In the 1950s, an Indian scholar named Irawati Karve set out on an unusual journey. Instead of studying temples or kings, she collected something most people never stop to notice: the words families use for their own relatives. She travelled across the country, region by region, writing down what people called a father’s brother, a mother’s brother, a wife’s sister, a husband’s mother.
As she moved across the map of India, the words changed (Fig. 1.0-1). And so did the rules. In much of the north, a young man could not dream of marrying his cousin; in much of the south, marrying a particular cousin was the ideal match. In some communities a widow was expected to marry her late husband’s brother. Elsewhere the joint household of many brothers together was the very picture of respectability.
Diagram
Fig. 1.0-1 – a stylised map of India lightly divided into broad regional zones (north, central, south, east), each tagged with a small cue that the words for relatives and the rules of marriage differ from zone to zone
Karve’s great insight, set out in her study of kinship in India, was that these were not random habits. Behind the everyday words and the wedding rules lay a hidden architecture — settled patterns of kinship, marriage and family that quietly decide who we count as relatives, whom we may marry, and where we belong.
That hidden architecture is what sociologists call a social institution. This chapter is an invitation to see it clearly.
Keep these five questions in mind as you read — by the end of the chapter you will be able to answer every one of them.
Of all the relationships in your life, some you have chosen — friends, a favourite teacher — and some you never chose at all. You did not pick your parents, your grandmother, your cousins. They were simply given to you at birth, and society expects you to treat them as relatives whether you like them or not.
This given, taken-for-granted web of relatives is the subject of our first institution: kinship. It is the oldest and most basic way in which human beings organise themselves into groups. Before there were states, schools or markets, there was kinship.
We will look at kinship in two steps: first what the word means, and then the two great kinds of kin tie — the tie of blood and the tie of marriage.
In everyday speech, a “kin” or a relative is simply someone we are related to by blood or by marriage. In simple societies this web of kin was everything: it decided a person’s rights, their duties, their share in land, and their very place in the world.
The anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers gave a compact definition that sociologists still use: kinship is the social recognition of biological ties.
The two words that matter most in Rivers’ phrase are “social recognition.” Kinship rests on biology, but it is never merely biological. Society decides which biological ties will be counted as important, and how each relative is to be treated.
Consider how this plays out. A child adopted into a family is treated as fully kin, though no blood connects them. A stepfather may be called and obeyed as a father. In some communities a widow’s new husband becomes, socially, the father of her earlier children. The biology has not changed; the social recognition has.
So the same biological relationship is named and valued differently from one society to another. That is why kinship is studied as a social institution and not as a branch of biology.
To describe kin relationships neatly, anthropologists start from a single reference person and trace outward from them. This central individual is called ego — Latin for “I”. Your grandmother is your father’s mother; your father is ego’s parent, and your grandmother is the parent of ego’s parent. Fixing an ego lets us map any relative’s position precisely.
Kinship, then, has two possible foundations. A person can be tied to ego by blood — descent from a shared ancestor — or by marriage. These two foundations give us the two basic types of kinship that we take up next.
The first type is consanguineous kinship — kinship based on blood, that is, on birth. Your parents, your brothers and sisters, your children, your grandparents and your father’s brothers are all your consanguineous kin. People related to ego by blood in this way are also called cognates.
Consanguineous ties have a distinct character. They are ascribed, that is, fixed by birth and not chosen: you cannot resign from being your sister’s brother. They are also permanent — the tie does not dissolve if relations sour, and it continues even after a parent’s death, percolating down to later generations. Because these relatives share what society treats as common blood, their relations tend to be informal, intimate and taken for granted.
The second type is affinal kinship — kinship created by marriage. The moment a marriage takes place, a whole set of new relatives appears: a husband and wife, a son-in-law and father-in-law, a wife’s sister and a sister’s husband. Relatives acquired through marriage are called affines.
Affinal ties are the mirror image of consanguineous ones. They are acquired, not given by birth; a person chooses (or has arranged) the marriage that creates them. They tend to be marked by distance and formal respect rather than easy intimacy — think of how carefully a son-in-law behaves before his mother-in-law. And they are comparatively fragile: if the marriage ends through death or separation, the affinal tie between the two families often loosens or breaks.
Diagram
Fig. 1.2-1 – a small genealogical chart with an ego at the centre; blood links to parents, siblings and children marked as consanguineous, and the links created by ego’s marriage (to spouse, and on to the spouse’s parents and siblings) marked as affinal, using the standard symbols: triangle for male, circle for female, an equals sign for marriage
Notice in Fig. 1.2-1 how the two kinds of tie run in different directions. Blood ties reach up and down the generations of ego’s own line; marriage ties reach sideways, out to a second family that had no blood connection before.
Though we separate them for study, blood and marriage are woven tightly together in real social life. Every marriage links two consanguineous groups, turning strangers into affines. And most societies enforce an incest taboo — a rule forbidding sexual relations or marriage between close blood relatives — which forces people to seek partners outside their own blood group.
The result is a self-repairing web: because you cannot marry your own kin, your marriage must knit your blood group to another, and that group’s next marriage knits it to a third. Consanguinity and affinity thus constantly overlap and reinforce each other, holding the wider society together.
Not all relatives feel equally close. Your mother and your father’s brother’s wife’s sister are both, in some sense, “family” — but one is at the centre of your life and the other at its far edge. Sociologists capture this difference of closeness through the idea of the degree of kinship.
The degree of a kin tie is measured by counting the steps that separate a relative from ego. The fewer the steps, the nearer the kin. On this basis, anthropologists distinguish three degrees — primary, secondary and tertiary. The scheme applies to blood and marriage kin alike.
A person who is directly related to ego, with no one standing in between, is a primary kin. These are the relatives of ego’s own nuclear family.
Ego’s primary consanguineous kin are father, mother, brother, sister, son and daughter. Ego’s primary affinal kin is the spouse — the wife or the husband. In each case the tie is immediate: there is a single, direct link between ego and the relative.
Now take any one of ego’s primary kin and look at their primary kin. Those relatives — one step further out — are ego’s secondary kin.
The logic is simple. Ego’s father is a primary kin; the father’s brother is a primary kin of the father, and therefore a secondary kin of ego. The father’s brother stands two links away from ego. In the same way, ego’s grandparents (the parents of ego’s parents) are secondary kin, and so are nephews and nieces. On the marriage side, the wife’s brother — ego’s brother-in-law — is a secondary affinal kin.
Go one step further still. The primary kin of ego’s secondary kin — or, put the other way, the secondary kin of ego’s primary kin — are ego’s tertiary kin.
