SIGNATURE ASSIGNMENT

Culture, Gender, Spirituality, and Family Life Cycle

Culture, Gender, Spirituality, and Family Life Cycle

Section 1

The term family comes from the Latin family, “a group of serfs and slaves of the chief assets of the gens” in turn derived from Famulus, “servant, slave”, which in turn derives from the Oscan famished. The term opened its semantic field to include the wife and children of the pater familias, who legally belonged, until eventually replacing gens. According exposed Claude Levi-Strauss, the family has its origin in the establishment of an alliance between two or more groups of offspring through marriage bond between two of its members. Families may be constituted by a few members who often share the same residence. Depending on the nature of the relationships among its members, a family can be classified as a nuclear family or extended family. Across most societies, a primary function of families is the socialization and protection of children so that the children can obtain the cultural behavior, beliefs, and values necessary for survival. The nature of the family inevitably shifts and reflects the social and cultural changes in economics, education, and political systems.

The birth of a family commonly occurs as a result of a previous fracture or union of members from two or more families. The integration of family members, as in the case of kinship groups and the broader lineages done through mechanisms of sexual reproduction, or recruitment of new members. The recruitment of new members of a family ensures its importance in the family. In the West, it has weakened as specialized institutions strengthen the education of young children. This has been motivated, among other things, the need for incorporation of both parents in the workplace, leading sometimes to delegate this role in areas such as day care, preschool education system and, finally, in the school. However, this phenomenon not observed in all societies there are those where the family remains the core training for excellence.

In the rapidly varying environment of today's world, communal wants and customs regarding the functions and roles of families are going through a procedure of instantaneous change. Nonetheless, the unit of the family still comprises of the key structure in which a person nurtures and grows (Duvall & Miller, 1985). Family units have the probability to depict more deviation across different cultures as they are a vital constituent of the social order (Segal et.al, 1990). Even though, attention towards the miscellany of family relationships and types have been drawn by various anthropologists, it appears that the magnitude of variation in patterns of family units were under estimated by psychologists (Kagitcibasi, 1990). Nevertheless, people may find increasing curiosity towards recognizing the impact of culture and ethnicity on family units, specifically for the duration of stages of development like adolescence.

French ethnologist, Martine Segalen said that what distinguishes our industrialized societies exotic societies is the fact that our social groups recruited less on the basis of kinship on age classes, class, affinity, the workplace, the leisure exercise, ...