As in most Western countries, family life in Australia has changed dramatically over the last few decades. Some changes in family trends— including increases in divorce, more cohabitation, and the falling fertility rate—have sparked misgivings about the direction that marriage and family life is heading. Such issues are best understood within a historical framework. Is today differen…
In France, during the 1960s and 1970s, the family was thought of in terms of its crisis, decline, or rupture. Some even spoke of its death. The rapid changes brought on by the strong economic, social, and cultural movements of the era explain this phenomenon. Yet the family was ever-present and continued to play a major role in society, as numerous works of the time emphasized (Rémy 1967; R…
In the Mexican culture, family transcends individuals and generations. The family brings together the past, present, and future through kinship ties and the transmission of member identity. Some of the words used by Mexicans to describe the family evoke an infinite array of images and value representations such as: unity, children, love, home, well-being, parents, understanding, tenderness, educat…
French Canadian families populate every province and territory in Canada; however, the trends and history of these families are most clearly delineated in Quebec. Like other families in the Western world, the Quebec family has experienced profound transformations since the beginning of the twentieth century. Until this period, the Quebec family had been marked by the historical circumstances of th…
The Republic of Austria is one of Europe's smaller countries, covering a landlocked area somewhat less than that of Hungary or Portugal. The 2001 census population of the country was 8.0 million, approximately the same as that of Sweden or Bulgaria. …
Any discussion of the Basque family must begin by acknowledging that Basque families can and do exist outside the Basque country. They differ even within the Basque country because sociological and political definitions are framed by the influence of two different states, Spain and France. The region known as the Basque country comprises an area of a hundred square miles (about the size of the sta…
The concept of rural families is, at best, a slippery one. This is because both aspects—family and rural—are today continuously being redefined. Further, in taking an international perspective, how family is defined varies regionally and from nation to nation. How family and rurality are defined differs depending on the theoretical context as well. For example, feminist thinkers have…
The word Bedouin is the Western version of the Arabic word badawiyin, which means "inhabitants of the desert," the badia. Technically, the term refers only to the camel-herding tribes of desert dwellers, but it has been applied in English to all nomadic Arabs (Kay 1978). The Bedouin-Arab presence extends to Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and elsewhere in the Mid…
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was established in 1830. By the year 2000, there were more than 11 million church members, who are commonly referred to as Latter-day Saints (LDS) or Mormons. International expansion of the church has been significant since 1960 when 90 percent of the membership lived in the United States. In 1999, only 12 percent of Latter-day Saints lived in Utah, …
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 has been followed by years of economic, political, and cultural tumult with serious repercussions for individuals and families. As the country struggles to privatize industries and services, jobs have been lost, workers have gone unpaid, inflation has skyrocketed, crime rates have multiplied, and people have discovered that attitudes and skills that garnere…
In Togo, a West African nation that lies between Ghana and Benin, the term family is broadly defined. A family is more than a husband, a wife, and children. Blood relatives of both spouses are considered part of the family, and the extended family embraces all relatives, living or dead. There is a strong cultural belief that ancestors, also called the living dead, are spiritually in contact with t…
Research has consistently demonstrated that heterosexual adults retain consistently and overwhelmingly negative attitudes toward lesbians and gay males. Heterosexual adults commonly view this negativity as acceptable despite political rhetoric lauding the contributions and multiple perspectives of an increasingly diverse citizenry (Kite and Whitley 1996). The stigma, prejudice, and discrimination …
The Scandinavian peninsula is made up of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Sometimes these countries are linked with the Nordic countries—traditionally including Finland and Iceland—and in the late twentieth century these countries were sometimes linked with the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as England and Scotland. This entry will examine marriage and fam…
Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world, with 170 million inhabitants distributed throughout twenty-six states and the Federal District. The official language is Portuguese. When the Portugueses arrived in 1500, there were between two and five million Indians living in the territory. They spoke around one thousand different languages (UnB revista 2001). As frequently happens with those wh…
New Zealand families have experienced changes similar to those of families in other developed nations, including falling marriage and birth rates, more de facto relationships, rising divorce rates, more solo mothers, and increased maternal employment. Yet the cultural composition, isolation, and small population of these islands (less than four million people) have made families different from oth…