The father’s brother’s son is the classic example. He is the primary kin (son) of ego’s uncle, who is himself a secondary kin of ego; equivalently, he is a secondary kin of ego’s father. Either way he sits three links from ego, and so is a tertiary kin. The sister-in-law of one’s brother, or the son-in-law of one’s uncle, are tertiary kin of the affinal kind.
Diagram
Fig. 1.3-1 – three concentric rings around a central “EGO”: the inner ring labelled Primary kin (father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter, spouse); the middle ring Secondary kin (grandfather, father’s brother, brother-in-law); the outer ring Tertiary kin (father’s brother’s son, uncle’s son-in-law), showing closeness decreasing outward from ego
Notice, in Fig. 1.3-1, how the number of relatives swells as we move outward. Ego has only a small handful of primary kin, but many more secondary kin, and a great many tertiary kin. G.P. Murdock, who studied kinship systematically, pointed out that the tertiary kin of a single individual can run into the hundreds.
This matters, because if every one of those hundreds of relatives were treated as a close and demanding kin, the circle would grow “as wide as the entire society” and lose all meaning. So every society draws a line, recognising some relatives as active kin and letting the more distant ones fade. Where exactly the line falls is decided not by biology but by social custom.
The degree of kinship is not just a diagram on paper; it shapes real social life. Some occasions call only the primary kin together; others draw in the whole spread of secondary and tertiary relatives. A small household ritual may involve only parents and siblings, while a wedding pulls in cousins, in-laws and their families from many villages. In this way the degree of a tie quietly decides who is expected to turn up, who is owed a duty, and who may be politely forgotten.
We have seen that consanguineous kinship is traced through blood. But blood can be traced in more than one direction — up through the father, up through the mother, or up through both. The rule a society uses to trace this line, and to decide which ancestors “count”, is called descent.
Descent is the principle that connects a person to their ancestors and, through them, to a wider group of blood relatives. It answers a very practical question: of all the people you could claim as kin, which line will decide your group, your name, your inheritance and your identity?
Whatever line it follows, descent performs the same set of tasks in every society.
It fixes a person’s membership of a kin group — the group you belong to by birth. It carries an identity and a name down the generations. It governs inheritance and succession, deciding who receives property and position. And it usually decides whom one may not marry, since marriage inside one’s own descent group is normally forbidden.
A group formed on this principle is called a descent group. When such a group can trace its line to a known common ancestor, it is often called a lineage; when it claims a more distant or supposed ancestor, it may be called a clan.
Descent lines fall into two broad kinds. When kinship is traced through one line only — either the father’s or the mother’s — it is called unilateral descent. When it is traced through both lines at once, it is bilateral descent. Fig. 1.4-1 shows how differently the two unilateral lines run.
Diagram
Fig. 1.4-1 – two small family trees side by side; in the first (patrilineal) the descent line is highlighted through the male members only; in the second (matrilineal) the line is highlighted through the female members only, showing how each rule picks out a different set of relatives as the “group”
In patrilineal descent, the line is traced through the father and his male ancestors. A person belongs to the father’s group; the father belongs to his father’s group, and so on up the male line.
Because the common ancestor is a male, the members of a patrilineal group are called agnates, and this kind of descent is also known as agnatic descent. A man’s own children continue his line, but his daughter’s children will belong to her husband’s line, not to his. In each generation, therefore, the daughters marry out and the sons carry the group forward.
Patrilineal descent is by far the more common pattern in India. Most Hindu and Muslim communities, and many tribal groups such as the Gond, the Santhal and the Ho, reckon descent through the father’s line.
In matrilineal descent, the line runs the other way — through the mother and her female ancestors. A person belongs to the mother’s group, and the line is carried forward by daughters rather than sons. The descendants of a common female ancestor are called uterine kin.
In India, matrilineal descent is found among the Khasi and Garo of Meghalaya and, historically, among the Nayar of Kerala, where property was held in the mother’s household and passed down through women.
Here a caution is vital. Matrilineal is not the same as matriarchal. Matrilineal describes only the line through which descent and property pass. It does not mean that women rule. In many matrilineal societies the effective authority over the group rests not with the women but with the mother’s brother — the maternal uncle. Tracing the line through women and placing power in women’s hands are two quite different things, and the evidence rarely lets us equate them.
In bilateral descent, a person traces kinship through both the father’s and the mother’s lines at the same time. You count your father’s relatives and your mother’s relatives as kin, giving weight to both sides.
This is the pattern most of us in modern urban India recognise from our own lives: we treat a paternal grandfather and a maternal grandmother as equally our own. Bilateral reckoning is convenient, but it has a limit. Because it multiplies relatives on both sides at once, the network quickly becomes enormous, and people rarely manage to trace it more than three or four generations back before the links fade.
Descent tells us through whom a person traces kinship. A separate question is where a newly married couple will actually set up home. The custom that settles this is called a rule of residence.
It is important not to confuse the two. Descent decides the line of kinship; residence decides the place of living. A society can trace descent through the mother yet have the couple live elsewhere, so the rules do not always match. The syllabus asks us to know three of these residence rules by their definitions.
The patrilocal rule is the most widespread. Patri means father and local means place.
Under this rule the bride moves to her husband’s household — the familiar pattern across most of India.
The matrilocal rule reverses this. Matri means mother.
Here the husband moves to his wife’s household. Matrilocal societies are far fewer than patrilocal ones.
The avunculocal rule is the least common of the three. The word comes from avunculus, Latin for the mother’s brother, or maternal uncle.
This rule appears in some societies where the mother’s brother is an important figure in family life.
Diagram
Fig. 1.5-1 – three small panels showing where a married couple settles under each rule: with the husband’s family (patrilocal), with the wife’s family (matrilocal), and with the husband’s mother’s brother (avunculocal)
Being related by blood or marriage is only the beginning. Once people live as kin, society lays down how particular relatives should behave towards one another — who may joke freely, who must keep a respectful distance, who owes whom special duties. These prescribed, patterned ways of behaving between kin are called kinship usages.
Anthropologists such as Tylor, Frazer, Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski recorded many such usages, more or less common across societies. Many were once strict and compulsory; today several survive only as softened rituals. The syllabus fixes six for us to study, each with its definition, its likely reason, and an example.
Avoidance is a usage that keeps certain kin at a formal distance, restricting close or informal contact between them.
The commonest cases are between in-laws — a son-in-law and his mother-in-law, or a daughter-in-law and her father-in-law and other senior men of the household. In many Indian families a new daughter-in-law veils her face before, and does not speak freely with, her husband’s father and elder brothers.
