如题所述
Ayoub's article deals with that wider set of relatives anthropologists call the "kindred" and Americans refer to as "family" or; simply, "relatives." Her subject is of special interest to scholars of modernization because it challenges and requires qualifications to the view that modern society is inimical to kinship relations. This view holds that relatives are not in a position to provide the solidarity and material support of kinsmen as occurs with traditional societies. Nowadays, except within the immediate family, we do not interact with relatives primarily or nearly as often as we do with others. Contacts between kin are tenuous and relations are maintained mostly through exchanged greeting cards, telephone calls, and occasional get-togethers. Relatives rarely offer us goods or services at discount prices; we do as well shopping around or relying on friends and other contacts. We do not depend on kin to provide our children with summer employment or assistance to meet college tuition and related costs. Still, Americans believe that relatives may be relied on at times of need.
If relatives are useless or unimportant for instrumental or utilitarian purposes, they remain significant, as Ayoub shows, because they exist. That they are there appears to be their primary raison d'être. We take comfort in the sense of belonging, they to us and we to them. They represent part of our "roots," our origins, and give us a sense of identity more intimate than we get from our other social personas. As much as Americans like to believe in freedom of choice and in establishing social intimacy on the basis of an other's intrinsic qualities and worth, they also recognize that relationships with friends, neighbors, colleagues, and workmates are not as enduring as ties of blood and do not carry the same moral weight. Thus kin are needed, and people drive hundreds of miles to share a day's picnic with distant cousins, some of whose names are unknown or hardly remembered.
Although Ayoub does not extend her conclusions to suggest why Americans desire and maintain wide family connections, it is due very likely, as Plotnicov and Silverman suggest in the chapter following Ayoub's, to the conditions of modern society, with its multiple social institutions, and social and geographical mobility, among other things. Under such conditions, primary group relationships are narrowly
If relatives are useless or unimportant for instrumental or utilitarian purposes, they remain significant, as Ayoub shows, because they exist. That they are there appears to be their primary raison d'être. We take comfort in the sense of belonging, they to us and we to them. They represent part of our "roots," our origins, and give us a sense of identity more intimate than we get from our other social personas. As much as Americans like to believe in freedom of choice and in establishing social intimacy on the basis of an other's intrinsic qualities and worth, they also recognize that relationships with friends, neighbors, colleagues, and workmates are not as enduring as ties of blood and do not carry the same moral weight. Thus kin are needed, and people drive hundreds of miles to share a day's picnic with distant cousins, some of whose names are unknown or hardly remembered.
Although Ayoub does not extend her conclusions to suggest why Americans desire and maintain wide family connections, it is due very likely, as Plotnicov and Silverman suggest in the chapter following Ayoub's, to the conditions of modern society, with its multiple social institutions, and social and geographical mobility, among other things. Under such conditions, primary group relationships are narrowly
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第1个回答 2011-06-26
This is my mother/father/sister/brother...,and you can call her/him "aunt/uncle/real name/nick name..."