The family is both the strongest social institution in Turkey and the foundation that supports the twin pillars of tradition and adaptation. The durability of marital unions, coupled with pressures for mutual commitment and obligation, contribute to this family stability. In 2001, for example, Turkey experienced a serious economic crisis, but despite severe levels of unemployment, rampant inflatio…
For most contemporary Egyptians, the family remains the central and most important institution in their everyday lives. Few individuals live independently from their immediate family or kin, and single-person households are almost unheard of. Individuals of all classes constantly articulate and defend the importance of family within the community and the nation. Issues relating to family relations…
In modern Western society, family formation is based on (regularly strong) personal emotions, such as romantic love. Moreover, given that family life is practically a synonym for private life, families are the primordial social contexts of privacy and intimacy, as well as of love and solidarity. Nevertheless, although each family operates in that essentially private manner as an intimate social gr…
Nigeria is a multitribal, multilingual, and, consequently, multicultural country in the West African subregion. It occupies an area of 923,770 square kilometers with an estimated population of more than 100 million people. The capital of Nigeria is Abuja; the official language is English. Nigerians speak more than 300 languages and dialects; the major ones are Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba. Nigeria has …
Iran (also known as Persia) is a Middle Eastern country in Southwest Asia. The country's official name became the Islamic Republic of Iran after the Islamic revolution of 1979, which abolished the monarchy of the Pahlavi dynasty and established a theocratic republic regime. The population of Iran is approaching 66 million (49% female), with 40 percent being younger than fifteen years of age…
The first family system in America was that of the native peoples. This was actually a kinship system rather than a family system, for despite the wide variety of marital, sexual, and genealogical customs found in several hundred different cultures, most early Native-American groups subsumed the nuclear family and even the lineage in a much larger network of kin and marital alliances. Kinship rule…
Families in Canada—more so than in Britain, France, or even the Americas—are characterized by enormous diversity, especially regional and ethnic diversity. Canada has historically been a society of immigrants and of regions. First, the Aboriginal, or native people, arrived from Asia about ten thousand years ago. They organized into complex national groups with their own distinct cult…
With a population of over eighteen million people, Ghana is the second largest country in West Africa. Since the 1960s, Ghana's population has been growing at an annual rate of about 2 to 3 percent (GSS 2000). This increase is a reflection of high birth rates at a time of declining mortality. One consequence of previous decades of high fertility of Ghanaians is that the country's pop…
To discuss First Nations families in Canada is to simultaneously learn about a core concept of indigenous social organization and to come to terms with the legacy of several centuries of colonialism. The common sense notion of family—a social unit comprised of husband and wife/parent(s) and child—is full of cultural connotations that render it ineffective as a way of understanding Fi…
The most striking feature of the family in Ireland during the last decades of the twentieth century is the rapid rate at which it has changed. From around the late 1960s the Irish family, in response to a national program of economic development, changed from a traditional rural form typical of economies based on agriculture to a postmodern form typical of postindustrial societies. Although the ch…
Marriage patterns in contemporary Senegal derive from Islamic, Western, and local traditions. This situation, which has prevailed for centuries, results from secular borrowings from the Arab world and European colonizers. Senegal embraced Islam more than a thousand years ago, mainly through early contacts with traders from Northern Africa. The trans-Saharan trade did not survive French colonizatio…
Venezuela is located on the northernmost tip of the South American continent. Its shoreline opens to the Caribbean Sea. The Venezuelan territory encompasses a portion of the Andes mountains chain, the Maracaibo Lake, and the Orinoco River basin and contains the regions of Guayana, Amazonia and the Plains. The capital city is Caracas. Venezuela has a wealth of raw materials—iron, asphalt, ba…
The religion of Islam is practiced by people from different ethnicities and nationalities throughout the world. People who adhere to the faith and practice of Islam are called Muslims. Traditional Muslims who practice as Sunnis and Shiites follow the teachings of the prophet Muhammad. From regions (e.g., North and Central Africa, Middle East) to various ethnic groups (e.g., Iranian, Egyptian, Mala…
The Caribbean, with a population of about 50 million, consists of a series of countries stretching from the Bahamian Islands and Cuba in the north, to Belize in the west, to Guyana on the coast of South America (Barrow 1996). The region can be divided by language with some of the countries speaking Spanish (e.g., Puerto Rico), some French (e.g., Martinique), some Dutch (e.g., Curacao), and others …
Compared to other industrialized countries, Israel is a familistic society. The country's small size permits relatives to live in close geographic proximity and have frequent personal contact. Holidays and life-cycle events are generally celebrated through ceremonies and customs that bring family members together. Intrafamilial involvement and assistance (from baby sitting through major fin…