Why should society prescribe distance? Two reasons are usually given. Tylor linked the son-in-law’s avoidance of the mother-in-law to matrilocal residence, where the husband entered his wife’s home as a stranger. Radcliffe-Brown offered a broader reason: a person joining a new family faces a real risk of friction, so a rule of avoidance heads off conflict before it can start. Avoidance also quietly rules out any hint of sexual impropriety between men and women who are not proper mates.
A joking relationship is the mirror image of avoidance. Instead of distance, it permits — even expects — an unusually free, teasing, informal exchange between certain kin.
In much of North India the classic pair is the devar and bhabhi — the younger brother-in-law and his elder brother’s wife — who tease each other freely. A similar licence runs between grandparents and grandchildren, where the grandparents indulge the young in a way the strict parents cannot.
Radcliffe-Brown explained the usage as a safe outlet between people who stand in a slightly awkward or potentially tense relationship — for instance, those who could, in some circumstances, become mates. Allowing controlled joking releases the tension harmlessly. A joking relationship can also work as gentle social control, since correction delivered through ridicule stings less than a direct scolding.
Diagram
Fig. 1.6-1 – a horizontal spectrum of prescribed kin behaviour running from “formal distance / avoidance” at one end to “extreme informality / joking relationship” at the other, with the son-in-law–mother-in-law pair marked near the avoidance end and the devar–bhabhi pair near the joking end
Teknonymy is a usage in which a person is not addressed or referred to by their own name, but through the name of another — most often their child.
You have almost certainly seen this. A wife is spoken of as “so-and-so’s mother”; a husband as “so-and-so’s father”; a son-in-law may be known in the village through the name of his wife or child. The term teknonymy was introduced by Tylor.
The usage arises where custom discourages naming certain persons directly — often out of respect, or because a name is felt to be too intimate to use openly. Identifying a person through their child sidesteps the difficulty while still marking the relationship clearly.
The avunculate is a usage that gives the mother’s brother — the maternal uncle — a specially prominent place in the lives of his sister’s children.
Under a full avunculate the maternal uncle carries real weight: he may hold authority over the children, owe them special obligations, and even pass property to his nephew. Malinowski described a strong avunculate among the matrilineal Trobriand Islanders, and the usage is found chiefly in matrilineal societies, where the mother’s brother is the leading male of the mother’s line.
Traces of it survive even in patrilineal India. The maternal uncle — the mama — often has an honoured, fixed role in a child’s first-rice ceremony and in weddings. Such ceremonial duties are widely read as relics of an older, stronger avunculate.
The amitate is the counterpart of the avunculate on the father’s side: it gives the father’s sister a specially prominent place towards her brother’s children.
Here the father’s sister becomes a figure of standing in her brother’s household, exercising influence over his children. Radcliffe-Brown and I. Schapera captured this by calling her a “female father.” Among the Toda of the Nilgiris, for instance, the father’s sister has an honoured part to play at important ceremonies.
The usage helps keep alive a tie that might otherwise weaken, because the father’s sister marries out of her natal family and could easily lose touch with her brother’s children. A recognised amitate ensures the bond is maintained.
Couvade is a striking usage tied to childbirth, in which the husband — not only the wife — observes restrictions during and after his wife’s pregnancy, behaving as if he too were going through the ordeal.
The reference points to its practice among the Khasi and the Toda, where the husband takes to a restricted, invalid-like routine during this period — a special diet, and abstaining from ordinary activities such as bathing his clothes or crossing a river until the child is born.
Malinowski saw couvade as a device to build a strong bond of married life and to secure the father’s attachment to the child. More broadly, the usage draws the husband intimately into the birth, publicly marking him as the father and tightening the husband–wife tie on which the family rests.
Every society gives its relatives names — father, mother, uncle, chacha, mama, bhabhi. But societies do not carve up the world of kin in the same way. One language may have a single word covering half a dozen relatives; another may insist on a separate word for each. The words a society uses for its relatives are called kinship terms, and the way it groups or separates relatives through these words tells us a great deal about how it thinks.
The systematic study of kinship terms began with the American scholar Lewis Henry Morgan, who noticed that different peoples name their kin on strikingly different principles.
A classificatory term is a single word that groups together several different relatives under one name.
The English word “uncle” is a perfect example. It covers the father’s brother, the mother’s brother, the father’s sister’s husband and the mother’s sister’s husband — four quite different relatives folded into one term. “Aunt”, “cousin” and “grandfather” work the same way, each sweeping several relatives together.
What matters in such a term is not the exact biological link but the broad social relationship. A classificatory system tends to merge relatives who are lineal (in one’s direct line of descent) with those who are collateral (related but off to the side, like cousins), placing them in the same named class. Many tribal societies in India and elsewhere use richly classificatory terms, calling by one word people whom other systems would carefully distinguish.
Diagram
Fig. 1.7-1 – on the left, one classificatory term “UNCLE” with four arrows fanning out to four different relatives (father’s brother, mother’s brother, father’s sister’s husband, mother’s sister’s husband); on the right, several descriptive terms each with a single arrow to one exact relative, contrasting the two principles
A descriptive term is the opposite: a word that points to one exact, specific relative and no other.
“Father” and “mother” are descriptive even in English — each names exactly one relationship. But Indian languages carry this much further. Where English says “uncle”, Hindi distinguishes taau (father’s elder brother), chacha (father’s younger brother) and mama (mother’s brother); Bengali distinguishes jetha and kaka in the same way. Each term pins down one precise relative.
A descriptive system therefore keeps the collateral lines clear and distinct, and refers closely to the exact blood relationship. It suits societies that need to track kin precisely — for inheritance, ritual duty, or the rules of marriage.
It would be wrong to think one society is “classificatory” and another purely “descriptive”. Every real language mixes the two — English is descriptive for parents but classificatory for uncles and cousins. The honest picture is a matter of degree: some systems lean towards grouping relatives, others towards separating them, and the balance reflects what each society most needs its kin terms to do.
Kinship, we have seen, comes in two forms — the tie of blood and the tie of marriage. We now turn to the institution that creates the second kind. When a marriage takes place, two people who were strangers become husband and wife, two families become linked as affines, and any children born are given a recognised place in society. All of this is the work of marriage.
Marriage is not simply two people choosing to live together. It is a socially approved union — one that society recognises, protects and surrounds with rights and duties.
The stress on social recognition is what makes marriage an institution rather than a private arrangement. Edward Westermarck, an early authority on the subject, defined marriage as a relation between a man and a woman that is recognised by custom or law and carries certain rights and duties. In every society some public procedure — a ceremony, a registration, an exchange of vows or gifts — marks the union as valid.
