In 2006, in its series on motherhood, BBC News reported that Italy’s
fertility rate—at 1.33 children per woman—is one of the lowest in the
world. Coupled with an aging population, experts estimate there will
14 million fewer Italians by 2050.
As a cultural anthropologist who studies the demographic trend involving
super-low fertility, particularly in Italy, I am interested not only
in how families are made but also in how the idea of the family is
constructed in the realm of everyday life as well as the arena of politics.
Definitions of the family vary as much as families themselves. Families
are diverse across cultures and over time. Even within contemporary
nation-states, a wide range of family forms and values proliferate.
If there is something universal about the family, it may very well
be its vulnerability as a tool of governance.
A classic definition, such as that formulated by anthropologist George
Murdock, characterizes the family as involving common residence, economic
cooperation, and biological reproduction. The U.S. Census Bureau considers
the family as “two or more persons related by birth, marriage, or adoption,
who reside together.”
Webster’s points to the roots in the household: “all the people living
in the same house” and then extends that notion to a common American
usage: “the basic unit in society traditionally consisting of two parents
rearing their children.” Subsequent definitions are less narrow and
more culturally inclusive: “a group of people related by ancestry or
marriage” and “all those claiming descent from a common ancestor; tribe
or clan; lineage.”
Anyone who has ever taken a cultural anthropology course will be familiar
with diversity of family forms. Many societies the world over have
practiced polygyny, wherein one man has multiple wives, and a few societies
have practiced polyandry, wherein one woman has multiple husbands.
Numerous societies have histories of extended families whose members
raised children. The custom among elite and even impoverished women
of handing over infants to wet nurses suggests that cultures have a
long history of elaborating on as well as policing family-making practices.
Same-sex households have existed over time and within various societies
and social classes.
In the United States, as of 2000 data, there is not one family arrangement
that represents half the population. Nevertheless, we can certainly
identify a dominant ideology of the normative family. The popular television
show The Simpsons may very well represent the American family ideal,
consisting of a married man, woman, and their biological 2.5 children
replete with all their love, conflicts, and dysfunctions.
In the mainstream U.S. kinship system, as anthropologist David Schneider
observed some decades ago, Americans distinguish between two kinds
of relatives: those related by blood and those related by contract.
In the first case, blood symbolizes a natural substance; in the second
case, law comes to stand as a code for conduct. In each case, the organizing
principles signify relationships of unity and “diffuse, enduring solidarity.”
Kinship is therefore very similar to nationality in terms of the symbolic
ties that bond disparate people together.
Although families and kinship exist in all parts of the world, their
diverse forms give pause to any assumptions that “the family” might
be a universal value. Whose values? What kinds of families? Who is
allowed to marry whom?
How does the idea of family come to serve certain political agendas
and exclude others? Furthermore, how do governments, religious institutions,
and political movements use the conjugal family to incite populations
to behave in particular ways or to create moral warrants for normal
or deviant behavior?
The stakes of family making are anything but neutral.
