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Which Family?: Problems in the Reconstruction of the History of the Family as an Economic and Cultural Unit

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Megan Vaughan
Megan Vaughan
Affiliation:
University of Malawi
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Extract

This paper explores some of the major methodological problems associated with the study of the history of the family in Africa. It sets out to explore the problem of the unit of analysis, concluding that the historian must be careful to distinguish between idealized family forms and the reality of family structures. Using both historical and contemporary examples from southern Malawi the paper explores this problem further by analysing the role of the matrilineage vis-à-vis the household over time.

Both oral and written sources specifically concerned with the history of the family tend to emphasize the formal structure of kinship relations and it is difficult to know how these relate to the facts of social and economic organization. Even using present-day evidence it is difficult to integrate cultural perceptions of kinship and family relations with realities – in particular with the economic realities, which may change much faster than cultural norms. In the final section of the paper it is suggested that the nearest we can get to a knowledge of the history of the family, avoiding the problems of ideology and the drawbacks of structural and evolutionary models, is to approach the subject ‘sideways’. By studying other institutions and relationships which impinge on family structures, we may get closer to defining the boundaries of these structures. This approach is illustrated using the example of chinjira - a non-kin-based relationship between women which exists in parts of southern Malawi. A study of chinjira indirectly demonstrates both the strength and the limits of kinship relations.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , April 1983 , pp. 275 - 283
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

1 Guyer, Jane, ‘Household and Community in African Studies’, African Studies Review, XXIV, ii–iii (1981), 87–137.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Many anthropologists have noted the phenomenon of what I shall call ‘cultural lag’. Epstein, T. S. discusses something like this in her Economic Development and Social Change in South India (Manchester, 1962), 328.Google Scholar Detailed and fascinating accounts of the ‘complex relation between normative ideals and situational adjustments’ are provided for widely different communities in Moore, S. Falk and Myerhoff, B. (eds.), Symbol and Politics in Communal Ideology (Ithaca; 1975).Google Scholar

3 Undertaken as part of a larger study on ‘Women, Policy and Planning in Malawi’, commissioned by the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa.

4 Vaughan, Megan, ‘Social and Economic Change in Southern Malawi: a study of rural communities in the Shire Highlands and Upper Shire Valley from the mid-19th century to 1915’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1981), 218.Google Scholar Some clan names were common to the indigenous Nyanja and the immigrant Yao. Yao immigrants could thus be welcomed into the area on the grounds that they were fellow clan members, even though their language and many aspects of their culture were foreign.

5 A group of Nyanja of the Mwale clan practised a policy of in-marriage in the late nineteenth century, at the same time as the Mbewe clan of the Yao were energetically out-marrying and using the clan as a device for assimilating more and more Nyanja into their ranks.

6 Vaughan, , ‘Social and Economic Change’, 147.Google Scholar

7 Evidence for the instability of the nuclear family amongst the Yao comes from ‘reported reminiscence’ of the many rituals devised to ensure fidelity on the part of women whose husbands were away on trading expeditions. Clearly there is a problem in dating the origins of these rituals, and of knowing how far concerns expressed in them reflected social realities.

8 It would take more than a brief paper to discuss the contributions of these anthropologists, and I do not deal with them here. J. Clyde Mitchell's work concentrates largely on the structure of matrilineality and authority amongst the Yao, and economic change is analysed within this framework. Mitchell's most valuable contributions to a study of the history of the ‘family’ in this part of Africa come in some of his articles: ‘The Yao Of Southern Nyasaland’ in Colson, E. and Gluckman, M. (eds.), Seven Tribes of British Central Africa (London, 1951), 292–353Google Scholar; ‘Preliminary notes on land tenure and agriculture among the Machinga Yao’, Rhodes-Livingstone J., X (1950), 1–13Google Scholar; ‘An estimate of fertility in some Yao hamlets in Liwonde District of Southern Nyasaland’, Africa, XIX, iv (1949), 293–308.Google ScholarMitchell, The Yao Village (Manchester, 1956)Google Scholar cites an unpublished paper by him, ‘Marriage among the Machinga Yao’. Mitchell also addressed the problem of the ‘household’ in an article which foreshadows much later work on the subject: ‘The collection and treatment of family budgets in primitive communities as a field problem’, Rhodes-Livingstone J., VIII (1949), 50–56.Google Scholar Another sociologist based on the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, David Bettison, examined the structure of households in periurban villages around Blantyre-Limbe and attempted to relate this to the position of these households within lineages, ‘clusters’ and villages. Such an approach, if it had been more generally applied, would probably have proved more fruitful than analyses centred solely on ‘matrilineality’. See Bettison, D., The Social and Economic Structure of seventeen villages, Blantyre-Limbe, Nyasaland (Rhodes-Livingstone Institute Communication no. 12, Lusaka, 1958).Google Scholar

9 Coudenhove, Hans, My African Neighbours (London, 1925).Google Scholar

10 Sally Falk Moore states that ‘changes in the relative positions of individuals and changes in social regularities are connected though not co-extensive phenomena’, and that these connexions are discounted by structural models. Instead of seeing ‘change’ as the opposite of ‘regularity’, she suggests that it is more useful to ‘conceive an underlying, theoretically absolute cultural and social indeterminacy, which is only partially done away with by culture and organized social life, the patterned aspects of which are temporary, incomplete, and contain certain elements of ambiguity, discontinuity, contradiction, paradox and conflict’. Moore, S. Falk, ‘Uncertainties in situations, indeterminacies in culture’, in Falk, Moore and Myerhoff, (eds.), Symbol and Politics in Communal Ideology.Google Scholar

11 Beinart, William, ‘The Family Youth Organization, Gangs and Politics in the Transkeian Area’. Conference on the history of the Family in Africa, S.O.A.S., September 1981.Google Scholar

12 What follows is based on the research of Mr Pexie Ligoya, a student of Chancellor College, University of Malawi, though I have placed my own interpretation on some of his findings: Ligoya, P. M. C., ‘Chinjira between Women in Thyolo District’, Department of Sociology, Chancellor College, Student Seminar Paper, 1981.Google Scholar