Societies understand the nature of that union differently. In some traditions marriage is treated as a sacred, near-permanent bond; in others, more as a contract between two parties. But underneath these differences lies a common core: marriage turns a private relationship into a public status, watched and upheld by the wider group.
Why does every known society bother to institutionalise marriage? Because it quietly performs several tasks that society cannot do without.
Marriage regulates sexual behaviour. Instead of leaving the powerful sexual drive unchecked, society channels it into an approved relationship, reducing competition and conflict. This is often held to be the most basic reason marriage exists.
Marriage provides for legitimate reproduction and the continuity of society. Children born within marriage are recognised as the legitimate offspring of known parents. Without such recognition, the orderly replacement of one generation by the next would be thrown into doubt.
Marriage secures the care and rearing of children. It creates a stable setting in which the young can be fed, protected and socialised into the ways of their society. The union of the parents becomes the cradle of the next generation.
Marriage establishes rights, duties and a division of labour between the spouses. It ties two people into a working partnership in which tasks, resources and responsibilities are shared, giving the household its economic footing.
Marriage creates and widens social bonds. Because most societies forbid marrying one’s own close kin, each marriage must reach outside the family and join two kin groups together. In this way marriage weaves separate families into a wider web and fosters social solidarity.
Marriage ensures the orderly transmission of property and status. By fixing who the legitimate heirs are, it allows property, name and position to pass down cleanly from one generation to the next.
Finally, marriage offers emotional and psychological security — companionship and support in a demanding world — and, through the family it founds, becomes a channel for passing culture from parents to children.
Diagram
Fig. 1.8-1 – two separate family groups on either side, joined in the middle by a marriage (a triangle and a circle linked by an equals sign), with the new link shown widening into a shared network, to illustrate marriage as an alliance between kin groups
Marriage is never a free-for-all. Every society hedges it about with rules — whom a person must not marry, whom they must marry within, which relatives make preferred partners, what happens when a spouse dies, and how status enters the choice. These are the rules of marriage, and together they show that even our most personal choices are shaped by social structure.
Exogamy is the rule that a person must marry outside a specified group to which they belong.
Among Hindus, exogamy takes three main forms. Gotra exogamy forbids marriage within one’s own gotra — a group whose members believe they descend from a common ancestor or sage. Pravara exogamy forbids marriage between families that invoke the same set of ancestral sages in their rituals. Sapinda exogamy forbids marriage within one’s sapinda relations — those linked by common ancestry within a certain number of generations. Among many tribal and North Indian communities there is also clan exogamy and village exogamy: because a small village is often made up of one or two clans, everyone in it is treated as kin, and one must marry out of it.
The core idea behind all of these is the extension of the incest taboo beyond the immediate family. Its functions and merits are real: exogamy prevents the harmful effects of marriage between close blood relatives, and — more importantly for sociology — it forces each family to reach outward, forging alliances with other groups and widening the web of social bonds. Its demerits appear when the rules are enforced rigidly: combined with endogamy (below), exogamy can shrink the field of possible partners, and harsh policing of gotra or village rules has been a source of social conflict in some regions.
Endogamy is the opposite rule: a person must marry within a specified group.
In the Indian setting endogamy operates at several levels. Caste endogamy requires marriage within one’s caste; sub-caste endogamy narrows this further to one’s jati; varna endogamy requires marriage within one’s varna — one of the four broad divisions of Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra; and tribe endogamy requires marriage within one’s own tribe.
The merits claimed for endogamy are the preservation of group identity, culture and solidarity, and the keeping of property and status within the group. But endogamy also carries a serious demerit: by walling off each group’s marriages, it hardens the boundaries between castes and helps reproduce caste inequality generation after generation. The jurist and social reformer B.R. Ambedkar argued that endogamy is the very mechanism that keeps caste alive.
Notice how the two rules work in tandem. A person is told to marry outside their gotra and village, yet inside their caste. The field of possible partners is thus squeezed from both sides at once, leaving a fairly narrow set of eligible families.
In several communities, marriage between cousins is not forbidden but preferred. Sociology distinguishes two kinds.
Cross-cousin marriage is marriage between the children of a brother and a sister — for example, a man marrying his mother’s brother’s daughter, or his father’s sister’s daughter.
Parallel-cousin marriage is marriage between the children of two brothers or of two sisters — for example, a man marrying his father’s brother’s daughter.
Diagram
Fig. 1.9-1 – a family tree at the top showing a brother and a sister, and separately two brothers; arrows show that the brother’s child and the sister’s child are cross-cousins (a permitted match in many groups), while the two brothers’ children are parallel-cousins (treated as siblings and usually forbidden)
Cross-cousin marriage is customary among many communities of the south and among tribes such as the Gond. Its reasons and merits are practical: it keeps property within the family, avoids the payment of a high bride-price, and — as Lévi-Strauss stressed — strengthens the solidarity of the group by repeating an existing alliance. Its chief demerit is that it narrows the field of choice to a small circle of kin.
Two customs deal with what happens to a marriage alliance when a spouse dies.
Levirate is the custom by which a widow marries the brother of her deceased husband.
When the widow marries her late husband’s elder brother it is called senior levirate; when she marries his younger brother, junior levirate. (Note that this is different from fraternal polyandry, in which several living brothers share one wife at the same time — a form of marriage we meet in the next section.)
Sororate is the mirror custom on the wife’s side: a man marries his wife’s sister, usually after the wife’s death, or sometimes if she is unable to bear children.
Both customs serve to preserve an alliance that a death might otherwise dissolve. Where a bride-price was paid, sororate lets the bride’s family send another daughter rather than return the payment; the alliance survives.
The last pair of rules brings status into marriage.
Hypergamy, known in India as anuloma (“with the grain”), is marriage in which a woman marries a man of higher caste or status than her own.
Hypogamy, known as pratiloma (“against the grain”), is the reverse — a woman of higher caste marries a man of lower caste or status. Traditionally this direction was disapproved of, and often forbidden.
Diagram
Fig. 1.9-2 – two vertical arrows between stacked caste levels: one labelled anuloma / hypergamy pointing from a lower-status woman up to a higher-status man (approved), and one labelled pratiloma / hypogamy pointing from a higher-status woman down to a lower-status man (traditionally disapproved)
Hypergamy had powerful and often harmful consequences. Because women were expected to marry “up”, the highest-caste families found few or no higher grooms for their daughters, which placed heavy pressure on them — reflected historically in the burden of dowry and, among the Kulin Brahmins of Bengal, in the practice of one man marrying many wives. So while hypergamy could function to build alliances across social strata and offer a bride’s family a step upward, its demerit fell squarely on women, whose worth in the marriage market came to be measured against the status of the men available to them.