In both ancient and modern Vietnam, the family is considered the foundation of society. Grounded in Confucianism, the traditional patriarchal family was viewed as the basic social institution in which the welfare of the extended family outweighed the individual interests of any member. For Ho Chi Minh, the nation's revolutionary hero, the security of the state was rooted in the stability of…
Ethnicity has been defined as a family's common ancestry through which identity develops as a result of evolved shared values and customs (McGoldrick, Giordano, and Pearce 1996). The definitions of ethnicity, or the more functional term, ethnic group, consist of individuals and families who are members of international, national, religious, cultural, and racial groups that do not belong to …
As in other southern European countries, in Italy, new family structures are coming into being more slowly and in a smaller measure than in northern European countries and North America. These new structures include such patterns as cohabitation, extramarital births, single parenthood, and one-person households. These countries are examples of the so-called Mediterranean model (Laslett 1983). At t…
The Catholic Church traces its origins directly to the person and life of Jesus Christ. Therefore, any historical presentation of family life as it relates to the Catholic Church must go back two thousand years to the very dawn of Christianity. Scholars of this early period point to a major role played by the family in the life and expansion of Christianity. During the first three centuries of its…
Evangelical Christianity entails being born again (John 3:3) and then experiencing a progressive conformity to the image of God in Christ over the lifespan. Evangelical Christianity understands marriage and the family in light of biblical understanding and Christian experience. It offers a normative vision of family life and relations aimed at embodying Christian convictions in everyday life. The …
The concept of the modern family—one in which biological parents give birth to, love, and nurture children—was introduced in Japan in the early twentieth century, after the nation opened itself up to international diplomacy under Emperor Meiji in 1868. A nationwide registration system was established at the end of the nineteenth century under the Meiji government. Until that time, pe…
Many countries have experienced very significant changes in patterns of family formation and family structure. Great Britain is one of the countries where these changes have been particularly marked, with the result that British families have become less stable and more diverse. The roles of women and men within the family have also changed, especially for women with children, who are now very lik…
Greece, the birthplace of Western civilization, has a long history. Philosophy and the humanities have flourished there for more than 2,500 years. Greece is situated at the southeastern end of the European continent and has an area of 132 square kilometers. Now a modern state, it has, according to the 2001 census, approximately 11 million inhabitants. It is a member of the European Union (EU). The…
Kalaallit Nunaat, the Greenlanders' Land, is separated from the eastern Canadian Arctic on the west by Davis Strait, Baffin Bay, and Nares Strait, and from Iceland, on the east, by Denmark Strait. Through the ages, peoples from the northern parts of North America, Scandinavia, and Europe have migrated to Greenland, while others, most notably Scottish, English, and Dutch whalers, have freque…
According to Jewish tradition, the family and home make up a mikdash me'at, or a small sanctuary, like a synagogue. However, as fewer twenty-first century Jewish families can be called traditional, there are different interpretations of what sanctifies them now and what will sanctify them in the future. No longer shaped primarily by religious laws, the Jewish family today defines itself in …
The 22 million Yoruba who live in southwestern Nigeria are one of the four major sociolinguistic groups of contemporary Nigeria. The others are the Igbo to the east, and the Hausa and Fulani to the north. Subgroups of the Yoruba in Nigeria include the Awori, the Ijesha, the Oyo, the Ife, the Egba, the Egbado, the Ketu, the Ijebu, the Ondo, the Ekiti, the Yagba, and the Igbomina. These subgroups ha…
The population of Kenya includes forty-two traditional ethnic groups (CBS 1994), which can be broadly divided into three groups: the Bantu, Nilotes, and Cushites. These three categories of ethnic groups are spread all over the country, and no particular group can be tied to one region. The regional boundaries do little to separate the similarity of customs and beliefs possessed by each group, owin…
Peru has a population of 26 million people, of whom 72 percent are concentrated in urban areas. Poverty is a major characteristic, with half of the population (48% in 2000) living in poverty. Even this striking statistic hides the extreme situations, especially in the mountains and rural areas of the Andes Mountains. According to 2000 data, 37 percent of people in urban areas live under the povert…
Zambia is a landlocked African country. Its population in 1995 was about 7.4 million. The average number of children in a Zambian family is about 6.5. The country occupies about 0.752 million square miles and has a density of fifty-four persons per square mile. …
Like other social formations of traditional Asia and Europe, Filipino society has, in the post-Cold War era, moved from being a predominantly agricultural society to a modern one. Economic transformations have brought new social changes as the concept of the traditional family continues to be reinvented and transformed. Globalization has created international employment opportunities for migrant w…
