corresponding to that trait. Expressivity is the variable degree to which a given trait manifests in an individual. 5.6 AFFINITY When Garth and Mills first published From Max Weber, many English-speaking readers who knew only Parsons’ translation of The Protestant Ethic and The “Spirit” of Capitalism were no doubt surprised to learn that the: “…decisive conception by which Weber relates ideas and interests is that of ‘elective affinity’”. Elective affinity, which in Garth and Mills’ estimation is a “decisive” concept, does not appear in Parsons’s translation, but not because the German term plays no important role in the Protestant Ethic; it appears instead as “correlation”. Parsons thereby transforms a chemical metaphor that Weber took from Goethe’s famous novel by the same name, and turns it into a more palatable metaphor for Anglo-American social scientists—that of statistics1 “Affinity” and “Elective Affinity” are indeed important terms in Weber’s work, as many scholars have recognized. There is, however, very limited consensus about what the term in fact means. It is probably going too far to suggest, however, that “the exact meaning of this term, which Weber often used, is contested”, because “contested” implies an active and ongoing debate. As Michael Lowy points out, the absence of debate is particularly surprising, given that it is such a frequently used keyword in some parts of sociology2. Few scholars seem to have given the term much thought, and fewer still have made any concerted effort to understand the term in Weber’s work in light of its origins. In the one of the few comprehensive overviews of the different interpretations of “elective affinity” to date, J.J.R. Thomas argues that the different understandings can be divided largely by whether the interpreter tends towards a “materialist” or “non-materialist” 143 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
understanding of Weber. This is probably not the most helpful pair of terms by which to understand any social thinker, and is more reflective of 1970s and 1980s sociology than it is of Weber’s discursive framework. The concepts are not entirely foreign to Weber either, however, though Weber talks about ‘idealist’ instead of ‘non-materialist’ understandings of social phenomena. He then typically argues that although either viewpoint is consistent and plausible, neither is entirely adequate to the understanding of most phenomena. It therefore seems justifiable to divide previous interpretations of “elective affinities” along the lines of materialist and non-materialist readings, so long as we take it as a schema for organizing Weber interpreters, rather than one for understanding Weber himself. The ‘materialist’ reading of Weber’s elective affinities begins with Garth and Mills’ argument that “elective affinity” was Weber’s means of connecting interests and ideas, and this proved to be quite influential in American sociology, particularly during the era of the Marx-Weber debates. It serves as a Weberian placeholder for the Marxian notion of ideology, and provides scholars who lean towards Weber rather than towards Marx a keyword for Weber’s superiority. After all, Weber provided the means of relating material interests and ideas, without assuming that ideas are simply expressions of interests. This ‘materialist’ reading has also been adopted by other theorists, with minor variations, including Anthony Giddens, and Frank Parkin. Both argue that religious innovators have considerable autonomy from their social locations, but that the ideas will tend to be appropriated by groups (‘carriers’) with whose interests they fit. Of these readings, one of the most sophisticated is still the description provided by Werner Stark: is no place for disembodied spirits; even ideas must have bodies if they are to last, and so they are on the lookout for appropriate social groupings who can take them in and carry them along. But human groupings, of whatever kind, will, for their part, always be on the lookout for appropriate ideas to give expression to their essence and their strivings, for, material as this life is, it nevertheless has a spiritual side to it. Thus, there will be a gradual convergence between the substructures and superstructures, not convergence ab initio. Stark’s theory has the virtue of emphasising the mutual accommodation of ideas and carriers: groups are on the lookout for ideas, and ideas are on the lookout for groups. As I will argue below, this is an indispensable dimension to Weber’s concept of elective affinity that is typically glossed over by ‘materialist’ readers, who often have no idea what to make of the suggestion that ideas actively search out a ‘carrier’. While these materialist accounts of Weber’s provide a tenable account of the connection of ideas to interests in the social world, the readings diverge considerably from Weber’s own texts, especially his early ones. The primary problem, insofar as they are intended to represent Weber’s views, is that while elective affinity may articulate the relation between ideas and interests, Weber sometimes uses the term in such a way that relates ideas to ideas, or “interests” (if we use this as shorthand for more material forces) to “interests”3 as Lowy quite rightly observes. Thus even if elective affinity does sometimes connect “ideas” with particular “social carriers”, it does not only do this. The second problem is that these ‘materialist’ accounts overlay Weber’s texts with a Cartesian division of the material and ideal that is only doubtfully consistent with Weber’s 144 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
