A family is a group of people related by marriage, descent or adoption. A household is a group of people who live together and usually share a common hearth, whether or not they are related. A domestic group is the unit that organises the everyday tasks of living, such as production, consumption, child-rearing and the care of members, and it changes in size and composition over time. A family may be spread across several households, and a household may contain people who are not family. Meyer Fortes described the "developmental cycle of the domestic group" in three phases: expansion, dispersion and replacement.
This note explains the difference between family, household and domestic group, the work of Fortes, Goody and Bender, the developmental cycle, household classification, and Indian studies of the joint family and household, for the UPSC Anthropology Optional. It belongs to Paper I, topic 2.4 (Family: family, household and domestic groups) in the Anthropology Optional syllabus.
Key points at a glance
- Family: based on kinship (marriage, descent or adoption). Members need not live together.
- Household: based on co-residence and shared consumption, a common roof and a common hearth. Members need not be related.
- Domestic group: the unit that carries out domestic functions such as production, consumption, reproduction and socialisation; it may or may not coincide with the household.
- Bender (1967): families, households and domestic functions are three separate things that often, but not always, coincide.
- Goody (1958): distinguished the dwelling unit, the production unit, the consumption unit and the reproductive unit.
- Fortes (1958): the developmental cycle of the domestic group has three phases: expansion, dispersion (fission) and replacement.
- Indian studies: A. M. Shah's household dimension of the family, I. P. Desai's "jointness", and Pauline Kolenda's cycle of the joint family.
- Census of India: a household is a group of persons who normally live together and take their meals from a common kitchen.
What is a family?
G. P. Murdock (1949) defined the family as "a social group characterized by common residence, economic co-operation and reproduction. It includes adults of both sexes, at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship, and one or more children, own or adopted, of the sexually cohabiting adults." He argued that the nuclear family is universal because it performs four functions essential to human life: sexual, reproductive, economic and educational (enculturation).
Murdock's definition combines three different things: kinship (marriage and parenthood), residence (living together) and function (economy and child-rearing). Much of the later debate on the family came from separating these. The family as a kinship group is defined by marriage, descent and adoption. Whether its members live together, eat together or work together is a separate question, answered differently in different societies.
What is a household?
William Haviland (2003) defined the household as the basic residential unit where economic production, consumption, inheritance, child-rearing and shelter are organised and carried out. The members of a household usually share a common hearth.
The Census of India defines a household as "a group of persons who normally live together and take their meals from a common kitchen unless the exigencies of work prevent any of them from doing so". The members may be related, unrelated, or both. A single person living alone is also a household.
A household is not the same as a family
A family can form a household, but a household need not be a family, and a family need not live in one household.
- Unrelated people as a household: students who move to another city for higher education often share a flat to save money. They live under one roof and cook and eat together. They form a household, but they belong to different families. The same applies to migrant workers sharing a room, a hostel, or a monastery.
- Non-kin within a family household: domestic workers, lodgers, apprentices and long-term guests may live and eat with a family.
- A family spread over several households: a Kerala family with a son working in the Gulf, a daughter married in Bengaluru and parents in the village is one family spread over three households. Remittances, decisions and obligations still link them.
The Mundurucu: men's house and women's houses
Robert and Yolanda Murphy described the Mundurucu of the Brazilian Amazon in the 1950s. In the traditional villages, all men and boys above about 13 years of age lived and slept together in the men's house. Women and younger children lived in dwelling houses, each usually occupied by several related women and their children. Husbands visited their wives in the dwelling houses. The basic domestic units were therefore a men's house and women's households, not households of husband, wife and children. The Mundurucu show that the household need not be organised around the married couple. The pattern later changed as many Mundurucu moved to mission and trading settlements and formed nuclear-family households.
