CHAPTER VI

THE NORMS OF DOMESTIC GROUPING

e have now examined most of the principal features of domestic organization and the structure of the household group, and the purpose of this chapter is to gather together some of the main threads of our argument, and to examine some of its implications.

It will be recalled that we have been dealing almost exclusively with Negro families which belong to the category of ‘village families’ in the narrower sense of the term.  These families belong to what is usually termed the ‘lower-class’.  We have neglected the families of persons in the higher status group, such as school teachers, for the most part, and we shall have to take up this question of ‘class’ differences in the final section of the work.

The fundamental importance of the relationship which we shall I term ‘matri-filiation’ has been amply demonstrated, and it is around mothers that all forms of domestic grouping seem to be ordered.  The primacy of the mother-child relationship has been reported for practically all Negro societies in the New World, and our findings do not substantially conflict with these reports, except that we would point out that this is a relationship of fundamental importance in any society.  What throws it into high relief in the West Indies is the fact that males are marginal in many ways to the whole complex of domestic relations, particularly in their roles as husband-fathers.  Though the male head of the household occupies an important position as the nominally dominant person, responsible for, and with well-defined rights over, the other members of the household, and particularly his spouse and children, we find that in fact his authority is undeveloped, and that his spouse becomes the real power-centre of the domestic group.  This is true even in Perseverance where there is a much greater dependence of women on the earning capacity of men, and far fewer cases of women achieving complete control of household groups.  It is not only with their spouses and their own children that men lack real authority, for unlike a matrilineal system they do not exercise responsibilities in relation to their sisters, and their sisters’ children.  It is within their own families of procreation and towards their mothers, that men’s fields of responsibility lie.  There does not arise any question of the society having to find a solution to what Richards has called ‘the matrilineal puzzle’.  As she says, ‘in most societies authority over a household, or a group of households, is usually in the hands of men, not women, as are also the most important political offices’ (Richards 1950: 246).  In the sector of Guianese society with which we are dealing, men have very little authority either over household groups, or in other spheres of political and economic life.  Women on the other hand have a clearly defined status as mothers, and it is by virtue of this status that they exercise authority and leadership within the household group.

Motherhood is not only a matter of biological relationship in this context, for we are dealing here with a situation where a woman who is the mistress of a household often stands in the social relationship of ‘mother’, to children who are not her own offspring.  When a daughter bears a child whilst she is living in the household controlled by her mother, the child frequently grows up calling its maternal grandmother by the term ‘Mama’, and its own mother by her christian name.  This is particularly true when the grandmother has small children of her own towards whom the child adopts a sibling relationship.  Were this not to be so, and the child were to adopt a different attitude towards the grandmother more compatible with the normal grandchild-grandparent attitude, there would be a serious confusion of authority within the group.  The older woman could hardly act as disciplinarian to one set of children and as an indulgent grandmother towards another set living within the same household.  Conflicts would arise between the older woman and her adult daughter over the treatment of the younger woman’s children and this problem is solved by assimilating the children to a filial relationship to the dominant female.  This process is to be observed not only in households with a male head but in those with a female head as well.  Even where the grandchild does not live in the same house as its maternal grandmother, the same phenomenon sometimes occurs if the grandmother has small children of her own, for the children will play with each other on terms of equality approximating a sibling relationship, and the same situation will exist.  One of the factors contributing to such a situation is the complete absence of any well defined pattern of mutual rights, duties and obligations between uncles and aunts on the one hand, and nephews and nieces on the other, so that there is no precise structuring of these relationships in regard to politico-legal or property factors.

All children who live with their grandmother do not call her ‘Mama’ and we must be careful to emphasize the fact that there is a normal grandchild-grandparent relationship which is one of affectionate indulgence, and a kind of equality.  A grandmother, in particular, will often identify herself with her grandchildren and take their part in quarrels they have with their own mother.  When a young girl has been forbidden to go to a dance by her mother, she will often appeal to her grandmother for support in her pleas.  It is commonly said that grandparents spoil their grandchildren, and old men certainly display far greater affection for their grandchildren than they ever do towards their own children.

