Family and Household: The Analysis of Domestic Groups

cts of family lif e in Australia was urgently needed. He claimed that the confusion and contradiction in extant depictions of the Australian family were due to certain theoretical postulates and axioms adopted by some ethnographers. Principal among these was the attribution of Eu­ ropean characteristics to the aboriginal family without adequate investiga­ tion of the details of actual family relationships. As an antidote to such inclinations, Malinowski proposed that we begin the study of the family in societies diff erent from our own by attaching only a vague meaning to the term family. For the essential features of the individual family, as of all other social institutions, depend upon the general structure of a given society and upon the conditions of life therein. A careful and detailed analysis of family life and of different aspects of the family unit in connection with other social phenomena is therefore necessary. Such an analysis enables us to describe the said unit in a complete and exact way (91, p. 6).