Toward More Family-Centered Family Sciences: Love, Sacrifice, and Transcendence

Toward More Family-Centered Family Sciences

Toward More Family-Centered Family Sciences Love, Sacrifice, and Transcendence

Howard M. Bahr and Kathleen S. Bahr

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bahr, Howard M. Toward more family-centered family sciences: love, sacrifice, and transcendence / Howard M. Bahr and Kathleen S. Bahr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-2673-8 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 0-7391-2673-3 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-7391-3506-8 (e-book) ISBN 0-7391-3506-6 (e-book) 1. Family. 2. Family—Research. 3. Love. I. Bahr, Kathleen S., 1943– II. Title. HQ518.B234 2009 306.85—dc22 2008047564 Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

xi

Chapter 1

Families and Self-Sacrifice

1

Chapter 2

Family Transcendence

33

Chapter 3

Love

67

Chapter 4

Family Spirituality

127

Chapter 5

Family Work

173

Chapter 6

Emotion Work in Families

211

Chapter 7

Family Work as Ritual

259

Chapter 8

Close, Warm, and Particular

297

References

317

Index

363

About the Authors

373

v



Acknowledgments

Any academic work is always to some degree a collaborative effort. Each of our chapters here is better because our colleagues at Brigham Young University and at various professional conferences shared their ideas and critiqued our work. Most notably, we are indebted to David Dollahite for many insights on family transcendence and family spirituality, to Stan Knapp for ideas on emotion work and family theory generally, and to Kristine Manwaring and Cheri Loveless for perceptive observations and meaningful examples over the years on the importance of family work. Nancy Rollins was senior author of the paper that formed the basis for the chapter on family work, and is a coauthor of that chapter. We are grateful for administrative support and encouragement during the preparation of this book from Dean David B. Magleby of Brigham Young University’s College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences. Finally, we are indebted to our sons—Alden, Dima, Jonathan, Anton, and David—whose lives with us have so enriched our experience of family love, work, sacrifice, and transcendence. As the copyright page cannot accommodate all the copyright notices, please refer to additional copyright notices below. Earlier versions of some chapters appeared in previous publications: chapter 1, as “Families and Self-Sacrifice: Alternative Models and Meanings for Family Theory,” from Social Forces, Volume 79, no. 4. Copyright © 2001 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher, www.uncpress.unc.edu; chapter 2, as “A Paradigm of Family Transcendence,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 58 (August, 1996), 541–55, copyright ©

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1996 by the National Council on Family Relations. Nancy R. Ahlander is a coauthor of chapter 5, which combines, updates, and extends two articles by her and Kathleen S. Bahr, “Beyond Drudgery, Power and Equity: Toward a Moral Discourse on Household Labor,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 57 (1995), 54–68 copyright © 1995 by the National Council on Family Relations; and “Morality, Feminism, and Family Work: A Reply to Sanchez’s Commentary,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 58 (1996), 520–25, copyright © 1996 by the National Council on Family Relations. The authors gratefully acknowledge permission to quote the following works: Quotes from Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps by Tzvetan Todorov. Copyright © 1996 by Tzvetan Todorov. English translation copyright © 1996 by Metropolitan Books. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. From Camille Williams, “Sparrows and Lilies,” from First Things, issue no. 35, pp. 12–16, copyright © 1993 by the Institute on Religion and Public Life, reprinted by permission of the Institute on Religion and Public Life. From My Grandfather’s Blessings by Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., copyright © 2000 by Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D. Used by permission of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Excerpts from The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, copyright © 1993 by Octavio Paz, English translation by Helen Lane copyright © 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, reprinted by permission of the publisher. From Parting Visions by Melvin Morse, M.D. and Paul Perry, copyright © 1994 by Melvin Morse, M.D. and Paul Perry. Used by permission of Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc. From Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee, copyright © 1984 by Andrea Lee. Used by Permission of Random House, Inc. From A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Richard Lannon, and Fariborz Amini, copyright © 2000 by Thomas Lewis, Richard Lannon, and Fariborz Amini. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. Excerpts from pp. 38–42 from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig copyright © 1974 by Robert M. Pirsig. Reprinted by permission of Harper Collins Publishers William Morrow. Excerpt from Jennifer Nedelsky, “Dilemmas of Passion, Privilege, and Isolation: Reflections on Mothering in a White, Middle-Class Nuclear Family,” from Julie E. Hanigsberg and Sara Ruddick, eds., Mother Troubles: Rethinking Contemporary Maternal Dilemmas, copyright © 1999 by Julia E. Hanigsberg and Sara Ruddick. Reprinted by permission of Jennifer Nedelsky.

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The lines from “voices to voices, lip to lip”. Copyright 1926, 1954, © 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1985 by George James Firmage. The lines from “pity this busy monster, manunkind”. Copyright 1944, © 1972, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust, from Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Excerpt reprinted with permission from The New Laurel’s Kitchen by Laurel Robertson, Carol Flinders, and Brian Ruppenthal. Copyright © 1976, 1986 by the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation, Inc., Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, CA, www.tenspeed.com. Excerpt from Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid. Copyright © 1985 by Jamaica Kincaid. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Excerpts from Kindling the Flame reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. from Kindling the Flame: Reflections on Ritual, Faith, and Family by Roberta Israeloff. Copyright © 1998 by Roberta Israeloff.



Introduction

Many persons of celebrated wisdom and achievement, and also people of little fame but some experience, have concluded that a single process is the most important part of family life, and perhaps of life generally. Elisabeth KüblerRoss (1999, 43), a physician renowned for her studies of death and dying, said it this way: “If you have experienced unconditional love once, it will last for your whole lifetime.” Polar explorer Richard E. Byrd reflected that, “At the end only two things really matter to a man, regardless of who he is; and they are the affection and understanding of his family. Anything and everything else he creates are insubstantial; they are ships given over to the mercy of the winds and tides of prejudice” (Byrd 1987, 179). Drawing upon many decades of psychiatric experience, the authors of A General Theory of Love (Lewis, Amini, and Lannon 2000, viii) concluded that “From birth to death, love is not just the focus of human experience but also the life force of the mind, determining our moods, stabilizing our bodily rhythms, and changing the structure of our brains. . . . Love makes us who we are, and who we can become.” This hard-won wisdom has often been overlooked by social scientists who study families and write the textbooks on marriage, family life, and human intimacy. In the world of mainstream family scholarship, love does not compute. In fact, much social science writing on families neglects essential aspects of family life because of a continuing modernist bias that minimizes the importance of things transcendent, and because such concepts as love, commitment, respect, and sacrifice are out of favor, politically incorrect, or scientifically suspect.

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This book builds a case for increased attention to some of these neglected processes. We urge a broader view of families—a wider lens, as it were—that includes some constructs and perspectives presently marginalized. Our makeshift “plebeian postmodernism” (Inchausti 1991) combines the findings of social research with cultural heritage, common sense, and, to a degree, the lives and perspectives of ordinary people. There is new interest in some of these long-neglected processes, especially love and spirituality, but family love continues to be neglected, as does sacrifice, and much of the work on spirituality is individualistic, oriented to maximizing the self within its own resources rather than as embedded in family or transcendent experience. We approach these family processes from a moderate postmodernist perspective, drawing from beyond the academic family fields to incorporate family-relevant insights of educators, historians, psychologists, philosophers, novelists, and others. Empirical modernism and its postmodern variants attend to means, not ends, to technique rather than teleology. But families are permeated with meaning, with manifest orientations to the ultimate and the temporary, the transcendent and the pragmatic. Families cannot be understood without reference to the rich language of love, sacrifice, honor, commitment, and good and evil, a language that has been eroded in its translation to the concepts of scholarly discourse on families. We do not reject the benefits of that discourse, but insist that its view is partial. It misses much of the essence of family life. Our effort is congruent with Jerome Brunner’s (1990) attempt in Acts of Meaning to redirect a cognitive psychology “diverted from its originating impulse by the computational metaphor” back toward the concept of meaning and how it is constructed. Brunner sees “meaning-making” as central to a pragmatic “cultural psychology” or “folk social science” (33, 35, 63–64). “Folk psychology,” he writes, “is about human agents doing things on the basis of their beliefs and desires, striving for goals, meeting obstacles which they best or which best them, all of this extended over time.” Its organizing principle is “narrative in nature rather than logical or categorical” (42–43). Bruner’s folk psychology overlaps importantly with Charles Taylor’s (2004) “social imaginary,” the common understanding (worldview) shared by ordinary people. It includes the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations. . . . the social imaginary is the common under-

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standing that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy. (23)

The social imaginary is not the same as social theory. Theories are “intellectual schemes” constructed in a mode of disengagement from everyday life when scholars “think about social reality.” The social imaginary is “understanding implicit in practice,” the background against which life is understood, the “implicit grasp of social space” or “common repertory” that makes it possible to function “without benefit of theoretical overview.” It is the shared image, partly unstructured and inarticulate, held by the populace. Unlike theory “it can never be adequately expressed in the form of explicit doctrines because of its unlimited and indefinite nature.” The social imaginary overlaps folk psychology, and its vehicle is the same: it is “carried in images, stories, and legends” (Taylor 2004, 23, 25–26). Others have been troubled by the lack of fit between folk psychology/the social imaginary and the prevailing theoretical models. Specific to the family is Kerry Daly’s (2003) focus on the “significant disjunction” between the explicit theories applied to families by family scholars and the implicit theories that families live by. He draws from the field of art the metaphor of “negative space,” that part of a drawing or painting that serves as background for the “positive space” that holds the viewer’s attention. Most of the time, our eye is drawn to positive forms. These are objects that dominate our attention. Hence if we look at a man with a hand on his hip, we see the positive form of the arm on the hip. We are unaccustomed to seeing the triangular shape, or the negative space, that is formed inside the arm. Negative spaces are the recessive areas that we are unaccustomed to seeing but that are every bit as important for the representation of the reality at hand. (Daly 2003, 771)

Daly suggests that through its neglect of certain critical aspects of family life, family scholarship has relegated them to the status of negative space. Obviously, any drawing, and any theory, can highlight only some things. There are always negative spaces, and our thinking will always foreground some dimensions of family at the expense of others. Daly’s point is not just that we have missed some things. It is that, in a perverse sort of “upside-down world,” researchers have overlooked some obvious, consequential family processes. These neglected processes are not peripheral, but the very essence of family, the figure rather than the ground. If this is so, their being consigned to the ground—to the status of negative space—is a serious oversight.

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This problem is not limited to the family fields. It also afflicts other disciplines of the particular that, in conformity with the modern Zeitgeist, have exalted that which can be counted and modeled statistically over realities that, to be understood, are best captured in narrative. Such realities may be felt, imagined, and intuited, but are rarely reducible to equations. Take, for example, the field of history, where some historians looked enviously at the more scientific ways of the social scientists, adapted their analytical techniques to the data of the past, and created a “new history.” There the quantifiable took precedence over the experiential, and model-building and statistical analysis trumped storytelling. Gertrude Himmelfarb’s (1987) critique of the values guiding the new history, with its altered patterns of positive and negative space, applies also to the family fields: Today a school of historians is being trained to write a kind of history that is as nearly devoid of moral imagination as the computer can make it. . . . In place of the moral imagination, we are more and more confronted with something that might be called the sociological imagination. The sociologist cum historian assimilates history to the social sciences. He prides himself on using only hard data, precise and unambiguous, the kind that can be counted, sorted and weighed, arranged in tables, charts, and graphs. In a more sophisticated variant of this method, he goes beyond the empirical, quantitative method and constructs models intended to represent the abstract essence of the data. . . . But where the traditional historian is disturbed by his presumptuousness, the sociological historian flaunts it; it is his pride and distinction. He invents a language that he claims conveys the social reality better than the language of contemporaries. He freely reorders and remodels the experiences of contemporaries. . . . The only parts of their experience he can recognize, because they are the only parts he can use, are those that manifest themselves externally, that are visible, measurable, quantifiable.” (Himmelfarb 1987, 49, 54)

Applying science to families, according to Alexis Walker (2000, 52–53), necessarily involves compromises. We have on the one hand “everyday life as it is lived in families,” and on the other, the scientific method, which “can only approximate family life, dealing as it does with theory, representation, operationalization, probability, estimation, and interpretation.” Walker agrees that when we try to fit daily life as lived to the approximations of science, there follow both achievements and underdeveloped or missing areas of study. While it is important to recognize the limitations of science, she writes, nevertheless “we understand families better every day” and she celebrates “just how far we have come by employing scientific ways of knowing.” Even so, because of the inherent limitations of science, “we are satisfied

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when quantitative studies can account for only a small portion of variance in the dependent variable of interest” (62). Daly is not so sure we understand families better every day. He points to low levels of explained variance as suggesting that the approaches we take are at best incomplete, and perhaps fatally flawed. It is not merely that there are negative spaces deserving serious attention. Daly’s position is more subversive than that. Instead, he maintains, the interests and methods of contemporary family scientists reflect their own values, both ideological and methodological, and not the values and priorities of the families being studied. Consequently much of what family scientists produce does not, in fact, help to “understand families better every day.” Daly maintains that these biases are self-serving. “We in family science,” he writes, “continue to delude ourselves that the work that we do has practical importance outside of ourselves . . . [when in fact] it is as if we are a subsistence community of scholars who consume what we produce and produce to meet our [own] continued consumption needs” (Daly 2003, 772). Much current work is also problematic because, to the degree that it is misdirected, it consumes resources, yet produces results of “profound unimportance” (Acock 1999, 2). Daly (2003, 772) laments that any attempt to respond to a neighbor’s practical family questions with answers provided by contemporary theorizing and research will leave the questioner unmoved—“I know that any kind of ‘theory’ response of jargon or intellectualized language will be met with a glazed look”—and in that statement he corroborates John Saul’s (1993, 7) claim that the modernist expert is often irrelevant to the real problems of ordinary people. What does mainstream family theory relegate to negative space? Daly (2003) cites three categories of neglect, namely, (1) The realm of belief, feeling, and intuition (emotions, spirituality, religion and the sacred, family myth and folklore); (2) The realm of “things” (family patterns of acquisition, consumption, distribution and meaning of goods); and (3) The location of family members in time and space. As a consequence, we have a family scholarship that studies sex but not love, that charts family violence far more than family caring. Consistent with the modernist perspective, we have a professional outlook that tends to ignore family ideals rooted in the past as obsolete or to dismiss them as “nostalgic,” that tends to overlook family members’ dreams, aspirations, and their vision of “family future.” We live in an avowedly capitalist society where people devote their lives to earning money to participate in a lifestyle that devolves around and is defined by “things,” but where research on the

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things purchased and their impacts on and meanings for family life lags far behind the technologies of production. An enormous fraction of family time is devoted to a media saturated with advertising and images of things, and additional time is spent shopping for and purchasing things. Yet the interpenetration of things, technologies, and families seems to rank far down the list of theoretical and research priorities.

On Worldviews: Truth, Modernism, and Beyond In its appeal for wider, more grounded approaches and orientations, this is a book about worldviews. The metaphor is not consistent—we may lobby for a wider view, a sharper focus, or a different lens—but the concern throughout is to direct attention to aspects of family process that have received less attention than they merit. To affirm neglect is to say that attention that might be directed to these processes has been directed elsewhere. To suggest that they are over-looked or mis-perceived is to raise questions about the processes of “viewing,” the accuracy and appropriateness of procedures of perception, and possible impediments to more a “correct” apprehension of things. Suddenly we find ourselves in the discourse of epistemologies, truth-finding techniques, and fundamental assumptions. We are back to worldviews, and some discussion of the paradigms (Kuhn 1970) and priorities by which our realities are shaped is in order. As a historical period modernism is defined with reference to the worldview it replaces, denoting “the confrontation of a ‘new’ world-view with a traditional one.” Associated with the modernist mind-set is the notion that scientific knowledge is better than other knowledge, and the attendant notion that “being rational” is good (Kuçuradi 2004, 12). Modernism is both a view and a program. Historically the program includes hostility to other worldviews, especially the traditional ones it replaced. Modernism, writes Borgmann (1992, 26), “has continued to search out and destroy traditional structures and constrictions; it has been most confident in devising powerful procedures to fill the newly empty spaces.” Following Charles Taylor (2004, 1–2) we recognize the existence of a variety of “alternative modernities,” as well as the complexity of modernism with its combination of institutional forms, ways of living, and ways of viewing the world. Taylor suggests that the underlying worldview of modernity—originally “a new conception of the moral order of society”— “has now become so self-evident to us that we have trouble seeing it as one conception among others.”

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Worldviews include assumptions about the nature of reality and about ways of distinguishing fact from non-fact, or what seems to be true from what seems not to be. Throughout most of human history societies have struggled to distinguish actuality from illusion, half-truth, and falsehood. Knowing what is, and what is not, has survival value, and ideas about what seems to be true have been valued and passed from generation to generation. Over the years, humanity learned several ways to apprehend truth. None of these, of itself, was the perfect avenue to truth. Even after a person’s, or a society’s, best efforts, only partial truths, truths mixed with error, were achieved. But life does not wait on final certification of truth, and people have always had to risk their futures on what they knew, or thought they knew. The search for truth, and agreed-upon ways to establish truth, may be essential to social survival quite apart from the quantity or caliber of truth attained. Filipe Fernández-Armesto (1997, 3) reminds us that “There is no social order without trust and no trust without truth or, at least, without agreed truth-finding procedures.” Fernández-Armesto’s history of conceptions of truth and how people have sought it identifies four truth-seeking strategies. Societies may emphasize some of these procedures over the others, but all of them contribute to most inquiry, and all are seen, in differing ratios and perhaps competing with each other, in functioning societies. The four ways of accessing truth are (1) the truth we feel, which is a truth of personal impressions and intuitions, often involving emotion but beyond rationality; (2) the truth we are told, which includes, but is not limited to, tradition; unlike the truth we feel, the truth we are told is mediated either by other persons or communications media of some kind; (3) the truth of reason, or “the truth you think for yourself,” which involves logic and rationality; and (4) the truth we perceive through the senses, or empirical truth, which is the truth we see, hear, or smell, the truth mediated by measurement (Fernández-Armesto 1997, 6–7). Modernity has privileged truth perceived by the senses, thereby achieving remarkable control over aspects of physical nature. Defining reality as what could be measured and controlled, and neglecting elements of reality difficult or impossible to measure, has meant that much of the traditional theistic (Judeo-Christian-Muslim) religious heritage has been marginalized if not actively opposed. Modernist philosophy dethroned God as the source of truth and replaced him with Nature. Science was the new religion and scientists were its priests (Bauman 1991). Postmodernity called the religion of science into question. It questioned all religions, grand narratives, worldviews, outlooks, and ways of knowing. Yet because its attitude toward religion is less directly hostile—in place of

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modernism’s firm declaration that the reality of scientific control allows no place for the immeasurable, there is an apparent tolerance for constructed realities of all kinds, including religion—postmodern sensibilities may seem more compatible with theistic religion. Postmodernism, at base, asserts inescapable relativism, maintaining that all perception is limited by imperfect human senses. Our logic, information, and declarations are further distorted by imperfect language, and our interpretations are biased by constructed grand narratives. In the postmodernist view, “all language is caught in a self-referential trap, revolving on itself like a serpent biting its own tail. Reality, if there is any, is left out of our efforts to formulate thoughts and signal their content to each other [because] . . . language tells us about nothing except itself” (Fernández-Armesto 1997, 229). Fernández-Armesto’s history of truth ends in an affirmation of truth and truth-knowing techniques. He (1997, 226–28) admits that language is limiting; people are immersed in worldviews and perspectives, and they sense reality from particular “niches.” Further, modes of truth-telling, and the mix of truth-seeking techniques, do vary over time. Still, the limitations of language do not negate its power, and “any use of language to deny its power is paradoxical, just as any repudiation of truth is self-contradictory.” The objectivity that sustained the paradigm of modernity may be imaginary, but “to see things from no point of view is not even theoretically possible.” If we can never master every possible point of view, we can try to multiply perspectives, and “even the most dedicated subjectivist should be able to imagine what it would be like: objectivity would be the result of compiling or combining all possible subjective points of view.” Finally, if we are creatures of language, it is also true that language is of us: “Even if they are unuttered or used inwardly to communicate only inside a single mind, words are part of the mind, generated by neural activity and by the electricity and chemistry of a physical brain. Words which relate to other words call a whole world into being” (228). Fernández-Armesto (1997, 222) cautions against the temptation to abandon truth as indefinable. He sees two ways to redeem the situation. First is an overt, unapologetic celebration of tradition, an appreciation of the benefits of the truth-finding techniques used by our ancestors: “No one should ever feel ashamed of turning back to tradition,” he writes, for “memory of what previous generations have learned is the foundation of all possible progress. When traditions conflict, they need more care, not less: they should be keenly scrutinized, not casually discarded.” Secondly, rather than shrinking from the fray, we should be “hounding subjectivism and relativism until truth is run to earth.” We do this by reaf-

