Daniel Bertaux (Directeur de recherche, CNRS Paris, Docent, University of Helsinki)
Life politics and/or anthroponomics
Wednesday 28.4 16-18
Thursday 29.4 10-12 and 14-16
Friday 30.4. 10-12 (sorry for the time!)
Place: Department of Social Policy, Seminar Hall, First Floor
(for more information: http://www.valt.helsinki.fi/sospo/opetus.htm)
The following is an article in which the methods of family case histories
is presented. The students are expected to prepare a case history to pass
the course. The directions how to do it are
presented in the beginning of the article. It is strongly suggested that
the students read the whole article.
The method of family case histories has been initially developed as an extension of the life story method, and for teaching purposes. As one of us, Daniel Bertaux, who had been developing the method of life histories, was teaching a course on social mobility at Quebec's Universite Laval he asked everyone of the sixty students to pick up one family and study its recent history in the perspective of social reproduction and mobility. As students began to work - most of them had chosen to study their own family - they asked for more directives on how to do it and what to focus on. This led Bertaux to define a 'standard' way of designing the frame of a family case history : if you start with an Ego who is of student age, go up two generations to the two couples of grandparents, and then go down, including on the way every descendant and her/his spouse(s) within the frame . As a result not only Ego's father and mother but uncles and aunts - and their spouses -, not only Ego's siblings but her/his first degree cousins on both sides.
Students were asked to collect the 'basic biographical (demographic)
data' for each person included in the frame and to copy it on a genealogical
graph. Besides gender, year of birth, place of birth, and level of education,
the main piece of data, in the 'social mobility' or rather social reproduction
perspective adopted, was of course the main occupation ; the hope was that
by replacing names by occupations on a standard genealogical graph one
would make visible some lineages of occupations, some transmissions of
trade from father to son and perhaps grand-son or nephew. They were
also asked to choose one lineage, to reconstruct the history of its last
three generations and to tell it in a twenty-pages narrative essay.
The students were given the possiblity to pick up another family that
their own - but all did take their own - ; and
they were told to respect the wish of every interviewee not to provide
information on a given event, a given period, or some other member
of the family .
The exercise was supposed to sensitize students to an alternative, 'qualitative' way of looking at social mobility ; however, given the very large size of families (i e number of siblings) in traditional Qu bec, students came back with wide graphs bearing a huge quantity of data. Although genealogical graphs were only three generations deep most of them were very broad, one even numbering 220 persons... The 'stories' students collected about how the lives of their parents and relatives got shaped were often highly interesting, revealing as it were some of the social logics typical of 'French Canada's cultural model.
Taken together these sixty family case histories mapped out many aspects of social-historical change as it had taken place in this region of the Qu bec province for the past seventy years. In older generations one could find a vast majority of small farmers, and even one trapper ('coureur des bois') having married the daughter of an Indian chief. In the next generation there were almost no farmers anymore, but many workers in the building trades, in industry and urban services, both in Qu bec and in the North-East of the United States ; family sizes got much smaller, married women who had a job were much more numerous. In the third generation the occupations in teaching, social work, health services were fast growing. But what was most fascinating were the details of this vast collective history : how social historical change has actually taken place, through which diverse, local, contingent mediations and initiatives, endeavours, dramas, victories, circumstances and happenstances -some happy, some tragic -. Students and teacher shared a common enthusiasm for this new approach ; and D. Bertaux came back to France keen on reflecting upon the experience, repeating it, discovering the potentialities of the new method as he had done previously for life histories.
Now, more than ten years later, with such experiments repeated in several universities by both coauthors separately, with the experience learned from several research projects done in collaboration, the time has come to present the method as a well-tested, well-working one.
We shall restrict this presentation to our own orientation, which is towards grasping the social historical realities (phenomena, norms and rules of the games, social logics and logics of action, processes, historical dynamics) of some given 'social world' . There are other ways to look at family histories ; for instance social researchers may focus on the various ways family stories are told and passed on within families, an approach which might be called narrativist. As for us, although we are perfectly aware that the symbolic level is an active part of reality, we believe that to restrict one's attention to it is as mutilating as once was 'crass materialism'. By focussing as much as possible on the objective situations of households - trying to discover their social logics -, on the social milieux to which they belong(ed) - attempting to understand the 'games ' which were/are played in each, and the rules of such games -, on family microcultures - trying to describe their specific patterns - and on the family members' styles of actions - trying to identify how they got shaped through childhoo and later experiences - we have developed a specific style of research. Other ones are certainly possible but this is the one we know, and therefore the one we can talked about meaningfully.
