![]() We can dare to experiment, try out new skills, new roles, knowing that we will soon find out if our experiment has worked. We can manage the complexities of social interaction on the human scale because we get a constant stream of messages about the consequences of our acts. It is what makes them so important to our existence as social beings however, the familial household is a very special form of the primary group because in the long run it is one in which we spend the most time. ![]() We get smiles, frowns, or shrugs we get a hundred clues as to “how we are doing.” The possibility of immediate feedback from one’s actions characterizes all primary, or face-to-face, groups. We call it the “human scale.” In the family setting, we immediately get feedback about whether our actions are producing the results we intend. While the complexity of the family is of a high order, the scale is manageable. If we are members of a recombined household, then we hold an even more complex map in our heads, including former spouses, children no longer living in our household, and so on. Much family conflict stems from out-of-date mental maps. If we fail to update them daily, we run into problems. We all have in our heads very complex maps of our familial households. Because family members live at close quarters and must share limited resources, including space and time, there has to be a continual negotiation process between each member and every other, a continual checking out of changed circumstances and preferences. Each day each member has her own unique growth tasks and her own unique experiences in the world outside, returning to the household a different person in the evening than she was in the morning. One reason the complexity is unrecordable is that each member of a household is growing and changing every minute. I use the term familial household to emphasize the fact that people who live together in households, whatever the arrangements, are in a familial relationship to one another. In my terminology these entities are all families. Whatever the pattern, the relationships and interactions of that micro-social system are so complex that I as a family sociologist could never fully capture and record that complexity. The people who make up that familial household may present the pattern of husband/wife/children, single parent/children, lesbian or gay couple with/without children, a small group of unrelated people who live communally, or the one-person household with its special extramural support system. Only in the most exceptional cases of malfunction do we throw up our hands and say, “I am helpless I can’t make my body work.” We have found a way to live intimately and effectively with our highly complex body system.Ĭomplexity of an unimaginable order also characterizes the households we live in. We are not likely ever to understand fully the functioning of the thousands of microsystems that maintain our body as a living organism, yet most of the time we can keep it in good working condition and get it to do the things we want it to do. Our own bodies are in some ways as complex as the universe itself. Schumacher said small is beautiful, but it would not be correct to say small is simple. By focusing on the familial household and calling it a small society, I am separating out the issues of complexity and of scale. As an entity, the familial group has met catastrophe after catastrophe over many thousands of years-including the social catastrophes of the rise and fall of civilizations-changing form, structure, and habitat many times with a unique combination of inventiveness, courage, and caring. ![]() ![]() My answer to that challenge is to call attention to the oldest of human groupings, the familial group archaeologists have identified household sites for homo erectus and mulier erectus from two million years ago and more in the Rift Valley of Africa. We approach the second millennium of the Christian era overwhelmed with problems of scale and complexity, unsure of the survival of the species itself. Our major challenge as human beings in the ninth decade of the twentieth century is to overcome widespread feelings of helplessness and despair over our apparent inability to have any effect on the social processes that grind on around us. Assumptions Underlying the SHARE Program.Community Supported Industry White Paper.What About the “Tragedy of the Commons”?.European Community Land Trust Directory.North American Community Land Trust Directory. ![]()
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