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OAH Magazine of History Copyright © |
Your Family in History: Anthropology at HomeJohn R. Gillis |
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| For about a decade I have been teaching a sophomore-level undergraduate course called "Your Family in History." As the title suggests, this course encourages students to explore their own family's history in broader contexts. However, it takes an approach that is perhaps best described as anthropological, focusing on the cultural rather than behavioral dimensions of family life. While it provides students with firm foundation in the conventional dimensions of family history the demographics of birth, marriage, and death, family economies, marriage patterns, class and ethnic diversity, etc. it challenges them to ask questions about the meanings of family, how those meanings are constituted, and how they have changed over time. In other words, it asks students to think anthropologically as well as historically.
Purposes The course is designed to encourage students to do ethnographic research on some dimension of their own family culture. Because virtually all my Rutgers students are New Jersey residents, they are in a particularly good position to do research on their own families or on relationships they define as family. I insist that they pick a topic early in the term on some dimension of family culture and that they explore the experience of at least three generations, including their own, so as to document both change and continuity over time. I am equally insistent that they provide a historical explanation for the changes they discover, relating their family's history to that of the society and culture at large. They are given guidance in ethnographic and oral methods, but I make sure through the readings and discussions of the first weeks that they develop a firm grounding in the history of family as it is now understood by professional historians. However, I am careful to leave open the definition of "your family" so that students are free to explore a whole range of relationships that ordinarily might not be defined as such. To get them thinking on the level of meaning, I start the semester by asking them to fill out a survey that asks them to indicate whether they could imagine designating as family a range of relationships that include everything from two-parent couples with children, to gay/lesbian partners, to singles devoted to pets, to roommates in dormitory or prison settings. We tabulate and discuss the results, teasing out the assumptions behind the diverse meanings of family in contemporary culture. This exercise prepares them for reading an article entitled "Is There a Family? New Anthropological Views," which suggests some of the problems involved in defining family (1). Through this assignment, I hope to divest family of some of the naturalized, apparently self-evident qualities that are attached to it; and to suggest that we understand family through cultural lenses, lenses that we must become aware of if we are to understand the ways in which family is ideologically constructed, not only across space but also through time. I am particularly concerned to get the students thinking about the diverse languages, images, myths, and rituals through which family is represented and constituted. In our own time we find it very difficult to avoid using the concept of "The Family," itself a historical construct. "The Family is a highly important and useful imaginary," notes Donald Lowe, "More than a sign, it is an image that can arouse culturally constructed nostalgia and longing. . . . The Family is an integral part of the culture of late capitalism" (2). The image of the family is used to sell everything from "home-cooked" frozen dinners to political candidates, but in this course I am more concerned with the ways that families themselves make use of it to represent themselves to themselves. In my own work I make the distinction between families we live with and families we live by. The first are the families as defined by the census and social survey research, namely coresident members of households who define themselves as related to one another. The families we live by will not be found in census tables or statistical surveys however. They are mental constructs that often overlap with the families we live with and to include not only a far more extended array of kin but both the dead and the unborn. Families we live by not only occupy a much larger space than the household, but are extended over time, belonging to the past and the future as much as to the present (3). What I like to call our imagined families are no less real to us than the people we live with on a day-to-day basis. They are made real through a set of cultural practices that are so embedded in contemporary culture that these go unrecognized. Such practices as family photography, family reunions and vacations, weddings, funerals, and graduations are all constitutive of our modern sense of family. Through them family is made present even in the absence of family members. In a similar way, notions of home have an existence quite independent of actual living arrangements. Home is also a mental construct, but no less real than the household itself. It too is constituted through a set of cultural practices homecomings, home cooking, home decorating which are so common today that they are usually thought of as belonging to nature rather than culture; to timeless tradition rather than living