The rules of marriage tell us whom one may marry. The forms of marriage tell us how many spouses one may have at a time. On this basis, marriage falls into two broad forms — monogamy and polygamy — and polygamy in turn has two varieties, as Fig. 1.10-1 shows.
Diagram
Fig. 1.10-1 – a simple classification tree: “Forms of marriage” branching into Monogamy (one man – one woman) and Polygamy, and Polygamy branching further into Polygyny (one man – several women) and Polyandry (one woman – several men)
Monogamy is the marriage of one man to one woman at a time. It is the most widespread form in the world today, and the only form permitted by law in most modern societies.
A common variation is serial monogamy, where a person marries again after the death of, or divorce from, a previous spouse — but still has only one spouse at any one time.
Monogamy carries clear merits. It tends to build stability and loyalty between the spouses, allows a fairer and more equal relationship, gives children the focused care of two committed parents, and keeps the household small enough to manage without the jealousies of co-wives. Its demerits are fewer but real: a monogamous couple has no built-in support if one partner dies or falls ill, and a childless marriage has no alternative within its own structure. On balance, its functions — stable child-rearing, clear inheritance and social order — explain why it has become the dominant form.
Polygamy is the general name for any marriage in which one person has more than one spouse at the same time.
G.P. Murdock, surveying societies across the world, found that a large majority of them permitted some form of polygamy — though, as we will see, permitting a practice is very different from most people actually following it. Polygamy takes two forms depending on whose spouses are plural.
Polygyny is the form in which one man is married to two or more women at the same time.
Where the several wives are sisters, it is called sororal polygyny; where they are unrelated, non-sororal polygyny. In India polygyny has been reported among some Naga groups and among the Gond, Baiga and Toda, and it was historically practised by rulers and wealthy men.
The merits claimed for polygyny are that it spreads household labour among several wives, produces more children, and — it is sometimes argued — is even sought by a first wife who wants help with her burden. But the demerits weigh heavily on the other side: rivalry and jealousy among co-wives, the large expense that limits it to affluent men, quarrels over inheritance, and, above all, the tendency to place women in an unequal and dependent position. A crucial point of fact is that even where a society permits polygyny, only a small, wealthy minority actually practise it; it is the privilege of the few, not the rule of the many.
Polyandry is the form in which one woman is married to two or more men at the same time.
When the husbands are brothers, it is called fraternal polyandry (also adelphic polyandry); when they are unrelated, non-fraternal polyandry. Polyandry is rare. It has been reported among the Toda of the Nilgiris and the Khasa of the Himalayan region, and it is generally linked to a shortage of women (in some cases connected with female infanticide), to poverty, and to the wish to keep family land from being divided.
Its reasons and merits are mostly economic. Fraternal polyandry lets several brothers share one wife and so keep their land and household undivided among them; where women are few or resources scarce, it allows a family to survive that could not otherwise be maintained. Its demerits include uncertainty over who a child’s father is, and, in some settings, a difficult position for the woman herself. Societies solve the paternity problem socially rather than biologically — among the Toda, a ritual with a bow and arrow was performed to establish which husband would be recognised as the social father, regardless of biological fact.
Marriage joins two adults; from that union grows the smallest, oldest and most basic group in all of social life — the family. Every one of us begins life inside a family, learns to be human inside it, and carries its mark for the rest of our days. It is the point where kinship, marriage and the rearing of children all come together.
What, exactly, is a family? Sociologists have offered several definitions, each catching a different part of it.
Put together, these tell us that a family rests on two kinds of tie at once — the marriage tie between the couple and the blood tie between parents and children. In other words, the family is where affinal and consanguineous kinship meet, as Fig. 1.11-1 shows.
Diagram
Fig. 1.11-1 – a simple nuclear-family chart: a husband and wife joined by a marriage (affinal) bond at the top, and their children linked below by a parent–child (consanguineous) bond, showing that the family combines both kinds of kinship in one small group
MacIver drew out a set of features that mark the family off from every other social group. Together they explain why the family is so basic and so hard to replace.
The first is universality. The family is found in every known society and in every period of history. Civilisations rise and fall, but no society has yet done without the family in some form.
The second is its emotional basis. Unlike a firm or a club, the family rests on feeling — affection, love, mutual care and a sense of belonging. It is held together not by contract but by sentiment, and it answers deep emotional needs.
The third is its formative influence. The early years of a person’s life are spent within the family, which shapes personality more powerfully than any later group. The family is the first and most important agency of socialisation — the lifelong process by which a person learns the ways, values and skills of their society. Whatever the family gets right, or wrong, leaves a lasting stamp.
The fourth is its limited size. A family is necessarily small. Its intimacy and its emotional bonds depend on being few enough to know one another closely; a group of hundreds could not be a family in this sense.
The fifth is its nuclear position in the social structure. The family sits at the very centre of society, the nucleus around which wider groups and institutions are organised. It is the primary group that first prepares the individual for participation in all the larger, secondary groups of society.
The sixth is the responsibility of its members. Family members carry real and binding responsibilities towards one another — parents for children, the young for the aged — of a kind that few other groups demand. It is within the family that a person is cared for without having to earn it.
The seventh is social regulation. Because so much depends on the family, society guards and regulates it closely, through both custom and law — rules about who may marry, about divorce, about the duties of parents. The family is never left wholly to private whim.
The eighth is its permanent and temporary nature. As an institution — a general form of social life — the family is permanent and universal. But as an association — a particular group of named people — it is temporary and changing: it forms with a marriage, grows, ages and dissolves, while the institution lives on.
That last feature returns us to a distinction we met at the start of the chapter, and lets us answer a question raised on our very first page.
We have just seen that the family is universal — found in every society and every age. But why? What is it about the family that no society has been able to do without it? The answer lies in its functions. The family survives everywhere because it performs a bundle of tasks that are essential to social life, and that no other single group performs as well.
The family, first, provides for reproduction and the continuity of society. It marks out the approved setting in which children are born and recognised, so that each generation is replaced in an orderly way and the group does not die out.
Closely tied to this, the family regulates sexual behaviour. It channels the sexual urge into a stable, socially approved relationship, and its incest taboo keeps sexual competition out of the household — both of which, functionalists argue, protect social order.
