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We aren't family >> All in the Family examines the ever-changing human unit by JULIET WATERS
Unfortunately, I hadn't factored that a happy afternoon's entertainment for the local children was to sit around and watch me live alone. I like children, but these ones had absolutely no concept of privacy. How could they? They'd never experienced it, and never would. I met some American travellers who had rented a small house just down the beach. After a month, they'd pretty much surrendered to the reality that their front porch was always going to be a drop-in centre for the local villagers, and that any dinner they cooked would always be considered a free-for-all. For this reason I share Suanne Kelman's ambivalence towards people who romanticize the "extended family" of olden days. As she points out in All in the Family: A Cultural History of Family Life, every member of a family is conceivably another human who has a claim on your time and generosity. And until you've experienced a significant loss of privacy you may have no idea what a valuable and rare commodity it is. However, Kelman is also ambivalent about current theories in academic circles, which suggest that the whole notion of family may have become extinct some time around the final episode of Happy Days and may be better left to die. True enough, the society we live in is increasingly abandoning so-called "family values." And it's hard not to be blown away by how dramatically we have shifted from previous notions humans have had about love and the breeding and raising of children. It's now estimated that only 40 per cent of people living in Quebec will marry before the age of 50. And while many of those unmarried people will have children from common-law marriages, very few of those marriages will last beyond 10 years. However, Kelman makes a very gentle and understated argument--mostly through comparison to the more often than not intolerable ideologies of family in other cultures--that the ideal of two parents who love each other and stick it out to raise a couple of kids is one of the better options humans have come up with. Kelman is no scholar. She's more of a digressive essayist along the lines of Diane Ackerman, author of A Natural History of the Senses and A Natural History of Love. Thus All in the Family is a meandering voyage through a vast number of cultures (and species) and their different notions of family. There isn't a family I would prefer to be born into than my own. Although if I were forced to choose another culture, I might enjoy being a member of the Nayar caste, who live along the Malabar Coast of India. Here a woman is married off before puberty, but doesn't necessarily have to have sex with, or even see her husband ever again--except at his funeral. In the meantime she can entertain "visiting husbands" (the average Nayar woman has, on a rotating basis, three to 12 of these guys) who must support any children they have with her. The Nayar are fascinating to anthropologists because they're the radical exception to the human tendency to control the sex and love lives of most women, in practice, and of most men, in principle. By the end of this book one is likely to feel somewhat punch drunk from all the anthropological and historical information that Kelman packs into the average chapter. But one is also likely to feel incredibly relieved to have been born into a society and era that exercises relatively little control over the family. All in the Family: A Cultural History of Family Life by Suanne Kelman, Viking, hc, 354 pp, $32
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I once spent three weeks alone in a developing village on the coast of Honduras. Or better put, tried to spend three weeks alone. My plan, after four months on the road, was to laze around on the beach and catch up on some reading, writing and some of the solitude I had sacrificed to travel.