creed_family values and domestic economies

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"Family Values" and Domestic Economies Author(s): Gerald W. Creed Source: Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 29 (2000), pp. 329-355Published by: Annual ReviewsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/223424Accessed: 20-07-2015 21:38 UTC

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Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2000. 29:329-55 Copyright ? 2000 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

"FAMILY VALUES" AND DOMESTIC ECONOMIES

Gerald W. Creed Department of Anthropology, Hunter College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York, New York, New York 10021; e-mail: [email protected] cuny.edu

Key Words capitalism, family history, households, kinship, strategies * Abstract This review inverts the idiom "family values" to show the value of the family. It grounds this value in family economic activity but advocates an interactive approach in which cultural commitments to the family influence economic and political outcomes. Historical and ethnographic research on the family is mustered to illustrate the interaction and then combined with theories of capitalism and nationalism to account for the resonance of the family values discourse. A final section reviews the potential dangers of family-focused research.

That tradesman who does not delight in his family will never long delight in his business. D. Defoe

INTRODUCTION

The discourse on "family values" in the United States reflects a radical insistence on connections anthropologists have spent 40 years disaggregating. We long ago distinguished families (defined by blood and marriage) from households (based on propinquity), which might or might not be the loci of various domestic functions (Bender 1967, Sanjek 1982). We subsequently accumulated a compendium of ethnographic examples to verify the cultural flexibility of domestic arrangements. Eventually, the concept of family came under scrutiny with challenges to the biological/affinal monopoly over its constitution (Carsten 1995, Peletz 1995, Ragone 1996, Weismantel 1995). Those concerned with the decline of family values refuse these insights and insist that living arrangements are essential to concepts of the family, and that proper families are constituted with particular types of blood and conjugal relations. Those whose lives do not fit these models often defend themselves with the same family breastplate. Gays and lesbians claim that their domestic relationships constitute "chosen" families (Weston 1991), and many ad- vocate marriage (Stiers 1999) and parenthood (Lewin 1993). For the defenders of family values, such actions provide more evidence of how far the family has degenerated; the attempt to broaden definitions of the family only amplifies their

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distress. The escalating arguments then enhance the social centrality of the family. This positive feedback has driven the debate to a fevered pitch.

The extreme positions that have evolved fail to contain the issues that inspired them. Many of those espousing narrow ideas about the family rallied to resist the return of Elian Gonzalez to his biological father in Cuba for political reasons. Conversely, some of the lesbians who challenged biological family dogma by forming "chosen families" pursued numerous strategies to replicate biological bonds (Hayden 1995) and appealed to blood connections to gain custody of their children when their relationships ran aground (Galst 1998). Such ironies verify that the argument over family values is not simply about (re)producing particular domestic arrangements. It is also an attempt to tap the cultural capital concentrated in the idea of "family" for personal, social, political, and economic objectives. As an analytical strategy, then, it is useful to invert the idea of family values and begin with the value of the family.

Domestic arrangements are meaningful in all places studied by anthropologists. There may be no universal understanding of the family, but everyone has ideas about how relationships of blood, marriage, sex, and residence should relate and articulate with processes of social reproduction (Ilcan 1996). These meanings are constituted in the experiences of everyday life, especially those related to making a living. Diverse economic experiences in different cultural contexts lead to divergent family forms, different family relations, and varied family commitments, both between societies and within them, as well as over time. These commitments can influence human actions in ways that impact broad political and economic developments. In other words, the value of the family begins with its everyday economic significance, but it does not end there. This view, of course, suggests that those concerned about family values are right-the constitution of families has social consequences. Although the formulas they offer are simplistic, their critics err when they deny the impact of social organization on society.

This article reviews some of the literature that illuminates the interaction between domestic arrangements, the material aspects of making a living, and the cultural value attached to the family. It examines work published since Yanagisako's (1979) magisterial trek over similar terrain, with an emphasis on the past decade. Much of the current anthropological literature is still comprehendible in the categories Yanagisako deciphered, but it has also taken her admonitions to heart. As she advised, most researchers have given up the search for a uniform defini- tion of family or household in favor of contingent characterizations in different cultural contexts. I follow their lead and resist defining these terms. Instead, I begin by contrasting an interactive view of family-economy relations to earlier approaches and illustrate the requisite interaction with recent work from family history, historical anthropology, and long-term field projects. I then review examples of ethnographic research in a variety of contexts where the family and capitalist economic forces are closely interwoven, from the family farm to the family business. The subsequent section reconnects these economic relations with family history and theories of capitalism and nationalism to better understand the


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latest fascination with family values. I conclude with a cautionary section on the possible pitfalls of family economy research.

FROM EVOLUTION TO INTERACTION

The interactive model suggested here is a fusion of two opposing views of the relationship between family and economy: economic versus cultural determin- ism. In the latter, the value of the family is associated with a particular family form thought to be conducive to capitalist development. This idea emerged from Hajnal's (1965) distinction of family formation in eastern and western Europe, which others adopted to explain the origins of capitalism in the West and its spread to those parts of Asia with similar family patterns (Wolf & Hanley 1985). The lack of development elsewhere could then be blamed on strong family commitments incompatible with capitalism. This logic is common in what became known as the modernization paradigm.

The alternative sees the value of the family in its complete adaptability to economic opportunities and exigencies. It is perhaps expressed most explicitly by Laslett (1972), who insists that the size and character of the family is not a value or norm, but rather "a circumstance incidental to the practice of agriculture, to the customs of land distribution and redistribution, to the laws and tradition of land inheritance, and of succession in the patriline" (1972:xii). Many family historians and historical anthropologists in the 1970s and 1980s accepted this economic reasoning (for a review see Casey 1989). Because most of the ethnographers who took up the study of households came from materialist perspectives, economic interpretations were reproduced there as well; most of these studies documented domestic adaptations to economic conditions and changes (e.g. Maclachlan 1987, Smith et al 1984).

Taken together, then, the literature on family and household in the 1980s seems to imply that cultural commitments to the family were either nonexistent or completely determinant. Both views have heavy evolutionary baggage, and both assume an association between particular family forms and particular economic arrangements, which Goody (1996:15) criticizes as a "too deterministic view of the relationship between macroeconomic and family variables." More important, both deny any processual interplay between family ideas and economic forces. When family commitments are recognized as important they are persistent and determinant. When families adapt, cultural commitments are nonexistent or ignored. The family as both a cultural and economic formation is conceptually foreclosed.