theoretical orientation. Thus, while their contributions to understanding Wahlverwandtschaft can by no means be dispensed with, neither do they exhaust what Weber means by the term. Some of the ‘non-materialist’ accounts are virtually indistinguishable from the ‘materialist’ accounts—except that they emphasise that ideal factors can have causal efficacy. How this actually works is a matter of some ambiguity, and the writers who make such assertions are typically less consistent than the ‘materialist’ authors in this respect, although in this they are truer to a certain ambiguity about the term in Weber’s texts. Non-materialist interpretations typically stress, quite rightly, that Weber sometimes uses the term to describe the relation between two beliefs, and they tend to emphasise those passages of Weber’s writing in which this is the case, such as the elective affinity of ethical prophecy and monotheism. While Parsons exorcised the term from his translation of the Protestant Ethic, when he discusses it in The Structure of Social Action, elective affinity refers to the way certain ideas and beliefs tend to cluster together due to the internal logic of each. Perhaps the most consistent non- materialist understanding of Elective Affinity is R. H. Howe’s argument for a Kantian logic in Weber’s analysis. Howe understands Wahlverwandtschaft as a parallel term to Kant’s Affinitas; it thus specifies not the relations between ideas and interests, but articulates the connection between the inner logic of ideal types in an analysis. Despite the many strengths of Howe’s argument, including recognizing the methodological importance of Kant for Weber, and the important place he accords Goethe in his attempt to come to terms with Weber’s theoretical logic, in the final analysis his argument is not really compelling. The connection between Affinitas and Wahlverwandtschaft works better in English than it does in German –both are translated using the English word “affinity”. The two terms do not fully correspond with one another in Weber’s, Kant’s or Goethe’s thought. In Weber’s first published use of the term “elective affinity” he suggests that it is worthwhile “accepting for the time being this superficially ambiguous term”. For J.J.R Thomas, Weber’s use of elective affinity is shorthand for ambiguity itself. He rightly observes that the reference to Goethe’s Elective Affinities would be perfectly obvious to turn of the century German readers. Drawing on Gandalf’s famous critical study of the novel in which the literary critic insists that the central meaning of the novel is the theme of ambiguity, Thomas suggests that “elective affinities” is Weber’s shorthand way of signalling that there is a relationship between the two things connected by that term, but it is non-deterministic and ambiguous, a short hand “etcetera clause” for this indeterminacy. Thomas’ argument does have considerable intuitive appeal, especially when it comes to suggesting that the term plays a role in his non-deterministic conception of social relations. Thomas assumes, however, that Gandalf’s interpretation of the novel is decisive for Weber’s use of “elective affinities”, and that Weber could expect his readers to understand what he meant in the terms Gundolf had proposed for interpreting Goethe’s novel. While Weber’s first published use of elective affinity dates from 1904, and it is used extensively in the 1904-5 version of the Protestant Ethic as well as Weber’s responses to his critics, Gandalf’s study was not published until 1916, the year he joined the faculty at Heidelberg 145 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
Like Howe, Thomas, having clearly articulated the importance of Goethe for understanding what Weber means by an “elective affinity”, then turns to a source other than the novel after which the concept is named—Howe turns to Kant, and Thomas turns to Gundolf. In like fashion, Michal Lowy argues that Weber derives the notion of elective affinity from Goethe’s use of the metaphor, but shifts his attention to the meaning of the term in a tradition of chemistry that had long since lost its currency by Weber’s time. Further, he complicates the question by trying to understand the term in all of Weber’s writings synoptically, without due attention to the question of how the concept may have changed in Weber’s texts. While Lowy is quite right that the chemical analogy is central to understanding the concept of elective affinities, all of these analyses could have benefited from closer attention to the source all three recognize as the origin of Weber’s analogy itself, Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities. There is good reason to believe that Weber took the term “elective affinity” from Goethe’s novel by the same name. Since Weber doesn’t reference the book, or identify the term as deriving from Goethe, however, we are forced to rely on