1. From life histories to case histories of families
There is much in common, but also much differences between life stories
and family stories.
The life history (or' biography') is the case history of one person,
where she stands centerfold ; her life story, her own narrative and evaluative
account of her life and life experiences as told to an interviewer, puts
her again at the center point of the picture. But few 'individuals' live
alone as isolated atoms ; most live in households, clusters of persons
connected to each other and moving together through time. All of them become
embedded in nets of reciprocal, strong feelings ; their actions, life decisions,
life paths interact with each other ; kinship, juridical, moral and other
kinds of bonds relate them to each other. While granting that what counts
most are not formal kinship ties but 'lived 'ones, it remains that most
persons are connected most of their life with some 'significant others'
by bonds of reciprocal dependence and moral solidarity. While individual
life stories glance at such relations only sideways, case histories of
families put such bonds at the very center of the picture and look at their
development in the 'longue dur e' as they unfold and change through historical
time.
Therefore the focus on a family rather than on an individual immediately
sets within the field of observation, and at its very center, not an individual
but relations, which are at the same time interpersonal relations and sociostructural
relationships. It is in this sense that we consider case histories of families
sociologically richer than life histories.
What both forms have in common is the passage of time, and the unfolding of actions through time - that is, history. Hence the use of the term 'social historical' to refer to the nature of what is brought back by the case study. Both forms are also based mainly - but not necessarily exclusively - on stories collected through interviewing ; for family case histories the interviewees are asked to tell not only their own story but also what they know and may tell about the lifepaths of their kins, a task at which women prove regularly an incomparably much better than men. For a family case history not everybody present in the 'window of observation' need to be interviewed ; three or four informants spread over three generations prove usually enough to provide an overall, cross-checked picture.
A single life story, although it may make fascinating hearing and reading, although it may brings to the mind of the researcher many one hypothesis about how this or that social world actually functions, needs to be supplemented by other life stories or by other kinds of materials in order to stand as sociologically relevant 'data'. Five life stories of individuals not connected to each other constitute five separated pieces, perhaps five gems but with no cumulative power unless they are taken from the same social world. But the life stories of five persons connected by close kinship ties, for instance a couple and its three grown-up children, bring more information than five separated life stories : they illuminate and confort each other like the gems of a necklace. The reason is not only methodological : such 'r cits crois s' deal with one and the same cluster of persons and lives ; one can see them unfold in parallel, and witness for instance howa given development in one impinges upon the other ones ; how the elder generations attempt to shape the life courses of the younger one ; or how relations of competition and complementarity between siblings contribute to orient their life paths.
The single life story is perhaps at its best when it is used to document the case of the transformation, through some Bildungsprozess, of a person into a full-blown Subject through the accumulation of experiences, through assessing these experiences and making them into what we have come to call a capital d'exp rience biographique sp cifique, a 'capital' of biographical (lived) experience specific to the person. Although the experiences take place in social worlds, the specific ways in which they are lived, evaluated in retrospect, and used for further self-progress depend on cultural (ideological) and psychic processes. The reciprocal metamorphoses of social features into psychic ones and vice versa (through, respectively, the internalisation of external elements - e g norms -, and the externalisation of inner elements - e g character features - through action ) is certainly fascinating, but to master its study involves knowledge of various disciplines, from psychology to sociology, social psychology, psychosociology, and the ability to combine them...
This is perhaps what the Italian sociologist Franco Ferrarotti had in
mind when he argued that
the individual is not, as it is believed too
often, (...) the most elementary of heuristic sociological units. Far from
being the simplest of social elements - the irreducible atom of social
life - the individual is a complex synthesis of social elements. (...)
Paradoxically, the true elementary unit of the social is, in our opinion,
the primary group : an apparently complex system which constitutes, in
reality, the most simple object under sociological observation. (...) By
comparison with this Grundkšrper, we can measure that vertiginously dense
and complex synthesis which constitutes an individual from the viewpoint
of sociology. (...) .Why shouldn't the primary group also be the
basic matrix of the biographical method ?
