Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Family

Family denotes a group of people or animals (many species form the equivalent of a human family wherein the adults care for the young) affiliated by a consanguinity, affinity or co-residence. Although the concept of consanguinity originally referred to relations by "blood," anthropologists[who?] have argued that one must understand the idea of "blood" metaphorically, and that many societies understand 'family' through other concepts rather than through genetic distance.
One of the primary functions of the family is to produce and reproduce persons, biologically and socially. Thus, one's experience of one's family shifts over time. From the perspective of children, the family is a family of orientation: the family serves to locate children socially, and plays a major role in their enculturation and socialization.From the point of view of the parent(s), the family is a family of procreation the goal of which is to produce and enculturate and socialize children. However, producing children is not the only function of the family; in societies with a sexual division of labor, marriage, and the resulting relationship between two people, is necessary for the formation of an economically productive household.
A conjugal family includes only the husband, the wife, and unmarried children who are not of age. The most common form of this family is regularly referred to in sociology as a nuclear family.
A consanguineal family consists of a parent and his or her children, and other people.
A matrifocal family consists of a mother and her children. Generally, these children are her biological offspring, although adoption of children is a practice in nearly every society. This kind of family is common where women have the resources to rear their children by themselves, or where men are more mobile than women.
May be in family member............
Grandparent
  • Grandfather: a parent's father
  • Grandmother: a parent's mother
  • Grandson: a child's son
  • Granddaughter: a child's daughter
    For collateral relatives, more classificatory terms come into play, terms that do not build on the terms used within the nuclear family:
  • Uncle: father's brother, mother's brother, father's/mother's sister's husband
  • Aunt: father's sister, mother's sister, father's/mother's brother's wif.Nephew: sister's son, brother's son, wife's brother's son, wife's sister's son, husband'sbrother's son, husband's sister's son
  • Niece: sister's daughter, brother's daughter, wife's brother's daughter, wife's sister's daughter, husband's brother's daughter, husband's sister's daughter.When additional generations intervene (in other words, when one's collateral relatives belong to the same generation as one's grandparents or grandchildren), the prefixes "great-" or "grand-" modifies these terms. And as with grandparents and grandchildren, as more generations intervene the prefix becomes "great grand", adding an additional "great" for each additional generation.
    Most collateral relatives have never had membership of the nuclear family of the members of one's own nuclear family.
The model, common in the western societies, of the family triangle, husband-wife-children isolated from the outside, is also called oedipal model of the family, and it is a form of patriarchal-family.
Many philosophers and psychiatrists analyzed such model. One of the most prominent of such studies, is Anti-Œdipus by Deleuze and Guattari (1972). Michel Foucault, in its renowned preface, remarked how the primary focus of this study is the fight against contemporary fascism. And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini [...] but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.
In the family, they argue, the young develop in a perverse relationship, wherein they learn to love the same person that beats and oppresses them. The family therefore constitutes the first cell of the fascist society, as they will carry this attitude of love for oppressive figures in their adult life. Kindship and family forms have often been considered as impacting the social relations in the society as a whole, and therefore been described as the first cell or the building social unit of the structure of a society. Fathers torment their sons. Deleuze and Guattari, in their analysis of the dynamics at work within a family, "track down all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives".
As Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault, also other philosophers and psychiatrists like Laing and Reich, have explained that the patriarchal-family conceived in the West tradition, serves the purpose of perpetuating a propertarian and authoritarian society. The child grows according to the Oedipal model, which is typical of the structure of capitalist societies, and he becomes in turn owner of submissive children and protector of the woman. some argue the family institution conflicts with human nature and human primitive desires, and that one of its core functions is performing a suppression of instincts, a repression of desire commencing with the earliest age of the child.[20] As the young undergoes physical and psychic repression from someone they develop love for, they develop a loving attitude towards authority figures. They will bring such attitude in their adult life, when they will desire social repression and will form docile subjects for society.
Michel Foucault, in his systematic study of sexuality, argued that rather than being merely repressed, the desires of the individual are efficiently mobilized and used,to control the individual, alter interpersonal relationships and control the masses. Foucault believed organized religion, through moral prohibitions, and economic powers, through advertising, make use of unconscious sex drives. Dominating desire, they dominate individuals.
According to the analysis of Michel Foucault, in the west:
the [conjugal] family organization, precisely to the extent that it was insular and heteromorphous with respect to the other power mechanisms, was used to support the great "maneuvers" employed for the Malthusian control of the birthrate, for the populationist incitements, for the medicalization of sex and the psychiatrization of its nongenital forms.
—Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality vol I, chap. IV, sect. Method, rule 3, p.99.

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