strong circumstantial evidence, including the importance of Goethe’s thought in Weber’s life and work, the expert witness testimony of Weber scholars as to the likely provenance of the term, and the original social context in which Weber expected the text to be read. Most importantly, there are remarkable parallels between Weber’s uses of the term and the way that the metaphor of elective affinities is used in Goethe’s novel, which I will discuss at length below. Goethe exercised an enormous influence over the cultural and intellectual life of the German-speaking world of the 19th and early 20th century he was a figure of “almost divine proportions for generations of Germans, revered from all sides”. A thorough familiarity with Goethe’s life and fiction was a requisite mark of distinction for the cultured, educated bourgeois in that milieu, including the ability to quote from his writings by heart. In Thomas’s words, Weber’s “reference, in employing the term ‘elective affinity’ is as surely a reference to Goethe’s novel as a reference by an English social scientist to Hamlet would be a reference to Shakespeare”. Indeed, if Weber had wanted to avoid any perceived allusion to a novel by Goethe, he would have been well advised to choose a different expression than the title of one of them. While Faust was widely acclaimed as Goethe’s masterpiece (even if its meaning was hotly contested) the ‘minor’ works were by no means considered unimportant. When Walter Benjamin set himself to establishing his reputation as a literary critic, it was to Elective Affinities that he turned his attention. Goethe was a major force in Weber’s intellectual and aesthetic life. As we know from Marianne Weber’s biography of her husband, she notes that Weber read the entire 40 volumes of Goethe’s collected works while Weber was still in his Tertia, and in his adult life regularly read and re-read Goethe for pleasure. In his scholarly work, Weber regularly quotes Goethe, and there is a growing literature on the important role of Goethe in Weber’s thinking, one that is comparable with that of Nietzsche, Kant and Marx. As in many of his other essays, in the Protestant Ethic essays, Weber quotes Goethe several times. In the Protestant Ethic, he does so four times with a reference and at least one further time without attributing a source. 146 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
Among Weber scholars who have commented on the term “elective affinities” in passing or who have examined it at length, there is a clear consensus that Weber takes the term from Goethe. Indeed, it is difficult to know where else it might have come from: by Weber’s time, it was an antique chemist’s concept that had long fallen into disuse except as an allusion to the novel. Other than Goethe’s novel, no other potential sources for this otherwise highly unusual expression have been identified in the Weber literature. Although the source of Weber’s allusion has often been noted, there has not yet been any thorough examination of the influence of Goethe’s novel Wahlverwandtschaft on its namesake in Weber’s work. Here I aim to fill that gap with a close reading of both Goethe’s Elective Affinities and Weber’s 1904-1905 Protestant Ethic essays, as well as Weber’s responses to his earliest critics where Weber found himself forced to restate the basic premise of the book in light of significant ‘misunderstandings’ of his argument. I will argue that the chemical metaphor of elective affinity plays a much larger role in Weber’s text than perhaps even he realised, and that it is helpful for reconstructing the logic of the argument and addressing the recurring questions about the causal claims of the Protestant Ethic thesis. 5.6.1 Heritability and Resemblance Heritability is a statistic used in the fields of breeding and genetics that estimates the degree of variation in a phenotypic trait in a population that is due to genetic variation between individuals in that population.It measures how much of the variation of a trait can be attributed to variation of genetic factors, as opposed to variation of environmental factors. The concept of heritability can be expressed in the form of the following question: \"What is the proportion of the variation in a given trait within a population that is not explained by the environment or random chance?\" Other causes of measured variation in a trait are characterized as environmental factors, including observational error. In human studies of heritability these are often apportioned into factors from \"shared environment\" and \"non-shared environment\" based on whether they tend to result in persons brought up in the same household being more or less similar to persons who were not. Heritability is estimated by comparing individual phenotypic variation among related individuals in a population, by examining the association between individual phenotype and genotype data, or even by modelling summary-level data from genome-wide association studies. Heritability is an important concept in quantitative genetics, particularly in selective breeding and behaviour genetics (for instance, twin studies). It is the source of much confusion due to the fact that its technical definition is different from its commonly- understood folk definition. Therefore, its use conveys the incorrect impression that behavioural traits are \"inherited\" or specifically passed down through the genes. Behavioural geneticists also conduct heritability analyses based on the assumption that genes and environments contribute in a separate, additive manner to behavioural traits. 147 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
