FAMILY IS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION

Family Is a Social Institution

Family Is a Social Institution

Introduction

The paper discusses that the family is a social institution. In the social sciences, the definition of family varies the approach. The family is a group of people united by kinship, whether parentage or alliance. For anthropologists (anthropology is the science that study man in society), the family has a social basis. Insofar as its structure and operation, it conforms to a set of social rules, therefore, it is an institution.

Discussion

The family as a social institution fulfills the function of the culture. It is perhaps the most important and most appreciated by politicians and all those who care about the development of nationality and patriotism. The family institution takes shape in marriage by which society imposes the following rules:

The first of them is the prohibition of incest forbidden sexual union between close relatives;

The second is the rule of exogamy which requires a spouse to seek outside his own family group. This obligation to build relationships with people from other groups based on society and seeks to establish peaceful coexistence conducive to the perpetuation of society.

Kinship is the set of consanguinity and affinity based on marriage, and designed, organized and experienced by a society.

The Diversity of Family Structures

The family called nuclear (nucleus) conjugal family consists of father, mother and children in the case of most families. The family called extended for more than two generations living under the same roof. It is the patriarchal family. The authority is exercised by the oldest person in the family.

Rules of Matrimonial Alliance

It depends on the number of spouses: - Monogamy: one spouse only; - Polygamy: multiple spouses. - Polyandry: A woman has several husbands; - Polygyny: one man has several wives.

The basic principles of the society which guide the choice of spouse are:

Exogamy choice of spouse outside the social group, to which he belongs, is due to the need to establish alliance relationships between the various groups that make up society. Endogamy is a marriage within a particular social group, due to the need to maintain the unity of social groups and society itself. Homogamy is marrying a fellow geographically or socially. If the spouses no longer meet in the same circumstances as before, they often continue to belong to social groups or similar, as social homogamy (AAVV, 2009).

The family as a ...