Other examples where household and family diverge
| Society | Arrangement |
|---|---|
| Nayars of Kerala (traditional) | The household (taravad) was a matrilineal group of a woman, her siblings and her daughters' children. Husbands visited at night and lived in their own taravad. |
| Ashanti of Ghana | Duolocal residence: many husbands and wives live in their own matrilineal households, and the wife sends cooked food to her husband (Fortes). |
| Na (Mosuo) of China | "Walking marriage": a man visits his partner at night but belongs to his mother's household. |
| Polygynous households in West Africa (Tallensi, Gonja) | One compound, with each wife and her children having a separate hut and cooking hearth (Fortes; Goody). |
| Muria of Bastar | Unmarried young people sleep in the ghotul (youth dormitory), not in their parents' houses (Verrier Elwin). |
| Caribbean matrifocal households | A mother, her daughters and their children form the household; men are loosely attached (R. T. Smith). |
Bender: families, co-residence and domestic functions
Donald Bender, in "A Refinement of the Concept of Household" (1967), argued that anthropologists had confused three separate phenomena:
- Families: kinship groups, defined by marriage and descent.
- Households: co-resident groups, defined by living in the same place.
- Domestic functions: the activities of daily life, such as producing and preparing food, eating, child-care and providing shelter.
These three often coincide, which is why they are confused, but they do not have to. Among the Nayars, the family (in the sense of the married couple) did not live together, while the household was organised by descent. Domestic functions may be carried out by people who do not live together, such as an Ashanti wife who cooks for a husband living elsewhere. Sylvia Yanagisako (1979) extended this argument, saying that analysis should start with the specific activities and relationships in a society rather than with an assumed unit called "the family".
What is a domestic group?
A domestic group is the group that organises the domestic functions needed to maintain and raise its members: shelter, food, economic production, consumption, reproduction, care of children and the old, and the transmission of property and culture. To understand it fully, anthropologists study it ecologically, economically, demographically and psychologically, since all of these affect its size and composition.
Meyer Fortes described domestic groups as "householding and housekeeping groups" that provide the material and cultural resources needed to maintain and bring up their members. He distinguished two domains of social life:
- The domestic domain: the internal world of the domestic group, organised around the mother-child bond, kinship, affection and the daily tasks of living.
- The politico-jural domain: the wider world of lineage, law, politics and public rights and duties.
The domestic group raises and trains individuals, preparing them to enter the politico-jural domain as full members of society. In this sense it is the "factory" in which children are shaped into social persons.
Goody: the units within the domestic group
Jack Goody, in The Developmental Cycle in Domestic Groups (1958), which he edited with an introduction by Fortes, showed that the domestic group is not one unit but several, which may or may not coincide:
| Unit | Function | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Dwelling unit | Living and sleeping together | A house or a hut in a compound |
| Production unit | Working together on land, livestock or craft, and owning resources | A joint family farming its land together |
| Consumption unit | Cooking and eating together, a common hearth | Each wife's kitchen in a polygynous compound |
| Reproductive unit | Bearing and raising children | A mother and her children |
In a polygynous West African compound, the whole compound may farm together as one production unit, while each wife cooks for herself and her children as a separate consumption unit, in her own hut as a separate dwelling unit. In an Indian joint family, brothers may farm their land jointly while their wives cook in separate kitchens, or the reverse.
The domestic group is also a resource-owning group. Its members pool their labour, divided by age, gender and status, and harness the group's resources, such as land, cattle or a shop, in economic production. The produce is then divided among the consumption units. This is why definitions of the family overlap with those of the domestic group: in many societies the family is the main unit of production as well as of reproduction.
The developmental cycle of the domestic group
Fortes argued that the domestic group is not a fixed structure but a process. It grows, divides and is replaced over the lifetime of its members, in cycles that are always going on. Any census at one moment shows households at different stages of the same cycle, so variation in household types does not necessarily mean different family systems. This was a major advance on earlier static descriptions of family "types".
Fortes described three phases:
| Phase | Starts | Ends | Key features |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Expansion | Marriage of a couple | Birth of the last child, when the family of procreation is complete | Depends on fertility, the wife's age at marriage and menopause, and child mortality. Children depend on parents, who hold full authority. |
| 2. Dispersion (fission) | Marriage of the first child | Marriage of the last child | Children marry and either leave to set up new households or bring spouses in, depending on the rule of residence. Property may be divided. |
| 3. Replacement | Ageing of the parents | Death of the parents | Parents withdraw from work and decision-making; authority passes to a child (often the heir), whose own family replaces the parental family in the social structure. |
Phase 1: expansion
The expansion phase begins with marriage and continues as children are born, until the last child is born. Its length depends on biological factors, such as the wife's fertility and age at menopause and the husband's capacity to have children, and on social factors, such as age at marriage, birth spacing and contraception. In this phase the ratio of dependants to workers rises: there are more mouths to feed than hands to work.