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firming the old ways of truth-telling. The inner feelings, the truths we intuit, persist. Often they are trustworthy, although they must be checked against other ways of knowing. The truth we are told, some version of consensus or authority, also bears close examination: “Tradition is the consensus of the dead. Authority may not be a reliable guide, but at least its claims are prior to one’s own and therefore have a measure of guaranteed independence: if it confirms what I already thought, I emerge fortified; if it corrects, I can be sure it did so without malice or caprice.” As for the other modes of truthknowing, reason, and sense-perception, while some may reject them, they “have served so well that even their critics depend on them in practice” (Fernández-Armesto 1997, 223–24). We recognize the problems associated with trying to group so diverse a population as scholars and practitioners of family sciences into such rough categories as “modernist,” “postmodernist,” or even “mainstream” and “marginal.” Still, the dominant tendencies in the field are visible and documentable, and without some abstraction it is impossible to talk about anything. The categories capture tendencies, they blur the particular for purposes of discussion. We doubt that anyone is purely modernist or postmodernist. Most scholars, and people generally, combine all four truth-finding techniques in their work and in their lives. Mainstream family scholarship is not wrong; it is incomplete. To respond with the truism that it will always be incomplete is to miss the point that certain important and obvious family characteristics tend to be understudied. Our theme is not “either-or,” but rather “both-and.” In the spirit of the Enlightenment, we would enlarge the circle of illumination, not reduce it. These days, there is support for a variety of postmodern positions and it is easy to be critical of modernist science. So we want to be clear that when we talk about modernist social science and modernist family professionals, usually we include most of the postmodernists as well. When it is important philosophically to distinguish between persons who believe that there are absolute laws of nature that can be discovered and used to improve our lives, and persons who believe that truth of any kind is beyond our apprehension because people have limited sensory equipment and are immersed in imperfect language, we will distinguish the two perspectives. We do not minimize the possible benefits of a postmodern theoretical stance in harmony with the political reality that diversity is acceptable and that often there are many “true ways” or acceptable models both in family life and the helping professions. Despite that minority position, the intellectual and professional organization of the study of families and of the professionals who serve them remain modernistic. There continue the same patterns

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of credentialing experts. If anything, today’s professionals are more tightly organized than before in ways that defend their professional priorities. There is increased tolerance for qualitative research, and for selected topics and points of view formerly not allowed into respectable academic discourse, such as love and theistic psychotherapy (Richards and Bergin 2005). These are pluses. But the organization and dominant worldview of the family fields continue to be modernist. A hallmark of modernism is control by experts. Another is the division of knowledge into disciplines whose practitioners communicate with fellow experts, often in a private dialect, and whose power depends on their effective use of the knowledge they control (Saul 1993, 8, 475–79). A third is “the virtually universal adoption of the idea that the world, its creatures, and all the parts of its creatures are machines. . . . Our language . . . is now almost invariably conditioned by the assumption that fleshly bodies are machines full of mechanisms, fully compatible with the mechanisms of medicine, industry, and commerce; and that minds are computers fully compatible with electronic technology” (Berry 2000, 6). A fourth is a continuing reliance on empirical evidence—on research-based knowledge—as the basis for policy and, in the end, professional authority. A fifth hallmark of modernism is a denial or neglect of the transcendent, a skepticism about anything beyond the access of the physical senses. These conditions continue to characterize our universities and much family practice and scholarship. Postmodernism decenters positivism by denying the ultimate authority of physical measurement, but that denial is largely philosophic rather than pragmatic. In principle the two are directly opposed. According to sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson (1998, 40), “Postmodernism is the ultimate polar antithesis of the Enlightenment. The difference between the two extremes can be expressed roughly as follows: Enlightenment thinkers believe we can know everything, and radical postmodernists believe we can know nothing.” Despite that opposition, most postmodernists are not radical, and many continue to apply the methods and technology of positivistic science, even though they question the underlying assumptions about reality on which those methods and technologies are grounded. In practice, many postmodernists occupy a middle ground, in which they “resonate to postmodern themes of difference, plurality, peculiarity, and irregularity as refreshing changes from past adherence to sameness, universality, and strict rationality,” and at the same time “continue to believe in some version of progressive, warranted enlightenment.” They “enjoy the ludic romp of postmodernism’s radical problematizing without really believing its full social constructionist and deconstructivist implications for themselves

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and their everyday and professional practices” (Martin and Sugarman 2000, 398). And while postmodernism celebrates personal actualization via emotional experience, it shares with modernism a skepticism about transcendent experience involving “higher” as opposed to “inner” reality. That it shares many of the premises and prejudices of modernism is apparent in Inchausti’s depiction of its attitude toward mystical experience: There is, in effect, a metaphysics of light and a metaphysics of darkness. The metaphysics of light is systematically antifascist in its advocacy of the sublime. The metaphysics of darkness is Blake’s dreaded priesthood, the pharisaic assault upon human solidarity made in the name of some privileged truth, method, or idea. . . . Postmoderns and moderns, those who build upon the traditions of Enlightenment skepticism, seek to avoid both by escaping metaphysical thought altogether. (Inchausti 1991, 2)

Whether we believe, with the modernists, in the supremacy of Nature and/or Society, or with the postmodernists that it doesn’t matter what we believe because we are all deluded, we continue to live and work in the modernist world of bureaucratic organization, credentialed expertise, and specialist knowledge that asserts power over, if not demeaning, “folk” knowledge and traditions. Modernist claims to authority continue to dominate research and clinical practice. For example, pronouncements in the Journal of Family and Consumer Sciences assert that the decisions and practices of FCS experts are “sciencebased,” grounded in “research and knowledge” (Anderson 2005, 2002); that they see with “complex eyes,” viewing things “through a research lens” (Moran 2005; Anderson 2003); and that the expertise of FCS professionals reflects “research-based family policies,” warranted by the “solid research of the family and consumer sciences profession” (Saunders 2002a; 2002b). Marriage and family therapists are at pains to present “compelling evidence that they are making significant progress toward becoming an evidence-based discipline” (Sprenkle 2003). In psychotherapy, “the mantra in the agencies . . . is evidence-based and empirically supported treatments” despite the anti-empiricist attitudes of some of the students interning there, and “students in training to become practitioners are learning that their tasks are to offer empirically supported treatments for disorders . . . . Clinicians do this because . . . it is the wave of the future in health care—everyone (meaning physicians) is doing evidence-based practice and so should we” (Brown 2006, 16–17). These are modernist claims to authority. Perhaps the standards of science have broadened slightly, but it is still “good science” that generates funding and is published in high-status journals. There is place for the postmodern,

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but the establishment belongs to the modernists. And it is not at all clear that a philosophy which, at its logical conclusion, finds there is no truth, is superior to one that asserts there is only the truth of measurement. Over a decade ago, Saul (1993, 475, 477, 582–83) assessed the status of disciplinary boundaries and specialization in American intellectual life and concluded that “the walls between the boxes of expertise continue to grow thicker.” He also found the elites, educational and political, to be profoundly pessimistic, and “above all . . . pessimistic about the human character.” These tendencies come together in professionals’ attitudes toward the non-elites, the publics who make up their students, clients, and patients. By definition, at least in their areas of expertise, the specialists are supposed to be knowledgeable, and their general pessimism about human character, combined with their intellectual specialization, make it difficult for them not to feel superior to ordinary citizens. There are dangers in such feelings of superiority. Octavio Paz’s (1986, xii) “Nocturne of San Ildefonso” includes an apology for the ideological intellectuals of his era who had thought to “straighten out the world.” He casts them as people of integrity who lacked humility. They were sustained by a proud, positivistic social science that from the privileged position of modernist rationality looked back on the “disenchantment” of the world. The old myths and values were outmoded, of historical interest but irrelevant to the future. The attitudes of modernism toward the past have carried over into postmodernism, which celebrates the “new age” and almost reflexively rejects “traditional” or “historical” wisdom in favor of the new or the soonto-be-discovered. Paz’s sense of the relation between history and poetry comes very close to our view of what a proper social science of the family might look like. He (1986, x) said that “history is a form of knowledge set between science properly speaking and poetry. Historical knowledge is not quantitative nor can the historian discover historical laws. The historian describes things like a scientist and has visions like a poet.” To glimpse, with passion and detachment, to describe like a scientist and envision like a poet, seems an admirable approach to understanding families, the most essential and transcendent of human institutions. We admire historian of world religions Huston Smith’s economical depiction of the essential differences between the modernist outlook and a more inclusive worldview. He labels the modernist worldview “the modern Western mind-set” (MWM), or naturalism. It is a worldview grounded in the epistemology of empiricism and generated by a motivation to control. The epistemology of empiricism is based on assumptions that “nothing that

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lacks a material component exists,” and “in what does exist the physical component has the final say” (Smith 1981, 434). Only what can be measured by the senses is meaningful. The possibility of transcendence is excluded in principle. By transcendence, Smith (1981, 435–36) means “something that is better than we are by every measure of value we know and some that elude us.” Because the MWM is reductionistic, that is, because it accounts for reality “only from the bottom up—from inferior to superior, from less to more,” it is unprepared and unwilling to consider transcendent or “higher” realities. Smith contends that despite the talk of postpositivism and postmodernism, the naturalistic “reductionistic momentum has not abated.” In the physical, biological, and social sciences, the trend toward “hard-core materialism” continues. He acknowledges the achievements of modernist science, but finds it insufficient because “if things that are superior to us exist . . . they are not going to fit into our controlled experiments. . . . An epistemology that drives singlemindedly toward effective knowledge is not going to allow transcendent realities to exist” (Smith 1981, 436). The MWM, Smith says, is incapable of dealing with questions of meaning. It neglects values, purposes, global and existential meanings, all invisible entities that cannot be inferred, and things superior to us. Its power is in the narrowness of its approach, and its triumphs in the material world “have swung our attention toward the world’s material aspects.” The result of this focus on the material has been “progressive inattention to certain of the world’s other properties,” including many of the things people throughout history have considered most important (Smith 1979, 428). What does the MWM omit? Higher realms of being—domains of existence that begin precisely where science stops. “Higher” functions metaphorically here, of course—the additional realms are not spatially removed. But if we discount this literal, spatial sense of higher, they are superior in every (other) way. They are more important. They exert more power. They are less ephemeral. They are more integrated. They are more sentient and therefore more beneficent. . . . The disappearance of the higher planes of reality from our contemporary philosophical maps—or, to speak more carefully, the decline in our confidence in such planes—is . . . the change that separates modernity from tradition most decisively. . . . We have lost our grip on the innate immensity of our true nature. (Smith 1979, 429, 431–32)

Why, Smith asks, should we settle for the meaninglessness and the resulting alienation associated with the MWM, when a richer worldview is available

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to us? The world, once an “enchanted garden,” “has now become disenchanted, deprived of purpose and direction, bereft—in these senses—of life itself” (Smith 2003, 105; Stanley 1976, 116). Smith proposes a different outlook, one that will not reduce all meanings to materialism, nor insist that humanity is autonomous from higher forces. He rejects the assumptions of the MWM that history can be controlled, that happiness can be bestowed or purchased, and that truth is instrumental. He introduces an alternative worldview oriented to acceptance rather than control, and predicts that “If we were to approach the world with an eye to embracing rather than controlling it, or asking how it might school us rather than serve us, it would reveal a different guise” (Smith 1981, 444). The motivation underlying Smith’s “logical alternative” to the MWM is participation, not control; the epistemology is intuitive discernment rather than empiricism, and the worldview is one of transcendence rather than naturalism. However, the alternative worldview does not reject knowledge based in measurement. That is included, along with knowledge obtained from intuitive discernment, in the richer worldview. The perspective is inclusive, following truth not merely for its pragmatic value but for its intrinsic worth. Unlike the MWM, the alternative view does not reject tradition nor the accomplishments of earlier ages (Smith 1981, 441–42, 447). Smith maintains that although science cannot prove transcendence, there is something to be learned from what modernist science has achieved, namely having discovered the physical world and the cosmos to be “quantitatively more extravagant than we had supposed.” He asks that we consider the meaning of this extravagance. If physical reality has turned out to be so vast and alien to our expectations, might not aspects of reality accessible only to qualitative measurement, aspects relevant to “spirit” and “mind” and “meaning” also turn out to be greater than we could possibly imagine? (Smith 2003, 116). The findings of science themselves suggest the need for a paradigm shift. It can be argued from at least three counts—the accumulation of empirical evidence suggesting that the naturalistic worldview is incomplete, the impoverished view of human nature that it offers, and its incompatibility with beliefs of both scientists and laypersons that are “inevitably presupposed in practice”—that the naturalistic worldview is “philosophically and empirically problematic” (Griffin 2000; Richards and Bergin 2005, 19). In addition to this “argument from science,” which by analogy states we are missing vast portions of reality by insisting on modernism’s narrow definition by measurement, there is an “argument from human health.” It builds on the substantial evidence that religiosity, both belief and practice, is as-

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sociated with positive physical and mental health. Accordingly, “the healthy move, it would seem, is to ground our outlooks in our noblest intuitions.” Finally, there is the “argument from special insights,” or what FernándezArmesto calls “the truth we feel.” “Intimations . . . come, and when they do, we do not know whether the happiness they bring is the rarest or the commonest thing on earth, for in all earthly things we find it, give it, and receive it, but cannot hold onto it” (Smith 2003, 118). We feel there is more beyond our control, a reality beyond physical nature and measurement. The MWM tends to minimize and disparage such intuitions. Smith can offer insight, but not proof. As an aid to insight, he offers an image of things as they may be, in contrast to the bleak image of how things are according to the MWM. The image is from Gai Eaton’s (1977, 11–12) The King of the Castle. Let us imagine a summer landscape, bounded only by our limited vision but in truth unbounded; a landscape of hills and valleys, forests and rivers. . . . Let us suppose that somewhere in this measureless extension a child has been blowing bubbles for the sheer joy of seeing them carried on the breeze. . . . And then let us compare all that we know of our world, the earth and what it contains, the sun, and moon and the stars, to one such bubble, a single one. It is there in our imagined landscape. It exists. But it is a very small thing, and in a few moments it is gone. This, at least, is one way of indicating the traditional or—taking the word in its widest sense—the religious view of our world and of how it is related to all that lies beyond it. Perhaps the image may be pursued a step further. The bubble’s skin reflects what lies outside and is, at the same time, transparent. Those who live within may be aware of the landscape in quite different ways. Those whose sight is weak or untrained may still surmise its existence and, believing what they are told by others who see more clearly, have faith in it. Secondly, there are some who will perceive within the bubble itself reflections of what lies outside and begin to realize that everything within is neither more nor less than a reflection and has no existence in its own right. Thirdly, as by a miracle of sight, there will be a few for whom transparency is real and actual. Their vision pierces the thin membrane which to others seems opaque and, beyond faith, they see what is to be seen.

A key point in Eaton’s metaphor is that people in the bubble differ in their position and angle of sight, and in the depth of their vision. Presumably they differ also in their willingness to believe persons whose vision is sharper than their own. In the absence of proof, Smith (1981, 445) knows which vision of reality is the more interesting: “Eaton’s image wins over the MWM hands down, for it allows for everything in the latter and vastly more besides.”

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Smith’s contrast between the naturalistic ontology of the MWM and the transcendent scope of his “logical alternative” is paralleled in Curtis Wright’s (1991, 28) history of the permanent conflict between these competing worldviews. The conflict between naturalism and supernaturalism, between Athens and Jerusalem, between skepticism and belief, is very old. Wright calls the naturalistic position “the sophic world view of horizontal naturalism.” It is “a monistic metaphysic that confines all realities to the natural order.” In contrast is the “mantic” worldview, “a dualistic metaphysic that includes not only the natural order, but also another world order which transcends it.” In the sophic view, there is only the “natural” order; in the mantic, there is the natural order, but also something above or beyond, something that incorporates and yet exceeds the natural.

Caveats and Disclaimers In none of the chapters to follow do we offer a definitive, up-to-date review of relevant literature. This is not a review-of-the-literature book, but an attempt to highlight useful theoretical approaches that have been neglected. We treat the literature selectively, drawing upon both past and current developments relevant to the theoretical points we are making. This does not mean that we ignore recent work in assessing whether the scholarly neglect of a topic continues, or in locating compatible approaches to family work or emotion work within existing scholarship. But we are selective, not exhaustive, in our use of the literature. Further, our efforts to transcend boundaries apply not only to academic disciplines, but to time as well. Thus Aristotle and Confucius may appear along with Karl Marx and Octavio Paz, and quotations from mid-twentieth century housewives may serve our purposes as well as contemporary pronouncements. Despite tendencies in some academic journals to cite only recent work, good research need not become irrelevant as it ages. Many of the processes we consider apply to families generally, not just current families. Data relevant to, say, the meaning of family work, may illustrate a theoretical position whether they derive from the nineteenth century or the present. So we have not hesitated to draw upon texts produced in that “other country” that is the past. Some readers of early versions of chapters in this book summarized them dismissively as “defense of the traditional family.” So it seems important to emphasize that this is not a book about traditional or any other type of family structure. With one exception—our thesis in Chapter Three that families, or more universally, kinship groups, incorporate transcendent elements that

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set them apart from other organizations—the emphasis throughout is on processes essential to families, whatever their structure. Love is a process, so are sacrifice and its consequences, so are transcendence, family work, and family ritual. These processes occur in families across the structural spectrum. We highlight neglected processes, not neglected families of one or another structural configuration. The processes we explore are essential to the well-being of couples, whatever their sexual orientation; to families with two, one, or no parents; to extended families, blended families, divorced families, even families of fictive kin. These processes transcend family structure. The examples we use reflect our own experience and reading. We have not drawn upon the literature in an “equal-opportunity” effort to represent the diversity of family structures. Suffice it to repeat that these processes apply across structure, and we encourage researchers to study them in all kinds of families. This is not a book about alternative families. It is a book urging that we look at families—of all kinds—in a different way. Finally, this is not a book about family pathology. Some readers may wonder why we have not emphasized the “dark side” of family life. We talk of family love, yet parents and children abuse and kill each other, love between partners turns to hate, and elders are abandoned by their kindred and left to die alone. We talk of sacrifice, but some family members also dominate and exploit each other for gain, and deny legitimate claims. We talk of family transcendence, of commitments and service to kindred that far surpass expectations, yet parents sell their children into slavery and deny or suppress obligations of kinship in struggles for power and property. The literature on what is wrong with families is vast. Most family disciplines originated in a perceived need to “do something” about pathologies of family life, and an emphasis on family problems still characterize the literature. A continuing flow of publications documents the challenges, stresses, frustrations, unmet expectations, shattered dreams, personality malformations, economic liabilities, injustices, abuses and neglect, violent crimes, and violations of person, self-esteem, or aspirations associated with family life. Yet surveys continue to show that for most people, family ties are their most important social ties and embody much that is meaningful in life. We illuminate a set of powerful family processes. Some of the narratives illustrating sacrifice, love, family work, or family transcendence have negative elements, but our contribution here is on the constructive aspects of these processes. We offer meaningful examples from real life, but have not shown the full range of possible outcomes of, say, love gone wrong, or sacrifice misplaced. We urge increased attention to these neglected processes. That call includes research on the full distribution of outcomes, both negative and

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positive. If our examples tend to illustrate exemplary rather than destructive aspects of these processes, we see it as appropriate counterbalance to a literature skewed in the other direction. We recognize several ironies in our critique of mainstream modernist family research. We may be accused of “biting the hand that feeds us,” since both authors conduct empirical research and are among the credentialed “experts” whose views, we say, take insufficient account of the definitions and priorities of ordinary people. In response, we call for increased attention—quantitative and qualitative, positivistic and intuitive—to important family processes that, in our view of the field from the inside, we believe have been neglected. Sometimes we shall simply argue that prevailing methods be applied to different problems than those which presently occupy family researchers. However, we know that some aspects of these processes are, by their nature and in their essence, resistant to or incompatible with the usual methods of empirical science. They may be invisible because the assumptions of the dominant worldview exclude them at the outset, by definition. In a society organized around specialized expertise, it may require expert knowledge to know that, indeed, the experts have shortcomings and neglect things, or to identify the nature and scope of the neglect. Further, there is no necessary contradiction in avowing a scholarly viewpoint that affirms the viewpoints of the people, as opposed to imposing an “external” scientific worldview upon them. In an expert opinion on expert opinions, a student of the perceptions and values of ordinary people may appropriately urge her peers to consider grounded or emic perspectives as legitimate worldviews. Our main concern is that the multiplicity of possible viewpoints be recognized, and that the folk psychology and common sense of the “subjects” of research (who truly are its “objects”) be recognized and respected along with prevailing academic theoretical orientations. In arguing that these processes may be better apprehended in an expanded worldview, we speak, again from the inside, against none of the benefits of applied social science, none of the “ground gained,” as it were. Rather, we encourage a further illumination, an additional advance that may be achieved by adjusting the “lenses” through which we interpret family process. All views are limited; all standpoints from which we sense our surroundings are partial. To repeat, it is not a matter of “either-or,” but of “both-and.” Our appeal for this wider view should be seen as a consequence of our long experience practicing within the “modern Western mind-set,” and of growing conviction that there is more to be seen than that mind-set allows.