and Japan have invaded the country often. The twentieth century also brought Korea tremendous upheaval, such as the Japanese occupation (1910–1945), the Korean War (1950–1953), the partition of the country (1953–present), and the foreign-exchange crisis in 1997. Korea and the Korean family are both in a period of transition. The concept of the contemporary Korean family dates …
Kurdish traditions and languages distinguish Kurds from other ethnic groups in that they live within numerous linguistically homogeneous nation-states. Kurdish communities are divided by the borders of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, and many Kurds also live in various diasporas in Europe. Although it is debated, some historians trace the origins of Kurds to the Medes. Kurds speak different but rel…
The Kyrgyz Republic gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, the family law of the former Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic (KSSR) remains in effect. With the transition to a market economy that began in 1991, Kyrgyz children and families face many new social and economic problems. Independence brought a significant revival of Islamic tradition, especially in the south. Th…
Since 1989, Poland has gone through extraordinary social changes. It has made a complex transition from socialism to democracy and capitalism and has joined the European Union (EU). The formerly implemented Marxist ideology of equality for all (including idioms of equal opportunities and rights, equal access to privileges and positions, etc.) is being replaced by the development of a free market, …
As with any large group, the 7.6 million Hispanic/Latino/Spanish families in the United States comprise a socially diverse population. Thus an analysis of Latino/a group composition and diversity challenges the tendency to use stereotypes. The U.S. Bureau of the Census notes, for example, that Hispanics/Latinos may be of any race—including Asian, Native American, European, African, or Middl…
Lying at the far southwestern corner of Europe, with 10 million inhabitants and one-fifth of the Iberian Peninsula's space, Portugal is diminutive in terms of population and territory, and comparatively homogeneous in ethnic terms. Yet it remains noteworthy for the variability of its social life, and no less so in marriage and the family than in other social domains. Analysts of marriage pr…
It is not possible to make accurate generalizations about an area as large and diverse as Latin America. There are many different kinds of Latin Americans. This overview provides some background on family life in the Hispanic world, drawing mainly on the research done in a few key countries such as Mexico and Colombia, and with special focus on how the struggle for economic survival affects that l…
Latvia is situated at the ancient waterway from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea via lands inhabited by Eastern Slavs. Because of its location, the territory has, since the twelfth century, been conquered repeatedly—by German crusaders, Russians, Poles, and Swedes. The principal inhabitants of the region—the Balts, one of the ancient Indo-European tribes, and Livs—were oppresse…
Sikhism originated in the Punjab region, in northwest India, five centuries ago. It is the youngest of all independent religions in India, where the Sikhs are less than 2 percent (1.8%) of India's one billion people. What makes Sikhs significant is not their numbers but their contribution in the political and economic spheres. The global population of the Sikhs is approximately 20 million, …
An increasing number of lesbians are choosing to become parents. Estimates of the number of gay and lesbian parents in the United States alone range from two to eight million, with the number of children of these parents estimated at four to fourteen million (Patterson 1995). Although more research exists on lesbian families than on gay male families, the lack of cross-cultural research is notable…
Afghanistan lies in Central Asia between Iran on the west, Pakistan on the east and south, and Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan on the north side. The Afghani population in the early twenty-first century is estimated at about 22 million people living in Afghanistan and as refugees in Iran and Pakistan. There are more than forty ethnic groups in Afghanistan. Pushtuns are the largest ethnic …
Marriage and family have always been considered fundamental social values among the Slovak population. Nearly 90 percent of all inhabitants consider the family to be the most important value in their lives (European Values Study 1999/2000). This feeling was formed under the strong influence of Christianity (according to the last census in 2001, 69% of all inhabitants are Roman Catholic). Approxima…
In 1998, there were approximately 8.4 million African-American households in the United States. With a total population of approximately 34.5 million, African Americans made up 13 percent of the population of U.S. families. African-American families are not very different from other U.S. families; they, too, are chiefly responsible for the care and development of children. However, African-America…
Early marriages, a relatively small proportion of single men and women, and a high level of fertility have historically characterized the Hungarian population. The family has traditionally played an important role in Hungarian society. The sociological and demographic analyses carried out during the 1990s have shown that the family is more important for people than other areas of life (e.g., work,…
