Introduction
There has been a course with the words "dynamics of family life"
at Teachers College for perhaps 60 years.
Until the middle seventies the full title of the course was "Psychodynamics
of family life" and was taught by a family therapist. Since then,
I have taught the course as an anthropologist convinced that the word "family"
indexes ("point to") much else than matters of mental health--though the word "dynamics" is worth keeping. This year, given the evolution of my own work and my growing interest in how, when, and with whom, people educate themselves, I have added the word "educational" to qualify "dynamics"
This reveals both the enduring concern that a school of education
must have for the forces that organize family life and the transformation
of the understanding of what is involved in this concern: from a centering
on what happens within small households when children are young to
an exploration of the social forces that move households, including
other households, their organization and needs. In this broadening,
fundamental questions about what we should be talking about when we
talk about "family" have been raised. What we can now be
sure of is that we know less than we thought we knew, and this all
the more paradoxical that all of us have intimate experiences within
social settings clearly relevant to "family."
This is not to lead to a postmodern critique of knowledge about "family"
("we all have different definitions of the family and all are
equally valid") but rather to a call for more critical and rigorous
research that can contribute what (social) science always contribute:
a more analytic understanding of the constraints on our lives and
of the ways through which we might transcend them.
Specifically
- Early sociology and anthropology
- initially (in the 1940s and 1950s) it appears to have made common sense to think
of the family as a group of persons locked within a set of walls.
This was the heyday of the "nuclear family" as a separate
institution with particular structural-functional needs. For Talcott
Parsons, these needs focussed on "the balancing of adult personalities"
and the "socialization of children." Questions of pyschological
adjustment were thus placed at the center of educational and therapeutic
concerns and research focused on such things as:
- the balancing of roles;
- the effect of various types of role definition on
the people holding them;
- the effect of various types of communication patterns
on the psychic or educational balance of family members;
- etc.
- The critique
- eventually, it became clear that this approach limited
our understanding of what is involved in family life. Through the
work of people like James Coleman in the U.S., of Pierre Bourdieu in France, of
Lawrence
Cremin and others associated with the department
of Family and Community Education here at Teachers College, it was
demonstrated that the functions of the family are much broader than
Parsons had envisioned and that they were not being diminished by
the evolution of the modern world.
- Parsons had argued that, as the labor of human survival
got more and more divided over the course of human history,
the family was stripped of all the functions which it may have
had for most of this history. This was a deductive argument
which, for a while, seemed unchallengeable.
- In the long run, two generations of naturalistic work
on family life, and the evolution of sociological and anthropological
theory, established that, while the family did become part of
a more and more complex network of institutions each calling
for the human beings caught within them to perform certain acts,
it also remained a privileged social space with a significant
power over the people who lived there. The family does not simply
organize itself, it also organizes its members' participation
in other institutions.
- above all perhaps, this research established that
when talking about "the family" we are not talking
about a particular constellation of "roles" (spouse,
parent, child) but rather about precisely a "social space,"
that is a time and a place around which relatively small groups
of people are given the opportunity of establishing and maintaining
a boundary. Other institutions give more or less explicit "freedom"
to the people who inhabit the space to establish particular
organizations. The placing of these boundaries, and their properties,
cannot be fully predicted even when one knows very well the
overall structure of the other institutions and of their relationships.
- Dynamics
- A course on what is dynamic about family life, that is
upon the activity of human beings in families must thus examine
family life from the point of view of its relationship with the
full ecology of the small multi-generational groups which will be
our concern here
- Note that I am talking here about families,
not "household." The later can be reduced to one person
(a young adult first living away from his parents, an elderly
person living by herself). The former always involve relationships
across households and generations.
- Note also that I am talking about an "ecology,"
that is an environment that gives people in families certain
problems to resolve, from which they can take certain resources,
and to which they must return some things and people.
- Note also that I not talking about the family as an
"institution" but rather as a potential within constraints
that everyone produces in one way or another.
- Above all, a course of the dynamics of family life must
emphasize the precisely dynamic character of this life. People in
families are not determined by their position within the larger
society. They are not even determined by the patterns which they
have evolved among themselves. They must always take these patterns
into account. But they always move into the future under the power
of their own energy and their trajectory is never predictable [ref.
to Bateson and the dog].
- Making a difference
-
The power of their own energy thus always introduce a
"difference" between the expected trajectory and the actual
one. This difference is most often glossed over under the topic
of "culture." We will indeed talk extensively about "culture"
here, but always in the strongest sense of the term. Culture, from my perspective, must be understood--as
it is traditionally--as the particular configuration a group has
evolved to deal with its conditions. More importantly it must be
understood as the activity of cultivation, the process that creates
these configurations. It is a direct implication of this understanding
that culture is not shared but constructed.
- Education
- Shifting from "culture" to "cultivation" opens new routes for looking at the educative in familial interaction
- from the impact of familial patterns on school careers to
- a consideration of what is taught, pondered, discussed, and perhaps learned in the process of everyday family life.
The Organization of the Course
The course is organized on the model of the life cycle of a family
over two generations, from established adulthood, through child bearing,
socialization and education of the children, growing up, getting married,
divorced and dealing with the illness and death of parents.
In every instance, the focus will be interactional with an emphasis
on the concreteness of the actions being performed, of the resources
used. Family life is infinitely more than the attitudes or values
one has about it. The garbage must be taken out, the children must
be taken care of. Whoever does either cannot do something else.
The interactional focus will always be dealt with from the point
of view of "cultivation" [also discussed as "mediation"].
Culture is a fundamental aspect of human nature and no understanding
of human action is possible outside a framework emphasizing the social
facting of difference.