Phase 2: dispersion or fission
The dispersion phase begins when the eldest child marries and continues until the youngest marries. What happens depends on the rules of residence and inheritance:
- In patrilineal and patrilocal systems, daughters leave on marriage and sons bring in wives. Sons may later set up their own households, forming new units of production and consumption.
- In some systems one child stays to inherit the parental home and look after the parents. Among the Khasi of Meghalaya, the youngest daughter (khadduh) inherits the ancestral house. Some patrilineal societies practise inheritance by the youngest son (ultimogeniture). Others favour the eldest son (primogeniture).
- In matrilineal systems such as the Nayar, sons and brothers remain members of the taravad, while sisters' children continue it.
Phase 3: replacement
The replacement phase begins as parents grow old and lose the strength for physical work. They depend on their children, who represent them and take over their functions. As parents stop contributing to production, their authority slowly declines and the children make decisions on their own. The phase ends with the death of the parents, when the family of a child, usually the heir, replaces the parental family in the social structure. That child's family then goes through its own phase of expansion.
Variations in the cycle
- The phases overlap: a couple may still be having children when their eldest child marries.
- Not every group passes through all three phases. A couple without children skips the expansion and dispersion phases, and may adopt children or rely on other kin in old age.
- Divorce, widowhood, remarriage, migration and early death interrupt the cycle.
- The cycle of the domestic group runs alongside the life cycle of the individual. The Hindu ashrama scheme of four stages of life, brahmacharya (student), grihastha (householder), vanaprastha (withdrawal) and sannyasa (renunciation), is a cultural model of the same process: the grihastha stage matches expansion and dispersion, and vanaprastha matches replacement.
Chayanov: the household cycle and the peasant economy
The Russian economist A. V. Chayanov (The Theory of Peasant Economy, 1925) showed that the size of a peasant household's farm and its work effort change with its developmental cycle. When children are young, the ratio of consumers to workers is high, so the household works harder and may rent more land. As children grow up and start work, the ratio falls. Chayanov's insight links the domestic cycle to the economy and explains differences between peasant households in the same village that look like class differences but are partly differences in stage.
Classifying households
Peter Laslett and Eugene Hammel of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population (1972) proposed a widely used classification of households by their kin composition:
| Category | Composition |
|---|---|
| Solitaries | One person living alone |
| No-family households | Co-resident siblings or unrelated people, such as students sharing a flat |
| Simple family households | A married couple with or without children, or a widowed parent with children |
| Extended family households | A simple family plus one or more other relatives, such as a widowed parent or an unmarried brother |
| Multiple family households | Two or more related married couples, such as parents with married sons, or married brothers |
Laslett showed that pre-industrial England was dominated by simple family households, contrary to the belief that the nuclear family was a product of industrialisation.
Family and household in India
India has been central to the study of the family and household, because of the ideal of the Hindu joint family and the large changes it has undergone.
A. M. Shah: the household dimension of the family
A. M. Shah (The Household Dimension of the Family in India, 1973), studying a Gujarat village, argued that sociologists had confused the household with the family. The household is a co-residential and commensal unit. The joint family is a wider group of kin who may live in several households. Many households classified as "nuclear" in census data are linked to other households by property, worship and obligations. A nuclear household does not mean that the joint family has broken down.
I. P. Desai: jointness
I. P. Desai, in his study of Mahuva in Gujarat (1964), measured "jointness" by the fulfilment of obligations between kin rather than by co-residence. He found that many families living in separate households still functioned jointly through shared property, mutual help and joint celebrations of rites. The degree of jointness, not the form of residence, was what mattered.
Pauline Kolenda: the cycle of the joint family
Pauline Kolenda (Region, Caste, and Family Structure, 1968) compared 26 studies of Indian household composition. She found that the proportion of joint households varied by region and caste, and that a single family moves between forms over time: a nuclear household becomes a supplemented nuclear household when a widowed parent joins it, then a joint household when sons marry, and then divides into separate nuclear households at partition. This is the developmental cycle in Indian form.
Change in Indian households
- Partition: joint families commonly divide after the father's death, often because of disputes between brothers or their wives. Under Hindu law, members of a joint family (coparceners) have rights in ancestral property. Since the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, daughters are coparceners equal to sons.