The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation was a watershed in the history of the Western theology and law of marriage—a moment and movement that gathered several streams of classical and Catholic legal ideas and institutions, remixed them and revised them in accordance with the new Protestant norms and forms of the day, and then redirected them in the governance and service of the Christi…
Since the 1960s changes in population patterns and the economy have significantly affected Malaysian families. Over those four decades, economic development, modernization, and rural-urban migration together altered family ties and contributed to a more fragmented family structure. There was a corresponding steady and noticeable decline in the average size of the family in Malaysia over the same p…
Confucianism is a philosophy with a religious function. It is named after Confucius, whose teachings on ethical behavior have been adopted as a national development model in Chinese history. Currently, Confucianism has a strong influence in China, Korea, Taiwan, and the countries of Southeast Asia, as well as influencing people of Far Eastern descent living around the world. An increasing number o…
The Hutterites are an Anabaptist group, along with the Amish and the Mennonites. Jacob Hutter founded the religion in central Europe in the middle 1500s. The official name of the religion is the Hutterian Brethren. Today, they total about 45,000 members living in more than 400 colonies. They are the oldest family communal group in the Western world, but they consider the community to be more impor…
American Indians are the indigenous peoples of the United States. According to archeological estimates, bronze-skinned women and men from northern Asia had been exploring and settling the Americas for 10,000 to 50,000 years. By the fifteenth century, descendants of these women and men from northern Asia had spread southward to populate both continents (Nabokov 1999). When Christopher Columbus arri…
The Czech Republic is a landlocked country measuring 78,866 square kilometers, lying in the central part of Europe. It was established in 1993 after Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The Czech Republic has 10.2 million inhabitants, 94.2 percent of which are Czech by nationality. The country's borders neighbor Germany, Poland, Austria, and Slovakia. The Czech Republi…
The Amish and Mennonites stem from the Anabaptist movement of the sixteenth-century Reformation. Members of the Anabaptist movement insisted that church membership involve a fully informed adult decision, hence many of them requested a second baptism that symbolically superceded their infant baptism. As a result of this practice their opponents called them rebaptizers or Anabaptists. The first adu…
South Africa, with its 40 million residents, is a multicultural society with eleven official languages. Although most residents (76.7%) speak an indigenous African language (Xhosa 23.4%; Zulu 29.9%; and Sepedi 12%), English is the language that most people understand (Statistics South Africa 1996). Family life must thus also be seen against the background of cultural diversity and extreme socioeco…
The term ancestor worship, coined in 1885 by the British philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer, refers to a ritualized invocation of dead kin. It is based on the belief that the spirits of the dead have the power to influence the affairs of the living. Ancestors who are respected and remembered by elaborate rites include members of the family, clans, and tribes. Ancestral spirits that are wo…
The Spanish family has been undergoing dramatic changes that started in the 1980s. These changes have influenced not only patterns of interaction, but also society's broader values regarding marital and family life. To understand these changes, it is important to study these families in their immediate social and larger historical context. …
India is a secular and pluralistic society characterized by tremendous cultural and ethnic diversity. It is made up of twenty-eight states and seven union territories. There are eighteen different languages and more than 300 dialects spoken by the Indian people. Indians practice many religions. Hinduism is the dominant religion in India, but through the centuries Indians have learned to coexist wi…
Argentine families are a heterogeneous result of the many changes that have had an impact on their structures and dynamics. These changes have taken place both in Argentina and other Latin American and Caribbean countries in the last few decades. The socioeconomic crisis that has affected Latin America since the 1970s aroused a growing interest in the study of its impact on family structures and d…
The Republic of Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous nation, has 203 million people living on nearly 1,000 permanently settled islands. Java and Madura hold about 60 percent of the nation's population. Some 200–300 ethnic groups with their own languages and cultures inhabit the nation, some numbering in the millions, some in the thousands. The national motto, Unity in D…
Asian Americans in the United States are a heterogeneous group of many ethnicities, including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Asian (East) Indians, and Southeast Asians. They are neither a single identity group nor a monolithic culture; therefore it is more accurate to speak of Asian-American cultures (Zia 2000). Early Asian groups were voluntary immigrants, but after the Vietnam War, Southea…
Switzerland is a highly segmented society. Marital behavior, divorce, and fertility have varied significantly by language regions and religious denomination. In addition, regional differences in family law and social policies, which are strong due to the far-reaching autonomy of the cantons (administrative and geographic units analogous to states or provinces), have played an important role in thi…