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Plan of the Book In line with our belief in the power of stories, each chapter begins with a narrative that introduces and humanizes the chapter’s theme. Some of these narratives are personal statements, some are from the lives and writings of others. All express life as lived by the narrator, or as reported to the writer. At the same time, all are partial. They reflect an experience of love, sacrifice, or other family process in a particular time and context. Chapter 1, on families and self-sacrifice, points to the virtual silence in the family literature on this topic, and underscores its importance both as an ideal in family life and in everyday interaction. Although some theorists see a willingness to sacrifice as part of the essential “glue” that holds moral society together, neither self-sacrifice nor love plays much part in prevailing family theories. Instead, they are grounded in assumptions of self-interest and framed in the logic of utilitarian individualism and the rationalized marketplace. We argue that the absence of an acceptable language of sacrifice and love limits our ability to give voice to experience and to understand these essential processes. A review of the relation of sacrifice to love and of the correlates of altruistic behavior is followed by examples of caring and self-sacrifice under extreme conditions. In the absence of serious scholarship on sacrifice in families, we identify three usable approaches: a macro-functionalist view in which viable societies are seen to “need” a certain level of altruistic behavior from their people, a “cognitive-perceptual” approach in which altruistic behavior is linked to identity, self-perception, worldview, and empathy; and a “postmodern ethics” model grounded in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, affirming that morality precedes society, and the primary attribute of human social existence is responsibility. Chapter 2 casts families as distinctive organizations, set apart from other types of organization by elements of transcendence. We promote a paradigm of family transcendence, grounded in the perceptions of family members and congruent with a moderate or nonradical postmodernism. Principles appropriate to the study of family transcendence include (1) a validation of the individual perspective and the presumption of integrity at the level of individual consciousness; (2) respect for “host” subcultures, manifested in attention to local meanings, values, and attributions; and (3) recognition of the holistic nature of family entities and the ubiquity of connection. Just as people differ in the scope and sensitivity of their physical senses, so are they differentially sensitive to the vertical complexities of the transcendent.

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Some of us “see through,” “hear beyond,” or intuit more successfully than others. The perspective of family transcendence is “open” in the sense that it encourages humility and fosters questioning. By emphasizing the grounded position and the local voice, we encourage a balanced view that highlights, in addition to the findings of family research, both common sense and the meanings of life as lived in families. Chapter 3 is an essay on family love. Romantic or erotic love has become an acceptable topic for social scientific investigation, but family love—the love between husband and wife, parent and child, or between siblings or other kindred—has been neglected by theorists and practitioners from the beginnings of the family disciplines. Many people consider love the primary attribute of families, a fact not apparent in the writings of most family professionals. We emphasize the priority and universality of love, its rightful place in the study of family, and its absolute necessity for the well-being and normal development of infants and children. We review how love has been conceptualized and identify several analytical frameworks useful in the study of altruistic love in families, including altruism and the anthropological rule of kinship amity, the economics of grants and exchanges, a psychobiological model of love and limbic resonance, a love and modernity model in which love competes with the commercialization of society, a sociological approach contrasting commitment and therapeutic individualism, and a typology of maternal love. A composite model of family love, drawing from several of these frameworks, includes the propositions that family love is generous, enduring, and other-oriented. A proposed orientation to altruistic commitment, at odds with most of the standard family paradigms grounded in utilitarian economics and expressive individualism, reorders and revalues some of the commonly accepted generalizations about family life. Chapter 4 extends the discussion of family transcendence to family spirituality, noting that over the past half-century there have been substantial changes in personal spirituality and religious practice. Part of contemporary postmodernism is a “new” spirituality that is individualistic, inward-oriented, and pluralistic. Among the social adjustments to an increased ethnic and religious pluralism has been greater tolerance for diversities of religious belief. Many professional organizations that serve families have recently codified that increased tolerance in statements on ethical standards with respect to religious and spiritual diversity. There is also new research on the spiritual dimensions of family life, partly due to massive evidence that religious attendance and practice are associated with positive medical and mental health outcomes. A review of definitions of spirituality shows that in its original usage it denoted the desire for connection with or access to “higher” powers

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outside the self, but contemporary usage includes anything that gives meaning to life, especially meanings associated with contemplating, knowing, developing, or actualizing the self. We favor a definition of spirituality that affirms the reality of transcendent as well as empirical entities and influences. All world religions, in different ways, sanctify marital, parent-child, and family-system functioning. Five types of family spirituality are identified, including (1) the holistic sanctification of family processes generally; (2) spirituality as an aspect of ordinary, prosaic family life; (3) spirituality as a source of comfort and support in times of loss and grief; (4) spiritual indicators of family continuity; and (5) family spirituality as a source of reassurance, calling, and commitment. Chapter 5 reassesses the discourse surrounding family work, with an eye to moral aspects of nurturing and caring behavior. Following a history of the study of family work and the rise of the disciplines of home economics and home management we identify theoretical approaches to the study of housework and child care, including functionalism and the division of labor, resource theory, the “new home economics,” feminist orientations, and social psychological and cultural discourse frameworks. A comparison of these approaches yields the conclusion that, while useful, each is partial, and most are limited by economic assumptions. A consideration of common assumptions about housework, combined with research findings on the meanings embedded in family work, leads to an alternative relational model that stresses the moral implications of family work and its meaning in the ongoing physical, mental, and spiritual maintenance of the family. Chapter 6 evaluates the utility of the concept “emotion work” in the study of family processes. As in the study of love and ritual, understanding emotion and its relation to emotion work is complicated by a welter of definitions, not least that the concept “work” is also very ambiguous. The theoretical promise of the emotion work “system” introduced by Arlie Hochschild justifies the effort to clarify component concepts. Research on emotion work in employment settings has become a major subdiscipline. Many findings from those studies are relevant also in family settings, but there has been little application of the “system” of emotion work to family life, except as a label for a newly identified category of formerly invisible “women’s work.” We offer several propositions based in the professional literature of occupational psychology that seem relevant to the study of emotion work in families. It merits much more attention than it has received. Chapter 7 applies the concept of ritual to family work. Ritual is an important concept in several disciplines, and definitions vary widely. A comparative analysis of definitions of ritual and a review of changing uses of the term

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reveal that much family work qualifies as ritual. It seems that the “little” rituals of family life have been neglected not because they do not fit prevailing definitions, but because they seem ordinary, small-scale, and have been largely women’s domain. We learn that many family rituals situate home and family in relation to ultimate meanings and the wider cosmos, and that much family skill, lore, and meaning is maintained and transmitted in family ritual. Holistic and analytical justifications are offered for applying ritual analysis to family work. Chapter 8 offers concluding reflections on the priorities and methods of contemporary family sciences. The distanced analysis of survey data collected by others seems now to dominate the social scientific study of families. With some exceptions, notably the clinical sciences, reward systems in family scholarship are increasingly oriented to “objectivity,” reflecting the modernist virtue of non-involvement and cold distance from the subject matter. Postmodernist approaches tend to reduce the distance between professionals and those they serve or study. They also legitimate a more dialogic approach, in which we talk with families, acknowledging the legitimacy of their points of view along with our own, in contrast to monologic talk about them. Beside the modernist certainty grounded in statistical analyses of aggregate data, there is need of holistic knowing and intuitive understanding, postmodernist uncertainty and the personal vulnerability that comes from “being there” and “doing with” families we know well and have come to care about.

CHAPTER ONE



Families and Self-Sacrifice

When I was pregnant with my first child, I asked my mother about labor. This woman who gave birth to her first on her own kitchen table (her mother and mother-in-law in attendance) hardly looked up from her work to say, “It’s not that bad.” Though she nearly bled to death after the birth of each of her children, she said little more when I asked for details. She did indicate that the labor was actually harder on my father. I thought she was joking, but he confirmed her account of his dismay at her experience. He decided after the first labor that he could never put her through that again—they should have no more children. As their fifth child, I’ve always been grateful my mother changed my father’s mind. Dr. Kartchner, trained by the Army in World War II, prepared us first-time parents for labor by explaining that labor was not pain at all—simply pressure. Our son came breech and pale blue into this world after eighteen hours of intense “pressure” at two-minute intervals. Labor is hard enough. Exhausted and relieved, I was not inclined to correct the good doctor as he stitched up the episiotomy, nor was I interested, later on, in contradicting my mother as she taught me how to bathe our child. I’d had firsthand experience of my limits, and it seemed to me that the pain or pressure was sufficient that God might have found a better way of delivering my children. I was for a time convinced that women were indeed the braver of the race for simply enduring labor through all the millennia it took to bring us Demerol and epidurals. That superiority complex was short-lived; I had not yet felt the dreadful pull to stay at bedside watching writhing pain tear at someone I loved, and praying that God either take away the pain or make me strong enough to bear it, too.

1

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Chapter One

I’ve glimpsed a bit of what fathers feel at the birth of their children. A coworker, a proud first-time father, modestly acknowledged at lunch one day that he had helped produce the world’s most beautiful child. He assured us his wife was recovering nicely, and our talk turned to pregnancy, labor, and birth. He paused midsentence, recounting his wife’s struggle; he had no words for what he felt. An experienced father of four explained that his first child came only after a very hard labor and significant short-term injury to his wife. “The next day,” he said, “I looked at myself and everyone I passed on the street, and said in my heart, ‘You did that to your mother!’” It took him some time to recover from the shock. The fathers round me mumbled agreement about labor’s difficulty, shaking their heads and looking away in silent frustration at their own helplessness in the process of birth. As I listened to what seemed to be their judgment that their respective wives had suffered far more than ought to be necessary, I found myself leaning across the table trying to comfort them. Though I couldn’t discount the distress they described, the only words that came to mind were my mother’s “It’s not that bad.” What I meant, I suppose, is that those labor pains are not without purpose. After four labors and one emergency C-section, I have not forgotten the heaviness of the child pressing to be born, but neither do I dismiss natural birthing as superfluous suffering. What is it I think that I have bought by my maternal pains? Certainly my friends who for years hoped for pregnancy, endured medical tests and self-doubt and grief, love their adopted children no less than I love the children of my body. I am also quite sure that there are many ways of learning love other than through offspring, but in my life, along with my parents and my husband, my children have worked a profound change in my ability to care for others. This could be sentimentality, but I prefer to think that in that relatively short time when body and soul are straining to bring forth the daughter or the son, some of us grasp for the first time that each irreplaceable life requires faith, patience, and more pain than any of us would choose. Labor gives life, and the long wait between conception and birth instills gratitude for each delicate finger and toe, and appreciation for the beauty of the human body and all its functions, right down to the last sleepy burp and snore of the infant snuggled at shoulder. A relationship that began with the biological connection between parent and child may, through labor and with astonishing speed, become a fierce, inarticulate urge to protect the vulnerable newborn whose face is seen only after long months of worry, long hours of effort. Maybe it is the work of motherly or fatherly nurture that brings about a change of heart linking us with those who have gone before us, with those who will live after us. As our children grow, we are invited to become patient and less selfish through the presence of dependent innocents or the pique of aggravating adolescents. As we and our parents age, we are, in recognition of our own infirmities, enticed to be more forgiving, more repentant, more compassionate.

Families and Self-Sacrifice 

3

Perhaps it is this witness of familial love that gives us hope beyond the present: we were not made to turn to forgotten dust. We are each of us bought through someone else’s pain and taught by our own suffering that every day’s breath is an infinite gift. We are none of us simply biological creatures. Like sparrows and lilies, we are known and accounted for; clothed by more than mortal flesh, the end of our creation is joy. (Williams 1993, 12–16)

 The concept of sacrifice used to appear occasionally in social science theorizing, but it is now so neglected that recent work speaks of the need for a “recovery” of sacrifice. Similarly, self-sacrifice in the service of family members, formerly seen as high virtue, now is sometimes characterized as personality defect or self-defeating behavior. Apart from some ethic of caring literature, where self-sacrifice typically is seen as pathological, self-sacrifice and family love rarely play a part in current family theory. This silence is more ideologically based than reflective of family process. The absence of a language of sacrifice and love limits our ability to give voice to our experience, and the neglect of these concepts diminishes our understanding of the family processes they name. In this chapter we draw from the disciplines of economics, history, philosophy, literature, and sociology, and from life as lived by everyday people in making the case that self-sacrifice is a powerful, essential part of social life generally, and family life in particular.

The Salience of Sacrifice Self-sacrifice is under a cloud these days. There is not much place for it in an era dominated by rational choice theory, market models of human relationships, and “having it all” individualism. The very concept calls to mind primitive rites and religious traditionalism, such that people who do want to talk about self-sacrifice may seek some less loaded term. Others deny that self-sacrifice is really sacrifice. In one view, it belongs in the paradigm of selfdenial, distinct from sacrifice which is “properly understood as a collective ritual, expressing a sense of group risks and benefits, and addressed to higher powers on the group’s behalf” (Mizruchi 1998, 29). In another, it is claimed that most self-sacrifice is interpretable in terms of exchange theory rather than selfless altruism (Milbank 1999). Even Susan Mizruchi (1998), who would “recover” the concept of sacrifice, justifies her book in its intended capacity to protect us from the social impairment that may accompany the processes of sacrifice, rather than in the richness and timelessness of sacrifice as social process and root metaphor. Her work, she says, “exposes a prevailing

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ideology of sacrifice that continues to inform (and impair) our culture.” In her view, the unrecognized “symptoms of a prior sacrificial culture” are likely to be harmful, hence the need for “recuperative criticism” (87–88). Mizruchi’s Science of Sacrifice is devoted to the theme that the concept of sacrifice is relevant “as social thought and social action, supporting the most entrenched as well as innovative institutions (from charity to life insurance) and mediating the most complex developments” (1998, 23). She pays some attention to self-sacrifice, but mostly is concerned with sacrifice as collective ritual. Her definition of sacrifice corresponds to the first entry under sacrifice in Webster’s New World Dictionary, “an offering of the life of a person or animal, or of an object, as propitiation or homage to a deity,” or to whatever social good replaces deity in modern societies. There is a second meaning of sacrifice that refers to the process of giving oneself for another. To sacrifice, it says, is “to give up, destroy, permit injury to, or forego (a valued thing) for the sake of something of greater value or having a more pressing claim.” Our aim in this chapter is to seek the recovery of this kind of sacrifice—the sacrifice of self or extensions of self, in the interest of priorities or persons whose needs we see as more pressing than our own—in contemporary thinking and writing about families. Part of our interest in sacrifice is spurred by a contradiction in the academic literature on mothering and fathering. Self-sacrifice is one of the traditional virtues that has been turned into a personal defect in the interplay of modern therapeutic individualism and certain strains of feminist writing, in the latter instance largely because it has been seen as a behavior required more of women, and of mothers in particular, than of men. Many who write on mothering identify self-sacrifice as a defect in mothers. For example, Sara Ruddick (1987, 246) says that the idea of self-sacrifice as a maternal virtue comes from a hierarchical view of gender which dictates that women, in the subordinate position, should do the sacrificing. “Self-sacrifice,” she writes, is “taken as a virtue rather than the defect it is.” Sharon Hays (1996) sees the persistence of an ideology of “intensive mothering,” which includes self-sacrifice, as problematic in a society that is increasingly ordered by the cultural logic of rational self-interest. “Given the invasive logic of the larger society, one would expect mothers to consistently act like good capitalists or bureaucrats, consciously calculating the most efficient means of raising children—that which would offer them the highest personal returns based on the least amount of effort” (12). On the other hand, the literature on fathering praises self-sacrifice. Thus, Levant (1992) calls for a celebration of the positive attributes in men, among

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them “a man’s willingness to set aside his own needs for the sake of his family.” Selfless generosity and self-sacrifice are seen as “the admirable parts of the traditional male code.” How can self-sacrifice be a defect in mothers but desirable in fathers? Whether virtue or defect, should not the answer be the same for both? If it is not appropriate to make sacrifices for one’s family, if one’s children do not merit self-sacrifice, do one’s friends, profession, community, or country? How does one recognize self-sacrifice? How does it impact the self?

Kinship, Morality, and Sacrifice Anthropologist Merlin Myers (1983) taught that self-sacrifice was an index of kinship solidarity. Exploring the meaning of kinship, he contrasted the morality of social relations among kindred with that applied to others beyond the circle of kin. Judging from the evidence, he said, the domain of kinship is governed by a “morality characterized by kindness and a predisposition to love and care,” while dealings with non-kin are governed by a less confining morality centered on the ethic of personal gain. He noted a current tendency for the ethic of gain to replace that of kinship, so that well-meaning “liberators” would “free those who would be responsible for children and parents . . . to pursue personal gain in one form or another.” Following Victor Turner, Myers identified love as “the basal principle of human social relationships” and he defined love in practice as one’s willingness to sacrifice for another. “People must cease to sacrifice others for personal gain and begin to sacrifice themselves for one another,” Myers urged, and he went on to define self-sacrifice as “the ready index to the moral quality of a relationship”: “If one is willing to sacrifice only a little, morality is small; if much, morality is great. The nature and quality of relationships can thus be seen as a correlate of the willingness of the persons involved to sacrifice for one another” (Myers 1983, 11). Thus one’s willingness to sacrifice—or rather, the experience of having sacrificed, and been sacrificed for—was the essential glue of a moral society. The morality of kinship was a willingness to not “count the cost” in sacrificing for one’s own, in contrast to the morality of the market, which involved contracts, exchange, and profit motive. Myers warned that the morality of the marketplace was ultimately alienating, for it encouraged us to treat people as things and relationships as opportunities for profit. He concluded that the altruism of kinship was being eroded by the less demanding morality of the market.

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Two years later, in their best-selling Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah and his associates (1985, 126) would independently repeat the Myers diagnosis. The problem, they said, is not that intimacy is tyrannically taking over too much of public life. It is that too much of the purely contractual structure of the economic and bureaucratic world is becoming an ideological model for personal life. . . . The prevalence of contractual intimacy and procedural cooperation, carried over from boardroom to bedroom and back again, is what threatens to obscure the ideals of both personal virtue and public good.

Outmoded Concepts? The Displacement of Sacrifice and Love The naming of love and sacrifice as essential concepts, even root metaphors, strikes the modern reader as quaint, for neither term plays much part in today’s discourse on families. “Love” is applied more often to erotic attraction or mate selection than as a trait of ongoing family life. When aspects of love appear in the family literature, it is usually in the poorer, sanitized guise of “attachment,” “bonding,” or “affect.” The concept “sacrifice” is even less visible. In the current literature it has two main usages: one, in anthropological and religious studies, as blood sacrifice or other communal ritualistic offering in the religious practice of certain historic or premodern peoples; the other, as economic strategy whereby future payoffs are increased by present forbearance, as in the sacrifice fly in baseball or a corporate sacrifice of products or personnel in the interest of greater profits. A third usage, mainly in the feminist literature, characterizes self-sacrifice as a pathology among women, as in a mother’s “losing” her self in caring for others. In the indexes of books on family theory and family life education one often searches in vain for “love,” “sacrifice,” or even partial synonyms such as altruism and caring. On the other hand, both love and child-centered nurturing practices involving parental (usually maternal) self-sacrifice continue to play a large part in the most popular child-rearing manuals (Hays, 1996). Love and sacrifice seem to have a continuing relevance for the pediatricians who advise parents, but not for family theorists. Postmodern writers have alerted us to the meanings of silence, and the ideological bases of absence and invisibility. It may say something about the anti-transcendent bias of social science—the intolerance of the modern Western mind-set (Smith 1981)—that love and sacrifice, two root paradigms

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of the Judeo-Christian heritage, have been effaced, erased, or minimized in contemporary family scholarship. Moreover, since both family authority and the direction of family process are increasingly given over to technical specialists trained in prevailing theories, this erasure affects everyday family life and is not merely an interesting scholarly artifact. The language of the professionals tends to trickle down to the masses. Conceptual models are like filters or blinders, increasing awareness of some things at the expense of others. We see what our concepts prepare us to see, and what we have words to express. In scientific inquiry, conceptual models are necessary aids to seeing and interpreting things, but they also may mislead, prompting us to imagine that the things we have highlighted are more important than they are, or preventing us from asking other useful questions. Complementary models—alternative views that help us to see some of what we have been missing—can help to achieve a more balanced account of things (Brümmer 1993). Given their near invisibility in current family theory, it is time for a complementary model that includes sacrifice and love. This proposal takes on added urgency in view of a widely observed tendency for such words to be unfashionable or politically incorrect. Some time ago, reflecting on “the language of faith and art,” novelist Madeleine L’Engle (1980, 18, 23, 52, 141, 180) identified several powerful, essential words that had gone out of favor. Among them were “obedience,” “servant,” “corrupt,” “devil,” and “sin.” These terms are even less acceptable now. The shrinking of language has occurred at both ends of the moral continuum, and includes traits of goodness formerly linked to deity and godliness. Terms like virtue, righteousness, honor, duty, obedience, and sacrifice now seem to have negative rather than positive loadings. Treated as the obsolete language of a bygone era, the language of nostalgia, they are less common in the writings and teachings of family professionals and other social scientists than in popular discourse. Language reflects our view of reality. Things we think about are necessarily things captured in our language. “We think because we have words, not the other way around,” adds L’Engle. “When language is limited, I am thereby diminished. . . . When language becomes exhausted, our freedom dwindles—we cannot think; we do not recognize danger” (1980, 37–40). E. F. Schumacher, author of Small Is Beautiful (1973, 106), observes that not only have we abandoned our ethical heritage, but we have made ethical discourse itself more difficult by devaluing many of the old, essential words: “We have even degraded the very words without which ethical discourse cannot carry on, words like ‘virtue,’ ‘love,’ ‘temperance.’”