The determining factor in whether grandmothers adopt the role of mother or of grandmother towards their grandchildren seems to be inherent in the relative position of mother and adult daughter in any particular case.  A daughter who is married but still living with her mother whilst her husband is away working, has a well defined social status in her own right as a married person and her relationship to her mother will be less one of subservience and dependence than one of friendly co-operation.  However there is always the danger of quarrelling under such circumstances, and it is significant that the great majority of married women will move into their own households whether their husband is with them or not.  Thus a young girl of 21 years who married in August Town, moved into a small rented house to live alone until her husband could send for her to go to McKenzie City.  This was a clear recognition of the fact that as a married woman she was now entitled to be mistress of her own household, though she would probably have been a great deal happier staying on with her mother, or in this case the aunt with whom she had grown.

Where two women who are both in the status of ‘mother’ live in the same household there is always the possibility of conflict inherent in the situation, since being a mother ideally implies having control of a household, and this would be particularly marked if the older woman is herself under the nominal authority of a male partner.  The fact that the distribution figures in tables VIIIa and IXa show a larger proportion of child-bearing daughters in the households with a female head would seem to have a special significance if looked at from the point of view of the status of the household head (see Chapter IV).  We have seen that in the household with a male head, although the spouse of the head is undoubtedly the focus of domestic relations and ‘mistress’ of the house, she is still nominally under the authority of her husband or common-law husband.  She is a mother with a close emotional tie to her children and with considerable authority over them, but at the same time she is a wife, dependent to a large extent on her husband’s earnings, and owing him the duty of a wife.  If her daughter becomes pregnant whilst living at home it means that the daughter is approximating to the status of her mother.  She too will become a mother, and it is common in the case of illegitimate first pregnancies at least, for the daughter to be beaten and driven out of the house.  This occurs both where the mistress of the house is married or living in a common-law union, and where the woman is sole head of the household, but it would appear to happen more frequently in the former case.  The girl is often told ‘If you want to play a big woman go find yourself a man’.  At least one function of this beating and temporary expulsion is to emphasize the subordinate position of the pregnant daughter, though of course other factors are also involved.  Where the girl’s mother is sole head of the household, her position is less equivocal than where she is subject to the authority of a spouse, and she can tolerate more easily the new status of her daughter.

In both cases, however, there will be the tendency for the older woman to continue to maintain her role as mother by placing both the new mother and her child in the one category of children of the mistress of the house.  As the older woman gets further away from the menopause and her own children mature, the situation changes and she comes to take her place in society as a grandmother.  Her relations to her spouse are changing, and she is much less subject to his authority.  Grandchildren who have been left with her whilst their mother has gone away will probably continue to treat her as a mother, but as they get older they are quite aware of the fact of their exact biological relationship to her.  However this does not alter their relationship within the field of domestic relations.  If the children move away from their grandmother’s house with their own mother, they may continue to call the older woman ‘Mama’ particularly if they see her frequently, and if she has young children of her own.  However the terminology is quite likely to change, and certainly the nature of the relationship changes as the child’s own mother begins to perform the mother role more completely

This assimilation of a child to a filial relationship to the maternal grandmother (and less frequently to the paternal grandmother) is quite clearly a function of the status of the child-bearing daughter in her mother’s home, and of the considerable authority of older women in the household group.  It must be borne in mind too that the child’s own mother may be away from the home working for a considerable portion of the time.  Women always nurse their own children and it would be only in exceptional circumstances that a grandmother would breast feed her grandchild.  In any case it is only in a small number of cases that a woman is still bearing children at the same time as her daughter.

