Venezuela

The axis organizing Venezuelan society does not lie in matrimonial alliances, mercantile practices, or religious ideology, but in the family. Based on the work of demographer James Mayone Stycos (1958), the definition of the family in the Venezuelan culture may explain Kingsley Davis's concern (1942) about Latin America as the black continent, speaking sociologically, with a social organization that is more unintelligible than Africa's. Characterized as matrifocal, Venezuelan family dynamics express one type of female-centered familism. Family conduct generally emphasizes the mother as the stable figure and decision-maker. Although families appear to be organized patrilineally, the cultural pattern is in reality matrilineal.

Conjugal forms of family and marriage are provided for in the civil and ecclesiastical codes that date from colonial times (Almecija 1992). However, these forms do not agree with the cultural reality. Various authors explain Venezuelan families in different ways (see e.g., Peattie 1968; Pollak-Eltz 1975). José L.Vethencourt (1974) considers Venezuelan family structure as atypical and as a failure to meet to bourgeois norms. His concept of matricentrism is conveyed in machismo, and both of these terms constitute conceptual poles in his structural analysis. Alejandro Moreno (1993) accepts Vethencourt's concepts but regards the family not as a failure to meet norms, but rather as an authentic Latin American family form. Rafael Lopez (1980) identifies this type of family with the Afro-Caribbean race, where the female is the focus of mythical and symbolic meanings in the kinship structuring process. The 1975 Congress on Family and Marriage in the Caribbean and Central America (Marks and Römer, 1975) discussed the matrifocal concept not mythologically but sociologically. The conclusion of this discussion was that concepts of matricentrism and matrifocality are insufficient to explain the reality of the Venezuelan family, that is, the powerful role of the grandmother figure.

Following a more sociological tendency, authors such as Gustavo Martin (1990), Manuel Briceño (1994) and Samuel Hurtado (1998) suggest that the Venezuelan family structure is ethnotypical—that is, it conveys the cultural pattern and explains the social structure. When the model cultural is so basic and strong, it affects societal rules. Society behaves as a family, characterized by an extremely pampering mother (Hurtado 1999). The neologism matrisociality defines the family-society relationship; however, the family structure interprets that relationship. Writers such as Alain Marie (1972), Audrey I. Richards (1982) and Karla Poewe (1981) have pointed to the tensions that exist in social organizations where the family structures tend toward a matrilineal system.