Is the Family Universal? Definitions, Murdock and His Critics

Whether the family is universal depends on how it is defined. G. P. Murdock (1949) argued that the nuclear family of a married couple and their children is found in every society and performs four universal functions: sexual, reproductive, economic and educational. Later anthropologists showed exceptions. Among the Nayars of Kerala, the Ashanti of Ghana and the Na (Mosuo) of China, husband and wife do not live together as a unit, and in the Israeli kibbutz children were raised collectively. Most anthropologists now conclude that some form of family, a recognised group of kin responsible for raising children, is universal, but the nuclear family is not. The mother-child bond is the most nearly universal unit.

This note explains why a universal definition of the family is so difficult, Murdock's definition and its critics, the test cases (Nayar, Ashanti, Na, kibbutz, Soviet and Chinese experiments, matrifocal Caribbean families), and the modern view of the debate, for the UPSC Anthropology Optional. It belongs to Paper I, topic 2.4 (Family: definition and universality) in the Anthropology Optional syllabus.

Key points at a glance

• The problem: every society has some kind of family, but its form varies so widely that no single definition fits all cases.
• Murdock (1949): the nuclear family is universal, based on a sample of 250 societies, and performs four functions: sexual, reproductive, economic and educational.
• Linton (1936): distinguished the conjugal family, based on marriage, from the consanguine family, based on blood ties, and argued that in many societies the consanguine bond matters more.
• Critics: Stephens (1963), Levy and Fallers (1959), Spiro (1954), Gough (1959) and Adams (1960) questioned each element of Murdock's definition.
• Test cases: the Nayar taravad, Ashanti duolocal residence, Na "walking marriage", the kibbutz, early Soviet and Chinese collective experiments, and Caribbean matrifocal households.
• Smallest unit: the mother-child dyad (Adams; Fox) is the most nearly universal unit.
• Modern view: Collier, Rosaldo and Yanagisako (1982) argued that "the family" is a cultural idea rather than a natural unit.
• Conclusion: the family is universal only if it is defined broadly, by function, rather than as husband, wife and children living together.

Why is a universal definition of the family a problem?

Ethnographic research shows that every known society has rules for mating, recognises some relationship between parents and children, and organises the care of children. In this sense the family, and with it marriage, appears to exist everywhere. But what it means varies from society to society:

• who lives together (husband and wife, a mother and her brothers, several wives, several generations);
• who counts as a parent (the biological father, the mother's husband, the mother's brother);
• who controls property and inheritance;
• who raises children (parents, the lineage, a commune, the state).

When anthropologists tried to define the family as a universal group, they had to decide which elements were essential: marriage, common residence, sexual relations, economic co-operation or child-rearing. Each element has exceptions. This is the crux of the problem: the more precise the definition, the less universal it becomes, and the more universal it is, the less it says.

Some classic definitions

Linton: conjugal and consanguine families

In The Study of Man (1936), Ralph Linton distinguished two kinds of family:

• The conjugal family: based on the marriage bond, of husband, wife and children.
• The consanguine family: based on blood ties, a core of related people (such as a mother, her sisters and brothers and their children) with spouses attached on the fringe.

Linton argued that the conjugal unit rarely stands alone and is usually part of a larger consanguine group. In many societies the blood bond is stronger and more lasting than the marriage bond: spouses can be divorced, but siblings cannot. Matrilineal societies such as the Nayars and Khasis illustrate this. Linton's argument is the starting point for the view that the nuclear family is not the universal building block.

Murdock's theory of the universal nuclear family

In Social Structure (1949), George Peter Murdock examined a sample of 250 societies from the Human Relations Area Files. He found three forms of family:

Murdock concluded that the nuclear family is present in all of these forms, either alone or as a building block of larger families. His definition is the most quoted in the debate:

The family is 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.

The four universal functions

Murdock argued that no society had found an adequate substitute for the nuclear family in performing these four functions, and that this explained its universality. He himself admitted that the Nayars might be an exception.

Critiques of Murdock

W. N. Stephens (1963), Marion J. Levy Jr. and Lloyd A. Fallers (1959), Melford Spiro (1954), Kathleen Gough (1959) and Richard N. Adams (1960) examined Murdock's definition element by element. Each requirement has exceptions.