With a nuclear family one is confronted immediately with a relatively
stabilized system of interconnected actors, a small organisation complete
with goals, a stabilized division of labour, roles, norms and sanctions,
with strategies turned either outwards or inwards, experiences being passed
on, exchanged, imitated, rejected ; with conflicts over values, beliefs,
styles of conducts ; with, therefore, internal dynamics.
We believe that each family (in the sense here of a household with at least one child) is not only a system of consumption or of living together, but also and perhaps primarily a unit of production, inaslong as it is within them that, through a whole range of activities structured by the gender division of labour and summarized under the umbrella of 'domestic labour', the energies and energy-orientations of their members get produced and reproduced anew. The necessities of this kind of production - which we conceive as participating to what we call' anthroponomic production', that is, the production of human beings themselves - make for the constrained and cyclic nature of daily family life.
One of the most interesting features of such microsystems of 'production'
in the widest sense (including the production of destinies) is the centrality
of gift in their functioning : neither exchange, nor command and exploitation,
but gift. All kinds of gifts, but the gift of life to begin with : a gift,
from parent(s) to child, that by definition cannot be reciprocated as such
to the donor(s), but which nevertheless can be reciprocated through the
mediation of a third person, the child that a daughter or a son 'gives'
to her/his own parents. Which is one more reason to include three generations
in the picture...
But beyond such commonalities between families there are their differences,
which make collecting case histories worth the effort : the indefinite
variety of patterns of relations, family settings and microcultures, histories
and stories...
Thus a great variety, a great wealth of patterns is what one may expect,
rather than uniformity ; for the sociologist the task is then to make sociological
sense of the data, either by comparing cases, or- preferrably in a second
phase - by focussing in depth on one singular case.
2. WHAT IS IN A FAMILY CASE HISTORY ?
Case histories of families bring forth materials which concern not only family life, and therefore not only family sociology, but also e g gender relations and how they have changed historically, through which concrete actions of lay women ; how practices of bringing upchildren vary within a given milieu, how they differ from one social milieu to another, and from one generation to another ; how migrations take place, who has the nerve to go and check if the grass is greener elsewhere, how people manage to settle in a new environment ; how social encounters end up sometimes in marriages ; how parents try to help their children, how fortunes get accumulated or wasted, how destinies take shape - this is the traditional topic of'social mobility', but captured this time at the very root of the process - ; how the various and multifaceted social games are played, especially the game of generalized competition ; how political ideas begin to take shape within the family setting, and a host of other sociological issues.
At a more abstract level they provide a great wealth of materials on
interaction, gift, identification and the genesis of identities, and other
key issues of general sociology.
One way to bring some order within the extraordinary wealth of possible
topics is to refer to a simple framework. Anthropologists have shown indeed
that all kinship ties may be decomposed into a combination of three basic
kinship relations : union (the relation between spouses), filiation (the
relation between parents and children), and germanity (the relation between
siblings). But the question is, what are the sociological meanings of each
of these three basic relations
When, more than one century ago (1887), Ferdinand Tönnies put
these three relations at the very center of his conception of Gemeinschaft
he qualified them, respectively, of carrying the elements of social bond,
of (common) blood, and of (common) spirit. But this he did at a time when
kinship relations were much more part and parcel of the structuring principles
of society. Today, as the Gesellschaft has spread considerably over
formerly Gemeinschaft territories, colonizing them without however eliminating
completely the former forms, Tönnies' conceptions need to be revisited.
Here is how we would redefine their sociological contents.
Sociologically speaking a union can be described, somehow provocatively, as a joint venture by which two persons attempt to merge their inherited and self-accumulated 'capitals' and their subjective resources to build something new : a couple, that is a form that usually includes virtually its trnasformation into a (nuclear) family. Mutual attraction, the desire to share their lives, love in a word is of course what pulls the partners towards each other. However each one comes with a specific set of values, tastes and cultural features, a specific habitus, a specific 'capital of biographical experiences', perhaps specific deeply ingrained projects conceived in the continuity of her/his own ancestral lineage and backed by its living members (ie her/his own parents and other kins). Thus tensions develop within each couple between forces of attraction and centrifugal forces : their ulterior dynamics can hardly be deduced or predicted, and case histories appear as the best way to get access to their desription.