There were dissenters. Many of the numerous collections on the household economy from the 1980s included contributions suggesting that domestic ideas were a cultural force in their own right (Kunstadter 1984, Olsen 1989, Rutz 1989). Cheal (1989) grapples directly with the opposition in the well-worn terms of moral versus political economies. He concludes that neither is sufficient alone, but he leaves us with the image of two "parallel systems" selectively drawn upon


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(1989:19, see also Cheal 1991). This reinforces evolutionary views in history and anthropology that see a shift from cultural to practical or individual motivations with the rise of capitalism and still fails to capture the way that multiple factors intertwine. The collection edited by Medick & Sabean (1984) was an explicit effort to overcome this analytical opposition, but most of the contributions focused on the emotional costs of material adjustments. I accept that the family is largely the dependent variable in relation to capitalism and the state (Harrell 1997:27), but cultural commitments can influence family "adaptations" in nuanced ways that are only evident when focus is on the process rather than the outcome.

An important breakthrough in this effort came with the history of the English middle class by Davidoff & Hall (1987). Following Ryan's (1981) insights about the middle class in New York, they provide overwhelming evidence that family- based motives drove most of the capitalist expansion and investment that eventually constituted the middle class in England. The purpose of business was not the pursuit of profit but the provision of a "modest competency" for the family. Family and home provided both the rationale and setting for business enterprises, and these enterprises then produced vast material resources and social confidence at a period when the nation was poised to reap the benefits of an overseas empire. Many of these goods and services were consumed by the middle class itself in the pursuit of a good family life (Davidoff & Hall 1987:195-196). In this model, then, much of the supply and demand driving capitalist expansion was generated by family objectives.

Creighton (1996) addresses how and why this middle-class, male-breadwinner model spread throughout the working classes of Europe and America from the middle of the nineteenth century. He calls for an integrative approach that examines "the ways in which the actions of households, male and female workers, employers, states and social movements all related to and conditioned each other" (1996:333). He credits Seccombe (1993) with getting closest to this ideal, although still falling short, and then attempts to achieve it with material from Britain. He maintains that men and women of the working class in the first half of the nineteenth century believed economic changes and ruling class policies threatened the reproduction of their family life. This was already evident in the enclosure movement, which foreclosed an important contribution to the budget of laboring families (Humphries 1990), and was verified by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which threatened to separate husbands, wives, and children in workhouses. These actions occurred in a context of Malthusian discussions among the upper and middle classes about the threats of working-class fecundity. "Circumstances such as these meant that the struggles of this period to defend working-class interests were saturated with concern for the maintenance of the working-class family" (Creighton 1996:332). In working-class consciousness, a main cause of declining wages was excessive labor supply, so the withdrawal of women from the workforce was a logical response.

These two cases are only a sample of the growing research in family history that grants family commitments a central role. Sabean's history of a south German


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village documents "the ways in which property and production...shaped and were shaped by the family" (1990:12). Property disputes could sever family connections between individuals, but family commitments reestablished them with the next generation (Sabean 1990:419-20). Pedersen's (1995) study of the origins of the welfare state in Britain and France denies that it can be explained adequately with class- or gender-based arguments and suggests that the perceived crisis of family relations and its impact on children was equally consequential. McMurry (1995) suggests that the transformation of dairying in nineteenth-century rural New York from a feminized home enterprise to a male factory occupation was driven in part by conflicts within the family related to the increasing demands of cheese making. Women's role as the skilled cheese makers gave them the power to effect its transfer to the factory. In the antebellum Southeast, it was men's need to establish family independence that drove frontier expansion to Alabama, Texas, and Mississippi (Cashin 1991).

In all these studies, family relations and expectations influenced people's choices or actions within changing economic contexts. That these insights come from historical studies is not coincidental; even adaptable families are not necessarily quick-response units. The life cycle cannot be easily compressed, and many family decisions are not reversible or adjustable. Ideas about the family may be more malleable but they do not change overnight or at the same time for all sectors of a society. Thus, within anthropology, many of the recent family studies transcending the material/cultural opposition also have longer historical purviews. The study of demographic transition in western Sicily by Schneider & Schneider (1996) begins in the nineteenth century to show how three different classes made the transition to limited fertility at different times. When the depression arrived at the end of the century, the gentry chose to limit their families rather than disperse them through migration. Artisans began restricting births in the interwar period when providing apprenticeships for sons became a problem. Proletarian men restricted fertility after World War II in part to meet family ideals that had previously eluded them, such as keeping women at home. In each case, class-specific economic conditions interacted with cultural commitments to the family to shape fertility decisions. The Schneiders represent a growing anthropological interest in demography that connects demographic trends to family life (e.g. Duben & Behar 1991, Greenhalgh 1995, Kertzer & Hogan 1989, Kertzer & Fricke 1997). The corrections these anthropologists have made to demographic theory demonstrate the value of a family focus.

Collier's (1997) long-term study of families in an Andalusian village also provides new insight into old theories. She documents a shift in ideas about the family between 1963 and 1983. In the 1960s, villagers attributed their family behavior to social obligation and conventions. In the 1980s, they said they did what they wanted to do: Love replaced status concerns in the choice of a spouse, and the resulting marriage was based on partnership rather than patriarchy. In many respects, however, these "new" families were much like the old ones- nuclear family households with partible inheritance. She attributes the differences


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to the development of a moder subjectivity. This argument seems to replicate Shorter's (1975) evolutionary model of the moder family (see also Frykman & Lofgren 1987), but Collier's attempt to grapple with the change in subjectivity using Foucauldian notions of power suggests more about the cultural significance of family relations than the earlier evolutionary paradigm. The changes were not a reflection of an objective modernization, which had occurred long before the 1960s, but rather a sign of the degree to which control had been internalized in the disciplines of daily life.

Collier traces this change to shifting ideas about the nature of inequality, no- tably the declining importance of land inheritance and its replacement by occupational achievement. People conceptualized kin relations in the ways they conceptualized economic relations. Rather than being completely transformed, however, continuing family commitments were repackaged to fit with new economic reality. Moreover, the fact that the family became the central arena for demonstrating modernity verifies its significance. Faier (1997) found the same focus among Palestinian social activists who defined their image of a "Pales- tinian modern" on the foundation of a critique of orientalist stereotypes of the "Arab family." Similarly, in Cashin's (1991) analysis of southern planter families, young men's desires to be modern provided part of the motivation to establish independence on the frontier in an agricultural variant of the male-breadwinner model emerging elsewhere. Following Collier, we cannot assume these modern ideas reflect a retrenchment in family values. They may instead reflect the need to make continuing family commitments consistent with other socio-cultural changes.