Third, and perhaps most important, the family carries out the socialisation of the young. The newborn child knows nothing of language, values or right conduct; it is within the family that all of this is first learned. The family is the child’s earliest and most powerful school, shaping personality before any other agency touches it.
Fourth, the family provides for the care and protection of its members — feeding, sheltering and nursing the young, the aged and the sick. It offers this care as a matter of belonging, not as a service to be bought.
Fifth, the family performs an economic function. Its members cooperate and divide labour to meet daily needs. In older economies the family was a unit of production — farming or crafting together; in modern economies it is more a unit of consumption and of pooled income, but the economic partnership remains.
Sixth, the family fixes a person’s social placement — the identity and standing they are born into.
Seventh, the family gives emotional and psychological security. In a competitive and often harsh world, it is the place a person can turn to for affection, belonging and support without having to compete for it.
And eighth, the family is the great channel for the transmission of culture. Language, beliefs, customs, manners and skills are passed from one generation to the next largely through the everyday life of the family, drawing each new member into the wider culture.
The lesson is straightforward. Because these functions — reproduction, socialisation, care, economic cooperation, placement, security and cultural transmission — are indispensable to any society, and because the family has always been the readiest instrument for performing them, the family exists universally. Its universality is not an accident; it is the reward for doing work that society cannot manage without.
Families do not all look alike. A household of a couple and their two children, a sprawling household of three generations under one grandfather, a Khasi household headed by a mother — all are families, yet they differ sharply. Sociologists sort them out by asking different questions: which tie holds the family together, where authority lies, and how large it is. Each question yields a pair of types, and the syllabus asks us to compare all three pairs.
The first pair asks: which tie is the core of the family — blood, or marriage?
A consanguineous family is built around the blood tie. Its centre of gravity is the bond of descent — parents and children, brothers and sisters — rather than the married couple. The individual is seen mainly as a member of a continuing blood group.
A conjugal family is built around the marriage tie. Its centre of gravity is the husband–wife bond; the couple, and the children they produce, form a relatively self-contained unit set somewhat apart from the wider kin.
This pair connects to a second, closely related distinction, which Ralph Linton drew. Every adult belongs to two families in a lifetime. The family of orientation — or family of origin — is the one a person is born into, made up of oneself, one’s parents and one’s siblings; it is a blood, consanguineous family. The family of procreation is the one a person creates by marrying, made up of oneself, one’s spouse and one’s children; it is a conjugal family.
Diagram
Fig. 1.13-1 – two overlapping panels sharing a central “EGO”: on the left, ego shown with parents and siblings, labelled family of orientation (consanguineous); on the right, the same ego shown with spouse and children, labelled family of procreation (conjugal), to show that a person passes from one to the other over a lifetime
The second pair asks: where does authority lie, and through whom does property pass?
A patriarchal family is one in which authority rests with the father or the senior-most male, who heads the household. Property and name usually pass down the male line, from father to son, and residence is generally patrilocal.
A matriarchal family is one in which authority and inheritance are vested in the female line, with a woman — or the mother’s side — at the centre. Property tends to pass from mother to daughter, and residence is often matrilocal.
Patriarchal families are by far the more common in India — among caste Hindus and among many tribal groups such as the Ho, Munda, Toda and Santhal. Matriarchal-type families are found among the Khasi and Garo of Meghalaya and, historically, the Nayar of Kerala.
One caution, met earlier, bears repeating. A matriarchal family means that descent and inheritance run through women; it does not automatically mean that women rule. In many such families real authority is exercised by the mother’s brother, not by the women themselves. Full matriarchy, in the sense of women holding power, is rare, and should not be assumed from the fact that a family is matrilineal.
The third pair asks the simplest question of all: how large is the family, and how many generations live together?
A nuclear family is small — a married couple and their unmarried children, living together as one independent household. It is sometimes called the elementary family, because it is the basic unit from which larger families are built.
A joint family is large. Two or more nuclear families, spread across generations, live together and are bound into a single group. When it is formed by adding relatives to a nuclear family through the extension of the parent–child tie, it is also called the extended family.
The classic marks of the joint family are worth learning: its members share a common residence, eat from a common kitchen, hold property in common, join in common worship, and obey the authority of a common head — usually the eldest male. It is a form long suited to an agrarian economy, where many hands and pooled land were an advantage.
Diagram
Fig. 1.13-2 – two family charts side by side: on the left a nuclear family (one couple and their children under one roof); on the right a joint family (a senior couple at the top, with their married sons, sons’ wives and grandchildren all shown under one roof, sharing one head), so the difference in size and generations is visible at a glance
These types are not merely labels; they are the ground on which the next section stands. For the great story of the Indian family today is the shift from the joint towards the nuclear — a change we take up now.
No institution stands still, and the family least of all. Over the last century the Indian family has been reshaped — in its structure, in its functions, and in the number of children people choose to have. This closing section examines those three changes, and asks a question worth keeping in mind throughout: is the family declining, or is it simply changing its form?
The most visible structural change has been the shift from the joint family towards the nuclear family — often called the “disintegration” of the joint family. In town after town, the large household of many generations has given way to the small household of a couple and their children.
The forces behind this change are several, and they reinforce one another.
Industrialisation struck the first blow. The joint family suited an economy where the family farmed or crafted together as a single unit of production. Factory work is different: it draws individuals, not families, to the workplace and pays them as individuals, so the family loses its old role as a working team.
Urbanisation and migration carried the change further. Young adults leave ancestral villages for jobs and education in cities, where housing is small and costly and cannot easily hold a large household. The nuclear household in the town is very often the offspring of a joint household in the village.
The spread of education encouraged new attitudes. Educated young people form their own aspirations, choose their own careers, and increasingly expect a say in their own marriages — an outlook that sits uneasily with strict obedience to a family head.
Behind all of these lies the growth of individualism — the modern value that prizes personal choice, freedom and ambition over subordination to the group. Where the older family asked the individual to sacrifice for the whole, the newer temper asks the whole to make room for the individual.
Legal change has also played its part, by making partition easier and altering inheritance.
Finally, internal tensions should not be ignored. Disputes between brothers, frictions between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, and suspicions of unequal treatment have always strained joint households, and today young couples often prefer to set up separately to avoid such friction.
Here we must be careful, because “disintegration” can mislead. Census evidence does show that small households have become the common residential unit, especially in cities, where the great majority of households are of only a few persons and very large households are a small minority. On the face of it, the joint family seems to be vanishing.
Yet many Indian sociologists argue that this reads the evidence too simply. Scholars such as I.P. Desai and A.M. Shah pointed out that jointness is a matter of degree, not an on/off switch, and that a household may be nuclear in its residence while remaining joint in its functioning. A couple may live apart in the city yet still send money home, return for every wedding and funeral, consult the elders on big decisions, and hold undivided ancestral property. The roof has divided; the bonds have not.