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Of the terms and phrases that merit redemption from the shrinking vocabulary of family virtue and family love, sacrifice, or more specifically, selfsacrifice, is certainly among the more important. Perhaps self-sacrifice could remain a part of our culture without our having adequate words to describe it. But the evidence seems to be, throughout today’s culture, from the highest levels down, that both the language and the culture are increasingly alien to the notion of self-sacrifice. As an example, consider a review by Michael Linton of two new operas premiered by the Metropolitan Opera in the 1990s. Linton concludes that while these operas differ in many ways, they share an attitude of “ravenous . . . assault upon the values of Western civilization” (Linton 1996, 26, 28–29). “With these two commissions,” he continues, “the postmodern aesthetic has entered the mainstream of Western high culture.” These operas “are artifacts of a different moral world” from that of Metropolitan Opera’s older repertory. They represent “a world where forgiveness, sacrifice, justice, and discipline have little currency. Here discipline is only choosing between competing pleasures, justice whatever feels good at the moment, and religion the cult of sensuality.” The surveys of American temperament and morale by Bellah and associates in the 1980s did not reveal, at the individual level, rampant selfishness and narcissism. Indeed, they found considerable concern for civic duty, personal responsibility, and altruism, but they also found the language of individualism to be pervasive and growing. They report that few of their respondents seem to find lives devoted to “personal ambition and consumerism” fulfilling, yet “the language of individualism, the primary American language of self-understanding, limits the ways in which people think” (Bellah et al. 1985, 290). On the whole, even the most secure, happily married of our respondents had difficulty when they sought a language in which to articulate their reasons for commitments that went beyond the self. These confusions were particularly clear when they discussed problems of sacrifice and obligation. While they wanted to maintain enduring relationships, they resisted the notion that such relationships might involve obligations that went beyond the wishes of the partners. . . . They were troubled by the ideal of self-denial the term “sacrifice” implied. (Bellah et al. 1985, 109–10)

Yet family responsibility and commitment necessarily entail sacrifices among family members. If the family theories do not allow for sacrifice, nor reflect its priority in family process, then it is the theories, not the practicing families, that are incomplete.

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In pointing to the neglect or diminishment of sacrifice in the social sciences, we do not deny that there have been good studies on sacrifice having implications for understanding and strengthening families. But, in the main, it has not been the work of family scholars, and is not a recognized part of the family literature.

The Economics of Love Consider, for example, the useful treatment of the power of sacrifice in economist Kenneth Boulding’s The Economy of Love and Fear (1973). Boulding, seeking to learn “how things come to hold together and how they fall apart,” compared two types of transfers of goods, the grant, or one-way transfer, and exchange, a two-way transfer. He identified two types of grants, the tribute, motivated by fear, and the gift, motivated by benevolence or love. Relevant here is his depiction of the extraordinary power of the benevolent one-way transfer to build social solidarity, i.e., of the power of gifts, motivated by love, to bind people together. The effects of the benevolent gift ripple through the community via “serial reciprocity” and “multiplier effects.” Boulding (27) advises us to think of the process perhaps in epidemiological terms. . . . The original gift giver becomes a source of infection of benevolence. The infection may lose its intensity as it goes through a number of receivers and subsequent givers, but under some circumstances it may increase in intensity as it triggers off previously latent benevolent feelings. . . . The gifts . . . need not be commodities. They may be merely communications—smiles, courtesies, hellos, small favors, and so on.

There are also pathologies of gift-giving, and in discussing these Boulding emphasizes the power of sacrifice over exchange as a source of strong social bonds: A gift helps to create the identity of the giver. . . . Up to a point the principle may be a healthy one, for without the kind of commitment or identity which emerges from sacrifice, it may well be that no communities, not even the family, would really stay together. Exchange has no such power to create community, identity, and commitment, perhaps because it involves so little sacrifice. (1973, 28; emphasis added)

Social systems, like golf courses, have built-in traps, and among the several traps inherent in a grants economy are a “dependency trap” in which

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well-meant gifts contribute to long-term incapacities in the receivers, and a “sacrifice trap,” in which the giver becomes “locked into an identity that may demand too much sacrifice.” A grant is a sacrifice we may make in the interests of our identity, for our identity depends very largely on the community with which we identify. If this community demands sacrifices from us, our identification with it is reinforced. . . . Sacrifice creates sacredness. Sacredness, like every other virtue . . . becomes a vice if there is too much of it. . . . However, we cannot solve the problem by denying all sacrifice and all sacredness, for up to a point, both sacrifice and sacredness give meaning and significance to human life and are positive values. (1973, 98–99)

Boulding emphasizes the relation between sacrifice and the identity of the giver. Sacredness and meaning are similarly viewed from the standpoint of the giver. In the sacrifice trap it is the giver who is trapped. Yet the value of the gift, even its very definition as gift, depends upon the situation and need of the receiver. There are negative as well as positive grants, and malevolent as well as benevolent motives for giving. Much of the negative press about sacrifice involves alleged pathologies of sacrifice: sacrifice that is inappropriate, meaningless, or harmful. We acknowledge such pathologies, but doubt that their existence justifies the neglect of sacrifice as an essential social process, a basis of meaning in life, and a powerful source of human bonding and community solidarity. One might expect that so powerful a social bonding agent as sacrifice would have received much attention from family professionals. But they, like the economists (Boulding 1973, 34), have concentrated on exchange as the primary social organizer, viewing families through a lens that highlights selfinterest and the morality of the market. In the process they have overlooked the fundamental place of the one-way transfer or grant, and, especially, that form of grant motivated by other-interest, the sacrifice born of love.

The Limits of Rational Choice and Self-Interest Justifying her book on altruism, political scientist Kristen Renwick Monroe (1996) observes that while self-interest does in fact explain much of human behavior, yet “even in the most vicious of Darwinian worlds, altruism and selfless behavior continue to exist. Why?” To answer that question she interviewed four key types of persons, thought to be located at different points along a theoretical continuum anchored at one end by presumed self-interest

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and at the other by the selflessness of the hero. Her respondents included entrepreneurs who were self-made millionaires, philanthropists, “everyday” heroes who had risked themselves to save others, and people who had risked their lives to rescue Jews in Nazi Europe. Monroe treats “why altruism?” as an empirical question, interesting in its own right. She is also concerned with the theoretical problem that altruism poses, namely the limitations of the basic model of self-interest that so thoroughly dominates social science. For her, altruistic behavior serves as a lens to highlight gaps in social theory, and its study can help us understand both the strengths and the weaknesses of the “dominant theoretical structures underlying many public policies and academic disciplines that assume normal human behavior consists of the pursuit of individual self-interest”: The assumption that self-interest is an intrinsic part of human nature lends an aura of scientific inevitability to self-interested behavior. Altruism challenges the inescapability and the universality of that assumption. . . . By understanding how theories based on self-interest fail to offer adequate explanations for altruism, we may learn something about the limitations of these theories themselves. (Monroe 1996, 3)

Monroe demonstrates a lack of fit between theories grounded in self-interest and the altruistic behavior of even the well-to-do entrepreneurs and philanthropists, let alone that of the everyday heroes or the rescuers of Jews. Some of her conclusions point to the costs of an over-reliance on the assumption of self-interest: Our study of altruism, if it teaches us anything, reminds us of the importance of seeing the human face, the person needing help, of moving beyond the anonymity of just another nameless victim, one more faceless Jew shipped off to a concentration camp, another child killed in Bosnia or dying from famine in some distant land. When we think in terms of “actors” or “agents” instead of individual people . . . when we speak of “utilities” and “preferences” instead of human emotions, desires, and passions, we rob our discourse of much of the human aspect of social science. . . . [A] study of altruism should remind us that squashing some behaviors into a self-interested paradigm robs them of their meaning. If we subscribe uncritically to intellectual theories that reduce significant social phenomena—such as altruism, marriage, and prejudice—to mere acts of rational calculus, we limit our understanding. . . . As unfortunate as it is to misunderstand altruism, it is far worse to allow a theory to so intensely focus our attention on the selfish aspect of human behavior that it distorts and limits our understanding of what it means to be a human being. (1996, 236)

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Caring and Self-Sacrifice in the Concentration Camps In Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, Tzvetan Todorov (1996) uses firsthand accounts of life in the Soviet and Nazi camps as a kind of lens that “projects, magnifies, and renders eloquent” certain fundamentals of life that may be less apparent in more normal situations (27, 43). Some have said that life under such extreme circumstances becomes a struggle for survival in which morality has no place, but Todorov (1996, 52) finds that instances of caring and self-sacrifice were a continuing part of life in the camps. For the most part, these were “ordinary virtues” exhibited in private, interpersonal settings, in contrast to the “heroic virtues” so highly valued in the public institutional spheres of politics and business. Acts of ordinary virtue are intended to serve real people rather than causes. Todorov identifies three kinds of ordinary virtue: acts of dignity or self-respect, acts of caring, and acts that stem from the life of the mind, such as writing, making music, celebrating literature or art. He also distinguishes “vital values” from “moral values.” Vital values are represented in the Darwinian struggle of tooth and claw, of “me first.” They “dictate that saving my own life and furthering my well-being are what matter most.” In contrast are moral values, which represent compassion or love. “[M]oral values tell me that there is something more precious than life itself, that staying human is more important than staying alive. . . . The difference between moral values and vital values [is that] . . . for the vital values it is my life that is sacred; for moral values it is the life of someone else” (Todorov 1996, 40). There is room for debate about the relative priority of the ordinary virtues, for life properly involves all of them. Nevertheless, Todorov discerns a clear moral hierarchy: Caring implies, by definition, taking other individuals into account. And while acts of dignity and the products of the life of the mind are always directed toward individuals—myself or my audience—these individuals can be simply a pretext, a nod to convention. Dignity then becomes taking pride in a job well done, even if the job is to exterminate millions of people. . . . Similarly, when the life of the mind addresses itself only to “humanity” or some other such abstraction, it succumbs all the more easily . . . to the sheer logic of success. (1996, 108)

Todorov (1996, 85–86) reminds us that some feelings and activities may resemble care but have different motivations or beneficiaries. Caring is not

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solidarity, or identification with a collectivity; it is not charity, which is “directed toward everyone rather than toward particular individuals” and does not involve the possibility of reciprocation. Finally, he says that caring is not sacrifice because sacrifice has connotations of religion, “while caring remains exclusively within the sphere of the human,” and also because the notion of sacrifice implies “separation from something one holds dear” or a “painful deprivation . . . redeemed by a sense of duty.” Todorov insists that “to care about someone does not mean sacrificing one’s time and energy for that person. It means devoting them to the person and taking joy in doing so; in the end, one feels richer for one’s efforts, not poorer. Like charity, sacrifice cannot be reciprocated.” We might be comfortable with Todorov’s distinctions, and use the term “caring” rather than sacrifice, were it not that some of his objections to sacrifice are, for us, reasons to recommend its use. First, we welcome, rather than lament, the connotations of transcendence or intimations of the sacred that accompany sacrifice. The word means to “make sacred.” Caring often involves work that is devalued as demeaning or dirty, yet it is the work of giving and sustaining life, and thereby acquires sanctity. Todorov distinguishes “the human” from “the sacred,” viewing acts of caring as more human than religious. We would distinguish sanctity from religion, and argue that acts of giving that affirm and enrich life partake of the sacred. Besides, it is precisely the transcendence of sacrifice—the going beyond the possibility of reciprocity—that characterizes many of the caring acts Todorov himself describes. Remember that it is the extension of giving beyond reciprocity that Boulding identified as the element of sacrifice that generates the strongest social ties. Todorov says that caring is not sacrifice because, in the end, one feels richer for caring. But along the way, and often it is a very long way, caring is a matter of complex motives and feelings, some of them painful. Caring responds first and foremost to the needs of the other, and meeting those needs, however joyful in retrospect, does not preclude the necessity of one’s separation from other things held dear. Secondly, while Todorov objects to the sense of grudging duty or obligation he associates with the term sacrifice, it has legitimate usages that involve not duty but love. One dictionary definition of sacrifice is “the destruction or surrender of something valued or desired for the sake of something having, or regarded as having, a higher or a more pressing claim; the loss entailed by devotion to some other interest.” Recognition of a “higher claim” or “devotion to some other interest” may be joyful as well as resentful. Todorov (1996, 115) quotes with approval Philip Hallie’s distinction between giving

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things and giving oneself, a contrast that fits the model of sacrifice as well as that of caring. The giving of self rules out many kinds of reciprocity, and often implies inattention to reciprocity. Aside from the distinction between good and evil, between helping and hurting, the fundamental distinction . . . is between giving things and giving oneself. When you give somebody a thing without giving yourself, you degrade both parties by making the receiver utterly passive and by making yourself a benefactor standing there to receive thanks—and even sometimes obedience—as repayment. But when you give yourself, nobody is degraded . . . both parties are elevated by a shared joy. When you give yourself, the things you are giving become . . . féconde (fertile, fruitful). What you give creates new, vigorous life. (Hallie 1979, 72)

The ordinary virtues identified by Todorov are underexamined in modern family theory. Here we focus on his “caring,” which corresponds to the kind of sacrifice Boulding and Myers wrote about. Among the characteristics of caring are these: 1. Acts of caring [or sacrifice] benefit both giver and receiver. For the receiver, there is the immediate benefit to which the care is directed. For the giver, there are a) the possibility of reciprocity of some kind; b) the satisfaction of having met the need, which may involve both the sense of accomplishment or good workmanship and of being needed or useful (Todorov 1996, 86–88); and c) the growth that accrues to the giver as she struggles to learn what is needed and how the need may best be met. “The reward lies in the act itself; in caring for another, one continues to care for oneself as well. Here, the one who spends the most is actually the richest” (89). 2. Acts of caring [or sacrifice] make the giver vulnerable: “To live life in the camps according to an ethic of caring is to render oneself especially vulnerable, for in addition to one’s own suffering, one takes on that of the people one cares about” (1996, 90). 3. Acts of caring [or sacrifice] are “directed beyond the self toward other human beings who are the object of their attachment.” They are “undertaken not in behalf of humanity or the nation but always for the sake of an individual human being” (1996, 17, 72). 4. Caring [or sacrifice] is not a virtue if it is forced upon one. Gifts of self must be consciously offered, not extorted or given mindlessly. “What is admirable as an act—in this case, caring—can cease to be so when it becomes entrenched behavior” (1996, 81).

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5. Caring [or sacrifice] helps to make us human, and everyone needs to be involved in both giving and receiving. Let us now consider instances of caring that occurred in the camps. Todorov writes: [S]ome human relationships, especially those between close family members, are more apt to inspire caring than others. Caring is the maternal attitude par excellence. From Salonika to Auschwitz, from Moscow to Magadan, in the cattle cars that carried them to the concentration camps and to the gulags, mothers continued to nurse their babies and did their best to keep them in dry diapers. . . . Even in the gas chambers mothers stroked the hair of their children to calm them. Other family ties were also likely to elicit caring responses. . . . In Auschwitz a young girl, “terrified of touching dead bodies, is ordered to pick one up; her sister . . . slips her own hands between her sister’s and the corpse.” . . . Men contrive to smuggle food to the women they love who are in the same camp; spouses and lovers forsake privileges in order to stay together. Friends do the same for friends. (1996, 76)

Here are three other examples of acts of caring among the many cited by Todorov. They represent one set of “different voices,” ordinary people exemplifying ordinary virtues under extreme conditions, whose acts powerfully witness to the morality of caring and sacrifice, even at the cost of one’s own projects. [1] What can one do for others [faced with death] . . . how can one express one’s concern for them? One can choose . . . to die with them. J. Kosciuszkowa, who survived her internment at Auschwitz, tells of a mother who gave birth there and managed to hide her baby for five months; when the child was discovered and taken from her, she chose to go with him. “Clutching her son to her breast, she carried him into the gas chamber.” (71) [2] Then there is the young man who grew too weak to work and whose father lay down beside him so that they might await death together. (71) [3] [Marek] Edelman tells . . . of a niece of . . . one of his colleagues, who, immediately after her wedding ceremony, found the barrel of a soldier’s rifle shoved up against her belly. Her new husband put out his hand to protect her, only to have it blown off. “But this was precisely what mattered,” Edelman says, “that there be someone ready to cover your belly with his hand should it prove necessary” (18).

Todorov follows this last story with the comment that Most often, the beneficiary of such concern was a family member—a mother or daughter, brother or sister, husband or wife. But with so many loved ones

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gone, other “relatives” were found, people who acted as “surrogates.” And even when the surrogate beneficiary was not one person but many—like the children whom Dr. Janusz Korczak accompanied from his orphanage to Treblinka so they would not go alone . . . the beneficiaries were never an abstraction but individuals of flesh and blood, personally known. (18)

This raises a sobering question for family professionals: If most often it was family members who exhibited such self-sacrifice, how can we hope to understand family processes and yet lack a theoretical lens that brings self-sacrifice into focus?

Self-Sacrifice as Pathology: The Ethic of Caring Perhaps the most serious challenge to the priority of self-sacrifice as personal and social virtue is the rejection of self-sacrifice as a feminine ideal in some versions of the feminist “ethic of caring.” The idealization of motherhood, and the notion that mothers should sacrifice themselves for their children, is a particular point at issue. Among the most recognized proponents of an ethic of caring that devalues maternal sacrifice is Carol Gilligan, whose book In a Different Voice (1982) claimed a pattern of moral development among women not based in, and not inferior to, the values of justice and authority associated with moral development among men. Gilligan’s model of the morality of caring and connection has spawned a sizable literature, and there are many versions of the “care ethic.” Most of them designate self-sacrifice as a defect. In response to criticisms that her work romanticizes female care, Gilligan (1993, 209) says: I portray twentieth-century women choosing to have abortions, as well as women . . . reconsidering what is meant by care in light of their recognition that acts inspired by conventions of selfless feminine care have led to hurt, betrayal, and isolation . . . in contrast to the paralyzing image of the “angel in the house,” I describe a critical ethical perspective that calls into question the traditional equation of care with self-sacrifice.

Her argument against sacrifice is stated in a critique of an extreme type, “the tendency for women, in the name of virtue, to give care only to others and to consider it ‘selfish’ to care for themselves” (1993, 213). A practical consequence seems to be the validation of an ethic that denies the legitimacy of self-sacrifice in general, and not merely at the pathological extreme where any care of self is seen as selfish. Recognizing that needs for care will exist and be unmet by people who reject self-sacrifice, part of the debate over the

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morality of care is a “politics of care” wherein the responsibility for caring is shifted to the government. Among the advocates of such a shift is Julia Wood (1994), who criticizes Gilligan’s “different voice” as “a distinctly conservative one that affirms traditional sex roles” (162). Wood values caregiving, but insists that the burden of care of both children and the elderly is so daunting, and the traditional allocation of care so harmful to women, that government must step forward and assume ultimate responsibility: “For caring to be safe for caregivers, it must be broadly supported and enacted, rather than relegated to particular groups of people. Our culture itself must be reformed in ways that dissociate caring from its historical affiliations with women and private relationships and redefine it as a centrally important and integral part of our collective public life” (163). Making caring safe for caregivers means taking much of the self-sacrifice out of it (which, it is said, we do by making it paid work, part of the market, subject to the gain ethic). It is hard to disagree with the position that everyone has some responsibility to care for others, or that self-sacrifice as practice or norm not be limited to only select social positions or categories. In family contexts, self-sacrifice is properly a family characteristic, a trait appropriate to all family members old enough to give of themselves, however modestly. In wider contexts, there is a place for social policies that aim to alleviate burdens faced by parents in caring for their children, or by families in caring for aging or disadvantaged family members. But there seems to be a critical ratio, a balance that we neglect at our peril, between personal responsibility, which involves sacrifice by individuals and families, and institutional responsibility, with its inevitable rationalization and bureaucratization. Moral behavior disappears as it is shifted from the context of the personal and particular relationship to that of bureaucratic regulation, from work provided close at hand for loved ones to work done for pay in the marketplace (Bauman 1991). The solutions are not merely institutional. In the words of Robert Putnam (2000, 414), “institutional reform will not work—indeed, it will not happen—unless you and I, along with our fellow citizens, resolve to become reconnected with our friends and neighbors.” In connection there is risk. It is in the nature of sacrifice that its safety is never guaranteed. Sacrifice is necessarily open-ended, defined by another’s need. By definition, sacrifice cannot be safe for the sacrificer. Sometimes, when you put your hand in harm’s way to protect another, the gun goes off. Much of the literature on elder care by family members focuses on the personal and family costs of the care, and the stresses associated with care of

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an older family member. Attitudes toward elder care in the literature generally range from viewing it as burden to everyone in the family to it being a disaster for one’s children. Rarely is it seen as an opportunity or blessing for members of the caring household, and a finding of positive outcomes from the experience of care is atypical. The following summary seems fairly representative: Stresses, strains, and pressures that lace contemporary families often lead to marital discord or dissolution, problems with children’s involvement in school and recreational activities, and necessarily, inevitably distractions from work. The repercussions of strains within families reverberate throughout society, taking a steady, relentless toll on all who comprise it. (Wood 1994, 140)

