In the Shadow of History by Andrew Davidson

Author:Andrew Davidson [Davidson, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General
ISBN: 9781412826174
Google: U5M56Y2X360C
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 1996-01-15T05:03:22+00:00

Towards a Household Typology

We begin the construction of our categories with the assumption that the household is a primary locus of people’s daily and generational reproduction in the Nuba Mountains. The household, structured predominantly by family or kinship, still provides a basis of reproduction in the demographic sense and ensures the creation of future labor. Of course, with the advent of modernizing pressures, including capitalism, this changes, especially in places like Kadugli where, for example, males cohabitate and form a household for the purpose of residence and consumption on a daily basis (there is no minimal family unit of mother and infant). Still, in Nuba Mountain villages the economic and ideological necessity of “family” predominates. Hence, variations in the life cycle of a household are attributed more to the life course of individual members than to any systematic breakdown in the family or domestic unit.

Reproduction also involves household labor as an institutionalized process through which the household provides its material sustenance. Not only does this include agricultural activities but also nonagricultural undertakings such as cottage industries and off-farm employment. We talk of household labor in that it excludes other sources of labor such as nafir and wage, although these also may prove important to the household’s reproduction, but for different reasons. In addition, the household is a site of socialization, where members are oriented towards the world and given instructions for deportment.

The conceptualization of household as a consumption unit in association with the ways that it meets those consumption requirements simultaneously creates categories of households as effective sites of production. This assumes that household composition and function, including the cultural (kinship, inheritance) and political practices (marriage responsibilities, control of resources) that buttress them, are intimately connected to specific economic or production practices—albeit, production in its broadest sense. Each household has members who engage in productive activities, whether for the market or not, that are essential for household reproduction. For this reason, we classify households according to the primary means households activate and ensure that (re)production. This is especially effective in a complex modernizing society, where households evidence different types and combinations of social organization—those based on rationalization principles of capitalism and those predicated on noneconomic precepts of the lineage system. To this end we have identified five household (re)production forms: three capitalist forms—capitalist entrepreneur, small-scale capitalist, and wage-labor; and two lineage forms—lineage market and lineage subsistence. Yet, we are in no way resurrecting a theoretically opposed dualism. To the contrary, it is necessary to increasingly link variant household forms together into an integrated framework of analysis.

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