Family, marriage and kinship

Social institutions are established, organised ways of carrying out important social activities, governed by rules that are fixed by law or by custom. Family, marriage, the economy, politics, religion and education are all institutions. They constrain us (they set rules and limits) and they also give opportunities (a family may pay for your education; it may also set a time you must be home).

Two views:

• Functionalists see institutions as sets of norms, beliefs, values and role relationships that arise to meet the needs of society. Some are formal (law, education, the state), some informal (family, religion).
• Conflict theorists point out that people are not placed equally in society. Every institution, from family and religion to the economy, law and education, tends to serve the interests of the dominant sections, whether by class, caste, tribe or gender. Dominant groups also shape the ideas a society holds.

Family. The functionalist view is that the family performs tasks that meet society's basic needs and help keep social order. Functionalists saw the nuclear family as best suited to industrial society: one adult (the husband) works outside the home as breadwinner (an 'instrumental' role) while the other (the wife) cares for home and children (an 'affective' role). This view has been criticised as unjust to women, and as untrue across cultures and history. Sociological studies of many societies show that family forms vary widely and that what happens in one society cannot simply be generalised to all.

Variations in family forms:

• Nuclear (parents and children) and extended or joint (several generations or siblings with their families together). Nuclear families have always existed in India, especially among deprived castes and classes. Whether the joint family is really declining is a question for careful study, not common sense.
• Female-headed households: when men migrate to cities, women may plough, manage the fields and earn for the family. Widowhood or desertion can also leave women heading households. Among the Kolams, a tribal community of south-eastern Maharashtra and northern Andhra Pradesh, a female-headed household is an accepted norm.
• By residence after marriage: matrilocal (the couple lives with the wife's parents) or patrilocal (with the husband's parents).
• By inheritance: matrilineal (property passes from mother to daughter) or patrilineal (from father to son).
• By authority: patriarchal (men hold authority and dominance) or matriarchal (women do). Matrilineal societies exist, but true matriarchy has rarely been found.

Family is linked to the economy and the state. After German unification in the 1990s, Germany saw a rapid decline in marriage, because the new state withdrew the protection and welfare schemes that families had enjoyed before. Families change with wider social and economic processes, though change and continuity exist side by side.

The family is gendered. Sex is the biological difference; gender is the set of roles and expectations society builds on it. A common belief that a son will support parents in old age while a daughter 'leaves' after marriage leads families to invest more in sons. Although girls have a natural survival advantage as babies, female foeticide has led to a fall in the child sex ratio: from 934 girls per 1,000 boys in 1991 to 919 in 2011. It is gravest in prosperous states such as Punjab (846), Haryana (below 800 in some districts), Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, which shows it is a matter of attitudes, not poverty.

Marriage takes many forms:

• Monogamy: one spouse at a time; the most common form. Serial monogamy: remarrying after the death of a spouse or after divorce, but only one spouse at a time. Remarriage has long been easier for men: the right of upper-caste Hindu widows to remarry was denied, and widow remarriage was a major cause of 19th-century reformers. Even now, about 10 per cent of all women in India and 55 per cent of women over fifty are widows.
• Polygamy: more than one spouse at a time. Either polygyny (one husband, two or more wives) or polyandry (one wife, two or more husbands). Polyandry may arise where economic conditions are harsh and one man cannot support a family.
• Endogamy: marrying within one's own group (caste, community, religion). Exogamy: marrying outside a defined group, such as one's own village or kin group, as in parts of north India, where daughters are often married into villages far away.
• Kinship ties come through blood (consanguines, such as a brother or an aunt) or through marriage (affines, such as a brother-in-law). The family we are born into is the family of orientation; the one we form by marrying is the family of procreation.