Alongside its changing structure, the family’s functions have been changing too. Task after task once performed by the family has been taken over, wholly or partly, by outside agencies.
The family’s economic function has shrunk the most. It is no longer a unit of production; earning happens outside the home, and banks and markets, not family elders, now handle money and credit.
Its educational function has passed largely to schools, colleges and coaching classes, and the care of small children increasingly to crèches. Its health and care function has moved to hospitals, nursing homes and old-age homes. Its protective function is shared with the police, the state and insurance; its recreational function with cinema, clubs and the media; and even its religious function has weakened as common family worship becomes rarer.
Diagram
Fig. 1.14-1 – the family at the centre with arrows pointing outward to the agencies now taking over its functions: a school (education), a hospital and old-age home (care), a bank (economy), the police/state (protection), and a crèche (child-care), showing functions flowing out of the family
The functionalist Talcott Parsons captured this as a loss of functions: in industrial society, he argued, the family sheds most of its old tasks and is left with two irreducible ones — the primary socialisation of children and the stabilisation of adult personalities. Contemporary writers push the theme further, describing an age of individualism in which relationships are increasingly matters of personal choice, functions are “outsourced” to markets and institutions, and new household forms — single-person households, dual-earner couples — multiply.
But how far should we accept the claim that the family is therefore in decline? Not fully. The very functions Parsons left to the family — the shaping of the small child and the giving of emotional security — are precisely the ones that no school, hospital or market has been able to take over. The family has lost tasks, but it has not lost its core. The evidence points not to a family that is dying, but to one that is being steadily redefined, doing less than it once did yet still doing the things that matter most.
The third change concerns family size — and here a new social ideal has taken hold. The small family norm is the growing acceptance that a small family, of a couple with only one or two children, is desirable.
Its features are easily stated. Family size is planned rather than left to chance, with the help of family-planning methods; the emphasis falls on the quality of care rather than the number of children; and such families are usually nuclear, often with both parents working. The norm was actively encouraged by the state.
The merits of the small family norm are considerable. With fewer children, each child can be given better nutrition, health care and education, so the quality of upbringing improves. Mothers’ health benefits from fewer and better-spaced pregnancies. Household resources stretch further, raising the family’s standard of living. And across society as a whole, the small family norm helps to slow population growth and ease the pressure on land, jobs and public services. For all these reasons it has come to be seen, in modern India, as a mark of a healthy and forward-looking family.
Kinship is the socially recognised network of relationships based on blood and marriage. Rivers defined it as the social recognition of biological ties, which shows that kinship rests on biology but is never merely biological.
There are two types of kinship: consanguineous (based on blood; relatives called cognates) and affinal (based on marriage; relatives called affines). The two interlock, because the incest taboo forces blood groups to marry outward and become affines.
Kinship has degrees, measured by steps from ego: primary kin (directly related), secondary kin (primary kin of one’s primary kin) and tertiary kin (primary kin of one’s secondary kin). Kin multiply sharply as the degree grows.
Descent is the principle allocating a person to a group of consanguineal kin. It may be patrilineal (through the father; members called agnates), matrilineal (through the mother; uterine kin) or bilateral (through both). Matrilineal is not the same as matriarchal.
The rules of residence — patrilocal (husband’s home), matrilocal (wife’s home) and avunculocal (husband’s maternal uncle’s home) — decide where a married couple settles, and are separate from descent.
Kinship usages are prescribed patterns of behaviour between kin: avoidance (formal distance), the joking relationship (free teasing), teknonymy (naming through a child), the avunculate (a prominent mother’s brother), the amitate (a prominent father’s sister) and couvade (the husband sharing the ordeal of childbirth).
Kinship terms are of two kinds: classificatory (one term covering several relatives, like English “uncle”) and descriptive (one term for one exact relative, like Hindi taau, chacha, mama). Lewis Henry Morgan founded this study; no system is purely one type.
Marriage is a socially recognised union that creates rights and duties, links kin groups and legitimises children (Westermarck stressed this social recognition). Its functions include regulating sex, ensuring reproduction, rearing children, economic cooperation, transmitting property, forging alliances and giving security.
The rules of marriage include exogamy — marrying outside one’s group (clan, gotra, pravara, village, sapinda) — and endogamy — marrying within one’s group (caste, sub-caste, varna, tribe). Cross-cousin marriage (to the mother’s brother’s or father’s sister’s child) is preferred in much of the South.
Levirate is the custom of a widow marrying her deceased husband’s brother; sororate is a man marrying his wife’s sister. Both protect the family and preserve the alliance. Hypergamy (anuloma) is a woman marrying up, hypogamy (pratiloma) a woman marrying down; both are bound up with caste and gender inequality.
The forms of marriage are monogamy (one man, one woman) and polygamy. Polygamy is of two kinds: polygyny (one man, several women) and polyandry (one woman, several men, which may be fraternal or non-fraternal). Most societies that permit polygyny still practise mainly monogamy.
The family is a group united by marriage, blood or adoption, forming a household and rearing children (MacIver and Page; Burgess and Locke). MacIver’s features are universality, emotional basis, formative influence, limited size, nuclear position, responsibility of members, social regulation, and its permanent-yet-temporary nature.
The family exists universally because it performs indispensable functions — reproduction, socialisation, care, economic cooperation, social placement, emotional security and cultural transmission. The functionalist view (Murdock, Parsons) explains its persistence but is criticised for ignoring inequality within the family.
Families are classified into three pairs: consanguineous versus conjugal (matching the family of orientation and the family of procreation), patriarchal versus matriarchal (by where authority and inheritance lie), and nuclear versus joint (by size and generations sharing a household).
Structurally, the joint family has been giving way to the nuclear family, driven by industrialisation, urbanisation, migration, education, individualism, legal change and internal tensions. But “jointness” persists as a matter of degree, so the joint family is changing shape rather than simply disappearing.
Functionally, many tasks of the family — economic, educational, health, protective, recreational — have passed to outside agencies, yet the family retains its core functions of primary socialisation and emotional security. The small family norm — the ideal of a couple with only one or two children — has taken hold, valued for better care of children, better maternal health, and slower population growth.
If kinship rests on social recognition and not on blood alone, is an adopted child any less a relative than a biological one? What does your answer reveal about what really makes someone “family”?
Descent and residence rules can pull in opposite directions — a society may trace kinship through the mother yet expect the couple to live with the husband’s people. What might such a mismatch mean for a woman’s actual standing in that society?
