What is the case for Diversity?

1. What is the case for Diversity? To some the panic over Family Diversity is unnecessary. There has always been diversity and there is no one right way to raise children.

2. What is the case For Diversity? • On the other hand primitive societies (pre-industrial) do reveal diversity in the arena of family, kinship and the socialisation of young • Modern Britain also appears to offer examples of diversity that suggest the traditional Kelloggs or Simpsons ‘family’ is not a universal phenomenon or the ‘natural’, sociobiologically determined, solution for all human beings, for all times and all societies.

3. Keesing: Cultural Anthropology 1976 • Ethnography (people watching) by anthropologists showed a diversity of family types in pre-industrial societies • Lakker Burma: Children related only to Father • Tahiti: Child mothers gave up their children to their parents • Ashanti Africa: matrilinear descent tied children to mother’s family

4. Mead : Coming of Age in Samoa 1928 • Cultural Anthropologist studying ‘primitive’ societies through non- PO • Showed that gender roles were cultural not natural, product of nurture, not nature • Communal raising of children( through rites of passage) produced children with fewer hang-ups than the more intense and patriarchal patterns of adolescence in the West • Early feminist she welcomed diversity • Research may not have been ‘value-free’

5. Gough: The Nayar 1959 • The Nayar of Kerala in Southern India appeared to disprove the universality of the family, because when contacted in the 18th Century they had no recognisable family form [ie Sexually acceptable partnership cohabiting with biological offspring]. • Only the women lived with the children. • Inheritance was effectively matrilineal. • The official ‘father’ of the child might not be related to it. • Sandbanham ‘marriage’ relationships allowed both warriors and wives to philander.

6. Turnbull: Mountain people 1994 • This was a study of the effects of famine on familial values in Northern Uganda, amongst the lk people • Babies, children, the elderly and the infirm were the first to be left to starve.Western sentimentality about kinship is a product of affluence. • The exposure (killing) of children, especially girls, was common in Medieval Britain

7. Westwood: Images & Realities 1988 • Even within an ethnic group there are diverse experiences of ‘family’. • ‘Asians’ include Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian Hindu, Indian Sikh, Indian Christian, Indian Parsee, Tamil, Sri Lankan, Kenyan Asian etc • Common stereotypes about ‘Asian women’, for example, actually refer just to Pakistanis • Even within different communities there are major differences between 1st, 2nd & 3rd generation migrants

8. Rapoport: Families in Britain 1982 • Diversity includes the traditional, as well as the apparently new types of family • Greek and Italian immigrants and traditional fundamentalist Jewish families sustain extended families. • Religious groups generally have an above average chance of sustaining nuclear, patriarchal life long marriages

9. Household survey 2002: Household Diversity & Ethnicity

10. Household Survey 2002:Ethnicity & Marital Status of Adults under 60 years .

11. Phoenix: The Afro-Caribbean Myth 1988 • Cohabitation, single mothers & matrifocal families are more common amongst the Afro-Caribbean community - although Kellogs families also exist, particularly amongst the black middle class & Pentecostal or other Christian denominations. • A throwback to the days of slavery?[or recent?] • Extended networks of support developed • Children do have guidance from several key male kin, including the different fathers of the siblings in a household • There was a low emphasis on long-term relationships and formal marriage.

12. Modood 1997: Ethnic Minorities in Britain..Contradicts Phoenix? • Proportions of families with children that were designated as ‘Lone-Parent’: • The Afro-Caribbean propensity towards single parent families was chiefly ‘learned’ after immigration into the UK and less likely in first generation immigrants.

13. Barrow: West Indian Families 1982 • First generation families and religious families, especially ‘Pentecostals’, were Conventional. • Poorer, less functional families tended to be Common-Law partnerships, where the children were a mix of siblings, half siblings & adoptees. • Mother Households were common also, where the mother or grandmother was the main carer & provider. [Many apparently conventional relationships were also in fact like this.] The typical Caribbean women’s networks [aunts & ‘aunts’] were more difficult to sustain in the UK, but had become a feature of the black community.

14. Ballard: South Asian Families 1982/1990 1 • In South Asia, families tended towards the multi-generational, extended & patriarchal; although the ‘beanpole’ phenomenon could be observed: caused by high death rates in the young and the old especially. Women generally worked within the compass of the home, either on domestic chores or household production of goods/services. These features can be observed in British S.Asian immigrant families. • This is a stereotypical image of peasant culture. It ignores the S. Asian middle class and applies only to Muslim immigrants rom the poorer areas of Bangladesh and Northern Pakistan.

15. Ballard: South Asian Families 1982/1990 2 • Differences did emerge though: women had to work outside the domestic circle, couples began to expect more independence and extended networks were harder to maintain. • This provoked a conservative reaction amongst 1st & 2nd generation parents, determined to halt a slide towards the host culture, which was seen as degenerate. [IE un-Christian, not un-Muslim]. • Children often had to exist in two cultures and learned to ‘switch codes’, for ethnicity or society. • Religion became a crucial factor in enhancing the continuing conservatism of the communities.

16. Bhatti: Asian Children at Home and at School: 1999 • Extended links to kin in the country of origin were common and considered important and obligatory. • Bhai chaara [brother’s help] expresses the obligation to provide mutual financial support. • Izzat [family honour] emphasised the patriarchal nature of gender roles, family obligation and solidarity. • Tales of honour killings intimidate other girls from exercising independence. Boys are more likely to form mixed relationships. • Arranged marriages, to men from Indo-Pak. have raised human rights issues, but are still common.

17. Faith Elliot: Case of the Homosexual Family 1986 • Elliot agrees with Gingerbread (The Single Parent pressure group) that single parenting does not damage children’s education, socialisation or well being - although poverty and neglect certainly do • The same is true for same sex families. Reconstituted Lesbian couples frequently have children. There are only a few cases of Gay men gaining custody over natural or surrogate offspring. Social Services does not let Gays adopt. • [ 1985-1990 San Francisco said to have been 1000 babies born to Gays… source = Campion 1995 ]

18. Felicity Edholm: The Unnatural Family 1982 • Diversity exists in the modern families • The nuclear family is only said to be universal because it serves the interests of patriarchal societies • The Kibbutzim show success of social ownership of the means of production and the raising of children • Marxist Feminist

19. Clark: Constituting the marital world 1991 • Marriages are not all the same. Postmodernists can deconstruct the individual meanings and then index typical experiences: • Drifting couples , those surfacing from previous breakdowns, Establishing & growing couples, empty-shell couples & those struggling over jobs,money or the past

20. Backett: Sociology of the Family 1980 • Diversity is created by social action: the meanings that people give to their interactions. • Individual meaning is not simply the product of socialisation, it comes through negotiations that occur in partnership interactions : EG we will both ignore contradictions that we cannot deal with.

21. Morgan: The Family 1990 • Embourgeoisement is the key to the rise in the number of divorces • Working class people are adopting middle class attitudes: you take holidays abroad and you get divorced if you feel like it • Divorce will hit 50% then decline rapidly, as fewer people bother to get either married or re-married • People see no reason not to be selfish: you only live once

22. Boh: European Family Patterns 1989 for the EU • Rising divorce rates and an increase in cohabitation and lone parenthood were a Europe-wide phenomenon. • There was a ‘convergence of diversity’ across the many different cultures of Europe & Europeans.. • Causation was both structural and cultural: Greater gender symmetry & freedom of conjugal choice; a more hedonistic [what’s in it for me?] view of marriage, love, premarital & experimental sexuality; greater marital instability, decreasing fertility & birth rate; changes in forms of parenting; greater awareness of alternative lifestyles; secularisation of societal norms and values.