history. The course is designed to disabuse students of such naturalist, eternalist assumptions by demonstrating that both the families we live with and those we live by have histories; histories that are related and help explain one another. As a consequence of this approach, students have chosen to research a very wide range of topics. Included among these are: Family vacations Structure of the Course The initial lectures and readings focus on preindustrial Europe and America, exploring a world in which family life was very different from anything we know today. Here I stress the peculiar demographic and economic conditions of the preindustrial household, noting the absence of the kinds of family times and family places that contemporary nostalgia has falsely associated with families in the rural past (4). Confronted with the absence of family meals and the utter lack of hominess in the preindustrial household, students are forced to ask where our pastoral images come from and what function they serve in contemporary culture. Having exposed some of the myths of preindustrial family life, it is then time to move on to the Victorian era, where, during what I call the first family revolution, so many of the features of modern family life were invented. It comes as a bit of a shock to students to find that many of the features they have assumed to be very old Christmas with family, for example are in fact relatively recent in origin. We discuss the causes and functions of the emerging cycles of daily, weekly, and annual family time that originated among the Protestant middle classes of Western Europe and North America from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. We pay particular attention to the process of ritualization, which was a response to centrifugal forces of modern linear time that had left families with a sense of a shrinking present. I attempt to provide students with an anthropological understanding of ritual, but one that is rooted in the very specific context of urbanization and capitalist industrialization (5). The genius of Victorian rituals lay in their capacity to calm the terrors of time by bringing the temporal resources of the past and future into the present. We also explore the ways that the newly invented notion of "home" was a response to agoraphobia induced by the emptying of public space in the course of the nineteenth century. Here the work of cultural geographers like Yi-Fu Tuan is highly relevant to a cultural understanding of notions of home (6). Once we have a firm grasp of the newly created dimensions of family time and family space, we are ready to look at the cultural construction of motherhood, fatherhood, and childhood in the Victorian era. Once again the starting point are the demographic, economic, and legal changes that altered the nature and function of marriage, repositioned childbearing and child-rearing, and altered generational relations in a significant way. We examine the ways in which the Victorian middle-class invention of the white wedding served as a cultural means of coping with changing gender relations. The redefinition of fatherhood associated with the termination of household production is explored in relation to the expanded symbolic importance of motherhood. Here I assign Michael Kimmel's study of American manhood in order to examine the ways changing notions of gender shaped family. The reimagining of childhood as a period of innocence is explained through reference to changing demographics, but also in relation to shifting religious sensibilities (7). This in turn opens up the possibility of exploring the cultural invention of adolescence and gendered notions of boyhood and girlhood that appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century. Exploration of the Victorian moment in the history of modern family life provides the class with a set of analytical tools with which to explore the second great revolution in family that we are living through today. It also provides a point of reference to examine the exaggerated claims about family decline that are so much a part of the literature on contemporary family life. The last segment of lectures and discussions turns to this contemporary revolution. We begin by reading Carol Stack's classic ethnography, All Our Kin, which provides a fascinating picture of working-class African American family life so at odds with the Victorian middle-class model. It reminds us not only of structural differences, but the diversity of family cultures found in America today. Elizabeth Pleck's recent exploration of African American family rituals provides grounds for fruitful comparison and analysis (8). Extraordinary diversity marks family life today, but even those families that might be regarded as most traditional are now changing at a rapid rate. We are experiencing yet another revolution in the families we live by as well as in the families we live with. In this part of the course we look at what has happened to marriage since the 1970s, exploring this against the backdrop not only of changing definitions of masculinity and femininity but the shifting understanding of sexual orientation which has challenged heterosexual norms. We revisit motherhood and fatherhood, and take into account the advent of the "hurried child" and cultural redefinitions of the life course that have brought forth new age categories such as the "preteen" and the "young-old." The matrix of family times and family places comes into focus as we examine the recent explosion of new rituals and