Gotra and village exogamy push a family to reach outward and make allies, while caste endogamy walls it in. Can one society lean hard on both rules at once without contradiction — and who gains from each?
Cross-cousin marriage keeps property and alliances inside a trusted circle of kin. What does a society give up when it prefers to marry “close” rather than reach out to strangers?
If the joint household is shrinking while joint feeling survives in scattered form, is the joint family truly declining — or have sociologists simply been measuring the wrong thing?
The family keeps handing its old tasks to schools, hospitals and markets, yet it endures. If even the primary socialisation of children could one day be done outside the home, would the family still be necessary — and why?
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Lewis Henry Morgan | i. kinship as the social recognition of biological ties |
| b. Ralph Linton | ii. the study of classificatory and descriptive kinship terms |
| c. W.H.R. Rivers | iii. the four universal functions of the family |
| d. G.P. Murdock | iv. the family of orientation and the family of procreation |
Fill in the blank: The residence rule by which a newly married couple settles with the husband’s maternal uncle is called __________. [1 mark]
State whether the following statement is true or false: In polygyny, one woman is married to several men at the same time. [1 mark]
Define kinship. [2 marks]
Name the three degrees of kinship and give one example of a primary kin. [2 marks]
Differentiate between consanguineous kinship and affinal kinship. [3 marks]
Differentiate between the nuclear family and the joint family. [3 marks]
Explain cross-cousin marriage with an example, and give two reasons why some communities prefer it. [4 marks]
Describe any four of MacIver’s features of the family. [4 marks]
State the meaning of the small family norm and explain two of its merits. [4 marks]
Describe the functionalist view of the family, stating its main claim, the evidence in its favour, and one criticism made against it. [6 marks]
Discuss the main factors responsible for the disintegration of the joint family in India, with examples. [6 marks]
1.1 Social Institutions: Meaning and Features
You have probably attended a wedding, sat through a school assembly, or waited your turn in a queue at a ration shop. Each of these looked like an ordinary event. Yet each one followed a settled pattern that nobody in the room had invented that morning.
The guests at the wedding knew roughly how to behave; the students knew when to stand; the people in the queue knew that pushing ahead was wrong. These patterns are older than the people following them, and they repeat themselves in family after family, school after school, shop after shop.
Sociology gives a name to such durable, organised ways of doing important things. It calls them social institutions. To understand the term, we first need two smaller ideas that lie underneath it.
Norms and values
A norm is a rule or standard that tells people how they are expected to behave in a given situation — stand for the national anthem, do not cut a queue, marry outside your own clan. Norms are the everyday “shoulds” and “should-nots” of social life.
A value is a deeper idea about what is good, desirable or worth protecting — respect for elders, the sanctity of marriage, the importance of the family. Values are the reasons that lie behind the norms.
Norms and values do not float about singly. Around each basic need of society, a whole cluster of norms and values gathers and settles into a stable, recognised arrangement. That settled arrangement is a social institution.
A social institution is a stable, organised cluster of norms, values and roles that grows up around a basic and lasting need of society, and that patterns how people behave in meeting that need.
Notice the key words in that definition. An institution is organised (not random), it is lasting (not a passing fashion), and it is built around a basic need — the need to raise children, to produce food, to keep order, to relate to the sacred.
An institution is not the same as a group of people
Here students often stumble, so it is worth pausing. The institution of marriage is not the couple standing at the mandap; the institution of education is not your particular school building and its teachers.
Marriage is the system of rules and expectations by which a man and a woman are joined and their children recognised. Education is the system of expectations by which knowledge is passed on. These systems are abstract. The people and buildings that carry them out form what MacIver and Page called an association — an organised group of persons pursuing a shared interest.
Institution vs Association | Feature | Institution | Association | |—|—|—| | What it is | A system of norms and procedures | A group of real people | | Character | Abstract — a way of doing something | Concrete — a body organised to do it | | Example | Marriage, education, the economy | One particular family, one school, one firm | | Membership | You cannot “join” or be a member of it | You can be a member of it | | Permanence | Very long-lasting; changes slowly | May form, split or dissolve more readily |
Q. Is your school an institution or an association?
A. Both ideas apply, but to different things. Your particular school — its gate, staff and students — is an association. “Education,” the wider system of rules and expectations about how the young should be taught, is the institution that your school helps to carry out.
The features of a social institution
Once we separate the institution from the association, its distinctive features become clear.
An institution is, first, normative — it is made of norms and values rather than of bricks or people. It exists as a shared understanding in people’s minds and conduct.
Second, every institution serves a basic social need. The family answers the need to reproduce and rear the next generation; the economy answers the need to produce and distribute goods; religion answers the need to relate to the supernatural. Sociologists have often mapped five such basic areas of life — kinship, the legitimate use of power, the distribution of goods and services, the passing on of knowledge, and the relation to the sacred — each organised by its own institutions.
Third, institutions are relatively permanent and stable. Individuals are born and die, but the institution outlives them and receives each new generation ready-made. This is why a young couple can marry without first having to invent marriage.
Fourth, in some form institutions are found in every society. No known human society is without kinship, without some way of pairing adults, or without rules for rearing children — though the exact shape these take varies enormously from place to place.
Fifth, institutions pattern and control behaviour. By laying down what is expected, they make social life predictable and reduce constant conflict. When you meet a stranger’s family, you already know, roughly, how a son-in-law is supposed to behave.
Sixth, institutions are interdependent — no institution stands alone. Marriage is tied to property, to religion, to law and to kinship; a change in the economy can reshape the family, and a change in the family can unsettle the economy.
Diagram
Fig. 1.1-1 – a simple web diagram with “Society” at the centre and the major social institutions around it (family, kinship, economy, religion, education, polity), connected by lines to one another to show that they are interdependent rather than separate
Institutions change — and can also constrain
It would be a mistake to picture institutions as fixed and always benign. They do change, though usually slowly, as the needs and conditions of society change. The joint household that once suited an agricultural economy loosens when its members move to cities for work.
And because institutions organise power as well as need, they can constrain some people even while they help others. The same family that offers shelter and belonging may also confine a member to an inferior position. Sociology therefore studies institutions not to praise or condemn them, but to understand how they work, whom they serve, and how they change.
Three of these institutions are so closely bound together that they are best studied as a set. Kinship tells us who our relatives are; marriage creates new relatives and new households; the family is the small group in which people are born, reared and made social. The rest of this chapter examines these three — kinship, marriage and the family — one at a time, and then watches how they are changing in our own times.