A few historians have started to grapple directly with the social translation of economic changes into a family-values discourse. Gillis (1996) attempts to "reconstruct the history of the western family imaginary from its beginnings in the late middle ages to the present" (p. xviii). The inevitable loss of cultural specificity in such a project is worsened by his apparent refusal to acknowledge it: "Today ... regardless of class, ethnicity, or region, there is striking similarity in the way family cultures are practiced" (Gillis 1996:xix). Nonetheless, parts of the argument are intriguing, especially his analysis of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Early industrialization strained resources of the nuclear family, leading to more expansions (Ruggles 1987). New kin were incorporated while spiritual families and associations such as the Masons acquired parity with blood ties. "On such bonds was built the class consciousness that encouraged the bourgeoisie to challenge the aristocratic monopoly of wealth and power" (Gillis 1996:65). Thus, although Gillis sees clear economic causes to family experiments, the resulting family arrangements provided the consciousness crucial to subsequent economic transformation. The era of experimenta- tion came to an end in the mid-nineteenth century, when industrial production moved from the household to the factory. This opened up vast new possibilities and obligations for individuals to construct family worlds according to their own specifications (Gillis 1996:71). The resulting obsession with family was evident


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in the celebration of children's birthdays, the veneration of family portraits and heirlooms, new patterns of gift exchange, Christmas celebrations (Kuper 1993), the new interest in family trees, and the significance of family reunions (Neville 1987).

Whereas Gillis is interested in the cultural history of family myths, Coontz (1992) is determined to show just how mythic these ideas are in the United States. First, the traditional family is not even "traditional" because the Victorian model was significantly reworked in the 1950s. Women in the nineteenth century left housework to servants, but their counterparts in the 1950s had to do everything for themselves. Men, who had focused on enterprise and occupation in the Victorian era, were increasingly encouraged to root their self-image in familial roles. This "historical fluke" was based on a post-war economic boom that allowed middle- class and many working-class Americans to adopt family models dependent upon cheap energy, low-interest home loans, educational and occupational opportunities, and secure employment, to wit: early marriage, early childbearing, consumer debt, and big houses in the suburbs.

Coontz then reveals a more complicated reality for the 1950s, with poverty rates at a quarter of the population exacerbated by extreme racial and ethnic discrim- ination. Many white people who could aspire to the family model embodied by television icons such as the Cleavers and the Nelsons felt restricted and pressured by it in a context where any deviations (e.g. disinterest in housework or refusal to marry) were pathologized, while real family pathologies (e.g. sexual abuse and domestic violence) were denied. Even for families that thrived, the basis of their enchantment was short-lived. The economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s under- mined the possibility or even desirability of the 1950s family ideal. "Family values, forms, and strategies that once coordinated personal life with older relations of production and distribution are now out of sync with economic and political trends" (Coontz 1992:257). This generic family crisis soon evolved into a collection of very distinct problems. As Coontz (1997) points out in her sequel on contemporary families, "kids who've had too much luxury and indulgence [sometimes] act like kids who've had too little, but both the reasons and the treatments ... are quite distinct" (p. 8). The fact that both are "family" problems, however, leads some to perceive a uniform family crisis. More specific analyses of family life and economy are crucial to deconstructing these conceptions.

DOMESTIC ECONOMIES

Studies of contemporary domestic economies illustrate the value of the family in a variety of places and economic circumstances. Most of these studies can be grouped into four categories: (a) the family farm; (b) households and development; (c) the family business; and (d) working-class families. In the following two sections, I discuss a few works in each category to illustrate their distinct contributions to an appreciation of the economic and cultural value of the family.


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Family Farms and Development The concept of the family farm, with the emotions it evokes and the policies it has provoked, constitutes definitive proof of the relationship between family culture and economy. Why does the family farm merit protection when so many other small enterprises of all stripes have been gobbled up or put out of business by capitalist behemoths? The small farm gains contemporary resonance from its cultural association with the family and the assumption that agriculture is somehow the appropriate custodian of such traditions. One of the most detailed recent efforts to document the economics of the phenomenon is Barlett's (1993) study of Dodge County, Georgia. Her major contribution is to disaggregate the category and show significant variation on the basis of three factors: (a) the scale of operation, (b) when operators began farming, and (c) "management style" (see Bennett 1982). Barlett concludes that the interaction of these variables, with an emphasis on management style, accounts for the ability of family farms to survive recurrent crises (especially the one that began in the 1970s). Cautious managers, who generally fared better than ambitious ones, valued physical work and preferred family labor to hired workers. Thus, the more family oriented the enterprise, the better it fared, albeit at the cost of significant self-exploitation. O'Hara (1998) makes it clear that this exploitation weighs heavily on Irish women whose important contributions to family farming are largely overlooked. The idealogical and cultural significance of the family farm in Ireland establishes a preserve for male dominance. Sick (1999) uses the concept of the family farm to characterize coffee growers in two Costa Rican communities. Acknowledging that their experience has been more positive than that of coffee farmers elsewhere, she sets out to document the factors that underlie this achievement. Sick shows how income diversification, migration, and education, which are often seen as the death knell of the family farm model, can actually sustain a family enterprise in periods of difficulty.

It is revealing that Sick sees the farmers in her study as relatively successful, because the concept of the family farm is usually reserved for more developed societies, primarily the United States, Canada, and parts of Europe. In less developed parts of the world, the relationship between family and economy is more often discussed in terms of "households," "development," and "ecology." This reflects differences in scale and the differential role of subsistence, as well as the fact that the families involved often do not conform to the discrete nuclear inde- pendent units of family farm fame (Blackwood 1997:282). The populist version of this approach is articulated by Netting (1993). He maintains that in situations where people are plentiful and land is scarce, small-holding intensive agriculture is more effective than industrial farming and that the household is the most efficient unit for small-holding production. The household not only reproduces its own workers, it also trains them in the special skills and ecological knowledge needed for careful husbandry. Household labor is superior to hired workers for the skilled, unsupervised work of intensive cultivation, and children can contribute as well. Households also enjoy lower transaction costs and provide greater incentives than alternative production units such as the collective or firm.