Heritability measures the fraction of phenotype variability that can be attributed to genetic variation. This is not the same as saying that this fraction of an individual phenotype is caused by genetics. For example, it is incorrect to say that since the heritability of personality traits is about .6, that means that 60% of your personality is inherited from your parents and 40% comes from the environment. In addition, heritability can change without any genetic change occurring, such as when the environment starts contributing to more variation. As a case in point, consider that both genes and environment have the potential to influence intelligence. Heritability could increase if genetic variation increases, causing individuals to show more phenotypic variation, like showing different levels of intelligence. On the other hand, heritability might also increase if the environmental variation decreases, causing individuals to show less phenotypic variation, like showing more similar levels of intelligence. Heritability increases when genetics are contributing more variation or because non-genetic factors are contributing less variation; what matters is the relative contribution. Heritability is specific to a particular population in a particular environment. High heritability of a trait, consequently, does not necessarily mean that the trait is not very susceptible to environmental influences.Heritability can also change as a result of changes in the environment, migration, inbreeding, or the way in which heritability itself is measured in the population under study.The heritability of a trait should not be interpreted as a measure of the extent to which said trait is genetically determined in an individual. The extent of dependence of phenotype on environment can also be a function of the genes involved. Matters of heritability are complicated because genes may canalize a phenotype, making its expression almost inevitable in all occurring environments. Individuals with the same genotype can also exhibit different phenotypes through a mechanism called phenotypic plasticity, which makes heritability difficult to measure in some cases. Recent insights in molecular biology have identified changes in transcriptional activity of individual genes associated with environmental changes. However, there are a large number of genes whose transcription is not affected by the environment. Estimates of heritability use statistical analyses to help to identify the causes of differences between individuals. Since heritability is concerned with variance, it is necessarily an account of the differences between individuals in a population. Heritability can be univariate – examining a single trait – or multivariate – examining the genetic and environmental associations between multiple traits at once. This allows a test of the genetic overlap between different phenotypes: for instance hair colour and eye colour. Environment and genetics may also interact, and heritability analyses can test for and examine these interactions. A prerequisite for heritability analyses is that there is some population variation to account for. This last point highlights the fact that heritability cannot take into account the effect of factors which are invariant in the population. Factors may be invariant if they are absent and do not exist in the population, such as no one having access to a particular antibiotic, or 148 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
because they are Omni-present, like if everyone is drinking coffee. In practice, all human behavioural traits vary and almost all traits show some heritability. Family resemblance is a philosophical idea made popular by Ludwig Wittgenstein, with the best known exposition given in his posthumously published book Philosophical Investigations .It argues that things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all of the things. Games, which Wittgenstein used as an example to explain the notion, have become the paradigmatic example of a group that is related by family resemblances. It has been suggested that Wittgenstein picked up the idea and the term from Friedrich Nietzsche, who had been using it, as did many nineteenth century philologists, when discussing language families. The first occurrence of the term family resemblance is found in Arthur Schopenhauer who attributed the term to the school developed by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling . The next occurrence appeared in a note from 1930, commenting on Oswald Spengler's ideas.The notion itself features widely in Wittgenstein's later work, and in the Investigations it is introduced in response to questions about the general form of propositions and the essence of language – questions which were central to Wittgenstein throughout his philosophical career. This suggests that family resemblance was of