The literature also reflects the resentment, self-alienation, and even rage of burdened mothers or adult daughters “forced” to care for children or elders. In the interest of honesty and truth in labeling, we need also to recognize those times when the experience of self-sacrifice is interpreted as a privilege of caring for one’s own, and to ask how it is that burden for some may be defined as blessing for others. Some writers, recognizing that caring cannot always be safe for the caregiver, suggest minimizing its risks by managing and distributing them (Peters 1997). Others see a danger in the ethic of care that one may care too much for others, and assert the need for a self-conscious equality of self and other, i.e., that one’s own will and welfare must always be a primary concern. One danger is that care is overly self-sacrificing so that one cares for others at the expense of caring well for oneself. The second danger is that care is limited to the sphere of personal relations so that one cares for one’s family members and friends, but ignores the needs of anyone outside that limited sphere. . . . For the ethic of care the central motivational obstacle is the tendency to give the rights and interests of others more weight than we give our own, or selfsacrifice. Thus the ethic of care recognizes the equality of the self and other by including the self within the scope of care, or by promoting the self to equality with the other. (Clement 1996, 113)

Here the central obstacle is seen as the danger that one will be too altruistic; the central concern, that one may give too much of oneself. This outcome is to be avoided by an ethic that promotes self to equality with others, as judged by the self. In response, we offer a version of the Heisenberg principle, namely that it is impossible to focus on two things at once. The careful attention to self necessary to assure that the self is not sacrificing more than her share, that she is caring for herself “well,” means that her attention cannot be

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fully focused on the needs of the other. In place of Immanuel Levinas’s principle that we are obligated by “the face of the other” (Bauman 1993, 47–53, 71–75; Peperzak 1993, 19–20), this ethic directs us to pay equal attention to one’s own face in the mirror. Some advocates of a political “morality of care” would further diminish the responsibility of family members to sacrifice for each other by adding to the norm that self-sacrifice is not appropriate the requirement that care (sacrifice) not be partial to one’s family or associates but be more universally or globally distributed (e.g., Tronto [1993] sees obligation to family as an impediment to efficient and appropriate care). In practice, this may mean that one’s obligations to one’s own family ought not to take precedence over one’s obligation to the families of Tibet or Thailand. The net consequence of this ethic is to demote family members to members of the national or global throng, or to raise the sights of caring individuals from their families and neighbors, persons to whom they formerly were responsible and among whom their lives are lived, to the abstract citizens of the world. Its effect is to move moral responsibility from the proximate to the distant. There is a literature on the costs of thus diluting personal responsibility to proximate others. One of the more important costs is that it attenuates moral responsibility (Bauman 1991, 1993; Vetlesen 1993). A focus on the distant and abstract at the expense of the proximate means that one’s obligations to one’s own network of friends and kindred are greatly reduced. We are not suggesting that the choice is necessarily between helping members of one’s family and helping non-family members, or between service to local causes and to national or global concerns. Indeed, studies of volunteering, philanthropy, and other forms of altruistic behavior reveal that the various forms of altruism tend to go together: people who exhibit selfless behavior in one context are likely to exhibit it in others (Putnam 2000, 118–22). What is clear, however, is that any form of distancing—be it philosophic or linguistic abstraction, bureaucratic mediation, psychological alienation, or physical distance—tends to diminish moral responsibility. “Love the poor,” said Mother Teresa, “but first of all love the members of your own family” (Le Joly and Chaliha 2000, 86). Some ethic of care theorists lament the devaluing of caring by society, the powerful, or other “oppressors,” but it seems that the devaluation of children and of those who care for them is also common among both women and men whose choices have freed them from the “oppressive” responsibility of having and raising children. Such attitudes appear in many of the statements about children and their characteristics reported in Kathleen Gerson’s Hard Choices (1985). Gerson interviewed a sample of California

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women about the choices they faced in deciding about careers, marriage, and children. To illustrate a fairly common devaluation of children, we have strung together adjectives and phrases from many of her interviews in the following summary paragraph. This summary is not untrue to a dominant if not general image of children and child care conveyed in the published quotations in Gerson’s book. Noteworthy in the comments quoted was how rarely even women who had children, or were planning to have them, celebrated the worth of the child in and of itself, rather than the child as consumer object, as something one’s husband wanted, or a life experience the woman didn’t want to miss. Children, actual or potential, were said to be: just a pain, a restriction on one’s freedom, a nuisance, a tremendous burden, a physical drain, an emotional drain, noisy and troublesome. They would, it was said, drive one nuts, cause all sorts of complications, stifle creativity and intellectualism, and ruin relationships. Among the reasons given for not wanting them were: “I want to be able to just pick up and go when I want to,” “I don’t think [children] would improve what I think of myself”, “I would just probably be relegated to the drudgery of the house,” “[They make you] ready for the looney farm,” “If [a child] said, ‘I need you,’ it would make me go bananas,” “We’d never be able to have a house like this, never be able to travel together again,” “I’m afraid I will lose control over my life and my time,” and “I don’t think just raising kids would be fulfilling for me” (Gerson 1985, 61–62, 75, 78–79 133–34, 144, 182). Rarely did statements on the burden and encumbrance of children refer to the burdens of life generally, or the encumbrances of callings, careers, and most human enterprises. In the absence of standards of value or morality that tell us when trouble, encumbrance, and hard work are worth it, is there reason to judge family encumbrance as less meaningful than any other kind? In care and sacrifice, as in other behaviors, we encounter pathologies based on “too much of a good thing,” but because some mothers are exploited or experience burnout does not justify the conclusion that it is the principle of self-sacrifice that is at fault. Exploitation and burnout also characterize non-family institutions. In fact, as Lewis and Rose Laub Coser (1974) warn in their book, Greedy Institutions, it is the nature of organizations to demand more of you than you can give, and this applies across the board, from the corporation to the military, the family, church and school, and certainly to the media with their incessant calls to watch and to buy, without regard to your bank balance, time budget, or life plan. Institutions are greedy, and to survive we learn to balance and sometimes decline their demands and opportunities. Yet there is little ethical theory or scholarly alarm about the

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danger of “losing self” to the corporation, the military, the government, the television set, or the Internet. No theory is free of the context in which it arises. All theories are based on assumptions tied to existing worldviews or power relations. The casting of self-sacrifice, especially of mothers, in negative terms is a function of theory oriented not to describing the world but to changing it. A stated goal of feminist theory is “to provide a conceptual framework that illuminates women’s experiences and perspectives and suggests how women’s oppression can be ended. . . . Explorations of the sources and forms of women’s oppression have focused on its relationship to the social assignment of the role . . . of mothering . . . women’s oppression is in some way connected to mothering” (DiQuinzio 1993, 3–4). No wonder, then, that characteristics formerly identified by society as the mark of superior mothering, namely self-sacrifice in the interests of children, should now be seen as marks of oppression, and accordingly devalued. No wonder, also, that self-sacrifice by men, and children, should tend to be overlooked in this framework, since these sacrifices have a less obvious connection to women’s oppression, or that the self-actualizing or personally positive consequences of giving of self should be neglected. Focusing on oppression, we are unlikely to see liberating or exalting effects; focusing on the individual and her rights, we are unlikely to grant high priority to group cohesion or other social benefits.

“Listening to the Natives” on the Character of Self-Sacrifice Beginning his book The Moral Sense, James Q. Wilson (1993, vii) says that the everyday language and practices of the people are a good deal closer to the truth of things than are the theories and practices of intellectuals. To understand the meaning and morality of our lives, he suggests that we look to the wisdom of the common man and woman, as well as listening to the experts. E. F. Schumacher (1973, 318) agrees: “The guidance we need . . . cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind.” Robert Inchausti’s The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People (1991, 123) speaks of “a new ethic [that] has walked unexpectedly onto the stage of world history looking very much like an ordinary person.” This new ethic has no name. Inchausti calls it a “plebeian postmodernism” that reflects the wisdom of ordinary people and “a legacy of personal virtue that runs like an

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underground stream beneath the great violent expanse of world history.” It appears in “ordinary people committed to the spiritual traditions that have defined their cultures” and at its core is “a new traditionalism and respect for the old ways,” and a “bold application of plebeian religious values to postmodern political circumstances.” Among other things, it is committed to a family idealism that “is fading fast but dying hard,” and that “in its everyday pain . . . testifies to another kind of living and another form of responsibility that the utilitarian minds of comfort-seeking moderns cannot comprehend” (120, 123–24). A critique of social scientific studies of religion, titled “Let’s Listen to the Natives,” observes that “the time seems ripe to renew an old plea that has fallen out of fashion . . . that students of religion should communicate more with practitioners of religion” (Bailey 1995, 391). In social science research on the family we face the same situation: it is time to renew the plea that students of the family communicate more with the practitioners of family life. “Listening to the natives” means letting people speak for themselves, in their own language, and paying attention to their use of such basic terms as love and sacrifice. Listening to the natives does not mean we believe everything they say. It does mean taking what they say seriously, as a legitimate supplement to the worldviews of clinicians and researchers. The natives say that sacrifice is an important part of mature love. The mothers interviewed by Hays (1996) affirmed that the unselfishness and sacrifice inherent in intensive mothering were superior to the self-seeking materialism of the marketplace. They stressed that “appropriate child rearing involves sacrifice and that the needs of children should and do take priority over any interest they might have in power or material gain.” Hays concluded that “their focus on unselfishness is not a passive selflessness but an active rejection of market logic. In this, as is also true of their arguments about love, mothers point to crucial and often hidden aspects of our culture” (157, 171). A review of research on love (Noller 1996) from the standpoint of both family professionals and the public found that “laypersons (as opposed to psychologists) identified features relevant to both love and commitment (including caring, trust, sharing, sacrifice, respect, loyalty)” as part of the common understanding of what love meant. Another study of behaviors associated with love included “acts of sacrifice” and “acts involving parents” as manifestations of love (Buss 1988; Noller 1996, 105, 109). To place self-sacrifice for families in appropriate comparative context, and to relate the burdens of family nurturing to the burdens of life generally, may we briefly cite Joan of Arc, an archetypical model of self-sacrifice? We

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mention her not to praise her sacrifice, but to note how, in her speech before execution (as portrayed in Maxwell Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine [1947, 127]), she dwells not on what is unique or unfair in her own sacrifice, but rather on the place of self-sacrifice in everyone’s life: “Every man gives his life for what he believes. Every woman gives her life for what she believes. Sometimes people believe in little or nothing, nevertheless they give up their lives to that little or nothing. One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it, and then it’s gone.” In the same spirit—that we all give our lives for something, be it worthy or base—Wendell Berry (1981, 197) observes that these times are “bad times for motherhood—a kind of biological drudgery, some say, using up women who could do better things.” He continues: Thoreau may have been the first to assert that people should not belong to farm animals, but the idea is now established doctrine with many farmers—and it has received amendments to the effect that people should not belong to children, or to each other. But we all have to belong to something, if only to the idea that we should not belong to anything. We all have to be used up by something. And though I will never be a mother, I am glad to be used up by motherhood and what it leads to, just as—most of the time—I gladly belong to my wife, my children, and several head of cattle, sheep, and horses. What better way to be used up?

The question is not whether one will or will not give of one’s self, but rather of priorities, of which people, ideals, organizations, practices, or things are worth the giving. It is not whether one will be used, but what one is willing to be used for. Meaningful self-sacrifice occurs in answer to need, not as a discipline aimed at actualizing the person who sacrifices. That is one of the challenges of personal caring for real people in one’s circle, as opposed to the care provided by paid caregivers. People’s needs are inconvenient; they are not ordered according to an eight-hour day divided by coffee and lunch breaks. Professional caregivers, by definition, have contractually limited responsibility, but the sacrifices required of family members are ambiguous and openended. If my ethic of care enjoins me to prefer the universal approach of giving part of my self to care for humanity in the abstract, rather than the particular responsibility of caring intensely for those in my circle of family and neighbors, I am to some extent freed from the inconvenient totality of the demands of the others who face me. James Baldwin said that “People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do

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with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility” (Baldwin 1995, 80). In contrast, if my offering of self in service is motivated by love, it is necessarily concentrated where the moral responsibility is greatest, which typically is among those near and dear. Not only are these the ones whose needs are most visible and who have the strongest personal claims on me, but also those who are most vulnerable to my actions or my inattention (Clement 1996, 72–75; Goodin 1985). Relevant here is Dag Hammarskjöld’s (1964, 131–33) statement on the issue of “ordinary” versus “great” responsibilities, of the proximate prosaic versus the distant heroic: The “great” commitment is so much easier than the ordinary everyday one— and can all too easily shut our hearts to the latter. A willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice can be associated with . . . a great hardness of heart. . . . The “great” commitment all to easily obscures the “little” one. But without the humility and warmth which you have to develop in your relations to the few with whom you are personally involved, you will never be able to do anything for the many. Without them, you will live in a world of abstractions, where your solipsism, your greed for power, and your death-wish lack the one opponent which is stronger than they—love. . . . It is better for the health of the soul to make one man good than “to sacrifice oneself for mankind.” For a mature man, these are not alternatives, but two aspects of self-realization, which mutually support each other.

Self-sacrifice tends not to be the result of conscious, rational decisionmaking. Its voluntary nature is more reflexive than cognitive, more a matter of community identity, intuition, and reaction, than a realistic weighing of alternatives. It is a response to need, not an assessment of possible damage to one’s projects. This characteristic is highlighted in the report of an interview with Magda Trocmé, wife of the Protestant pastor of the French village of Le Chambon, who with pastor Trocmé, assistant pastor Eduard Theis, and the villagers saved some five thousand refugees, mostly children, from the Holocaust. They did so without violence and without manifesting hatred toward the occupying forces. Interviewing Madame Trocmé long after the war, philosopher Philip Hallie responded to her stories with the words, “But you are good people, good.” She reacted with vehemence and a little anger, “What did you say? What? Good? Good?” Then, settling down a little, she continued: “I’m sorry, but you see, you have not understood what I have been saying. We have been talking about saving the children. We did not do what we did for

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goodness’ sake. We did it for the children. Don’t use words like ‘good’ with me. They are foolish words” (Hallie 1997, 31). Part of the debate on the appropriateness of self-sacrifice centers on the question of where significant moral action begins. The common assumption seems to be that it begins with the self: I choose to be a father, I choose to distribute my time in ways that I feel will enhance my own interests. In an alternative position, held by Immanuel Levinas, Dorothy Lee (1986), Robert Bellah, and others, the significant action begins with the other. It is the face of the other, the baby’s cry, the “call” of my bedridden neighbor, that invites the moral response. I do not decide what the need will be, or when it will arise. Peter Berger and Frederick Neumann suggest that the moral imperatives of everyday life are not conscience-directed affirmations of right and wrong, but rather mental images that point us in a direction, call a scene to our remembrance, or direct our attention to need. Berger (1992, 199) writes: Our sense that we ought to act in a certain way and to refrain from other actions is triggered, so to speak, by scenes that come into view and that carry with them these moral implications. Someone once said that the mother of a newborn infant is in a morally privileged position, because she knows exactly what God wants her to do. But this is not because God has instructed her as to her proper behavior in the situation, by whatever set of imperative norms, but because the infant is there and being there it calls for protection, care, and love.

Attending and responding may be very inconvenient. Need presents itself at times, places, and in ways that do not serve one’s self-interest. An appropriate moral response requires paying attention to what is needed to foster the growth and well-being of the other. It may be terribly demanding. According to Sara Ruddick (1984a, 223) if one is consumed by attention to the “greedy organism of the self,” she cannot see clearly what is needed. One must sacrifice self-centered interests even to apprehend what is in the interest of the other. The question is not what one would like to give, or what would be convenient to give, but what is needful. “Love not only uplifts us, takes us out of ourselves,” said John Paul II, “it also lays burdens on us. And perhaps the burdens tell us more about love than do the moments of ecstasy and spiritual élan” (Little 1992, 30). The quality of attention necessary to see the needs of another with some clarity is challenging because of the difficulty of removing the focus of one’s attention from one’s own needs and wants. The temptation is to do what one would like to do, to satisfy self-serving aims and images, rather than to

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do the difficult work of seeing and responding in a moral way to the needs of the other. Thus, we arrive at the place where the concept of self-sacrifice is relevant. When self-sacrifice is seen as a defect, what is generally at issue is the willingness of women, in particular, to neglect their own legitimate needs in an effort to make life easier for those around them, or to avoid conflict, or because they are powerless to do otherwise. Rubenstein (1998, 7) warns against being a “sacrificial mother” because it is harmful to one’s health and sanity. She argues that what is needed is to be a “selfist”—an orientation “not to be confused with selfish, which is focusing on yourself at the expense of others.” A better description of the so-called sacrificial mother would be the indulgent mother. She tends not to ask the difficult questions about what her child, other family member, friend, or neighbor needs for growth and development. It is possible, probable even, that what passes for self-sacrifice is often actually self-serving. Its aim may be to protect the self from harm or to make life easier for one’s children. Self-sacrifice in the moral sense is the giving of self in ways that help make the receiver stronger, not weaker. The difficult moral issue, and it is also a theoretical issue that applies to family work in general and to emotion effort in particular, is to be able to ascertain with some degree of integrity whether the object of one’s deep attentiveness is the self or the other, in order that one may see clearly what will foster the growth of the other. Self-sacrifice is moral work, and it is grounded in “just and loving” attention to the needs of the other. But paying attention is demanding. It requires self-sacrifice. That is, one cannot attend wholly to one’s own projects, and have mind or vision left over to see the need of another. We conclude this section with a statement on the meaning of self-sacrifice in life, as understood by ordinary people. In the book Parting Visions, physician Melvin Morse tells about many of the pre-death and near-death experiences he has accumulated in case studies and medical histories. Among the recurrent themes he has documented is a principle relevant to family love and self-sacrifice. Dr. Morse says: I learned from these experiences that we die the life we live. I have never interviewed anyone who had a near-death experience who told me that they came back to make more money or to spend more time at their jobs away from their families. Rarely do they tell me that they learned they were not selfish enough or greedy enough. Instead they become convinced that they need to be more loving and kind. They react to their experience by living life to its

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fullest. They believe their lives have a purpose, even if that purpose is obscure to them. Invariably it involves concepts such as love of family or service to others. (Morse and Perry 1994, 157–58)

Other Perspectives Earlier we quoted Monroe (1996, 236) to the effect that the study of altruism highlights the limitations of theories grounded in the assumptions of rational calculus and individual self-interest, demonstrating that “squashing some behaviors into a self-interested paradigm robs them of their meaning.” Where then, might we turn for theoretical frameworks more hospitable to self-sacrifice and other instances of altruism? Here we offer three options. First is a macro-functionalist view in which viable societies are seen to “need” a certain level of altruistic behavior from at least some members. This view assumes, often implicitly, the operation of an “invisible hand” with respect to the processes of recruitment and motivation whereby certain members of society choose to forego self-interest in the interest of others, and also with respect to regulatory mechanisms at the societal or system level whereby the system “knows” that the current mix of individualistic and altruistic action is sufficiently out of balance to signal the need for remedial adjustment. Appeal to such system tendencies is where Hays (1996) arrives after she has evaluated other arguments for the continuance of the ideology of intensive mothering and found them useful but partial. The cultural model of intensive mothering, she argues, is more than the natural outcome of increased knowledge about the true nature of parental love and children’s needs, more than the disguised self-interest of mothers, and more than the working out of the self-interests of the powerful via the sacrifices of the less-powerful. It is also a response, at the cultural or societal level, to the “horror” of a world dominated by the rationalized marketplace. “The cultural logic operating here offers an alternative account of what might count as status, power, or self-interest. In this sense, the ideology of intensive mothering persists not only in spite of the fact that it runs counter to the logic of impersonality, competition, and personal profit but precisely because it does” (171). Hays (1996, 173, 175) makes the linkage between maternal selflessness in child rearing and the imbalance of the wider system direct and explicit: “the more the larger world becomes impersonal, competitive, and individualistic and the more the logic of that world invades the world of intimate relationships, the more intensive child rearing becomes.” Yet the response is not an orchestrated one, it is not consciously organized, it is a countermovement

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more at the general system level than the individual level: “When women engage in this opposition, they generally do not make a self-conscious decision to oppose the system that values competitive individualism and material advantage. And although they do not engage in collective action, per se, they are also not acting as isolated individuals. They act as members of a culture that maintains two contradictory ideologies.” In the end, the system-problem that the ideology of intensive mothering confronts is about much more than family, children, and motherhood, it is “an ideology that speaks to a more prevalent set of social and moral concerns” and to a degree “the valorization of nurturing mothers and innocent children is meant to protect us all from the full impact of a dog-eat-dog world” (Hays 1996, 176). There are echoes here of Pitirim Sorokin’s (1957) notion of immanent change whereby the excesses of a given cultural mentality, whether sensate or ideational, generate corrective tendencies in the opposing direction. And the system tendencies posited by Hays and Sorokin seem to be reflections of both Marxian dialectics and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” A second theoretical approach, one better suited to the study of selfsacrifice in middle-range and micro contexts, is Monroe’s (1994a, 1994b, 1994c) “cognitive-perceptual” explanation of altruism by reference to factors such as identity, self-perception, worldview, and empathy. Monroe suggests that ethical action, including the possibility of self-sacrifice, arises from “deep-seated dispositions that form one’s central identity,” and that such action is less a matter of conscious choice than of who one is. In her view, moral values and moral action evolve out of basic identity rather than from rational calculation, and tend to be discovered and recognized rather than computed and chosen. Issues of how one sees one’s relation to others are more significant than issues of cost and benefit. Monroe does not deny the importance of rational calculus in behavior, but rather suggests that the actions to which it applies tend to be more superficial than the moral decisions which “strike at our basic sense of self.” She concludes that certain kinds of ethical action, including much altruistic behavior, “emanate primarily from one’s perception of self in relation to others, a perception that effectively then delineates and sets the domain of choice options an actor perceives as available, both empirically and morally” (1994a, 220, 224). Monroe’s approach is compatible with Wilson’s (1993) argument that sympathy, attachment or affiliation, and perceptions of similarity evoke altruistic behavior. Wilson sees the “soft-core altruism” of humans as partly reciprocal altruism, but acknowledges an added dimension that has nothing to do with reciprocity:

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Humans may not sacrifice as much for their own kin as do ants, but they sacrifice more than do ants for nonkin—adopted children, friends, neighbors, and countrymen. And in the case of people who lavish care on their pets (even to the extent of risking death to rescue a dog from a burning house), they even make sacrifices for other species. . . . [S]ometimes sentiment alone, unsupported by utility, motivates our actions, as when someone makes an anonymous benefaction or a lone bystander helps an endangered person. . . . We engage in acts contributing to reciprocal altruism only when we first value reciprocity, especially in its nonmaterial forms. And we value nonmaterial reciprocity only when we are affectionally dependent upon one another. (43–44)

And here we are back where we began, looking at the two-way connection between sentiment and sacrifice. A third theoretical alternative wherein self-sacrifice is an essential element rather than an anomaly is a “postmodern ethics” (Bauman, 1991, 1993) grounded in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (1969, 1978, 1985, 1987). Levinasian thought is a radical challenge to modernist notions of morality as product of the social collectivity. He “stands modernist Western philosophy and social theory on its head by beginning with an ethical philosophy which precedes either ontology or epistemology” (Knapp 2000, 192). For Levinas, morality precedes society. The subjective self emerges out of an encounter with “the face of the other,” a particular, personal other, and “‘being with others’, that most primary and irremovable attribute of human existence, means first and foremost responsibility” (Bauman 1991, 182). This existential responsibility . . . has nothing to do with contractual obligation. It has nothing in common either with my calculation of reciprocal benefit. It does not need a sound or idle expectation of reciprocity, of “mutuality of intentions,” of the other rewarding my responsibility with his own. I am not assuming my responsibility on behest of a superior force, be it a moral code sanctioned with the threat of hell or a legal code sanctioned with the threat of prison. Because of what my responsibility is not, I do not bear it as a burden. I become responsible while I constitute myself into a subject. Becoming responsible is the constitution of me as a subject. Hence it is my affair, and mine only. “Intersubjective relation is a non-symmetrical relation . . . I am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it. Reciprocity is his affair.” (Bauman 1991, 183)

Levinas’s own briefest summary of the guiding principle of his work is a quotation from Dostoyevsky, “We are all responsible for all and for all men before all, and I more than all the others” (Bauman 1991, 182).1

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Looking Ahead Often the value of altruistic behavior seems to depend not upon the activity itself or its benefit to the recipients, but on whether the activity is valued by the wider society. Thus, Gerson (1985, 229–30) warns that “Until we value our children enough to provide them with the services they need and reward those entrusted with their care, we cannot expect women to shoulder the burden our political and economic systems refuse to accept.” She seems to be saying that if our governments and corporations don’t care about the nation’s children, we can’t expect their mothers to care. This may be true of care in some definitions. It is not true of care as Todorov defines it, benefitting both giver and receiver, nor of sacrifice as Boulding defines it, binding giver and receiver in a solidarity of gratitude and love. The professional literature on caring says far too little about the positive benefits of sacrifice to the giver. Indeed, to label the benefits of sharing the burdens of the vulnerable or the infirm as “gratification” (Gerstel and Gallagher 1993) is to overlook their growth-enhancing potential. We give because there is need. But for the giver, meaning centers on how one impacts the other, on whether one exhibits love or something else, on whether one enlarges life or diminishes it. The unsought growth potential for the giver, the one who sacrifices, or its flip side, the potential for self-debasement and loss as one turns away, seems also to be meaningful. There is a certain inevitability that as one struggles to foster someone else’s growth, one’s own growth, in one way or another, is also enhanced. A generation of “king-children” (Van de Kaa 1987), reared by selfsacrificing mothers, may not have been taught how to sacrifice, and therefore we may face an entire generation who need to learn to give more fully of themselves. The pressing professional issue is whether family scholars and clinicians, committed to understanding what happens in real families, can supplement the presently popular theoretical frameworks with attention to variables such as family love, mutual definitions of ideal, expected, and observed acts of self-sacrifice, and accounts of personal and family consequences of sacrifice. For the plebeians still believe in virtue and evil, and still practice the processes of self-sacrifice and the language of love, albeit partially and sometimes without the support of the experts who advise them. Theories are not ends in themselves; they are more or less useful aids to understanding, lenses that magnify some things and minimize others. What matters to families is what works, and not whether it violates current philosophical assumptions or is incompatible with a prevailing intellectual stance. As Nicholas Rescher has observed, ultimately “social theories do not

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measure altruism but altruism measures social theories” (Wyschogrod 1990, 242–43).

Notes 1. For more extensive summaries and interpretations of Levinasian theory and assessments of its potential impact on social theory, see Peperzak (1993), Knapp (2000), and the works they cite. For consideration of its profound implications for psychology, psychotherapy, and the social construction of altruism, see Williams and Gantt (1998), Gantt (2000), and Gantt and Reber (2000).

CHAPTER TWO



Family Transcendence

The Sioux boy sat in the vision pit, alone on the hilltop. He faced four days of solitude, until the medicine man returned for him. The boy was far from home, alone for the first time in his life, left without food or water to experience the challenges and the vision that would make him a man. Yet he was not entirely alone. He had the star blanket, a beautifully designed quilt made especially for this experience by his grandmother. He had bark tobacco and a peace pipe, a source of spiritual power, for “power flows down to us through that smoke, through the pipe stem.” Years later, he remembered that “as I ran my fingers along its bowl of smooth red pipestone, red like the blood of my people, I no longer felt scared.” That pipe had belonged to my father and to his father before him. It would someday pass to my son and, through him, to my grandchildren. As long as we had the pipe there would be a Sioux nation. As I fingered the pipe, touched it, felt its smoothness that came from long use, I sensed that my forefathers who had once smoked this pipe were with me on the hill, right in the vision pit. I was no longer alone. Besides the pipe the medicine man had also given me a gourd. In it were forty small squares of flesh which my grandmother had cut from her arm with a razor blade. I had seen her do it. Blood had been streaming down from her shoulder to her elbow as she carefully put down each piece of skin on a handkerchief, anxious not to lose a single one. . . . Someone dear to me had undergone pain, given me something of herself, part of her body, to help me pray and make me stronghearted. How could I be afraid with so many people—living and dead—helping me? (Lame Deer and Erdoes 1972, 1–3)

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 In 1835 Franciscan missionaries in California cleared some of the offshore islands of their scattered Indian populations, resettling them on the mainland. The transfer of the last survivors from San Nicolas Island was interrupted by a fierce gale that threatened to swamp the ship. A landing was made with difficulty, and the ship was in danger. Wishing to leave the bad weather as soon as possible, the captain loaded the islanders onto the ship in a great hurry and set off. As soon as the ship was under weigh, a woman realized that in all the excitement and confusion her child had been left behind. The captain tried to tell the agitated mother that he could not return to the island under the present weather conditions but that he would return the next day to fetch the child. The woman, a widow between the ages of twenty and thirty, could be neither calmed nor restrained, and she jumped overboard and struck out through the kelpy waters for shore. She was soon lost to the view of the other passengers. (Niethammer 1977, 135–36)

 One stormy night in the early days of jet-propelled airplanes, I (A. Rossi) happened to share a flight from Boston to Chicago with an exuberant basketball team celebrating its victory earlier that evening. The plane hit an unusual amount of turbulence, lost altitude rapidly, and oxygen masks dropped before our faces. The incident was over within minutes, as the pilot regained control and climbed back to our assigned altitude. When the cheers of released tension subsided, I leaned across the aisle to another woman passenger and asked if she had heard what I thought I had heard when the oxygen masks first appeared: several deep masculine voices crying out “Mama!” She nodded that she had and we compared notes on what we thought about during those frightening moments: We had not uttered a sound, but we both thought of the children we might leave motherless that night. I have thought of that incident many times in the past 25 years, musing on the fact that the young athletic men and the two older women might have spent the last moments of their lives thinking of either mothers or children. The experience emphasized the deep psychological salience of the parent-child relationship: Under duress, the young adult men cried out for their mothers, and the women experienced panic at the prospect of their children bereft of their care while still very young.(Rossi and Rossi 1990, 3)

 Each of these examples may be seen as an instance of family transcendence. Each illustrates the possibility that there are aspects of family life and family

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commitment that set families apart from other organizations. Some of these may be unique to family life, others are more frequent in family settings than elsewhere. This chapter applies the concept of family transcendence as a way of thinking about the distinctive aspects of family life. We shall arrive at transcendence via an earlier attempt to interpret the distinctiveness of families, the notion of a “family realm.”

Family Distinctiveness and the Family Realm The idea that the family is a special kind of organization is not new. Almost a half-century ago, sociologist Clifford Kirkpatrick began a textbook on the family with a section on “unique and important characteristics of the family,” a topic that provoked far less argument then than it does now. Kirkpatrick said that “the family in the sense of a group comprising parents and offspring is universal,” that it was “the outstanding example of a primary group,” “unique in providing continuity of social life,” and “uniquely important in its influence on individual personality” (Kirkpatrick 1963, 4–5). Many later writers, while acknowledging the widespread existence of family forms other than the traditional nuclear family, still have seen families as special or unique. Thus, explaining the theoretical significance of the family, William Goode (1982, 5–6) wrote that it was “the only social institution other than religion that is formally developed in all societies.” He saw the holistic nature of family interaction as setting it apart, noting that “the various tasks of the family are all separable from one another, but in fact are not separated in almost all known family systems.” In an effort to define the family in a way that allowed for all its variations and alternative forms, Ira Reiss (1976, 19) pared away most of the “unique” functions asserted by previous analysts, yet still identified a “universal core,” namely “a small kinship-structured group with the key function of nurturant socialization of the newborn.” A later attempt to incorporate family uniqueness and universality into family theory (Beutler, Burr, Bahr, and Herrin 1989a) identified seven differentiating characteristics that distinguished families from other organizations. Their “family realm” perspective was intended to complement existing approaches and to heighten people’s sensitivities to unexplored dimensions of family process (1989b, 827). The framework of family transcendence considered below is a reformulation that builds upon Beutler et al.’s family realm essay and its critiques (Jurich 1989, Menaghan 1989, Edwards 1989). We will consider some of the issues involved before arguing for their resolution in the transcendence framework.

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Beutler et al. (1989a, 814) designate the family realm as “the perspective that is acquired when scholars begin with a family-oriented approach.” However, they seem unsure about whether their approach is a realm or a perspective, and about whether the use of their “lens” creates a master identity or simply a period of alternative imaging. Mostly, as they suggest in their lens metaphor (1989b, 827), they seem to be talking about a perspective, a way of looking at things.1 Issues of Terminology, or Truth in Labeling The realm terminology is troubling in its political and literary connotations. Beutler et al. also called their set of distinctive characteristics a family “sphere,” an alternative that avoids the political baggage of realm, yet connotes separateness, division, distance, and distinctive orbit. However, the image of a symmetrical sphere is incongruent with the nongeometric, amorphous character of family process and meaning systems. Uncomfortable with both these terms, we examined the text of the realm essay for other possibilities. Beyond (1) the “irreducible” core of the family realm—the birth process and generational ties—were six other “relatively unique” characteristics: (2) relationships as total persons, (3) simultaneous process orientation, (4) emotional intensity, (5) an emphasis on qualitative purposes and processes, (6) altruistic values, and (7) nurturing governance. Beutler et al. said that the importance of these elements was in their holistic application, yet they offered no clear pattern or unifying theme. Their theoretical contribution would have been more elegant had they cast their elements as manifestations of an underlying dimension, a true set rather than an aggregate. Their relational approach to defining family was based on the assumption that people distinguish relationships that are “like family” from other relationships. In other words, people recognize kinship ties. This is the well-known principle of kin selection, one of three fundamental “bases of sociality” in humans (van den Berghe 1979, 15; the others are reciprocity and coercion). It also applies to certain social species of animals. In addition to this assumption, Beutler et al. provide synonyms, explanatory phrases, and partial definitions that, taken together, reveal their vision of the family realm. It is created by the birth process and the establishment of ties across generations. . . . [It includes] the biological, emotional, social, and developmental processes that are inherent in procreation and the nurturing of dependent children. . . . [It combines] a large set of multifaceted familial connections that are physio-

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logical, interpersonal, mental, emotional, temporal, spatial, hormonal, genetic, generational, sexual and developmental. . . . [Its] associations . . . are rooted in lineal or adopted parent, child, and sibling relationships . . . [and] derive from the begetting, bearing, and nurturing of children and from the ties of lineage. (Beutler et al. 1989a, 806–7)

Seeing this description, many anthropologists and sociologists would identify the topic at hand as kinship relations. The family “realm” is another name for the network of kinship,2 and there already exists a sociology and an anthropology of kinship. In place of the problem-laden “family realm” terminology, we would label the framework offered by Beutler et al. a “familial paradigm.” We might have called it a kinship paradigm, but for C. C. Harris’s useful distinction between family, familial, and kin relationships. In Harris’s (1990, 70) typology, a family is a group defined by its activities, where “relationship flows from activity.” Two types of family are the “nuclear family household,” a domestic group made up of parents and young children, and the “elementary family,” defined by “a set of relationships which comprise the elements of the kinship system, i.e., all first degree (i.e., direct, unmediated) kin relationships.” Initially, the nuclear family household may be identical to the elementary family. But when the nuclear stage of family life has ended, and grown children move from the parental home, the relationships constituting it do not dissolve. . . . The relationships endure beyond the point at which they cease to be domestic and residential relationships. . . . It follows that . . . the nuclear household has a penumbra of extradomestic familial relationships. . . . Familial relationships arise out of reproductive activities involving interaction by persons living in proximity and are therefore emotionally charged. (Harris 1990, 71–74)

Most social science research on kinship ties pertains to the familial in the above sense; it treats, for example, relations between adult children and their parents or between adult siblings. Moreover, the description of the familial as emotionally charged is congruent with the emotional intensity characteristic of the family realm. Issues of Generality: Some Familial Paradigm Universals We have said that the family realm is essentially a familial or kinship perspective. Identifying its unifying element as kinship makes it easy to demonstrate the universality of some its characteristics. Among the criticisms of Beutler et al.’s proposal (Menaghan 1989) was that the distinctive family

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characteristics it identified were limited to the Western bourgeoisie. This criticism evaporates as one samples the anthropological literature. To illustrate the wide generality of the distinctive attributes identified by Beutler et al., we refer to Donald Brown’s (1991) Human Universals. Brown assembled extensive cross-cultural documentation for numerous cultural universals, including several of the family realm characteristics associated with distinctions between kin and non-kin (characteristics 1, 4, 6, and 7).3 As for the other three realm characteristics, if they are not universal, they are known to be less characteristic of modern Western societies than of premodern or less developed societies. Impersonal secondary relations proliferate in the bureaucratic organization of the Western city, while the emphasis on primary relations or total persons belongs more to historical or traditional societies and small towns; monochronic time organization is more characteristic of industrial than non-industrial society (Hall 1984); and the quantitative emphasis on having and consuming associated with a media-driven market economy is likewise more applicable to modern Western countries than others (characteristics 2, 3, and 5, respectively). Thus, to the degree that the distinctive characteristics of the family realm are not demonstrably universal, the literature suggests that they are less common in the industrialized West than elsewhere. Brown’s (1991, 105, 108, 133, 136–37) universals, stated as attributes of “Universal People,” are firmly grounded empirically and cross-culturally. Let us restate those universals most relevant to Beutler et al.’s list of distinctive family characteristics: (1) People everywhere use kinship terms that refer to the relationships of procreation, namely variations on the terms mother, father, son, and daughter. (2) Everywhere “family” is an important group, although not the only group. (3) Despite diverse elaborations, everywhere the basic family core is a mother and child (or children), and usually the birth mother is also the recognized or social mother. (4) Everywhere raising children follows established social patterns, and everywhere children’s senior relatives are expected to help teach and care for the children. (5) Everywhere, “one’s own children and other close kin are distinguished from more distant relatives or nonrelatives,” and people “favor their close kin in various contexts.” (6) Everywhere there are recognizable kinship terminologies, for kinship is universally recognized as important. (7) “Along with mate selection or marriage, the essence of kinship comprises those sentimental attachments that distinguish kin from nonkin and close kin from distant kin.” (8) Kinship solidarity is based in nepotism and reciprocity. Brown’s work is useful as a source of cross-cultural evidence on human universals in family behavior. But it is also evidence that the situation Beu-

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tler et al. confronted—a community of scholars prevented by their paradigms and political priorities from seeing relevant, even essential aspects of the human organizations they are supposed to know best—is not limited to the family disciplines. Brown (1991, 156) writes of the “blinkers” that prevent his colleagues in anthropology from examining the evidence dispassionately: It is wrong to think that there is some sort of zero-sum game—or even worse, a winner-takes-all game—between universals and the culturally particular or between biological and sociocultural approaches to anthropological problems. The notion that it is such a game has been a major contributor to producing a blinkered and shackled anthropology, an anthropology unable or unwilling to see the relevance of human nature, and thus severely handicapped in solving anthropological problems. The time is upon anthropologists to take off those blinkers; to rise above the self-serving motives and honest mistakes that put the blinkers on in the first place; to search for, see, study, and analyze what is universal as well as what is unique.

Brown’s plea for a reexamination of what is known, independent of the modernist assumptions and intellectual lobbies that have both directed and shackled the knowing, is appropriate in the family sciences as well. Norms and Behavior, Ideology and Reality Among the ambiguities unresolved in Beutler et al. (1989a) was whether it was norms or behavior that distinguished families from other social contexts, for, it was said (Jurich 1989), behavior in families often falls short of the positive ideals. This problem may be stated in terms of ideology versus reality, experience versus image, or what is versus what ought to be. Of course behavior in all human contexts, not just families, consistently falls short of the ideal. This ever-present shortfall does not weaken Beutler et al.’s (1989a) general position, for their generalizations plainly can apply both to ideals and to interaction. Thus, not only do the norms specify that family members should care for and love each other, but when family members are polled about what is most important to them or gives them the greatest satisfaction, consistently family ranks at the top (Caplow, Bahr, Modell, and Chadwick 1991, 535, 561; Gallup 2003, 1). Lest the present chapter be vulnerable to the same criticism, we will be explicit about the relevance to our work of the usual categorizations of norms and behavior, or ideology and reality. First, norms are neither more nor less objective than behavior or reality. In creating conceptual abstractions convenient to their problems, analysts may distinguish norms (statements about what ought to be) from behavior (statements about what people do or have

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done). The latter are no more real than the former. A statement about what people ought to do is a behavior. So is a statement about what people have done. Calling some observed action norms and other observed action behavior is standard analytical procedure, but the differentiating process is itself creative activity and bears no necessary relation to observer-independent differences in the behaviors under study. Second, even if all family data were not ultimately classifiable as behavior of one kind or another, there is a well-known reciprocal relation between norms and behavior. Behaviors become normative, and norms influence behavior; the two perpetually shade into one another. In place of such artificial distinctions, we are advised to “learn to see relevance or meaning as arising from an embodied history in which action and meaning are inseparable” (Varela 1989, 16). Critics also called the family realm conceptualization too optimistic, “romantic,” or “nostalgic” in not sufficiently affirming negative family behavior except as pathology. This criticism overlooks the necessary connection between normative behavior and deviance. It does not matter that a presumably normative characteristic of families is frequently violated. Obviously much family behavior violates the altruistic and nurturant characteristics that societies everywhere associate with family life.4 If the characteristic is truly normative, then that norm is maintained by sanctions, and sanctions are elicited by violations. As Emile Durkheim ([1902] 1984) noted more than a century ago, some deviance is “normal,” that is, it is essential to the maintenance of the norms.5 Were a norm so well obeyed that there were no violations, it would not survive as a norm. We suspect that in all societies, much family behavior violates the positive norms, and if such behavior provokes sanctions, it is by definition deviant or pathological. Also relevant here is the distinction between models that may fit some context or reality (i.e., are not refuted by it) and those that might more definitively correspond to the reality in question. Evidence of incongruity between a theoretical model and the social world as empirically known does not disqualify the model as a research tool. It is where our models do not fit that we learn something; “the ‘real’ world manifests itself exclusively there where our constructions break down” (von Glasersfeld 1984, 39). On the other hand, too many breakdowns, an accumulation of anomalies, may necessitate a paradigm shift (Kuhn 1970). Although aspects of reality such as family processes have structures of their own, “we can only comprehend that structure conceptually via the constructs we develop about it” (Speed 1984, 519). In part, we see what our theories prepare us to see:

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There is thus a continuing developing interpenetration between reality and the constructs we evolve about that reality. Given such interpenetration, some of the constructs we bring to bear on reality will be more adequate to the reality of what is there than are others. . . . [T]here is no one “true” hypothesis. Rather there are a number of hypotheses that may be adequate to the reality of particular family patterns; there will be different hypotheses relevant at various levels of analysis, different levels of complexity, and at various points in time. (519)

If our theoretical constructs facilitate access to some realities, they also may deflect interest or mask evidence. Mary Douglas (1975, 6) warns that “information that forms an intelligible pattern in that very process destroys competing information,” and when we “remove the filters” that show subjects in a “preordained light,” “suddenly masses of suppressed information surface.” If families are in some ways unique or distinctive, these attributes will be revealed when they are represented—in a sense, called for—in our theories. On the other hand, if the distinctive attributes do not exist, there can be no answer to the theoretical call. There also is the question of whether an ideal type is expected to conform exactly to observed reality. Conceptual models sensitize us to some things and distract us from others. Whether they conform to external reality is less important than that they stimulate thought and research. Consider Max Weber’s ideal type of bureaucracy. No one seriously criticizes it because real life bureaucracies do not measure up to this model of rational management. Rather, charting the disparities between observed bureaucracies and Weber’s model has been a productive way to study organizations. According to Weber, an ideal type is “formed by the one-sided exaggeration of one or several points of view” in a synthesis of “a great many diffusely and discretely existing component phenomena . . . which are in accordance with those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints . . . arranged into an internally consistent thought-image.” Exaggeration and emphasis are part of the process, and so is “‘idealizing’ abstraction from the features of known situations of the requisite kind” (Burger 1987, 159–60). Thus, identifying distinctive attributes of families and purposively shaping or idealizing them is precisely what theorists ought to be doing. All conceptualizations are selectively constructed; all highlight some variables at the expense of others. Indeed, this is Beutler et al.’s (1989a) central message, that existing family theories have systematically neglected significant aspects of family life. Many of the family disciplines originated in the study and treatment of family problems, and there is a long-term tendency for our professional view of families to be through families in crisis

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(Laing 1972, 22). As a result, there is no shortage of models of family life that reflect conflict, trauma, distress, and deprivation. A perspective that focuses, instead, on issues of altruism, positive emotional intensity, and nurturing provides needed balance. In summary: (1) The distinction between norms and behavior is an artificial, analytical one; the proposed perspective is intended to apply to both. (2) Normative patterns are defined and maintained by sanctions of deviance, and there is always some normal deviance; whether observed variations from a proposed model are sufficient to justify rejecting the model is an empirical question. (3) The proposed perspective is an ideal type, and exaggeration, stereotyping, and highlighting are standard procedures in the construction of ideal types. (4) The utility of an ideal type reflects both its role as a sensitizing tool (exploration) and its correspondence to the reality it supposedly illuminates (validation). Without the exploration, validation is impossible. Conversely, too many failures of validation justify changing the model of exploration. But that happens after the model has been applied repeatedly, not before. Beutler et al. do not say that the family-realm perspective is cognitively superior in all contexts or for all purposes, nor do they reject the contributions and continuing utility of other perspectives. They accept as sufficient the assumptions inherent in science as a worldview (but not science as the worldview), and recommend a creative application of existing methods to new variables and contexts. They advocate shifts in emphasis: presumably more application of “grounded theory” and “emic” rather than “etic” approaches (Feleppa 1986), more attention to a family’s experience in its own terms, and less to the language and technical virtuosity of the investigators. The increased emphasis on the subject’s point of view, and a corresponding diminution of confidence in the rightness of the investigator’s worldview, is in line with trends in marital therapy. There, theory dictates less reliance on the clinician’s expert viewpoint, and more attention to the stories of clients, in their language and according to their priorities and values (Bott, 2001a; Fraenkel, 2006; Guilfoyle, 2003; Parry 1991).

Family Transcendence as an Alternative: Justification and Assumptions Just what is it about familial things that sets them apart? Beutler et al. illustrate one type of unmapped family “beyond” in Murray Bowen’s (1976, 60) statement that “far more of life is governed by automatic emotional

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forces than man is willing to acknowledge.” But if automatic emotional forces explain some aspects of family distinctiveness, what explains the rest? Beutler et al. offer the metaphor of tapestry design, visible holistically but not in the patterns of individual threads.6 Like the tapestry, families are “a combination of phenomena,” a patterning of “basic roots and connections” involving long-term bonds, relationships, and “multifaceted familial connections” (1989a, 806–7, 811; 1989b, 827–28). Thus, family life may be seen as experience in connectedness, combination, and commitment, much of it long-term or open-ended. We propose that what is unique about families—the unconfirmed essence that changing the “lens” may reveal—is captured less in an aggregate of distinctive elements than in a commonality that these and other family attributes express. We refer to a core that the disparate elements share, a unifying dimension that combines the fundamental elements of birth process and generational ties with other attributes. This core dimension—the essential familial connection to life and to the cosmos, to what has been and what could be—may be termed family transcendence. In its simplest sense, it refers to the idea that in many important ways, family ties go beyond other ties. Definitions and Usages To transcend is to go beyond the limits of, to overstep or exceed. The term derives from the Latin transcendere, meaning “to climb over,” and scandere, meaning to climb or mount. To transcend is to rise above, to exceed, excel, outdo, outstrip, surpass, and soar. The transcendent tops, surmounts, and reaches beyond. In its metaphysical senses it is a synonym for mystery or the sacred. Other definitions refer to connecting or surpassing behavior in more everyday contexts. It may denote ways of coping with the discontinuities of life, “actions across ordinary and frequently crossed boundaries,” or mysteries associated with crossing extraordinary boundaries. It may pertain to living holistically and harmoniously, or to “the capacity of human beings to move beyond one reality or symbolic meaning system to another” (Brewer, Neville, Patton, and Payne 1975, 11–12, 18). Scientific and literary usages also cover a broad spectrum.7 Sometimes the term is applied to mystical or religious experience, to the evanescent or the otherworldly. In this sense it is often opposed to practicality and hard science. Thus, Sara Ruddick (1989, 15) writes that in “the practicalist view . . . there is no truth to be apprehended from a transcendental perspective, that is, from no perspective at all,” and Huston Smith (1981, 442) contrasts alternative mind-sets, the modern materialist approach oriented to reductionistic

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control versus an “ampler view of reality” that he calls transcendence and which “turns out to include things that are superior to us.” Other writers place the transcendent and the material world on the same continuum. “Between matter as we observe it in the laboratory,” says physicist Freeman Dyson (1988, 8), “and mind as we observe it in our own consciousness, there seems to be only a difference in degree but not in kind. . . . [S]cientific materialism and religious transcendentalism are neither incompatible nor mutually exclusive.” Perhaps not, but there is a history of oppositions in which the experience of transcendence is contrasted to science and measurement, or, in related dualities, it becomes objectivity vs. subjectivity, the secular vs. the sacred, horizontal vs. vertical causation, naturalism vs. religion, skepticism vs. faith, matter vs. spirit, sophic vs. mantic explanation, or Athens vs. Jerusalem. These are no idle contrasts, for the sophic, objective, skeptical viewpoint tends to deny the right of the alternative viewpoint to exist. The strong naturalistic position is that “the natural order is all there is,” and thus “naturalism is committed to the extermination of supernaturalism” (Wright 1991, 53). It is not just supernaturalism that is devalued or excluded, but whatever does not meet the strict criteria of rational measurement and utility for control, for “an epistemology that aims relentlessly at control rules out the possibility of transcendence in principle” (Smith 1981, 435). Reason, which in the seventeenth century was one among several recognized human characteristics, came “to separate itself from and to outdistance the other[s] . . . spirit, appetite, faith and emotion, but also intuition, will and, most important, experience.” The encroachment has continued, until now “the mythological importance of reason obscures all else and has driven the other elements into the marginal frontiers of doubtful respectability” (Saul 1993, 15). Yet an over-immersion in objectivist knowledge effectively deforms us, making us half-blind. In an image that links Robert Frost and E.E. Cummings,8 the educator Parker Palmer (1983) has criticized the modernist world view for generating “one-eyed lives,” responsive to the “fact and reason” of sensory knowledge but blind to matters of the heart and spirit, including the knowing based in intuitions, beliefs, actions, relationships, and “our bodies themselves.” If we are to make ourselves whole, to achieve “wholesight,” we need a viewpoint that “prepares us to see beyond appearances into the hidden realities of life.” Palmer’s call for “education in transcendence” includes a localizing or centering, inward-looking emphasis that is compatible with the study of families. He talks of renewing “the community of creation” through education that, among other things, portrays the world “as an organic body of personal relations and responses, a living and evolving community of creativ-

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ity and compassion . . . [whose members are] drawn into personal responsiveness and accountability to each other and the world of which we are a part” (Palmer 1983, xi-xiii, 2-4, 7, 14–15). Transcendence, he writes, is not so much a window to the beyond, a reaching outward, as it is a process of viewing ourselves and our communities in a different light: We must resist the popular tendency to think of transcendence as an upward and outward escape from the realities of self and world. Instead, transcendence is a breaking-in, a breathing of the Spirit of love into our existence, a literal in-spiration that allows us to regard ourselves and our world with more trust and hope than ever before. (Palmer 1983, 13)

Relevance to Family Contexts In the perspective of family transcendence the reaching beyond that distinguishes family life applies to physical and psychological limits as well as metaphysical experience. It incorporates into the analysis of family processes the perceived meanings of experience, felt or intuited, obvious or implicit. Family connections stretch beyond the present situation and group, linking family members to social and genetic heritage, to meaning systems, ascribed statuses, present identity and future possibility, to obligation, order, and opportunity. What is special about families, in this view, is the transcendence, the reaching beyond that familial ties express and inspire. Each of the seven distinctive characteristics identified by Beutler et al. may be seen as a context or process for reaching beyond self or situation. Each represents an open-ended effort, responsibility, or connection that in some way exceeds the usual considerations of equity, efficiency, and appropriate input that prevail in nonfamily settings: (1) Generational nature and permanence applies to the linkage of family ties across generations in an open-ended overreaching of present time and cohort. (2) Concern with total persons represents a surpassing and combining of individual roles, a reaching across developmental stages and temporary identities in the construction of “negotiated commitment over time” that builds on the relational history and anticipates a future (Finch 1989, 201). (3) Simultaneous process orientation is a similar stretching and combining, an overarching of activities, objects of attention, and responsibilities, a displacement of unilinear task organization by multimodal orchestration. (4) Intense emotionality, by definition, is extraordinary emotion, well-illustrated in Ruddick’s (1989, 67) comment that “mothering can be imbued with such passionate feelings that onlookers, accustomed to distinguishing thought from feeling and work from love, can

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barely recognize amid the passion either the thinking or the work.” (5) The emphasis on qualitative purposes and processes reaches beyond the getting and having of market economics to incorporate process and being; it rises above units and parts and exceeds appearances, organizing and interpreting experience holistically. (6) Altruistic orientation goes beyond self-interest, surpassing concerns about equity or personal profit in the “inescapable moral claims and obligations” of kinship (Fortes 1969, 242). The prescriptive altruism of kinship surpasses the responsibilities of other social relationships, for “in the last resort kinship is the one type of social relationship which is not instrumental, and . . . it is marked off from all other social relationships by its moral dimension” (Finch 1989, 231). Finally, (7) nurturing governance exceeds mere providing and is oriented beyond present needs and circumstances toward the growth, development, and the future well-being of others. Thus, the perspective of transcendence orients us to the connectedness of things, working outward from family but stretching, level by level, to all living things, to the earth, and beyond. Applying the perspective of family transcendence means paying attention to the scope and meaning of connections, real and imagined, and to times when family relations take on attributes of the sacred. It alerts the observer to the difference, or the possibility of difference, between a fine antique rocking chair made by a nineteenth-century craftsman and a rocking chair made by one’s great-grandfather (Beutler, Owen, and Hefferan 1988); between child care by competent professionals and child care by one’s mother or grandmother; between one’s relationship to adoptive parents and to birth parents. It does not assert that grandfather’s chair, mother’s care, or the ties to birth parents are necessarily better than their counterparts. It does focus attention on the different meanings associated with the alternatives, and their possible consequences. What then, as we work within this perspective, are we sensitized to perceive? What will attention to family transcendence add to the knowledge of family processes? A partial answer is that many apparently unrelated characteristics of families are expressions of the essential limit-stretching, threshold-crossing, boundary-breaching nature of human generational groups. This tendency to surpass or reach beyond, evident in a diversity of manifestations, reflects the meanings family members give to their connections and to the place of these connections in the larger schemes of things. The surpassing power of these meanings is celebrated in song, fable, cliché, and epigraph. It underlies the extraordinary effort in “he’s not heavy, he’s my brother,” the extraordinary seeing beyond appearance in “a face only a mother could love,” the extraordinary warmth in André Maurois’s “without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold,” and the extraordinary salience

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of family in Richard E. Byrd’s “at the end only two things really matter to a man, regardless of who he is, and they are the affection and understanding of his family.” Salience, warmth, insight, effort: all extraordinary, beyond common thresholds, all reflections of the meaning of family connections. What is exceeded, surpassed, gone beyond here? Normal limits, the model suggests, both social and physical; normal, that is, as defined by the norms of nonfamilial organizations and settings. Families are distinctive because they provide connections, meanings, and opportunities to transcend many of the normal limitations of life, including time, appearances, mortality, and meaninglessness. This powerful distinctiveness may transcend family boundaries and spill over into other contexts, as, for example, when families are models for political systems or when fictive kinship fosters social cohesion. Basic Assumptions The perspective of family transcendence is not limited only to that which requires transcendental seeing or knowing because, unlike the epistemology of empiricism, that of transcendence does not reject other ways of knowing. Whereas the epistemology of Western rationalism “rules out the possibility of transcendence in principle,” the alternative epistemology aimed at “embracing rather than controlling” the world does not reject empirical research as a path to knowledge (Smith 1981, 435). This distinction is the ancient one between sophic Western naturalism and mantic Eastern supernaturalism, between a “horizontal” monistic worldview “that confines all realities to the natural order” and a “vertical” dualistic worldview “that includes not only the natural order, but also another world order which transcends it” (Wright 1991, 51). The perspective of transcendence focuses attention on the connections between family members and the social, cultural, and natural entities beyond the bounds of the family. In some ways, it applies a semiotic perspective, exploring how social meanings are constructed from the connections—the relationships—among linguistic, social, and biological fragments of life. “Not essences, nor classes, but filaments—those connections out of which webs of meanings are spun are the subjects of cultural inquiry,” writes Perin (1986, 98–99, 101). The “connected relations” of a meaning system “are the concepts, most often silent, on which we predicate choice and conduct.” They tend to be silent, tacitly understood, unremarked despite their core importance as underlying moral systems or guides to action. Perin quotes Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) statement that “what is essential goes without saying because it comes without saying” and identifies relations among family

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members as the point of greatest concentration of such essential, typically unsaid, connections (or “predicates”): These silent predicates are Intimacy, Trust, Obligation, Choice, Reciprocity, and Love, among others, and all their shadings of intensity in our feelings and the weightings we give them in practice. We receive each concept as a convention embedded in an invisible social history, and throughout life we elaborate on it through a personal history formed out of experiences in every domain. . . . When Nearest is not Dearest, it is especially confusing. For Close and Love, paired with the predicates Blood and Intimacy, endow relatives with the deepest intensity and heaviest weight of all American personal relations. . . . When neighbors are friends and we fine-tune Close in our actions toward them, we reserve some of that same moral space of Intimacy and Love for each relative by blood and marriage. What each of them in turn means is modulated by religious, ethnic, and personal emphases on the kind and degree of Obligation, Reciprocity, Trust with which we choose to act. . . . Systems of meaning are such systems of predicates, tunneling by the thousands beneath the surface of everyday life. Making our actions possible, they make our world meaningful. (Perin 1986, 101–2)

Perin’s metaphor is tunneling, ours is the reaching beyond or surpassing that is denoted by transcendence. Both draw attention to the connections that make life meaningful. Family contexts are especially fruitful in the production of connections and meanings that transcend in the vertical or spiritual sense, as well as in natural, physical terms. The proposed perspective is an orientation to a variety of possible beyonds, including those quantitatively and naturalistically knowable. It is anchored in certain assumptions about families and about transcendence generally. Let us review some of these assumptions. Locations in space and time are situated within and defined against a background or a “beyond.” Each definition of an entity in society or nature, abstract or concrete, separates that entity in some way from the beyond that surrounds it. That is, all conceptualizations involve boundaries that separate self from other, us from them, now from then, here from there, a focus of attention from a surround of inattention. Each social unit exists by being discernably, or at least definably, bounded, identifiable against its background. In systems, some units seem more salient than others (i.e., more apt to project outward or upward), more implicated in entities located beyond their boundaries, both in their context (the near surround) and further afield. (By “implicated” we refer both to the numbers and the intensity of connections to other units or systems). Historically, families and kinship groups have been among the most significant of social units, extensively and pervasively

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connected in configurations of action and meaning both known and tacit. The model of transcendence alerts the investigator to the possible importance of the many ways that elements and characteristics of families surpass or extend into the family beyonds. In summary, the family transcendence model invites holistic inquiry into the diversity of possible contexts and connections that characterize families, including dimensions of location and meaning that heretofore have not been seen as appropriate for scientific inquiry. In its explicit acceptance of epistemologies other than empiricism, this perspective allows for multidimensional beyonds, for connections, divides, intuitions, or images that may be inaccessible by the strict standards of positivism. It accesses an epistemological and procedural beyond relevant to our inquiries into the nature and meaning of family contexts and connections.

A Preliminary Typology We will introduce three general categories of family transcendence with six illustrative types. These illustrations are not intended as proofs but rather as parts of a preliminary statement of an ideal-typical framework. The broad categories distinguish family transcendence as generational, social mediational, and as context for encounters with the sacred. Generational transcendence pertains to connections among kindred, and covers extensions both backward and forward in time. It includes: the parent-child, and especially the mother-child bond, as the primordial, essential human linkage; kinship ties as links to an ancestry reaching beyond mortality with claims and commitments that bind the dead and the living; and kinship ties as claims on the future, to one’s posterity among the generations of the unborn. In instances of family transcendence as social mediation, family attributes are extended beyond one’s kindred, as when family relationships are invoked as explicit models for social relations generally; or when kinship terms serve a mediating, solidarity-building function among unrelated persons or even to affirm one’s solidarity with nature. Finally, family events and processes may serve as occasions for encounters with the sacred, some of them mediated by representatives of organized religion. Generational Transcendence The Essential Bond: Parent-Child Relations. Family life is built around parentchild relations, and these most basic of kinship ties usually engender deep

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emotion and intense commitment. The generational bond—the dyadic link between parent and child and especially between mother and child—may be so powerful in contrast to other social bonds that it seems to transcend ordinary human ties. The motivation inherent in such powerful commitment may compel mothers or fathers to do “superhuman” things or take “irrational” action for their children’s sake, as in the case of the California Indian mother who leaped into the stormy sea. This kind of generational transcendence is illustrated in the following statement on love and parenting, based in a woman’s experience both as a mother and as a professional woman who studied caregiver-child interaction in day care centers: The bond between parents and children is incredibly strong. The love between them is special; it grows for so many years without judgment, without limit. Parents simply love their children beyond all bounds. . . . Parents will do things for their children that no one else would dream of. . . . You could ask a parent about the rage she feels when someone does her child harm. It is not a normal rage that knows normal bounds. There is a depth of feeling, of commitment, of love, that lies beyond the rules of order of the rest of the universe. Parents may carry these larger-than-life feelings about their children deep in their hearts, but most are never called upon to do extreme things for their children. . . . Most of the things we do with our children, like the things we say to them, can seem ordinary, small, mundane. (Fallows 1985, 230–31)

Notice how many times this author invokes the experience of transcendence, the extension of feeling or obligation beyond limits. The parent-child bond grows “without limit,” parental love extends “beyond all bounds,” parental behavior is beyond explanation, parental protective rage is beyond normal bounds, the commitment is “beyond the rules of order,” the feelings are “larger-than-life.” Plainly, to work from a position defining families as simply another kind of economic organization is to blind oneself in advance to much of this. By contrast, a family transcendence model sensitizes one to the high probability that such unbounded states will be encountered. Ancestral Linkages. Among the ways that cultures invest death with meaning are the beliefs (and practices) of ancestral transcendence. However, the personal and familial ramifications of these beliefs extend well beyond the cultural problem of interpreting death. For example, Chidester (1990, 40) explains ancestral transcendence this way: Ancestral transcendence connects the individual person with a continuous biological chain of parents and offspring. The death of a parent may seem

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to create an unbridgeable gap, but ancestral beliefs and practices attempt to bridge any separation created by death. Through ancestral transcendence, parents live on through their children. In a real sense, parents, grandparents, and even more distant ancestors may be kept alive by specific practices that show honor, respect, reverence, and service to the “living dead.” Ancestral transcendence represents rising above and going beyond death to the extent that ancestors live on through their children and continue to have an effect on their descendants.