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Wilk apparently learned this lesson and has become a strong and prolific pro- ponent of a household focus in economic research. In his work among the Kekchi Maya of Belize (Wilk 1991), he uses insights of ecological and economic anthropology, specifically a focus on choice, strategy, and decision making, to redress the limitations of evolutionary thinking. He wants to show that domestic arrangements are always finely tuned to local factors. This local "niche" includes spatial and temporal patterns of access to markets, population pressure on land resources, ecological variation, and the social organization of productive labor in agriculture (Wilk 1991:9). Through a contrast of three villages, he shows that expanded production for consumption and the market leads to the emergence of the household as the main cooperative work group and a greater role for household clusters (formed when married children settle near their parents and continue to cooperate). These discoveries would provide stronger support for his emphasis on local factors if he had incorporated villagers' expressed dislike of three-generation families more centrally. This minor slight reaches major proportions in the innovative analysis of the domestic economy and its relationship to economic development in Colombia by Gudeman & Rivera (1990). They claim "the house is the principal grouping for carrying out the practices of livelihood" (1990:1), but in the "conversations" they relate, the issue of family or kinship is hardly broached.

Hakansson (1994) suggests that much of the literature on African gender and development has made a similar mistake. Despite an extensive literature on African households (Mackintosh 1989, Haswell & Hunt 1991, Guyer 1981, Moock 1986, Vaughan 1985), he believes political-economic factors have eclipsed the role of kinship and marriage systems. Across Africa, elopement and informal unions have replaced traditional marriages, leading to an increase in households headed by women with diminished access to subsistence and income (Kilbride & Kilbride 1990, Vaughan 1983:277). The causes include land scarcity, market dependency, and labor migrations, but Hakansson (1994) suggests these forces are mediated by culturally specific kinship and marriage ideas to produce different family forms with different consequences for women. To make this point, he contrasts the Gusii of western Kenya with the Luyia. Luyia women have secure rights as daughters, so women endangered by the dissolution of informal unions can call on parents and brothers who incorporate them or their children into extended families. Gusii women are "detachable," with their connection to natal families based on their role as wives, so if their marriages dissolve they lose claims on their natal family and have to support themselves.

Blackwood (1997) shows how kinship relations can also shape the outcome of economic development. The green revolution transformed the Minangkabau villagers she studied from subsistence farmers to market producers and opened up the possibility for wage labor. Most families, however, preferred the kin relations of sharecropping to the capitalist relations of wage labor. Sharecropping contracts were usually established between kin, and unrelated parties actually became kin through the arrangement. Kinship obligations prevented elites from freely dismissing clients whereas the ability to tap clients for other labor made the arrangement attractive to owners as well. In short, the role of kinship kept


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sharecropping central (cf Emigh 1998, Kertzer 1984, Shaffer 1982). The result was not a lack of development but rather a culturally specific variant that miti- gated capitalist individualism and proletarianization (Blackwood 1997:291). This replicates Harmsworth's (1991) view of kinship relations in tobacco production in Uganda, but both require more attention to the inequality between kin.

The issue of inequality brings us directly into the resilient differentiation debate. This debate was central to the original anthropological interest in peasant households and has been with household and family studies ever since. It is especially robust in the literature on Africa (Guyer 1981:109-14). We need not engage it here because both sides of the debate accept that the family may be crucial to economic outcomes. Those who follow Chyanov emphasize the cyclical nature of economic fortunes as a result of changing household composition, whereas those who see differentiation sometimes attribute it to particular family or household constellations that allow members to consolidate resources in particular economic circumstances. Toulmin (1992:277), for example, points out that Bambara households with sufficient labor during the groundnut boom of the 1950s and 1960s, were able to accumulate enough wealth to give them a permanent economic advantage. Of course, the question of differentiation need not have the same answer in all cases of capitalist development.

Family Businesses and Working Families Moving from agrarian to industrial contexts shifts the family focus but the inequality remains. At the most advantaged end we find research on elite families that are multifaceted concentrations of financial, human, social, and cultural capital (McDonogh 1986, Marcus 1992, Lomnitz & Perez-Lizaur 1987, Douglass 1992, Hamabata 1990). Douglass's (1992) analysis is unique in that it covers all the pow- erful families of Jamaica-21 families that live in the hills around Kingston and own the major manufacturing, financial, import/export, and tourism enterprises (1992:1). She insists that it was the intense commitment to family among these groups that facilitated their economic supremacy (Douglass 1992:266-67). Lom- nitz & Perez-Lizaur (1987) reach a similar conclusion about the Gomez family in Mexico, which is basically a business conglomerate with hundreds of members across a variety of class positions. The authors' original objective was to show how members of this "grandfamily" tapped family connections for economic gain, but they discovered instead that these entrepreneurs wasted valuable resources and made bad decisions to satisfy cravings for family sentiment. Hamabata's (1990) account of several wealthy business families in Japan comes closer to showing strategic manipulation of family connections, but not within the patrilineal enterprise family. Instead, relationships between owners' wives through their natal families established essential networks between industries. These studies demonstrate the economic value of family commitments, but they often give too little attention to how economic success over time can reinforce and even create family sentiments.


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Kondo (1990) explores this relationship in smaller Japanese family businesses. She distinguishes ie, the family as weight of history and obligation, from uchi, the family as a center of emotional attachment. Together they "create a symbolic whole with tremendous power" (Kondo 1990:153). Rather than a kinship group, however, the ie is best understood as a corporate group holding property in perpetuity. Although recruitment to the ie is based on sets of priorities that privilege kin, continuity of the ie takes precedence over kin, and a blood relative could be passed over for an unrelated person with more competence at the family trade, assuming the enterprise was promising enough to attract such a person. Her account of one young man's dilemma in deciding between his desired career as an art teacher and taking over the faltering family shoe business, which would likely default without him, illustrated how the family enterprise was interwoven with the ie and how perpetuity of both was a strong force in his sense of self.

