Transcription
[Music] hello, I'm the culture genie. Today, the topic of this video is going to be something dear to the heart of most of us: the family throughout the ages.
Now, this is an extremely huge subject, and family structures can and have been vitally different between cultures and certain periods. So, this video is going to be a very broad and brief video in its overview. Exceptions to what I am talking about do exist, and there have also existed hybrid forms of the family types I will mention.
Now, let us start. But don't begin again. We are in the Stone Age, looking at Stone Age societies. No, not those ones before the appearance of agriculture. Good. Now, that was what I wanted. Anyway, this was an age where mankind was forced to live off nature directly through hunting wild animals and gathering eatable plants. In short, these are hunter-gatherer societies. This meant that due to the limits of food availability, family sizes were smaller than full-blown clan structures, where there are usually several generations and branches in one clan. Though hunter-gatherer family units were still bigger than the Western nuclear family of just parents and children, as more people means more success in hunting and in defending territory from other undergraduate groups that might move in.
These hunter-gatherer families would just contain the closest relatives within a couple of generations, so no more than three generations: the grandparents, if still living, their kids, and the children of their kids, with some people from the outside. So, around 20 people. In other words, not huge, but still rather sizable. These families would not be alone, though. Depending upon local factors, such as the availability of food, the total number of other family groups that they could have contact with could be several. Based upon observations of modern hunter-gatherers, say this, they can have around half a thousand members, meaning around 25 families sharing some sort of culture and actually living rather peacefully together in various territories. Though this is under ideal conditions. If conditions deteriorate or were not ideal to begin with, the numbers of contacts could be much lower. And let's just say that genetic diversity in certain Stone Age bills were not the greatest due to limited contacts.
A deterioration in the living competitions with less food and overpopulation would also mean an increase in competition with these areas rich in food, so intermediate and violence between groups, depending upon the conditions, could be common. This is another reason to have a great amount of people gathered in a family group. It offers protection from others and helps in taking over territory when needed. We can actually observe these sorts of structures and interactions in modern times with isolated hunter-gatherer societies. So, in short, the primary functions of the family during the Stone Age was to help in hunting, gathering resources, and protection, were extending territory, and they were not much larger than 20 members.
Moving away from the hunter-kildren societies of the Stone Age to agricultural societies, we now enter the most common form of family for recorded history: the clan. No, not that one. Clans as in multi-generational kinship associations that can contain several hundred to the thousands of members in the largest and most loose forms, I tribes. The clan is a much bigger family unit than the hunter-gatherer family or their connected societies due to the ability to feed larger amounts of people and create a surplus of food, which is possible in an agricultural society, which in turn leaves time for socialization of larger groups of people, and those larger family units are possible to form. The clan, as a concept, has been and still is outside the industrial world the main political unit for a lot of societies. When we talk about family lines and dynasties, we are talking about clans. Remember this.
The clan being the main political unit stands, in both theory and much in practice, above singular persons. There is, as to why I say persons, because the concept of separate individuality from the clan is very rare throughout history and will demand an entire video for itself. As a person in a clan structure, you are not only supposed to obey the clan and act in its interests, you are also a representative of the clan and not just yourself. This is why, for example, punishing adultery is so important in many clan-based societies. It is because it is not just a question about individual persons but about a greater political context where marriage is part of alliances between plans. Arranged marriages are to cement the politics of the clan. Personal interests, such as personal love, risks the greater clan and just need to be put aside. In a clan-based society, making the marriage wow for personal interests, such as love and lust, risks these alliances.
This concept of the clan superseding the individual is also why intergenerational conflicts are so common throughout history because it was not about singular persons but about the future of the great clan and their claims. Since the person of a clan cannot be separate from his unclan, he shares in the depths and responsibilities of the clan. Clans being the center of society throughout much of history is also why honor culture is so common throughout history. With other culture, I mean the need to answer to insults, efforts, and threats to the clan's reputation, even if it would not be advantageous to the individual person to do so, to preserve the face of your clan and his associates. Not doing it risks weakening the clan or making it appear weak and risky, resulting in the clan's destruction at the hands of other clans. This, of course, also means that conflicts due to perceived slights are much more common in class societies than societies based upon the concept of modern Western individuality. But as a person living in such a society, you are expected, through cultural norms, to defend your honor and through extension, down of your plan. I mean, not supporting or excusing clan structures. Saying this, I am just trying to explain it, and even the explanations here are just an overview. I might even make a video just about plant structures and the culture that usually results from it in detail. But suffice to say, clan culture brings with it a lot of behaviors that non-clan-based societies would find problematic, even outside increased everyday violence. For example, nepotism, which is illegally helping your clan and its associates to the detriment of others. It is a common form of corruption, but it's not frowned upon. Instead, it was or is even seemed almost as a virtue in clan societies, as you are expected to prioritize your clan and your family above strangers and others that you do not have these familial associations with, because the clan exists in order to further its, and through extension, its members' goal of survival, and the members of the clan should in turn help the clan prosper. Remember that most of history has been dominated by societies lacking a strong state, which can protect individual persons and or limit the powers of large families. Thus, the only way to avoid getting trampled upon would expend one's own personal power was through the clan and the associates that existed within them and between them. This is also why nuclear families as a dominant family type only appear in societies with strong states, and most of the world outside the industrial world is still clan-based. The reason for the clan, which is the power structure of the great family, is to protect and advantage its members in a dangerous, unstable world.