It should be quite clear by this time from our descriptions, that the family, or the household group as we have preferred to call it, is primarily a child-rearing unit, and that child-rearing is a task allotted primarily to women standing in the relationship of mother to the child.  It is necessary that there should be a division of labour by sex, and that men should provide a large measure of the economic support for the women and children.  It is a matter of some theoretical importance to know why there should be a family consisting of a man, a woman and their children as an ideal type of child-rearing unit at all, but this is a question we cannot take up here.  Given the fact that there is institutionalized social fatherhood and motherhood, with non-incestuous marriage of some kind as the basis of distinct family units, we are interested in knowing, firstly, the kind of form taken by these family units in terms of their internal relationships, and secondly, their relationship to other structures in the society.  The latter is, in this case, really another way of asking why the family system takes that particular form.  We need not concern ourselves unduly with the fact that the domestic unit meets certain ‘needs’ such as the need for shelter, for sexual satisfaction or for nourishment, for these are ‘givens’ as far as we are concerned.  It is the way in which these needs are satisfied that interests us as sociologists.

If we view the internal relationships of the family system as power or authority relationships, we can see that there are certain fairly well defined statuses involved.  We began by discussing headship of the domestic unit and we tried to sort out the criteria by which headship was defined, or legitimated.  We discovered that husband-fathers are ideally heads of households, and that the majority of household groups come into being when a man builds a house and enters a conjugal relationship with a woman who is either the mother or the potential mother of his children.  The ideal pattern is for a man to marry the woman before they live together and before they have children, and this is the ideal of the total society, not only the sector of it with which we are dealing.  His authority as head of the household is embodied in his status as a husband-father and at this stage of the development of the household group it is not seriously challenged.  The woman also has a well defined status as a spouse, particularly if she is legally married, and this is recognized to be both complementary to and inferior to that of her spouse, for he is ‘responsible’ for her in the sense that he must support her economically.  As soon as children are taken into account, we can see that they are subordinate to the authority of both their parents, but their most significant relationship is to their mother.  It is their mother who directly feeds and clothes them and with whom they develop strong affective relationships.  If their father does not live in the same household group, then he has literally no rights over the children in the majority of cases.  Children derive practically nothing that is of importance from their fathers.  They do not inherit property of a kind that is crucial in affording them the means of livelihood (though they do inherit land and sometimes houses from both their parents); they do not acquire membership in any group primarily on the basis of patri-filiation and they do not suffer if they never even see their father.  It is for this reason that it is uncommon for children to be provided with a ‘social’ father who may be different from their biological father.  Every individual must have a father of course, but it is not crucial to have a father with whom one has a concrete and definite social relationship.  Within the field of activities of the household group the husband-father associates with the other members of the household with varying degrees of intensity at varying stages of his career.  By and large his association with other members of the group is infrequent.  He does not lead them in productive activities, and all the occupational tasks of family members in the external system tend to be undertaken independently.  This carries over into leisure activities and ritual occasions.  When the household group is first established, frequency of association between the spouses is at its peak.  They co-operate in the establishment of the home; they spend a good deal of their leisure time together and they are often seen going together to dances, parties etc.  This level of inter-action is not maintained, and in any case both spouses have important ties involving close association with other persons.  The woman with her mother, sisters and other women, and the man with friends who are members of his occupational and leisure activity cliques.  As soon as the woman becomes a mother she virtually ceases to go out with her spouse, and the relationship between the spouses contracts to one of performing reciprocal services such as cooking and washing clothes on the one hand, and providing cash, food and clothes on the other, and of course there are reciprocal sexual obligations involved.  The status and authority structure does not change significantly, but there comes to be a redistribution of power within the system.  The coalition of mother and children tends to harden vis-a-vis the husband-father, and whilst the woman remains technically inferior in status to her spouse, she comes to exercise power within the group, which encroaches on his authority.  The conversion of a common-law marriage into a legal marriage often serves to validate this new power distribution and the care with which men address their legal wives as ‘Mistress’ is illuminating in this respect.  The diminution in the amount of power attaching to the authority of the husband-father is keenly felt by males, and they are always complaining of the lack of consideration shown to them by their spouses.  The fact that they so frequently contract liaisons with other women must be viewed in relation to this fact. The power of the wife-mother is often buttressed by the accretion of extra members of the household group, who are frequently her kinsfolk.  The incompatibility between the ideal status of husband father and the reality of the power distribution as between he and his spouse often leads to separation.  In such cases, males almost invariably rationalize the separation by saying that their spouse was too ‘quarrelsome’, too wicked or too rude, whilst women com plain that their spouse was too fond of other women.  The fact that a woman’s power in the household group derives from her status as a mother and her relationship to her children, is correlated with the fact that women extend their period of effective motherhood by taking over their daughters’ children or adopting other children when their own period of child-bearing is over.  The widespread desire to have children and the opposition to birth-control, is connected, at least to some extent, with the social importance and prestige of the mother rôle.