Kondo offers an explanation of the current arrangement grounded in the early history of Japanese capitalism, but studies of small family enterprises elsewhere trace their significance to more recent global transformations of capitalism (and socialism). This model suggests that small, family-based enterprises (sometimes in combination with other economic activities) are a product of global economic difficulties after the 1960s, reflected in oil shocks, recurrent recessions, and generally slow growth. Capitalists responded by seeking cheaper labor around the world, shucking off many of the expenses they had acquired in post-war expansions and Fordist compromises with workers, and instituting productive arrangements that could respond quickly to changing market conditions. The new strategy, often referred to as flexible accumulation (Harvey 1989), depended on fragmented production units, dispersed to the cheapest location, utilizing existing social arrangements that could be easily abandoned with little cost. Families fit the bill perfectly and had the added benefit of a preexisting hierarchical organization by gender and generation buttressed by emotional cultural attachments, all of which insured inter- nal efficiency and self-exploitation. In a sense, this represents a return to elements of the proto-industrial family economy (Medick 1981) revived by deindustrializa- tion. It also required a shift in capitalist strategies toward more accommodation of local cultural practices (Rothstein & Blim 1992), which in turn produced new variants of capitalism (Blim 1997). Thus, capitalist diversity is partially a product of the culturally distinctive family contexts that late capitalism embraced.

Blim (1990) details the efficiency of such small family enterprises in central and northeast Italy. These small businesses were central to Italian economic development and succeeded through self-exploitation, minute specialization, shared risk, and flexibility. They were limited, however, by the same family commitments that accounted for their success. They avoided aggrandizement because the risks endangered the household's well-being, and they redistributed profits first to family needs instead of expansion. Greenhalgh (1994:751) asserts that Taiwan's early economic miracle "both fostered and was fostered by Taiwanese family enterprises." Family members were important not only for direct labor and administration, but also for deployment in various networks important for recruiting labor, capital,


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and information. Among furniture-producing households in Cuanajo, Mexico, Acheson (1996) found that "the household and business are so closely intertwined that it is difficult to distinguish between the two" (1996:334). Living and working quarters overlap, and family members switch regularly between house and shop tasks. He traces differential success among enterprises to household variables such as composition, degree of consensus, and budgeting practices.

Ironically, the capitalist value of domestic production is clearest in the case of socialist China, where the model has been a centerpiece of the reforms credited with unprecedented economic growth. According to Bruun (1993), the explo- sion of family businesses developed from two opposite motivations: Some people were forced into such activity by unemployment, whereas others were attracted to it by the possibility of profit. Farquhar (1994) discusses how these reforms transformed the rural town where she worked as storefront family shops sprang up to provide everything from noodles and tobacco to funeral goods and medical services (1994:240). She notes that the Chinese word for such entrepreneurial activity literally translates as "one-body-household." She is primarily interested in how entrepreneurial doctors attract patients through efforts to embody their medicine in ways that are antithetical to state institutional approaches, and she maintains that their ability to do so lies partially in "the fact that they work with their families and for family welfare" (Farquhar 1994:242). Whyte (1996) has questioned the role of entrepreneurial familism as the "engine" of Chinese development, but he still acknowledges that it has played a part in economic improvements.

A final example complements the picture of Chinese family businesses by following their significance outside China. Working with immigrant Hakka Chinese tanners in Calcutta, Oxfeld (1993) shows how their status as a politically insecure minority and their commitment to a seemingly nonnegotiable family development cycle shaped their entrepreneurial strategies. She develops the idea of "family process" to include both the unfolding of family structure and the manipulation of its possibilities. She is wrestling with the dilemma of structure and agency that is central to the culture-economy dialectic. How can we simultaneously recognize that people manipulate family relations and arrangements without denying the apparent cultural power of family ideas and commitments? The cases reviewed here may suggest part of an answer. What if family commitments are based on the recognition of alternatives? Given the diversity of family arrangements within societies, the possibility of naturalization seems limited (cf Harris 1981). Perhaps ideal family arrangements, although overlapping with ideas of sexuality and gender that are thoroughly naturalized, acquire cultural meaning precisely as preferential practices among alternatives. These preferences certainly acquire meaning in connection to group/class identity and morality, but the fact that they are "preferential" renders manipulation culturally acceptable, at least until variation reaches the point of threatening their status as preferences.

This brings us back to the United States and to Stacey's (1991) analysis of working-class families in the Silicon Valley. In a path-breaking book that became a lightning rod in the family values debate, she focuses on two families to


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show just how diverse family arrangements are becoming. According to her, the modem family included the seeds of its own destruction: the dependence on love and affection. That idea logically required the outlet of divorce when affection waned, and divorce proved to be the Achilles' heel of the modem family when the women's movement and economic changes reoriented marital relations and expectations (Stacey 1991:9). Subsequent remarriage, however, turned out to be the creative mechanism of the post-moder family, generating all sorts of innovative family relationships (Stacey 1991:254). Contrary to its image as a bastion of family conservatism, the working class pioneered these changes.

Stacey focuses on a wide array of social relations from romance to religion. Other economic studies of working-class families focus more attention on the workplace (Lamphere 1987, Lamphere et al 1993, Wolf 1992, Zavella 1987). Here we find the recurrent interest in how women manage the multiple demands of family and work, and how their increasing involvement in wage labor and greater contribution to the family's cash economy influence gender ideology and practice within the family. Some suggest that work allows women to challenge family patriarchy, others see it as only a temporary respite from such oppression, and still others emphasize the patriarchy of the workplace itself (cf Salaff 1981, Kim 1997). Taken together, they verify a complex interaction between family and work, often with ambiguous results.

Lamphere (1987) has noted women's use of the family to humanize the workplace by holding baby showers and showing family photographs. In other contexts, however, owners and managers are the ones who bring the family to the work site to increase exploitation. By modeling factory relations on a family idiom and equating the workplace with the family, owners tap into such family values as cooperation and industriousness to increase production and minimize resistance. Still, the metaphor cannot be sustained without some support from factory owners. Kondo (1990) recounts the efforts of Japanese owners to impart a family feeling to their enterprises through a variety of practices, including company outings and involvement in important personal events of employees, such as weddings and birthdays. These efforts are driven by profit motives, but for the owners these economic ties "are far more than merely contractual, entailing... strong bonds of loyalty, gratitude, and commitment"(Kondo 1990:198). She then shows how workers turn the family idiom to their own advantage, using it to build group solidarity within enterprises and to criticize owners for failing to fulfill familial obligations.