the proliferation of second homes. There is no avoiding the question of where families are heading. I ask the class to read one of the clearest expositions of the "family decline" thesis, but I juxtapose this with one of my own responses to the question. Once again, I try to get students to work with the distinction between the families we live with and those we live by. The first is undergoing a set of changes comparable to that which triggered the Victorian revolution in family life 150 years ago. But while living arrangements are changing drastically, so too are contemporary cultural practices. Looked at in this way, family values, if by that we mean the value placed on "The Family" as a central icon, are stronger than ever before. The gap between the family ideal and family reality is growing, but there is nothing new about this divergence. It is a condition that appears to be built into the very nature of capitalist industrial society, one that a cultural history of family illuminates much better than does the kind of ahistorical sociological analysis on which much of the family decline literature rests. During the first ten weeks students are also researching and consulting with me on an individual basis. In the eleventh and twelfth weeks I meet with each member of the course to discuss their research and go over their plans for their papers. In the last two weeks of the course, students present a short version of their work to a subset of the class before handing in the final version. Abbreviated Syllabus Part I. What is Family Anyway? Week II. Pinning Down the Subject: Studying Families Part II. Emergence of Modern Families Week III. Family Life before the Industrial Age Housefuls of Strangers Week IV. The Victorian Moment and the First Family Revolution Week V. Making Marriage Modern Reconciling Masculinity and Femininity Week VI. Modernizing Parents and Children Part III. Contemporary Families Week VIII. Diversity of Contemporary Family Life: Class, Race, and Ethnicity Week IX. Changing Family Structures and Functions Week X. Future of Family Part IV. Presentation of Student Research Week XI. Research and Individual Meetings with Instructor Week XI. Research and Individual Meetings with Instructor Week XII. Oral Presentations of Final Paper Week XIII. Oral Presentations of Final Paper Endnotes 1. Jane Collier, et al., "Is There a Family? New Anthropological Views, in Rethinkinq the Family: Some Feminist Questions, ed. Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom (New York: Longman, 1982) 25-39. 2. Donald Lowe, The Body in Late-Capitalist USA (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1995) 102. 3. John R. Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press). 4. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992). 5. Barbara Myerhoff, "Rites and Signs of Ripening: The Intertwining of Ritual, Time, and Growing Older," in Age and Anthropological Theory, ed. David Kertzer and Jennie Keith (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). 6. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977). 7. John R. Gillis, "Birth of the Virtual Child," paper presented as the Seamus Heaney Lecture, Dublin, Ireland, March 2000. 8. Corol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); and Elizabeth H. Pleck, Celebratinq the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). Bibliography Collier, Jane, Michelle Rosaldo, and Sylvia Yanagisako. "Is There a Family? New Anthropological Views." In Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions. Edited by Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom,25-39. New York: Longman, 1982. Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Elmer-Dewitt, Philip. "Now for the Truth about Americans and Sex." Time (17 Oct, 1994) 62-70. Gillis, John R. "Boys will be Boys: The Discovery of Adolescence, 1870-1900," in Chapter 3, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770 to the Present, New York: Academic Press, 1974. ____"Birth of the Virtual Child," unpublished paper, 1999. ____"Is the Family Really in Decline," unpublished paper, 1995 ____A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, the Quest for Family Values. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. London: Free Press, 1996. Lowe, Donald. The Body in Late-Capitalist USA. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Myerhoff, Barbara. "Rites and Signs of Ripening: The Intertwining of Ritual, Time, and Growing Older." In Age and Anthropological Theory. Edited by David Kertzer and Jennie Keith. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Pleck, Elizabeth H. Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Popenoe, David, "American Family Decline, 1960-1990: A Review and Appraisal," Journal of Marriage and Family 55 (August, 1993). 527-55. Stack, Carol. All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. John Gillis is a professor of history at Rutgers University. He is author of several influential books on family history, including Youth and History (1975), For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (1985), and, most recently, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values (1997). He is also the editor of The European Experience of Declining Fertility and Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (1992). He is past cochair of the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing the best in family scholarship to the wider public. In the spring 2001 he was a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences in Uppsala. |