If we are to maintain that the pattern of domestic relations we have outlined constitutes a system, then there must be a set of sanctions which operate to maintain it in some sort of equilibrium.  Authority itself constitutes a form of control of social interaction and the internal power distribution of the household group is a self-regulating mechanism in many ways.  When we speak of the norms of domestic grouping and organization we must distinguish various types of norm and the way in which they are established (see Fortes 1949b: 58).  In the first place we have mentioned the ideal pattern of domestic organization, and there is no doubt that the norm in this sense is that which is common to the total Guianese structure.  It is a feature of the primary value system of Guianese society that the ideal family type is that consisting of a man and woman, unrelated by kinship, and married according to the rites of the Christian Church, who share one dwelling with their own offspring.  No one would dispute this as the ideal pattern and the person wishing to improve his status by advancing in the class hierarchy (e.g. by becoming a school-teacher) would certainly try to conform to this pattern in setting up a household group.  However, the value system is differentiated with respect to the social sub-system with which we are dealing and it becomes both permissive and expected that persons will deviate from the ideal in certain fairly specific ways.  The actual deviations from the ideal we can discover by examining the type of norm which is an average, or numerically defined mode, and this we have attempted to do by our analysis of distribution of types and their development over time.  However, it must also be recognized that the permissible deviations from the ideal pattern within the sub-system must themselves be governed by a differential ideal pattern and in fact we find that this is the case.  There is a moral system within a moral system so to speak, and although the over-all moral system is accepted as being ‘right’ for the sub-group, at the same time people will say that because they are black people they do things in a different way.  It does not mean that because a couple live together without being married that their union is not a socially sanctioned one or that they are under no moral obligation to behave in certain fairly definitely conceived ways.  There are ‘moral sentiments’ which are held by individuals and which are presumably homologous with the social value system, being its individually internalized personality counterpart.  For the anthropologist to attempt to state what these are is a somewhat ambitious undertaking.  In our Guianese villages one gets the impression that it would be quite immoral for any person to show open disrespect to his mother, but this is merely an inference.  There is no overt expression of this moral norm, nor are there any easily recognizable symbols of its generality.  The most one can say is that one never observed anyone showing disrespect to their own mother.  Generally speaking, the sanctions ensuring conformity to the ideal patterns, within the limits of permissiveness of the subsystem, are either diffuse ones such as the effect of public opinion and local gossip, fear of magical reprisals, etc., or more importantly, they derive directly from the processes of interaction in the system itself (see Homans 1950: chap. 11 and Parsons 1952: 300–301).

We still have not answered the question of why the husband-father should tend to be so peripheral to the complex of intra-household relationships and in order to do this adequately we shall have to engage in a series of comparisons with other societies which will take up part of the final section of the work.  At the present stage two fundamental considerations present themselves.  One is that our analysis so far has represented the male household head as a provider for his household group, and not as the leader of a unit of production in the way that a typical peasant farmer tends to be.  He sells his labour for wages and this tends to be regarded as his most important source of income.  Homans has described the American middle-class family as a group in which the authority of the husband-father tends to diminish because of the lack of common tasks in which he can exercise leadership for the group (Homans 1950: 276).  However, the nuclear family in the American middle-class has certain important functions which the Negro Guianese rural family lacks, particularly in defining the social status of its members, and in this respect the husband-father is an important member of the group because of his participation in the status-defining occupational system (see Parsons 1949 and Centers 1949).  In Guiana, where one of the main criteria of status is the fact of skin colour, and where there is relatively little occupational differentiation of a status-defining nature in the rural Negro groups, the husband-father does not perform this important function for the other members of the group.  As we move out of the very lowest social strata, males do tend to perform this function, but this is a matter we must take up in the final chapters.