prime importance for Wittgenstein's later philosophy; however, like many of his ideas, it is hard to find precise agreement within the secondary literature on either its place within Wittgenstein's later thought or on its wider philosophical significance. Since the publication of the Investigations, the notion of family resemblance has been discussed extensively not only in the philosophical literature, but also, for example, in works dealing with classification where the approach is described as \"polythetic\", distinguishing it from the traditional approach known now as \"monothetic\". Prototype theory is a recent development in cognitive science where this idea has also been explored. As the idea gained popularity, earlier instances of its occurrence were rediscovered e.g. in 18th- century taxonomy,in the writings of Lev Vygotsky. The local context where the topic of family resemblances appears is Wittgenstein's critique of language. In Philosophical Investigations §65-71 the plurality of language uses is compared to the plurality of games. Next it is asserted that games have common features but no one feature is found in all of them. The whole argument has become famous under the heading 'language games'. The larger context in which Wittgenstein's philosophy is seen to develop considers his uncompromising opposition to essences, mental entities and other forms of idealism which were accepted as a matter of fact in continental philosophy at the turn of the preceding century. In his view, the main cause for such errors is language and its uncritical use. In the received view, concepts, categories or classes are taken to rely on necessary features common 149 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
to all items covered by them. Abstraction is the procedure which acknowledges this necessity and derives essences, but in the absence of a single common feature, it is bound to fail. 5.6.2 Intangible and Ethereal Affinities Place is disguised, hidden or simply ignored in much sociological research. Belonging, however, has become a focus of sociological concern. This thesis proposes that one way of belonging is through belonging-in-place leading to a sociological positioning of place as an active participant in social life. In much sociological research places have been seen as fixed and essentialised. To avoid this problem, this study turned to geography and anthropology for suitable frameworks incorporating an open, fluid and relational understanding of place. In particular, in gold’s concept of the ‘tasks cape’ has been used to understand the connections between place, people, activity and time. The thesis argues that ‘imagined’ and narrativized places create only an ‘outer layer’ of belonging and that it is through embodied connections to other people in the place (what I call a ‘peoples cape’) and through inalienable connections to material places over time that a three dimensional ‘ontological belonging’, as a way of being (and doing) in the world, can develop. Belonging, often spoken of as a sense or feeling, is here shown to be the outcome of social practices, by embodied beings, in a material place. The research took a phenomenological approach in order to see the life-world of the participants from within. A multi-dimensional belonging was uncovered through various user driven qualitative methods: biographical interviews and photo and written diaries with families who have lived in one place, Wigan, for at least three generations. The diaries detailed social encounters which revealed that knowing other people and being known are crucial to an embodied belonging-in place. Taking photos alongside the diaries enabled specific places of importance to the respondents to be discussed and these revealed that places can be passed on, as inalienable gifts, from one generation, or one life phase, to the next. Inalienable traces of previous generations of Wiganers are present in the material place. The phenomenological methodology and the mix of qualitative methods enabled an inductive analysis which disclosed the everyday life-world of these people in this place. Diaries, both written and photographic, together with other respondent directed methods could be used more widely to explore seemingly mundane aspects of social life from the perspective of the participants. The research found that place is not merely a backdrop to social life but is an integral part of the social practices carried out by embodied and emplaced people. A greater emphasis on both place and materiality as they impact social life could enhance much sociological research. Sociology often treats place as a passive context for social life. This research stems from my undergraduate dissertation investigating farming families in Cheshire. I interviewed four couples out of whom three of the men were living in the houses they grew up in having taken over their father’s farm. As Steve expressed it: ‘we’re all from farming backgrounds going back numerous generations...I’ve always got what I wanted right here’. This attitude made me question what part place plays in people’s lives and identities. The inherent difficulty in 150 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)
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