The term 'sociological dynamics' points to such issues as differential dynamics according to class ; processes leading to splitting and consequences on the children (divorce is not merely an event, but a process spread over years, beginning before and lasting after the event itself takes place) ; homogamy and heterogamy. In her processual study of mixed marriage, based on thirty case histories of mixed couples, C. Delcroix has pointed out that when partners come to the marriage carrying with them not only different religions or cultural models but different country citizenships, e g Belgium and Morocco, Belgium and Italy, Belgium and Zaìre, their couple is like one little point of contact and friction between two giant tectonic plates ; an experimental laboratory of interpersonal, but also intercultural and even inter-national communication. Their private conflicts may eventually involve nation-states if, when divorcing, both want to keep custody of the children ; but conversely, it is also through the invisible everyday efforts - taking place in thousands of mixed couples - of mutually teaching to the other to understand, tolerate and respect alterity that intercultural communication really occurs. Learning the Other, which begins as a private experience and endeavour, generates new skills that many members of mixed couples are subsequently able to use to find a job, or a role in associative life : a good investment, a typical example of 'capital d'experience biographique'.
The mixture of private and public, micro and macro that characterizes sociological issues about mixed couples may be found in many other kinds of families. It will be enough here to mention the families of traditional shopkeepers whose living comes from a 'family business'. In such couples the family relationships function as production relationships as well - not only couple relations but also relations to children, who often contribute their labour to the family business. In Taìwan, central Italy and many other regions throughout the world the family business is a frequent, typical, and dynamic entrepreneurial form. Case histories of such families allow to understand not only family dynamics but also the economic and anthroponomic dynamics specific to a branch, as in the case of the artisanal bakery in France. One of the most unexpected discoveries of a research project on this branch of industry concerned the various ways young ambitious bakery workers moved from bachelorhood to marriage right at the same time they moved into self-employment : as they needed a partner for their family business they suddenly hurried from place to place to find a suitable one, secretly testing their dates on their labour skills, values and ambitions as they courted them.
The concrete pictures yielded by case histories of families may differ rather strikingly from commonsense assumptions about family life. For instance our Mexican colleague Jorge Gonzalez, who organized the collection of one hundred case histories of families in Mexico's main cities, was struck by the frequency in the fifties and sixties of cases where the mother, in spite of her many children, was also - through informal activities - the main or sole breadwinner. In the country which gave to the world the term machismo it appears that many a young man who started a family and tried hard at first to make a decent living, could not overcome his first failures, began to drink and to misbehave. In such families mothers had to invent ways to survive ; as the Catholic Church insisted that they remain housewives no matter what, and as they had anyway several children to take care of, a frequent pattern of action was to transform the home in a workshop and enlist the labour of children to make goods - sweets, pastries, toys, dolls, paper flowers,etc. - which they would then sell in the streets. A woman whose kitchen window was on a busy street tore part of the wall and began to successfully sell food to passer bys... Such cases shed a new light on the picture of 'family' in times where women seemed wholly under the influence of the Church.
The case histories of Russian families that Daniel Bertaux and a team of Russian sociologists collected in Moscow in the early 1990's revealed the frequency, during the nineteen forties and fifties, of a particular type of household where the mother played the role of the hardworking breadwinner with very long hours while the grand mother ('babushka') played the role of the mother, doing the shopping and taking care of the children. Many a husband was absent from home because he had been killed during the war, because he was detained, because he had been sent to work on one of those huge building sites in Siberia where it was impossible to raise children ; because he had left home (especially in rural areas) in search of a better fate, or because he had been kicked out of his own home by his wife in view of his too frequent infidelities or drinking. The number of children- now grown-up men and women- who have been raised in Russia within such a form of family probably reaches millions ; but to our knowledge the form itself, although familiar to ordinary folks, has not been studied by Soviet sociology.
These are only a few examples ; they aim at giving a flavour of the extraordinary variety of forms of the 'social bond' of marriage that one discovers if one studies it through case histories of families, an approach that yields much more concrete pictures of family forms than survey questionnaires designed to fit all cases, and thus restricted to tap only the 'variables' common to all families ; not to mention, of course, the capacity of case histories to collect and analyze narratives, a property unheard of in most other sociological methods.