1. Common residence

Murdock's definition requires husband, wife and children to live together. Several societies do not meet this requirement.

The Ashanti (Asante) of Ghana: Meyer Fortes described duolocal residence. Many married couples, especially in the early years of marriage, live separately, each in the house of his or her own matrilineal kin. Children usually live with their mother in her brother's or mother's house, while the wife cooks and sends food to her husband, and visits him at night. Descent and succession are matrilineal: a man inherits from his mother's brother, not from his father. The mother's brother has authority over his sister's children and acts as a "sociological father". A woman's tie to her brother and her lineage often counts for more than her tie to her husband.

The Nayars of Kerala: Kathleen Gough (1959) described the traditional Nayars of central Kerala in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

• Before puberty, each girl went through the talikettu kalyanam, a ritual in which a man of an appropriate lineage tied a tali (ornament) around her neck. The ritual husband had no further obligations, and the couple did not live together.
• After puberty a woman could form sambandham unions with several men at once, of her own caste or of a higher caste, such as Nambudiri Brahmins. These "visiting husbands" came at night and left in the morning.
• To make a child legitimate, one or more of these men acknowledged paternity by paying the costs of the birth. If no man of suitable caste did so, the woman was suspected of a liaison with a man of lower caste, which was severely punished.
• The household, the taravad, was a matrilineal group: a woman, her children, her sisters and their children, and her brothers. It was headed by the eldest man, the karanavar. Husbands had no rights in their wives' property or children.

The Nayars had no household of husband, wife and children, no economic co-operation between spouses, and no paternal role in raising children. They are the classic exception to Murdock's nuclear family. The system declined in the 19th and 20th centuries, and legislation ended it (the Madras Marumakkathayam Act of 1933 and the Kerala Joint Hindu Family System (Abolition) Act of 1975).

Gough proposed a broader definition of marriage to cover the Nayars: a relationship between a woman and one or more other persons that ensures a child born to her is given full birth-status rights as a member of the society. On this view, the Nayars had marriage but not the nuclear family.

2. The sexual function

Murdock's definition assumes that the family regulates sexual relations. But many societies allow sex outside marriage. In Onotoa (Kiribati, Gilbert Islands), Truk (Chuuk) in Micronesia, and among the Trobriand Islanders, young people had considerable premarital sexual freedom. Among some Inuit groups, spouse exchange between partners created alliances between families. In these cases the family is not the only place for sexual relations, so the sexual function cannot define it.

3. Economic co-operation

In many societies the main economic unit is a larger group, such as the joint family, the lineage, a commune or the state, not the nuclear family. Among the Nayars, husband and wife had no shared economy. In the kibbutz, members worked for the community, not for the household.

4. Reproduction and socialisation

Levy and Fallers (1959) argued that the functions Murdock assigned to the nuclear family can be, and in many societies are, performed by other agencies. Children may be raised by the lineage, by grandparents, by an age group, by a youth dormitory such as the Muria ghotul of Bastar described by Verrier Elwin, or by a community. In their view, no function is performed only by the nuclear family.

Collective alternatives to the family

Several modern societies tried to replace the family with collective child-rearing. Their history is cited on both sides of the debate. Their existence shows that the family can be replaced. Their failure or later retreat suggests that it is very hard to replace.

The Israeli kibbutz

Melford Spiro studied the kibbutz in the early 1950s and asked, in a famous 1954 article, "Is the family universal?" In the traditional kibbutz:

• a couple was recognised as married and shared a room;
• children lived in children's houses (dormitories) from infancy, raised by trained caretakers (metaplot);
• children spent a few hours each day with their parents;
• parents had little role in their children's education;
• there was no economic co-operation or sharing of household duties between husband and wife: both worked for the kibbutz;
• cooking and dining were communal;
• the kibbutz met the economic needs of its members.

Spiro concluded that the kibbutz lacked the nuclear family in Murdock's sense, unless the whole kibbutz was regarded as one large family. He later noted a return to "familism": parents, especially mothers, sought more time with their children. From the 1970s onward, kibbutzim moved children back to their parents' homes, and the children's houses had almost disappeared by the late 1990s. Kibbutzim have always been a small part of Israeli society, today under 3 per cent of the population.