Actually, on the subject of the nuclear family, the next type of family to discuss is the nuclear family. The nuclear family, that stayed a smaller family of parents and children, as it appears in the modern world, has appeared sporadically throughout history but began in its modern form to appear alongside the more dominant clan structures during the late medieval period and Renaissance, particularly in the northern and western parts of Europe during the 14th to the 17th century. That there are several factors that could have led to the nuclear family appearing. It is possible to notice a decrease in multi-generational homes, i.e., parents living with their kids' kids or more generations back, following the Black Death during the 14th century. There is a decrease of serfdom. Serfdom here is in contractual obligations between peasant serve families that should be interpreted as clans and land who love families and their plans in favor of more direct ownership by individual persons. It is also possible to notice more codified law with a focus upon personal responsibility and agency rather than intergenerational obligations and responsibilities. There are also more formalized types of clan structures in the form of standardized nobility, which only recognized certain families as being nobles, which could have led to the discrediting of class structures among the richer peasantry and non-noble households, as a lot of the privileges disappeared.
Another factor is the Christian theological developments due to the power struggles between emilia politics and the church. In this, we can see a glorification of simpler households as the ideal. For example, the description of the ideal household in modern looters, no, not that one, this one, yes, this one, its doctrinal book, their clinic, actually describes a smaller nuclear household as being the ideal. This could have been implemented in order to weaken certain clan structures due to various political aims. We can also notice the strengthening of central power and the beginning of modern states during this period. These states actually have the power to protect persons at private property, which means you no longer have to rely only upon your extended family and their connections to protect you. The reasons could be many, but for a long time, nuclear families lived alongside strong client structures in Europe. In fact, it was not until the beginning of the early industrialization and Enlightenment during the 18th century, with the parallel development of strong states, that the nuclear family was beginning to become the dominant form of family in the European world, and even then, remnants of the past clan structures, such as royal lines, remained in power until the 20th century. You know, World War I and all the royal families that ruled the various empires in Central Europe.
Today, the Western world is so dominated by the nuclear family as the dominant family type to the extent that the classical clan structures of the past are almost completely gone and forgotten. Of course, there does exist exceptions, such as Italy and Albania, with the various clan families, and some royal and noble families would still cling to the old ways in ceremonial ways, but I'm speaking generally here. New ucla family has dominated such a degree that when you hear conservatives in the West talk about going back to the traditional family, it is often this type of family that they envision, not the clan structures of old.
And now, it might be time to discuss what we might see in the modern world, or what we are currently seeing in the world with regard to family structures today. In the West, we can see a tendency towards single-parent homes, with though not unheard of in the past due to loss of life, what's rarer and it was even rarer to be the case of divorce and willful absence of one parent. The modern welfare state, after World War II, with his various benefits, have made it possible to remain alone and raise children. I will make a prediction about modern life and how the family is going to develop, at least in the West, but take this with a truckload of salt, as large-scale predictions based upon the past have not always had the best track record. Though I still think that history can be useful to learn from and predict some things. Think that it is possible that maybe we will see a long period where single-parent families are common sight together with the older nuclear families, at least in the Western industrialized world, and this is at least for as long as there exists strong states that sustain the structures necessary for both single-parent and nuclear households. If strong centralized states collapse, then I think that these family structures will also collapse. But the existence of the single-parent household and the nuclear household could be a phenomenon that is not dependent upon the state, but rather due to norms in society, though I doubt it. And time will tell if I'm right or wrong, because sooner or later, even the strongest states collapse eventually.
Now, I have gone through a couple of family structures that have been common throughout history and thus might be of importance for considering historical events and how people understood the world in the past. Hopefully, this brief overview of the types of families common throughout history have been informative, and hopefully you enjoyed it. Please do subscribe, as it would help the channel spread awareness about the humanities historical items.