Filiation .
We see the relation of filiation between parents and children as the core of the family phenomenon, whatever way one looks at it. Concerning time for instance, the birth (or adoption) of the first child not only leads to a restructuration of its use, but introduces a wholly new 'arrow of time' leading virtually into a very distant future, way beyond parents's death. Concerning anthroponomic processes, the 'production' (transformation) of children from mere flesh into fully socialized human beings mobilize immense energies and affects. Symbolically, children add meaning to the union itself ( in these times and places where divorce was forbidden they even provided often, for couples that did not get along anymore, family life's only source of meaningfulness). Economically, given that the entire private wealth of a country is passed down from the proprietors to their children every thirty years or so - the entire private wealth of a nation : from the totality of the privately-owned land and real estate to the sum total of enterprises, shares and bonds - this generates a yearly flow of property rights's transfers whose magnitude is of the same order than the gross national product ; but rather than being organized by markets it follows the channels of filiation.
This is enough to recall that the study of filiation should not be restricted
to the narrow framework of family sociology. In this perspective Tönnies's
conceptualization of filiation as being about 'blood' appears particularly
outdated.
Perhaps the most encompassing way of looking at it - although it is
bound to leave much out - is to conceive of the relationship of filiation
as characterized by the parents (and grandparents', and other kins' ) efforts
at passing on/down their own resources and values to their children . The
endeavour to pass on (l'effort de transmission ) is the key
to decipher what is taking place between parents and children.
Within sociology it is not family sociology but the ill-named 'social mobility' research that has dealt most with this relation between two successive generations. It is ill-named because it assumes that mobility is the rule and that its opposite, reproduction, is the exception ; whereas in most societies it appears to be the contrary. Whatever the case, 'social mobility' research, proceeding exclusively with surveys, has been able to describe and quantify the anthroponomic ('human') flows between social origin and occupational destination ; but these are only the end results of millions of very diverse processes having taken place within and outside families during half a lifetime. It is only by opening the black boxes of families and getting the stories about how the life paths of their members got shaped that one may begin to draw a much richer and varied picture of 'social mobility' than the one yielded by survey research.
Take for instance the issue of what happens to upper class families which remain trapped in a country where a social revolution has been victorious, abolishing their former powers. This century has witnesses such revolutions in Mexico, Russia and China, in Cuba and Nicaragua, in Iran and in several other countries, not to mention the victorious wars of independence which kicked out the colonial powers in Viet Nam, Congo, Algeria, Angola and many other countries ; but - for obvious reasons - nowhere have serious studies been done about the fates of formerly ruling or well-established families. A recent study based on fifty case histories of 'families' picked up at random in Moscow showed that, in eight of them, at least one branch of the genealogical tree went up to the pre-1917 upper class. The stories passed down, usually under condition of secrecy, to the descendants about how their parents had lived the post- revolutionary times showed how difficult it had been for them to help their children and grandchildren. Not only had they got dispossessed of most of their wealth ( all that they could not hide) and of their former sources of income ; but, especially after Stalin confiscated Soviet power, many adult men from former upper class background were repressed, i e killed, imprisoned, deported, or deprived of any possibility of making a living. Their wives and daughters, most of whom had never worked before, had to find by themselves solutions to prevent their children - and themselves - from freezing and starving.
The study brought to light some of their strategies of resistance and adaptation, which were not always successful . One interesting point is that although they still commanded more 'capitals' ( the name Bourdieu gives to objective or 'objectified' resources) than most families, they hardly could use them : to show that one had had an excellent education was dangerous ; to be discovered as having hidden silverware or jewels from the Soviet State was more dangerous ; and to have contacts with other members of the formerly ruling class could be lethal. Hence cultural capital, economic capital and social capital coming from the prerevolutionary times had all changed their meaning to the opposite : they were not resources anymore but dangerous handicaps. This drastic inversion of sign, from positive to negative, may be interpreted as an effect of the societal context : family capitals are capitals or 'trumps' in the games of generalized social competition only insofar as the rules of such games are biased in favor of members of the ruling class ; insofar as, for instance, the school system sifts and selects on the basis of that kind of knowledge which is acquired while growing up in the upper or middle class, insofar as credit for setting up one's business is granted in priority to those who have already property, and so on. As long as the same class is in power such rules don't change and become so much taken for granted, so much part and parcel of a fixed background that they disappear from perception by lay people and sociologists alike ; it takes their brutal suppression to make them visible... in retrospect.