Early Soviet family policy

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks regarded the traditional family as a source of conservatism, religion and inequality between the sexes.

• The family codes of 1918 and 1926 made divorce easy, recognised unregistered unions and gave equal rights to children born outside marriage.
• Alexandra Kollontai and others argued for collective nurseries, communal kitchens and communal houses that would free women from domestic work.
• The state's failure to provide enough childcare, together with homeless children and falling birth rates, led to a reversal. Laws of 1936 and 1944 made divorce harder, banned abortion (from 1936 to 1955) and promoted the family as the basis of socialist society.

The kolkhoz (collective farm), set up from 1929 onward, collectivised land and labour. It did not abolish the family.

Chinese communes and others

• During the Great Leap Forward (1958–61), Chinese communes set up communal mess halls, nurseries and boarding schools. They were abandoned after the famine of 1959–61.
• The Shakers, a celibate Christian sect in the United States, had no families at all. They recruited by conversion and adoption, and declined to almost nothing.
• The Oneida Community (1848–81) practised "complex marriage" and collective child-rearing.

Matrifocal and female-headed families

R. T. Smith (1956) studied villages in British Guiana (now Guyana) and found many households centred on a mother and her children, often including her daughters and their children, with men only loosely attached. Such matrifocal households are common in the Caribbean and in parts of Latin America and among poor urban populations. They arise from male labour migration, unemployment and the history of slavery, which broke up families. In these households the stable unit is the mother and her children, not the married couple.

The Na (Mosuo) of China: a society without marriage?

The Na, also called the Mosuo, live around Lugu Lake on the border of Yunnan and Sichuan in south-west China. The anthropologist Cai Hua, in A Society without Fathers or Husbands (2001), described them as a society without marriage. Clifford Geertz's review of the book (2001) brought the case to wide attention, and Chuan-kang Shih (2010) gave a fuller account.

• "Walking marriage": the main form of sexual union is the visit, known as sese or tisese, and in Chinese as zouhun. A man visits his lover's house at night and returns to his own household in the morning.
• No obligations: the relationship carries no expectation of fidelity or permanence, no economic obligations, and no responsibility of the man for the children born.
• The household: a household is matrilineal. It comprises a woman, her brothers and sisters, the sisters' children, and the daughters' children. A child is raised by the mother and her siblings, and the mother's brother is the main male figure.
• Marriage did exist: marriage was practised among chiefly families, and the Chinese government forced couples to register marriages in campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s. The visiting system has continued alongside. Cai Hua's claim that the Na have no words for "father" or "husband" has been debated.

The Na are the strongest modern case against the universality of marriage and of the nuclear family. But they do have a family in the broad sense: a stable household of kin that raises children.

Indian examples

In India today, urbanisation, migration and smaller family size have made the nuclear household more common, although joint-family ties and obligations remain strong. Single-parent households, households of widows, live-in relationships (recognised under the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, as relationships "in the nature of marriage") and same-sex partnerships widen the range of families. In 2023 the Supreme Court declined to recognise same-sex marriage, leaving the matter to Parliament. For tribal family and kinship systems in context, see our note on tribal India, PVTGs, displacement and the development-versus-isolation debate.

Smaller units: dyads and the mother-child bond

If the nuclear family is not universal, is there a smaller unit that is?

• Richard N. Adams (1960) argued that the nuclear family is a combination of two dyads: the conjugal dyad (husband and wife) and the maternal dyad (mother and child). The maternal dyad is found everywhere; the conjugal dyad is not always attached to it.
• Robin Fox (Kinship and Marriage, 1967) argued that the mother-child unit is the basic unit of kinship. The key question in any society is which man is attached to it: the mother's husband, as in the nuclear family, or the mother's brother, as in the Nayar and Na households.
• Radcliffe-Brown treated the elementary family as the basic unit of kinship, but stressed that the relationships within it, between parent and child, siblings and spouses, are combined in different ways in different societies. The useful approach is to study these relationships in each kinship system rather than to argue about one universal form.

Family, household and domestic group

Part of the confusion comes from mixing three different ideas:

Murdock's definition combines all three. The Ashanti and Nayar cases show that they can be separate: the family (kin ties) exists, but the household is organised by descent rather than marriage.

