In 1949, I became research assistant to Ernest W. Burgess at the University of Chicago. For the next four years, I worked closely with him on marital prediction studies and wrote my dissertation on the conceptual analysis of qualitative materials in the prediction of marital adjustment. Professor Burgess has had a profound influence upon me, both as a person and as a sociologist. Upon receiving my Ph.D. in 1953, I accepted my first teaching position at Henderson State College in Arkansas. The following year, I moved to the Institute for Research on Exceptional Children at the University of Illinois, Urbana, where I undertook a program of research on families with severely mentally retarded children. This work resulted in a series of mongraphs and articles in which I tried: (a) to document the conditions which most affected adaptation to the presence of a retarded child; and (b) to assess the strategy of institutionalization as a means for alleviating family stress. In these studies, I further developed my view of the family as a set of mutually contingent careers (Farber, 1961), and I conceptualized reactions of families under stress in terms of game theory (Farber, 1960). By the early 1960s, I grew restless over the limitations of the pragmatist framework for understanding social relations. My research had shown that the major determinants of adaptation to a retarded child pertained more closely to the place of the family in the larger social structure than to the emergence of solutions through intrafamilial interaction. I shifted from a pragmatist perspective to a more contemplative theoretical position. Regarding society as structured by dialectical oppositions, I gradually developed a series of conceptions about family and kinship, several f which are presented below. (1) If we assume that social order is generated, in part, by the need to regulate the distribution of scarce things, then we find a duality in family and kinship institutions. There is an opposition between a just distribution of goods and property for use by the current generation, which acts to equalize life chances for people throughout the society, and a competitive distribution of goods and property, which tends to maximize life chances for some people and their descendants more than for others. The motive toward just distribution serves to create an extensive network of families, weaving the society into a cohesive whole. The motive toward competitive distribution serves to establish a hierarchical structure involving congeries of related families, dividing the society into differentiated strata. Implications of this dichotomy between interweaving and differentiating functions formed the framework of my book, Family: Organization and Interaction (Farber, 1964), in which I introduced the opposition of orderly replacement of family norms and values versus permanent availability for marriage regardless of current marital status. Extending this opposition to a cross-cultural analysis, I then tried to indicate the broader relevance of this dialectic in a short monograph, Comparative Kinship Systems (Farber, 1968). This book also presented a diagramming technique for the systematic study of incestuous-marriage proscriptions in kinship analysis. (2) The friction between interweaving and differentiating functions has other consequences for the study of the relationship *Burgess Award address presented at the annual meeting of the National Council on Family Relations in New York, New York on October 21, 1976. For assistance in the collection of data reported in this paper, I am grateful to Dr. Morris Axelrod, Director of the Survey Research Laboratory, Arizona State University; Dr. Albert J. Mayer, Director of the Kansas City Jewish Population Study; and the Jewish Federation and Council of Greater Kansas City.