Generally speaking the literature on social mobility, perhaps because it stays too close to what is observable through surveys, is poor in concepts that could be used at the family level . By contrast, although Bourdieu's 'reproduction' theory also claims its validity from surveys, his author's theoretical imagination (his ability to picture mentally what may be happening in families 'out there') has produced a number of useful concepts, such as the various forms of family 'capitals', that have been accepted by the sociological communities worldwide. However Bourdieu, and even more those who use his concepts uncritically, often seem to assume that such 'capitals' are handed down from one generation to the next as if they were mere things. This might be the case for the various forms of economic capital (depending of course on the laws about the transmission of property rights) ; but it is obviously not the case for two of the three forms of cultural capital that Bourdieu distinguishes ; and neither is it for social capital.
Hence the issue of the degrees of transmissibility of various forms of capitals. By extension, the same issue arises about values, traditions, religious beliefs, artistic and other kinds of skills, political orientations, cultural tastes, which more often than not parents attempt to pass on to their children so that 'something' of them -anything, provided there is something - survives: for all these the question is, what is their degree of transmissibility ?
The answer to this question cannot be speculative . One needs series of case studies to study it, knowing that it will depend, among other things, of the cultural and sociohistorical context. Some in-depth case studies may also prove useful ; such is perhaps the case history of a three- generations family business in Southern France, which has allowed to discover one hidden characteristic of such small economic capital : that in some traditional contexts its real 'economic' value, being made up of some immaterial (social) relations between the entrepreneur and a set of given customers - a goodwill - can only be handed down if the son himself steps into the father's shoes ; but at the same time, that - as Goethe pointed out long ago - the son may only 'own' the asset inherited from his father if he makes it his own by transforming it into something new, something of his own.
Bourdieu's theory of family 'capitals' takes only into account parents' objective resources such as property assets and income, culture, and connections ; but other, more 'personal' and definitely subjective resources may be used by parents, especially those deprived of any capitals, to build into their children self-confidence and other personality features, which may in turn prove very useful later on in their struggle for occupational acheivment and status attainment. Numerous cases of economically poor but psychologically strong fathers, mothers and grandparents have been described in the (fiction) literature by writers, and in (non-fiction) autobiographies as well. In the Qu bec 'founding' experiment mentioned in the first paragraphs there was a case of a strongwilled woman living in the back country in the interwar period, who took all her twelve children to the woods every summer day to pick up blueberries from dawn to night (they hated it, they would have preferred to play) and sell them on the local market in order to collect enough money to pay secondary school fees for the youngest ones. As for the five oldest children they had left school and gone to work early, for the family needed their wages ; but later on, when the youngest children got secondary diplomas and good jobs, the mother got them to finance retraining for their elder brothers. The methodological/theoretical point here is that survey research would have classified this mother as wholly deprived of any capitals, and the occupational success of her children as sociologically unaccountable. Perhaps she had no capitals to speak of, but she definitely had strong subjective resources !
The later concept has been created within the framework of a recent research project on 'working poor' families, mostly originating from Algeria, Morocco or Tunisia, who are living in a low-rent housing estate in Toulouse : we came to feel its need as we got so impressed by the considerable efforts made by immigrant fathers and mothers, most of them illiterate, poor and with no middle class connexions, to try and help their children reach some achievement at school and in the labour market in a very difficult context of discrimination against 'foreigners' ( note that most of these youths are born in France and therefore are French citizens).
Many other examples could be given of the unlimited richness and complexity of the relationship of filiation in various social contexts and historical periods. One more issue is whether the resources which parents attempt to pass on to their children are equally presented to all of them, whatever their gender or birth rank, or whether such offer is differentiated. This concerns the whole issue of 'germanity', i e the relations between siblings.
Germanity.