- Migration: rural-urban and international migration create split households, such as Kerala's "Gulf families", where wives manage the household while husbands work abroad.
- Urban living: students, young professionals and migrant workers live in no-family households such as shared flats, hostels and paying-guest accommodation.
- Ageing: as fertility falls and life expectancy rises, more elderly people live alone or as couples. The Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007, places a legal duty on children to support their parents.
- Tribal households: many tribal communities have nuclear households linked by clan and village obligations, youth dormitories, and matrilineal households in the North-East.
For family and household change in tribal communities, see our note on tribal India, PVTGs, displacement and the development-versus-isolation debate.
Family, household and domestic group compared
| Basis | Family | Household | Domestic group |
|---|---|---|---|
| Defined by | Kinship: marriage, descent, adoption | Co-residence and a common hearth | Domestic functions: production, consumption, reproduction, care |
| Members must be related? | Yes | No | Usually, but not necessarily |
| Members must live together? | No | Yes | Often, but functions can be shared across dwellings |
| Main scholars | Murdock, Linton, Lévi-Strauss | Haviland, Laslett and Hammel, Census of India | Fortes, Goody, Bender, Chayanov |
| Change over time | Continues through generations | Formed and dissolved as people move | Passes through the developmental cycle |
| Example | A Kerala family with members in the village, Bengaluru and the Gulf | Students sharing a flat | A joint family farming together with separate kitchens |
Using this topic in a UPSC answer
- Define each term clearly, then show where they overlap and where they diverge.
- Use Bender's three-way distinction and Goody's units (dwelling, production, consumption, reproduction).
- Draw Fortes' developmental cycle as a circular diagram with three phases: expansion, dispersion, replacement.
- Give examples where household and family diverge: Mundurucu, Nayar, Ashanti, Na, the ghotul, students sharing a flat.
- Add Indian studies: A. M. Shah, I. P. Desai and Kolenda, with the Census of India definition.
- Link to change: migration, partition, ageing, and the 2005 amendment on daughters' coparcenary rights.
- Conclude: the family is a kinship group, the household a residential group, and the domestic group a functional group that changes over time.
Likely questions: "Distinguish between family, household and domestic group." "Discuss the developmental cycle of the domestic group." "Is the nuclear household a sign of the breakdown of the joint family in India?" For structure and presentation, see our guide to anthropology answer writing with diagrams, thinkers and case studies.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a family and a household?
A family is a group of people related by marriage, descent or adoption, who need not live together. A household is a group of people who live together and usually share a common kitchen, who need not be related. Students sharing a flat form a household but not a family.
What is a domestic group?
A domestic group is the unit that carries out the functions of daily living: shelter, production, cooking and eating, child-rearing and the care of members. Meyer Fortes called domestic groups "householding and housekeeping groups" that provide the material and cultural resources needed to raise their members.
What is the developmental cycle of the domestic group?
It is Meyer Fortes' idea that a domestic group passes through a cycle over time: expansion (from marriage to the birth of the last child), dispersion or fission (from the marriage of the first child to that of the last), and replacement (from the ageing of the parents to their death and replacement by an heir's family).
What did Jack Goody contribute to the study of domestic groups?
Goody edited The Developmental Cycle in Domestic Groups (1958) and showed that the domestic group contains several units, the dwelling unit, the production unit, the consumption unit and the reproductive unit, which may or may not coincide.
What is Bender's distinction?
Donald Bender (1967) distinguished families (kinship groups), households (co-resident groups) and domestic functions (the activities of daily living), and showed that these often coincide but are not the same.
How does the Census of India define a household?
As a group of persons who normally live together and take their meals from a common kitchen unless the exigencies of work prevent any of them from doing so. The members may or may not be related.
What did A. M. Shah argue about the Indian household?
A. M. Shah (1973) argued that the household, a co-residential and commensal unit, should be distinguished from the family, a wider group of kin. Many households counted as nuclear remain part of a joint family through property and obligations, so nuclear households do not prove the breakdown of the joint family.
Why did the Mundurucu household differ from the nuclear family?
Among the traditional Mundurucu of the Amazon, men and boys above about 13 lived in a men's house, while women and young children lived in separate dwelling houses. Husbands visited their wives, so the household was not organised around the married couple.