Distinguish between family and household with reference to the concept of development of the household. (2018)
The family is a group defined by kinship: ties of marriage, descent and adoption. The household is a group defined by co-residence and commensality, people who share a dwelling and a hearth. Donald R. Bender (“A Refinement of the Concept of Household”, 1967) insisted that the two be kept apart. The developmental cycle shows why: the same family passes through several household forms over time.
Family and household: the analytical distinction
| Criterion | Family | Household |
|---|---|---|
| Basis | Kinship and marriage | Shared residence, kitchen and budget |
| Membership | Kin only, who may live apart | May include non-kin (servants, lodgers) |
| Boundary | Normative, extends across space | Spatial, observable, countable |
| Core functions | Reproduction, socialisation, inheritance, ritual | Consumption, pooling, domestic labour |
| Typical use | Kinship theory, law | Census, surveys, welfare policy |
- The Census of India counts households as persons who normally live together and eat from a common kitchen. Kin living elsewhere are not counted as members.
- The two often diverge. A migrant son in Surat belongs to his parents’ family in Bihar but to a separate household. Nayar spouses lived in different taravads.
Development of the household: Fortes’s developmental cycle
Meyer Fortes, in his introduction to Jack Goody (ed.), The Developmental Cycle in Domestic Groups (1958), argued that a domestic group is a process, not a fixed type. It has three phases:
- Expansion: from marriage until the children are born and reared.
- Dispersion or fission: children marry and leave or set up separate hearths.
- Replacement: the parents die and a new couple takes over.
The consequence is that household types are phases of a cycle. A nuclear household today may become a joint household once a son marries, and split again after the father’s death.
Indian evidence
- A. M. Shah, The Household Dimension of the Family in India (1973), studied Radhvanaj in Gujarat. He showed that “joint family” had been used loosely for both the kin group and the co-resident unit. Most people live in both simple and complex households over a lifetime, depending on demographic events, partition norms and household tensions.
- I. P. Desai, Some Aspects of Family in Mahuva (1964), found that families living as separate nuclear households kept functional jointness through shared property, rituals and mutual obligations.
- Pauline Kolenda (1987) and Patricia Uberoi note that longitudinal studies often record a rise in both nuclear and joint households, partly because longer lives keep parents with married sons.
- Census 2011: nuclear households slipped slightly, from 70.34% (2001) to 70.11%, and fell in urban areas. This fits a developmental and situational reading, with housing costs and dual-earner couples drawing parents back in, better than a straight line of “nuclearisation”.
- The One Nation One Ration Card scheme lets a migrant draw his share of rations at his destination while his family draws the rest at home. Policy thus recognises one family spread across two households.
Limits
The cycle model can reduce household change to demography. Bina Agarwal shows that property, gender and bargaining power shape who partitions and when.
Conclusion
Family is a structure of kinship relations; household is a residential and economic arrangement that changes as the family moves through its cycle. Reading one census snapshot as proof that the family is “breaking down” confuses the two.