Cairoli (1998) has a different assessment of the "factory as family" model in the garment industry in Morocco. She sees little gain in terms of labor conditions and acknowledges that the model rendered women more amenable to exploitation. But she still sees the model as a workers' product with other benefits. Contrary to the rationalizations offered by exploitative factory owners, these women's wages are essential to their family economies. However, their jobs violate gender codes that value women primarily for their family/domestic roles. In an effort to simulate this cultural ideal, they remake the factory into a private space like home and recast staff as family. There is certainly no liberation here, but the resulting patriarchal


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family factory makes it possible for lower-class women to adhere to cultural ideals that otherwise threaten to further demean them. Rural immigrant women in Istan- bul resort to home and informal work for the same reason-it allows them to deny that they actually work (White 1994). Home work also allows economically secure Dominican women in New York to leave the workforce to symbolize their households' socio-economic mobility while still contributing to it economically (Pessar 1994). In these cases, the family becomes a site of industrial production but not a family enterprise. The invisibility of these arrangements often facilitates greater exploitation, including child labor (Beneria & Roldan 1987). At the other extreme, working at home (as opposed to home working) allows career women (and even men) to fulfill family commitments such as child rearing without being defined as a housewife (or househusband) in places where such a category is devalued.

THE NEW VALUE OF OLD VALUES

From the diverse examples of domestic economies reviewed here, one fact seems clear: Contemporary economic developments are not eroding the value of the family; rather, in many places, the family seems to be of increasing economic significance (Wheelock & Mariussen 1997). I have suggested that the rise of small family businesses has to do with the advent of a flexible global economy, and home work is probably even more attractive for the same reasons (Boris & Priigl 1996). In many places these small family enterprises are part of a diverse economic strategy. Multinational corporations are often attracted to such places expressly because subsistence production and other economic activities lower the level of wages required to reproduce the labor force. Workers must then combine formal wage labor with cash-cropping, subsistence production, and various informal activities. Sick (1999) finds the same situation among commercial farmers vulnerable to the world market: "For many farming households, a diversified strategy involving a combination of farming, wage-labor, craft production, migration and formal sector employment (when possible) has become the norm" (1999:17). Such arrangements can be found throughout Latin America and the Caribbean (Buechler & Buechler 1992, Deere 1990, Rothstein 1999, Safa 1995, Tice 1995, Weismantel 1995) as well as in Asia (Blackwood 1997, Bruun 1993, Wolf 1992), the Middle East (Singerman 1995, White 1994), Africa (Ellis 1998, Haswell & Hunt 1991, Moock 1986), and North America (Barlett 1993). In other words, the same capitalist economic forces that generate multiple income possibilities make it necessary to tap them, not only to supplement low wages but also as a hedge against the uncertainty that accompanies flexibility (Nash 1994). This also applies to the so-called transition economies. In eastern Europe, the importance of household production under socialism was reproduced by transition difficulties (Creed 1998), provoking some to see postcommunist domestic economies as a distinctive arena in a new variant of capitalism (Smith 2000). In China during the crucial early years of the reform, Bruun (1993) believes families pursued a


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"dual flow" strategy in which some members continued to tap the prestige and security of the state sector while others pursued the material wealth of private enterprise. The point here is that diverse global economic forces in the 1990s-from capitalist flexibility to socialist transition-make the family as a space of interaction more important than ever. The new information age may have challenged patriarchalism within the family as Castells (1997) insists, but related capitalist dynamics have made the family, reformed or not, more economically essential for many people. They need multiple incomes, from multiple sources, with multiple fallback positions; the family provides this synthesis.

The new value of the family is clearly reflected in family research. A prior fascination with the household division of labor has given way to a focus on the articulation of income streams. This has been accompanied by a decline in attention to inheritance. Earlier anthropological and historical research on the family focused on inheritance as the central factor shaping household forms and relations. To the degree that family farms or enterprises are among the multiple sources of income families rely on, inheritance will still be important, but the diversity of income sources diminishes its centrality. Even in family enterprises, new economic considerations have made management skills and business acumen perhaps more valuable. Thus, Greenhalgh (1994:750) notes an increased importance of acquired over inherited property for the family/firm heads in Taiwan. In more marginal re- gions, one might query the very benefit of inheriting a family enterprise when part of its value to a flexible global economy is its expendability.

The declining importance of inheritance in family studies has been balanced by increasing attention to migration. Migration has long been a central concern in both the anthropology and history of the family, but its role has shifted in the context of globalization. Historians often see migration as the unhappy des- tination of family members who could not be supported with family resources. Anthropologists traditionally focus on how migrant families adapt to their new environment, or how the departure of individuals, usually men, shapes the structure of the families left behind (Brettell 1988, Gailey 1992). Increasingly, however, migration of family members is seen as a way to maintain a family or family enterprise. Pessar (1982) argues that Dominicans migrate to the United States precisely to sustain their island family economies with remittances. Re- mittances are not new, but her research suggests that those who send money and those who receive it are involved in a more collective family endeavor than in the past, enhanced by richer and more frequent interaction. Thus, Harrison (1997) suggests that structural adjustment policies in Jamaica have reduced the extended family by encouraging migration, but that relations with migrants are now central to these families, creating families that are in some ways more complex than their predecessors. Ho (1993) captures this complexity with the concept of "international families" among Afro-Trinidadian immigrants in the United States. They maintain intense relations, including child-minding, with relatives back home through regular travel and telephoning. It is probably not coincidental that these revelations come from a migration stream that is predominantly female


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(Ho 1993:33), reinforcing and/or reflecting the feminization of kinship (di Leonardo 1987, Gillis 1996:80, Stacey 1991:267). But it is not only women creating this phenomenon. Oxfeld (1993) concludes her study of Chinese tanners in Calcutta with analysis of their migration to Toronto as an effort to diversify the family economy.

The complex combinations now needed for economic security account for the increasing difficulty many families around the world have in sustaining these arrangements and the problems that result. This is especially evident in the increasing global phenomenon of female-headed households (Mencher & Okongwu 1993, Fitchen 1995, Mullings 1997, Br0gger & Gilmore 1997, Susser 1993, Kilbride & Kilbride 1990). These arrangements have become a focal point for the family values discourse even though most of the people in these families share the domestic ideas of the larger society and may even be more committed to them (Coontz 1992:232-54). The escalating rhetoric reflects not a crisis of values but rather the new value of particular family arrangements in an economic context where multiple incomes are needed to support children and/or aging parents, and where the state is less willing to help. Single-parent families constitute a "crisis" precisely because the family has become more important as a space of economic interaction and integration, not to mention market demand. Still, the diversity of economic niches under flexible capitalism assures that no single family arrangement can answer the call for socio-economic coordination across a society, guaranteeing variety and perhaps anxiety (Stacey 1991).