Recent perspectives

• Feminist anthropology: Jane Collier, Michelle Rosaldo and Sylvia Yanagisako, in "Is There a Family?" (1982), argued that "the family" is not a natural, universal unit defined by biology, but a cultural and ideological idea, closely linked to the modern Western distinction between the private home and the public world. Universal definitions risk projecting the Western nuclear family onto other societies.
• David Schneider (A Critique of the Study of Kinship, 1984) argued that anthropologists had assumed that kinship everywhere is based on biological reproduction, as in Western culture.
• New kinship studies: Janet Carsten's idea of "relatedness" and Kath Weston's Families We Choose (1991) show that people create kinship through shared food, residence, care and choice, not only through birth and marriage.
• New reproductive technologies, such as surrogacy, donor gametes and IVF, separate biological and social parenthood further. India regulated surrogacy through the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021.

Is the family universal? A balanced conclusion

The family is a universal social group as long as it is not confined to the conventional husband-wife-children unit. The forms of the family vary with descent, residence, economy and law, but every society has some recognised group of kin that cares for and socialises children.

Using this topic in a UPSC answer

• Begin with the problem: universality depends on definition.
• Quote Murdock's definition and his four functions, with the 250-society sample.
• Critique element by element: residence (Ashanti, Nayar), sex (Trobriand, Onotoa), economy (kibbutz, Nayar), socialisation (Levy and Fallers; the ghotul).
• Use Indian examples: the Nayar taravad (Gough), Khasi and Garo matrilineal households, Toda polyandry and the Hindu joint family.
• Add the Na as the strongest modern case.
• Mention collective experiments (kibbutz, Soviet, Chinese) and their retreat towards the family.
• Use the dyad argument (Adams, Fox) and the family-household distinction.
• End with recent views (Collier, Rosaldo and Yanagisako) and a balanced conclusion.
• Diagram: a kinship chart comparing a nuclear family with a Nayar taravad, showing where the man stands in relation to the mother-child unit.

Likely questions: "Is the family universal? Discuss." "Critically examine Murdock's view of the nuclear family." "Discuss the Nayar case in the debate on the definition of marriage and family." "Family, household and domestic group: distinguish." For structure and presentation, see our guide to anthropology answer writing with diagrams, thinkers and case studies.

Frequently asked questions

Is the family universal?

Some form of family, a recognised group of kin who raise children, is found in every society. The nuclear family of husband, wife and children living together is not universal, as the Nayar, Ashanti and Na cases show.

What is Murdock's definition of the family?

Murdock (1949) defined the family as "a social group characterized by common residence, economic co-operation and reproduction", including adults of both sexes, at least two of whom have a socially approved sexual relationship, and one or more children, own or adopted.

What are Murdock's four functions of the family?

Sexual, reproductive, economic and educational. Murdock argued that the nuclear family is universal because it performs these four functions, which every society needs.

Why are the Nayars important in the debate on the family?

Among the traditional Nayars of Kerala, a woman had a ritual husband (through the talikettu kalyanam) and later several visiting husbands (sambandham). Husbands did not live with their wives, support them or raise their children. Children belonged to the mother's matrilineal taravad. The Nayars therefore lacked the nuclear family.

What is the difference between conjugal and consanguine families?

Ralph Linton distinguished the conjugal family, based on the marriage bond, from the consanguine family, based on blood ties between relatives, with spouses attached at the edge.

What did Melford Spiro find in the kibbutz?

Spiro (1954) found that children lived in children's houses, husband and wife did not co-operate economically, and the kibbutz rather than the parents met economic needs. He concluded that the kibbutz lacked the nuclear family unless the whole kibbutz was regarded as a family. Kibbutzim later returned children to their parents' homes.

Who are the Na and why are they significant?

The Na or Mosuo of south-west China practise "walking marriage" (sese), in which a man visits a woman at night and returns home in the morning, with no obligations of fidelity, support or fatherhood. Children are raised by the mother and her siblings. Cai Hua (2001) described them as a society without fathers or husbands.

What is the difference between a family and a household?

A family is based on kinship: marriage, descent or adoption. A household is based on co-residence and shared consumption, and may include non-kin or exclude family members who live elsewhere.