The Nuclear Family in Afro-American Kinship

Abstract

While the universality of the “nuclear family” has been disputed by a number of anthropological writers the problem hasa always been to specify what is meant by this term. Here it is suggested that there are three analytically separable ways of looking at the nuclear family; as a cultural construct of very general definitional significance; as a unitary system of normative emphasis in which the roles of husbandfather, wife-mother, son-brother and daughter-sister are combined into a solidary unit with its own peculiar normative stress; and as a group of co-resident kin. It is argued that while lower class Americans in general and lower class Afro-americans in particular, share the general cultural premises which make nuclear family relations an important configuration for the definition of kinship, and while they frequently are to be found living in nuclear family households, they do not share the middle-class normative emphasis upon a unitary and ideally independent nuclear family system.