There are also historical explanations for why the current diversity is interpreted as a crisis of values in the West. An extreme diversity of family forms and arrangements is certain to limit the development of a rigid family notion common to a whole society or group. Given that the family, despite being flexible, is not a quick-response unit, cultural uniformity is unlikely to develop from short-term adjustments. In Anderson's (1985) work on Britain, however, we see a long-term trend toward increasing uniformity that may be applicable more broadly. Over the past century, there was a significant increase in the uniformity of the life cycle. This uniformity combined with economic developments to produce similar family units, relations, and experiences. I believe this broad similarity transformed everyday practice into culture, which then became a standard to criticize noncon- formists, as well as subsequent changes. As several of the cases reviewed here suggest, this process usually occurs via class emulation. Economic improvements allow lower-class families to aspire to the cultural and material advantages of upper/middle-class forms. This achievement increases the similarity of family arrangements and strengthens the power of these models as cultural icons in the society. This iconic status then provides the basis for blaming lower classes when economic shifts force them to abandon valorized family forms for new arrangements, even if they do so in defense of their families. Their mobility forges the cultural weapon that is later used against them.

If we turn to Borneman's (1992) work on national identity in the two Germa- nies, we see another dimension of significance. He suggests that the state-through


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policies and laws pertaining to marriage, taxation, and other state prerogatives- produces a single master narrative of the life course. The extent to which one's life experience corresponds to that scenario affects one's sense of belonging to the state, which provides the basis of national identity. Combined with Anderson's insight, we can see how this might have contributed to the growth of nationalism since the nineteenth century. The increasing uniformity of the life cycle within societies made it possible for state policies to resonate more closely with large portions of populations, engendering a sense of belonging across otherwise diverse populations. The increasing investment of states in the national idea then increased the political and cultural significance of the uniform family arrangements that underlay nationalist identifications. Deviations from these models could be interpreted as threats to national projects and their associated values.

Many of these factors came together in the 1950s in the United States. Al- though never predominant, the male-breadwinner family model did become more common (Coontz 1992, Stacey 1996). The increased uniformity of family form across the society combined with an increased sense of national pride associated with victory in World War II. All of this was cemented by the growing role of television and the representation of ideal family forms among the Cleavers and the Nelsons. It was during this period that family form entered the culture. The subsequent diversification of families seemed to threaten this aspect of American culture. This interpretation is heightened by the fact that the economic changes reshaping families are also further separating the population by class, race, and ethnicity so that the diversification of families is occurring at a time when national identity is threatened on other fronts. These divisions have not been muted by the economic recovery of the 1990s, which has, in some ways, widened the gulf between a growing number of beneficiaries and those who are still left out. Simultaneously, the increasing role of cultural mediation has transformed earlier images of the Nelsons and Cleavers, along with such multi-cultural successors as the Huxtables, into hyperreality. In other words, in our shared concept of family, these fictionalized ideals and composites have become more real than reality itself (Lemert 1997:30-31), exacerbating the sense of dysfunction. The collective anxiety created by these developments makes the family a focus of popular concern ripe for political posturing.

INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE FAMILY

The objective of this review was not to synthesize the expansive literature on family economies but rather to illustrate the value of the family in various economic activities and to suggest that this economic value both benefits from and contributes to political and cultural value as well. This combination also generates anthropological value for the family as a site for research on various topics. Having advocated such a focus, I conclude with some important cautions. A common fatal flaw of family studies noted by both practitioners and critics (Hart 1992, Wilk 1989b) is


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the tendency to reify the unit, to treat it as an entity or "black box" rather than a collection of people and relationships. In this view, the household becomes an ac- tor itself; the social relations that actually constitute it disappear and conflicts and divisions within the family are eclipsed. This is especially problematic in terms of gender because inequalities between men and women are usually elemental to family cultures (Dwyer & Bruce 1988, although see Hamilton 1988 for an important exception). The same charge can be made on the basis of generational differences. Neither is inevitable, however, and many of the family studies reviewed here actually focus on conflict. Much of Sabean's (1990) account of families in Neckarhausen, for example, concerns the conflicts, disputes, and negotiations between generations and spouses.

These differences often overlap with economic inequality between members. Deere (1990) points out that the common multiple-livelihood strategy described above actually introduced multiple class positions into the household, with at- tendant conflict. White (1994:4) says we must see power relations within the commodity-producing family as simultaneously kin relations of solidarity and capitalist relations of exploitation (see also Brass 1986). This interaction is clear in Schrauwers' (1999) examination of adoption practices in central Sulawesi. There, fragmentation of landholdings and increasing market involvement increased inequality among small-holding rice farmers. In a cultural context where relationships are based as much on nurturance as on filiation, poorer parents have difficulty binding children to them. Adoption is easy and usually reflects the movement of children from poorer households to wealthier ones in need of cheap labor (see also Weismantel 1995). Because kinship relations are culturally defined as distinct from any calculation of costs and benefits, the adoptees are vulnerable to exploitation. This outcome is verified by some children's use of the category "slave" to characterize their position in their adopted homes.

In China, 15%-20% of the family enterprises Bruun (1993:52, 59) interviewed had incorporated distant relatives or strangers as full family members. Blim (1990) suggests that this strategy accounts for the success of Italian household industries, which picked up vulnerable laborers from among in-laws to supplement the elderly and young who provided much of the enterprises' "flexibility." Stephen (1991) claims that the Zapotec ideology of equality among kin masked increasing differentiation among women who used kinship ties to mobilize resources in a context of increasing commercialization. These relations are hardly novel: The history of capitalism is replete with examples of family exploitation. Rebel's (1983) descrip- tion of the manorial system in sixteenth-century Austria shows how rationalization efforts divided the peasant house into two classes: an advantaged one consisting of the head, his parents, and his heir, and a disadvantaged one made up of the noninheriting children, servants, and lodgers.

Greenhalgh (1994) has criticized the concept of "family firm" for obscuring these relations in Taiwan. She suggests it reproduces an orientalist discourse based on Confucian collectivism, which hides the fact that family firms are based instead on gender and other inequalities. As previously noted, O'Hara (1998) lodges a similar complaint against the concept of the family farm in Ireland. Many more


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critics have associated this violation with the concept of "family/household strategy" (see especially Wolf 1992). Feminists have suggested that so-called household strategies are often just the interests of the dominant male imposed on the rest of the household members (Folbre 1988:248). To see the outcome as a strategy not only misrepresents the result, it also ignores the struggle involved in the process (Schmink 1984). These problems are compounded by the rational economic motives often assumed to drive "strategic" behavior.