Athropology has taught us that the universal problem of transmissions
to the next generation has received the most diverse answers in various
cultures. Within Europe and even within a country like France one may find
in various regions very different and ancestral forms of family, some which
concentrate inheritance on the eldest son, or on one chosen son ( the 'stem
family') ; some which distribute them equally between all sons, or between
all children, and so on.
The core concept for us here is not 'common spirit', as in Tönnies,
but rather the differentiation of life paths, and the 'differentiality'
of siblings ; that is, their feature of being different from one another.
Here one will probe family histories in order to understand how, through which processes the life paths of siblings became differentiatied. Siblings who have been born from the same parents, within the same family, seem to have had initial access to the same range of resources and possibilities of development ; how then does it happen that they more often than not take differing paths in life ? Based on surveys, the literature on social mobility has very little to say on this issue. Case histories of families on the other hand bring a wealth of cases of differentiation ; close scrutiny and comparisons seem to indicate recurrences, regularities which would be signs of underlying processes involving birth order, gender, and their interactions (for instance there is, according to our colleague Martine Chaudron, some tendency of parents, if their first child is a daughter, to subconsciously consider her as the heir and to relate to her as a boy ). But this is a question we have studied less, and we'll refer to delay its treatment to another opportunity.
So far we have looked at each of the three core kinship relationships. This is not the only way one may cast a theoretically informed glance at families. Let us now turn briefly to an alternative.
3. FAMILIES AS MICROCOSMS
One way to look at families is to consider them as microcosms : small worlds, each one worth exploring, deserving description for its own 'sociographic' sake , but each one also susceptible of enclosing some sociological pearl - some vivid evidence of a given process whose awareness might illuminate thousands of other cases.
Probably the best approach here, the one yielding the richest harvest of facts and findings, is one inspired by the anthropological spirit, complemented by a historical sensivity to social change. For it takes some degree of anthropological spirit to be able to look to a given household as a 'totality', a small world (microcosm) complete with its basis, structure(s) and superstructure whose specific patterns and internal consistency may be taken as objects of description and interpretation. And it takes some degree of historical spirit to complement the 'structural' look by a dynamic perspective including several generations, to identify the connections between overall social change and changes in families' patterns, and to realize that each 'anthropological' pattern is only a moment in historical time and social space.
As a point of departure it seems heuristically useful to conceive of households as small totalities made up of four main 'tiers' : material constraints and externally imposed rules ; patterns of behavior corresponding to constraints ; internalized norms of behavior as mirroring but specifying external rules ; and value systems (specific to a given household) legitimizing norms and routine practices, as well as projects embodying the household's members' aspirations to make their situation better or even to radically escape from it.The point of course is not to refine this theoretical model by reflexive speculations, but to use it as a rough tool to be used in research projects for collecting data and analyzing given cases : it is through fieldwork that the sociographic, and later on the sociological work lives and blooms.
It is repeatedly fascinating to discover how indeed, in most cases, there are hidden connections between the constraints coming from work, housing, transportation, lack of means, but also moral commitments - and patterns of conducts, e.g. patterns of consumption and life styles, patterns of educating children, patterns of relating to neighbours, relatives and friends, and so on. The 'consistency' hypothesis, that there must be some coherence between constraints, conducts, internalized norms, and household's ideology (i e its particular microsystem of beliefs, representations, values, and projects) gets regularly confirmed, but each time in new and interesting ways as actors specify what they accept from the 'structural determinations' when they take them into account.
One might argue that this is too crude a model, still too 'materialist', and opne which does not pay attention enough to the cultural level : after all, e g skilled working class families or teachers' families may carry/elaborate different microcultures according to their religion, political beliefs, family traditions, or tastes. One might also argue that if this rather deterministic model happened to hold anyway, one would not need to include three generations in the research framework to 'deduce' its microculture.
But precisely, the answer to the first criticism is to include three generations in the picture : for it is only through knowledge about the previous generation(s) and what they passed on to their children, now adults and having formed their own household, that one may identify those roots of observable patterns which do not seem to stem from present-day constraints, but appear connected to inherited, moral/cultural/ideological elements and past experiences. The anthroponomic perspective helps to see in which ways people's mentalities are the products of their experiences and of the ways they have been themselves 'produced'.