I accept these criticisms but do not think they are terminal. First, the fact that there is debate and conflict within a family does not preclude seeing the outcome as a strategy, unless one has an unduly romantic view of the term. "Decisions emerge from households through negotiation, disagreement, conflict, and bargaining" (Netting et al 1984b:xxii). If the outcomes were not in some ways mutual products, then there would not be so much conflict. This is nicely illustrated by Brettell's (1991) historical discussion of property transmission in Portugal, where the differential interests of family members provided occasions for renegotiating social relations. Of course, we must attend to inequities in the negotiation process. Even when the outcome is not a completely collective product, however, family members make individual decisions on the basis of the collective resources or possibilities within the family. In other words, the degree to which family considerations affect individual decisions about activities and livelihood makes the concept of strategy more appropriate than critics suggest, albeit a strategy by default.

Obviously, these particular justifications do not always apply, so the idea of strategy must be viewed as a socio-cultural variable. Lamphere (1986) noted that Portuguese immigrant workers in New England had a more corporatist notion of family than their Colombian counterparts. Sick (1999) found that women who brought land into Costa Rican family farms had more say in household decisions. Such differences affect the applicability of the strategy idea. It is no coincidence, then, that the term is encountered most often in studies of poor families, sometimes qualified by "survival" (Selby et al 1990). As Singerman (1995:50) notes, "Co- operation, trust, and mutual dependence make sense in a context where financial scarcity, political exclusion and incomplete information are everyday realities." Hart (1986:164) discovered that landless households in rural Java exhibited a greater degree of coordination and interdependence among family members than households with more control over the means of production. The role of economic difficulty also implies that strategies may be more likely at some times than at others because economic fortunes shift. Toulmin (1992) believes the groundnut boom of the 1950s and 1960s in Mali led to more individualistic labor activities, whereas the periods before and after were characterized by pooling of labor and collective activity within households. In addition, strategic behavior might vary over the family developmental cycle because the interests of different generations and genders may be more simpatico at some points than at others.

Certainly, technological and economic changes associated with globalization have affected the possibilities for family strategies. The increasing ease with which people and money move around the world, combined with the increasing ease of communication, have made migration more of a family strategy. Intense interaction


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facilitates real-time negotiation between members, reproduces their mutual interests, and sustains their collective identity (Basch et al 1994, Ho 1993, Pessar 1982). This may be even more likely if migrants are discriminated against in new loca- tions, and indeed, it seems that the concept of strategy is generally more applicable when families are under a perceived threat from the outside. According to Bruun (1993:55), the constant threat of state bureaucratic interference in private family businesses in China made it easier to manage family conflicts. This would apply as well to East European socialism (Kideckel 1993, Rev 1987). In Africa, Heald (1991) found that Kuria cattle herders placed greater emphasis on mutual interests and cooperation within the family than the Teso partly because of the threat of cattle raiding. Threats may also account for the utility that Oxfeld finds in the term strategy because it is clear that the Calcutta Chinese feel threatened in their position as a "pariah ethnic group" (1993:27-28). Similarly, Pessar (1994:138) says Dominican immigrant women in the United States put household interests ahead of individual ones in an attempt to challenge the negative stereotypes of Dominicans held by the majority culture. Of course, marginality can also diversify family interests and create conflict, as Kibria (1993) finds among Vietnamese Americans. Family unity is not the inevitable result of external pressures, but it is one possibility, as Oxfeld (1993) and Pessar (1994) demonstrate.

Pessar's analysis suggests that the refusal of the concept of strategy to highlight women's agency may have the opposite effect because women may opt for a collective domestic strategy. The Dominican women she interviewed recognized a choice between household versus individual interests, and their selection of the for- mer "was not a resigned or passive one foisted upon them by traditional husbands. Rather, these women saw themselves as struggling on another front ... confronting the distorted and denigrating cultural stereotypes of the majority culture" (Pessar 1994:138). In some cases a household strategy may represent women's initia- tive. Brusco (1995) argues that Colombian women converted to Protestantism in a strategic effort to convert their husbands to its ascetic regime, which prohibited drinking, gambling, and womanizing. The money that was saved benefited the household as a whole. To see these efforts as women's resistance rather than as a household strategy is to diminish women's influence in the family a priori.

A final caveat can only be acknowledged by way of conclusion: We cannot fully understand domestic economies without situating them within larger contexts of communities and states. Critics of the family values discourse in the United States suggest that it is largely a response to a crisis in community and collective responsibilities (Coontz 1992, Stacey 1996). Families have taken on all the emotional and material responsibilities previously shared between families, so it is little wonder that they are beleaguered, especially in economic hard times when community relations are most needed. In many places over the past decades, the family has become the sole real community, supplemented only by imagined and virtual ones. Imagined communities of nation and ethnic group may actually enhance the centrality of the family in that they rest upon essentialized notions of relatedness through blood that reinforce rigid notions of the family (Connor 1993)


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and highlight its role as the production site of new nationals (Huseby-Darvas 1996, Lampland 1994, Verdery 1994).

The imagined nation is often manifest in a real state. In nearly all the examples of family research discussed in this review, the options available to families and households were shaped as much by state actions as by economic factors, albeit often in service to capitalist forces. In many of the cases, the economic changes that influence families are themselves state productions, such as development projects (Blackwood 1997) or reform programs (Davis & Harrell 1993), although sometimes forced on the state by international forces (Bolles 1996, Harrison 1997). Some family economies, from the family farm (Barlett 1993, Sick 1999) to the single-parent family (Mullings 1997, Fitchen 1995), are actually sustained, if barely, by state support. In other cases, the state attempts to shape the family directly in ways that are more conducive to economic development (Salaff 1988, Ong 1990) or to administration and taxation (Rebel 1983, Sabean 1990). The applicability of the strategy concept is also mediated by the state because the bargaining power of individuals within the family (especially women and children) is shaped by the formal legal rights they can assert and the state's likely response (Sabean 1990). In sum, the state's pervasive engagement with the family is perhaps the definitive evidence of its value. Cultural commitments to particular family ideas can provide a basis for resistance to state and economic forces, but they also render activity championed by politicians and advertisers in the name of the family beyond reproach. This power is why politicians and corporations cannot get enough of "the family" and why anthropologists need to pay attention to it, even if we cannot define it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to Erin Martineau for extensive bibliographic assistance and editorial advice.

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