Let us draw an example from the 'Toulouse' research project which has been already presented. Its goal was to study how families cope with precarious conditions of life. As we have already mentioned, out of the thirty case histories of families which Catherine Delcroix collected in a low-rent housing estate most were families of immigrants from the Maghreb. Practically all fathers had been workers in construction or industry, and many still were in these trades. During the fieldwork C. Delcroix was struck by differences among households in their style of educating children. As an urban environment the housing project is rough, involving some dangers for the youths : confronted to these risks some parents were keen on keeping their children within the flat whenever they were not at school ; by contrast other parents allowed their children to participate to collective activities, cultural, sportive or otherwise, as organized by the school or local associations.
The first style of practice was referred by Delcroix as 'pratiques de fortin' ( 'closure' style) ; the second one, to 'pratiques de passage' ou d'ouverture ('open' style). This difference between family microcultures was first thought to derive from differences in the parents's value systems ; the parents themselves related their values and conducts to their own childhood. However when the households' budgets were studied closely and put in relation with educative styles a striking correlation with income appeared : the lower the income, the more frequent the 'closed' style.
Families with the lowest incomes are the ones practising a thoroughly 'closed' style ; for them the priorities are to pay the rent and to 'respect the rules' (of French society). All the other goals and expenses, and especially expenses for children's leisure activities, appear secondary and are actually sacrificed to the first two priorities. The children's freedom of movement is seen only from the point of view of the monetary costs it might involve if they break something, damage a piece of clothing, hurt themselves or - worse - somebody else.
Those families which allow their children more freedom ( controlled freedom as it were ) appear to have higher levels of income per capita : although they have had the same type of poor childhoods back in the Maghreb they have come to understand the necessity for and desire of their children to move to another social life, to participate more to the activities of their age group ; and also to be confronted to the risks and dangers of the neighbourhood, but in a controlled fashion, under the supervision of adults : so that they may learn to avoid them.
During the fieldwork, as awareness of differences between educative styles was emerging and patterns of interpreting it were taking shape, Delcroix discussed the issue with some mothers and fathers ; and it appeared that some of the households which were now practicing the 'open' educative style had indeed practiced the 'closed' one earlier on, when the family's income had been significantly lower.
This example vindicates the validity of the model presented earlier, where material constraints impinge strongly on patterns of conducts (here educative practices), on internalized norms, and on ideologies (including values). It would seem however that there is no need to refer to the earlier (grand parents) generation to account for the observed educative behavior. But parents educating in the 'closed' way have made clear in the interviews that if they are able to stick to their educative practices, it is because they have inherited from their own childhood a specific worldview and internalized imperatives. They are actually using their own experiences of poverty to try and convey to their children the absolute necessity to hold tight even if it feels highly frustrating. Children however compare their own situation not to the one of their parents when the latter were children - in which case they would feel very privileged - but to the one of their peers ; a comparison which makes them feel definitely victims of strongly unfair deprivations.
Another example of the usefulness of a three-generations model is provided by a research project on the effects of social transfers on the level of living of families in Guadeloupe, an island in the French Antillas where there is much poverty . To make it brief, the researchers have been able to show that the recent political decision to give pensions to aging women not only has made their life much better, but that by allowing them to stop working on odd jobs and to take care of their grand-children it has given their daughters the opportunity to take up jobs, or to train for a skilled job, and their grandchildren the opportunity to live better and study longer.
CONCLUSION.
We began by presenting the method of case histories of families as an
extension of the life history method ; what we hope to have conveyed afterwards
is that the word 'extension' may be understood here in the widest sense,
almost as if the life history approach had been a seed and the family history
approach the full-grown plant resulting from it.
It is plausible that most of the properties and uses of such an approach
remain to be discovered. Among those we have already identified we have
only mentioned a few ; for instance we have said nothing of the amazing
ability of case histories of families to mirror societal change. But above
all, what we would like to underline is that this sociological approach
encapsulates within itself, built into its very nature, openings towards
the anthropological glance and the historical perspective. After so many
decades during which sociological methods, in spite of C.W. Mills's warnings
and advice, resolutely turned their back to the spirit of the two sister
disciplines of history and anthropology, it may be useful for sociology
to put in, within some of its own instruments of empirical observation,
channels of access to anthropological variety and to historical dynamics.