The generational ties implicated in ancestral transcendence are at least bidirectional and impact the meaning of life as well as death. Marcel’s (1962) essay on “the mystery of the family” is, in part, a reflection on ancestral transcendence: Under the abstract words of paternity and sonship, I have gradually come to guess at occult and forbidden realities which make my soul dizzy. . . . At the very least, I come to believe that, far from being endowed with an absolute existence of my own, I am, without having originally wished or suspected it, I incarnate the reply to the reciprocal appeal which two beings flung to each other in the unknown and which, without suspecting it, they flung beyond themselves to an incomprehensible power whose only expression is the bestowal of life. I am this reply, unformed at first, but who, as I become articulate, will know myself to be a reply and a judgment. Yes, I am irresistibly led to make the discovery that by being what I am, I myself am a judgment upon those who have called me into being; and thereby infinite new relationships will be established between them and me. On the other hand, I have to recognize that behind the lighted but much restricted zone which I call my family there stretches, to infinitude, ramifications which in theory at any rate I can follow out tirelessly. Only in theory, however, for in fact an impenetrable darkness envelops this upstream region of myself and prevents me from exploring any further. I can discern enough, however, to enable me to follow this umbilical cord of my temporal antecedents, and to see it taking shape before me yet stretching back beyond my life in an indefinite network which, if traced to its limits, would probably be co-extensive with the human race itself. My family, or rather my lineage, is the succession of historical processes by which the human species has become individualised into the singular creature that I am. . . . Between my ancestors and myself a far more obscure and intimate relationship exists. I share with them as they do with me—invisibly; they are consubstantial with me and I with them. (Marcel 1962, 70–71)

Novelist Joyce Carol Oates (1990, 85) captures generational transcendence more deftly still as a “small stab of recognition” between grandmother and

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granddaughter, whose extraordinary mutual awareness exists “because we are linked by blood and blood is memory without language.” Ties to Posterity. One version of immortality is that extension of life achieved vicariously through one’s descendants. This is an old idea compatible with the Darwinian model of natural selection. Its modern version is a sociobiological immortality dependent upon the continuity of genes, an end so programmed into the cells, the model suggests, that the drive to maximize the continuity and spread of one’s DNA becomes the meaning of life (Wilson 1980; 2005). The transcendence of generational ties, of family over mortality, is also conceived in ways that place less emphasis on biological persistence than on the present referencing of one’s behavior to future generations. Such forward-oriented generational transcendence appears in the Confucian affirmation that “if a man does good deeds, then amongst his descendants in future generations there will rise one who will become a true King. All a gentleman can do in starting an enterprise is to leave behind a tradition which can be carried on. Heaven alone can grant success” (Mencius 1970, I.B.14). Contrast this aiming beyond the limits in Mencius with a Native American view of the claims of posterity on Indian women, “the clan mothers, faithkeepers, mothers, and grandmothers”: “They are the carriers of life, transmitters of sacred knowledge, the keepers of ancient ways, the hearts of the nations. Through them the generations pass and the wisdom of the ages flow. Highly venerated in their culture as the conduit connecting the worlds of the past with the now, they are revered for giving life, both physically and spiritually, to the world to come” (Wall 1993, xii; emphasis added). An instance of generational transcendence in which both the parentchild and the conjugal bond play a part is the account by English critic and essayist Edmund Gosse of his dying mother’s vision of her family’s future. My Mother, in her last hours, had dwelt on our unity in God; we were drawn together, she said, elect from the world, in a triplicity of faith and joy. She had constantly repeated the words: “We shall be one family, one song. One song! one family!” My father, I think, accepted this as a prophecy, he felt no doubt of our triple unity; my Mother had now merely passed before us, through a door, into a world of life, where we should presently join her, where all things would be radiant and blissful, but where we three would, in some unknown way, be particularly drawn together in a tie of inexpressible beatitude. (Gosse 1984, 50)

An example from ancient Greece will round out this cross-cultural demonstration of forward-oriented generational transcendence. Aristotle (1934,

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55, 57) remarks the contingent nature of post-mortal happiness, which may depend on the proper actions of one’s descendants and friends: That the happiness of the dead is not influenced at all by the fortunes of their descendants and their friends in general seems too heartless a doctrine, and contrary to accepted beliefs. . . . It does then appear that the dead are influenced in some measure by the good fortune of their friends, and likewise by their misfortunes but that the effect is not of such a kind or degree as to render the happy unhappy or vice versa.

Family Transcendence as Social Mediation Beyond Kinship: Ties to the Human Family. Family life is transcendent in the sense that the values and practices acquired there resonate beyond it, affecting relationships with others. Kin selectivity, or preference for one’s kindred, is a cultural universal. Conversely, caring greatly about what happens to persons outside of one’s kinship network is not universal. The Confucian literature holds up family love as the model for human relationships generally; it is the extension of the love between parents and children to a wider social circle that promises social peace. Ideally, the love of family, or rather, the influence of a loving family, extends beyond one’s kindred to strengthen society. According to Mencius, as interpreted in Lau’s (1970, 30–31) introduction and commentary, one cannot love humanity without loving one’s family: One should treat one’s fellow human beings with benevolence, but benevolence is based on the love one feels for one’s parents: “The content of benevolence is the serving of one’s parents.” . . . It is by extending this love to others that one becomes a benevolent man. “A benevolent man extends his love from those he loves to those he does not love.” . . . As benevolence is an extension of the natural love for one’s parents to humanity at large through various degrees of kinship, it would be . . . unnatural to love all men alike. One should love one’s parents more than other members of the family, other members of the family more than members of the same village, and so on until one reaches humanity at large. Thus to love all men alike is to deny the claim of one’s parents to a greater degree of love.

In early Christian scripture the strength of the parent-child bond is the readily recognizable standard against which commitment to a more universal discipleship is judged, e.g., “he that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matt. 10:37, Authorized Version). Not only is family love a standard by which to gauge the commitment of discipleship, it is also a

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threshold against which divine love may be compared. Statements about the nature of divine love are anchored in references to the love of earthly parents for their children. Terms That Transcend: Fictive and Symbolic Relationships. The mediational use of kinship terms includes the bestowal of specific titles of honored relationship, such as brother or grandmother, to persons one wishes to honor. Another usage is to assign a prestigious kinship title to an entire category or group of persons. The honorific label is a term of power and courtesy with meanings and connotations that extend beyond existing relationships and that lift relatives and others to honored, responsible positions. Beverly Hungry Wolf, of the Blackfoot people, illustrates both usages in a chapter on “who my grandmothers are.” As a child, she knew only one of her biological grandmothers, her mother’s mother, AnadaAki, yet she was nurtured and guided by many grandmothers: Among the Indian people relationships are much more generalized than among many others. For instance, all my female relatives of Anada Aki’s age are my grandmothers, as well as some who are younger. Also, all the women of my tribe who lived long ago are spoken of as grandmothers. In addition, it is common for any old woman in the tribe, when speaking kindly, to call any young woman or girl “my granddaughter.” (Hungry Wolf 1982, 19–20)

Similarly, the Confucian model for the relationship between virtuous rulers and their subjects is the parent-child tie. Good government is benevolent government, the argument goes, and benevolence is learned at home. Mencius (1970, IV.A.27) said that “the content of benevolence is the serving of one’s parents,” but benevolence is also expressed in a parental concern for children. Thus, a summary of the political implications of Confucian orthodoxy states that “the love a ruler feels for his people is not identical with, but an extension of, the love felt by a parent for his child” (Lau 1970, 41). Mencius often used kinship terms to emphasize the benevolent nurturant attitude of a good king, who was to be “father and mother to the people” (Mencius 1970, I.A.4, I.B.7, II.A.5, III.A.3). Fictive kin are created by applying kinship terms to friends and neighbors, and persons so designated may function as if they were literal kindred, assuming the appropriate obligations and roles (Stack 1974). This practice increases commitment to friendship and also affirms the priority of kinship over friendship (Jurich 1989). The adoption of outsiders by making them fictive kin functions similarly in other settings. It may extend beyond human society to include claims of a family tie that binds one to a species of animal, all living things, or even the earth.

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To affirm a kinship tie to the biosphere, or to portions of it involves more than merely asserting a liking or sympathy for nature. The application of family terminology transcends the culturally defined boundary between humans and other life forms and links them in the language of commitment and duty, extending the morality of kinship to a diversity of beings. Such usage shows the power of family transcendence, its claims so strong that there is spillover that extends to other connections. Consider the obligation and kinship to the family of creation expressed in Danny Blackgoat’s (1991, 6) statement: I am a Navajo and I belong to the earth. The earth is my mother, my provider, and my caretaker. I am her child. She nourishes me from her body and her soul. I belong to the land. I am rooted in my mother earth. Her deserts, canyons, and mesas encircle me. Her mountains, fields, and forests are a part of me. I am one with nature, and she is one with me.

Family as Context for Experiencing the Sacred People experience the sacred in family contexts. Many of the important rituals that enact cultural meanings are family rituals or developmental rites of passage. Among the ceremonies in which one may be touched by the metaphysical are weddings, christenings, confirmations, healings, ritual purifications, dedications, and funerals. Even when directed by religious leaders, such rites tend to be family occasions, and associated metaphysical experience may validate family contexts as settings for the sacred. Although family transcendence extends beyond the strictly religious, the call for theory development at the intersection of religion and family (Thomas and Roghaar 1990) should include aspects of family transcendence, for the sanctity to which both organized religion and personal spirituality relate may be sensed in the processes of parenthood and family life. Observe the spirit of reverence and awe in this father’s attempt to express his largerthan-love feelings about his child: My loving my child is akin to my sensing how sacred is the bond between us. But the loving does not seem large enough to contain my experience of the sacredness of our link, while the second does seem to embrace the first. What is added in recognizing the realm of the sacred is something that goes beyond me as the container of the feeling, beyond the immediate relationship between me and that which I appreciate deeply. In the recognition of the sacred, my consciousness experiences itself as a part of the entire vibrant and seething whole.

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It is not just that things matter. They matter so much that their mattering cannot be contained within my little vessel. I feel small in relation to the enormous value I have glimpsed. . . . The love I have for my child is something in itself, but it is also part of something that goes beyond him and me. When I experience this, my comprehension of this child’s “value” makes my cup run over. (Schmookler 1993, 7–8)

These three general categories and six subtypes do not exhaust the possible varieties of family transcendence. Applications of this perspective surely will reveal other important types, such as the transcendence of class status and hierarchy, of the mundane and the ordinary, of space and location, and of physical limitation. We turn now to the positioning of conceptualizations of transcendence within contemporary theory.

Transcendence and Contemporary Family Theory Mainstream family theory continues to be positivist, although perhaps less so than in the recent past when in contrast to the growing disenchantment with “objectivist theory” among methodologists and philosophers, “family theory was building its theoretical foundation on the positivist rubble being discarded by the philosophy of science” (Thomas and Wilcox 1987, 96). Family transcendence belongs to an alternative tradition, the perspective of hermeneutics, with its emphasis upon interpretation and meaning, its goal of understanding rather than causal explanation, its focus on introspection and the role of the knower in shaping reality. But some of the theoretical approaches applied by positivists are also relevant, either as frameworks to be recast to include aspects of family transcendence, or as unresolved issues and anomalous findings to be reconsidered. A family transcendence perspective is postmodern in its emphasis on local reality and local authority, and in its rejection of the modernistic elevation of externally accredited technical specialists over culturally validated local authorities. It does not share the modernist intolerance for modes of inquiry other than rationalistic quantification. It affirms the right to be taken seriously in terms of one’s own subculture and one’s personal or familial vision of things. To the student of family, it means accepting the grounded account of a family member as a legitimate view of reality from that person’s viewpoint, according as much respect to that viewpoint as to the preconceived explanations whereby elements of such experience that do not fit prevailing theories are discounted or refigured.

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A family transcendence approach is congruent with many of the concepts and procedures of discourse analysis (Benwell 2006; Gee 2005; Gubrium and Holstein 1993) and, as we noted earlier, with semiotics. The parallels include an emphasis on subjectivity and everyday life, an overriding concern with meanings and their relation to language, awareness of multiple or indeterminate interpretations, sensitivity to the various dimensions of the construction of reality, and attention to family imbeddedness in organizational, cultural, spatial, and temporal milieux. Issues of family transcendence are also relevant to the life course perspective in family theory (Bengtson and Allen 1993; White and Klein 2002), families’ experience of time (Daly and Beaton 2005), and human ecology theory (Bubolz and Sontag 1993; Rettig 1993; Phenice and Griffore 2005; White and Klein, 2002). The basic themes of human development central to life course analysis—the application of diachronic and multidisciplinary perspectives to multiple temporal and social contexts and attention to heterogeneity in structure and process—bear directly upon inquiries into family meanings and the ways that family processes facilitate a reaching beyond present time, location, and social situation. The parallels with ecology theory remain to be explored, but certainly they include tracing the implications of the special meanings of kinship and family, both literal and fictive, as they may apply to the ordinary tasks necessary for sustaining family life as well as to wider contexts of claims and relationships. Theorizing on the “religion-family connection” (Thomas 1988; Thomas and Roghaar 1990; Dollahite, Marks, and Goodman 2004) points to the important role of personal spirituality as a predictor of personal and, presumably, family well-being. We would add that the metaphysical meaning and experience in transcendence sometimes identified as “spirituality” may be as closely tied to family processes as to religious institutions or may influence both while belonging to neither. This seems to be the import of many of the childhood spiritual experiences recounted to Edward Hoffman (1992).9 They imparted transcendent insight that resonated into adult life, often affecting future priorities and values, yet typically these experiences were not directly associated with institutional religious practice. In taking a phenomenological approach to family meanings, it is important to acknowledge the wide range of transcendent experience that may relate in some way to family and kinship ties. Not all transcendence can be seen as positive or all studies of family transcendence as optimistic. We share Huston Smith’s (1981) concern over a cultural tendency to deny or fear rather than admit the possibility of benign forces and powers beyond our ken.

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Yet we must affirm that phenomenologically, there is also a transcendence of evil (Adams 1999; Moehle 1978; Niemeyer 1989).

Studying Family Transcendence: Toward Knowing and Understanding For several decades now, a “new cosmology” of indeterminacy and chaos, wormholes and superstrings (Thorne 1994; Dyson 1988; Koestler 1979) has negated many of the assumptions that have sustained the modern Western mind-set (Smith 1981), but the old mythology that reductionistic positivism holds the key to reality dies hard. The dominance of objectivist epistemology continues. It is “a way of knowing that treats the world as an object to be dissected and manipulated” and it accepts as truth whatever “works” (Palmer 1983, xi-xiii, 2–4, 7). There is a marked contrast between the facts-are-facts mentality of objectivism and the more holistic, pluralistic reality accessible through “respectful listening and faithful responding” in a “patient process of dialogue, consensus seeking, and personal transformation” (67–68). In the past, family life consisted of the activities of common people operating in well-understood, commonsensical ways. But common sense and the down-to-earth understanding of family processes have sometimes been among the casualties of rational analysis by specialists,10 and of modernist education, which in some ways seems to have “cut us off from the self-evident” (Saul 1993, 137). Recovery of the self-evident means, among other things, respecting family members’ narratives about what is going on in their families. It means respecting the connectedness of their lives and the integrity of their definitions of the situation, not as “truth,” but as legitimate viewpoints to be taken into account. It involves respect for the rationality of ordinary life, for “folk” psychology, along with respect for scientific rationality. The data family scholars use—and the information family members use, for that matter—are always texts of some kind, and our methods involve assembling and interpreting selected texts (behaviors) about families and family life. We recognize that the same accounts of behavior may be variously interpreted in line with different epistemological and theoretical assumptions. Along with the modernists, we assume that beyond the apparent diversity of individual and local accounts are repetitive patterns. With some of their critics, we recognize that in the social sciences “there seems to be a precise trade-off between truth and generality. If the ‘law’ is true, then it is not general; if it is general, then it is not true. . . . At best, the statements of general laws are neither empirically true nor false” (Bohman 1991, 24). Fur-

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ther work is needed to improve procedures for negotiating this tricky middle ground between “true” and “false.” Prevailing epistemologies—Cartesian/Newtonian, Einsteinian, Batesonian, or pragmatic, positivistic, and hermeneutic (Fuchs 1993a)—are ways of extracting meaning from texts. Of these, the interpretive/hermeneutic seems best suited for charting family transcendence. An appropriate methodology for telling transcendence must be cross-cultural in the broadest sense. It is grounded in the voice of the people, but it is also connected to the voice of the observer, the analyst, the spectator. In Clifford Geertz’s terms, we seek “experience-near” understanding, but we need not be mystically endowed, transcendent ourselves, to accomplish this: The trick is not to get yourself into some inner correspondence of spirit with your informants. Preferring, like the rest of us, to call their souls their own, they are not going to be altogether keen about such an effort anyhow. The trick is to figure out what the devil they think they are up to. . . . The ethnographer does not, and, in my opinion, largely cannot, perceive what his informants perceive. What he perceives, and that uncertainly enough, is what they perceive “with”—or “by means of,” or “through” . . . or whatever the word should be. In the country of the blind, who are not as unobservant as they look, the one-eyed is not king, he is spectator. (Geertz 1983, 53)

The perspective of family transcendence, in its research applications, is grounded in conversation, in what is said to be, and oriented toward interpretation rather than prediction and control (Fuchs 1993b, 35–36). However, in taking the personal account or the cultural artifact seriously, we recognize that the very act of taking that voice is an interactive act. We do not aspire to get inside people’s skins, nor imagine that in confronting their texts that we confront their experience. Yet we share the phenomenologists’ desire to observe and probe reflectively, to temporarily reenact or reexperience the transcendent content of experience (Twiss and Conser 1992, 9). Recognizing that no more definitive grounding is available, we begin with the local text. A first principle in the study of family transcendence is the validation of the individual perspective and the presumption of integrity at the level of individual consciousness. It is assumed that subjects are no more likely than scientists to lie, to be deceived, or to be victims of false consciousness. If modernist science can be decentered in terms of linguistic and cultural biases, and alleged rationality and objectivity revealed as relativistic fictions (cf. Hekman 1990, Saul 1993, von Glasersfeld 1984), then there is place

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and grounding as well for personal, idiosyncratic “truth.” It is a respected place, for with the collapse of truth as hegemonic consensus comes a revalidation of the local and personal worldview as at least no less worthy of attention than that of the dominant technical expert. In a relativistic social universe, the majority may be as mistaken as the minority, and the coding of a respondent’s experience into the categories of the learned investigator is properly recognized as not merely a refining of reality but also as an exercise in power. In the mythic view of postivitistic science, nature presents itself democratically to all who apply the appropriate technologies of apprehension. In fact, as Crease (1993) has shown, access to reality via the controlled experiment depends not only on the use of the right procedures and equipment, but also on the differential preparation and sensitivity, indeed, the virtuosity of the investigators in calling forth a performance in much the same sense that performances are created on the stage. People differ in the scope and sensitivity of their physical senses, in training and experience, in analytic and interpretive abilities. Similarly, it seems, people are differentially sensitive to the vertical complexities of the transcendent. Some of us seem to see through or hear beyond or intuit better than others. Earlier we cited Eaton’s (1977, 11–12) notion that what separates us from a knowable beyond is like the transparent skin of a soap bubble, and if there are many to whom the bubble seems opaque, others “perceive within the bubble itself reflections of what lies outside and begin to realise that everything within is neither more nor less than a reflection.” In a similar vein, Schmookler (1993, 3–5) invites us to “envision the sacred in terms of the quality of the human instrument that registers it,” and suggests that, among the many inequalities of life, the most significant divide may be “between those who experience the world as having a sacred dimension and those who do not.” A second methodological principle is respect for the host subculture, or niche, manifested in attention to local meanings, values, and attributions. Part of the challenge is to balance the power of specialists, whose views of family processes and what they mean have generally prevailed, with the power of family and community members. Over the years the experts have criticized local and familial definitions of things as naive, emotional, nostalgic, outdated or impractical, and generations of families have been impoverished by modernistic counsel prompting them to exchange their own family fictions for those grounded in someone else’s cultural reality. (See, for example, Greer’s [1984] indictment of Western population experts and government family planning programs; Ehrenreich and English’s [1978] account

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of 150 years of the experts’ advice to women on such matters as health, sex, marriage, housework, motherhood, and child care; or Red Horse, Shattuck, and Hoffman [1981] and Unger [1977] on the impact of modern expertise on American Indian families.) Now, in retrospect, it has turned out that the abstractions of the experts are as culture-bound as those of the family members, and the modern view as self-serving as the traditional. A third principle is recognition of the ubiquity of connection, that entities overlap and interpenetrate such that to distinguish boundaries and to identify limits is always somewhat unnatural and arbitrary. In the interpretive mode necessary for studying transcendence in families, at first we settle for comprehensible parts, recognizing that in the parting that produced them, much that was necessary to our understanding may have departed, having been set aside or partitioned away.11 Temporarily, at least, the larger view is beyond us. Attention to transcendence means that we pay attention to hints and flashes12 of that which is beyond, rather than asserting in purblind pride that there is no beyond. A paradigm that allows transcendental attributes is open, not closed. It encourages humility, not hubris, and fosters questioning rather than dogmatic assertion of fact. In the application of a familial paradigm we seek to facilitate the meaningful sharing of family experience. By emphasizing the emic, the grounded position, the local voice, we hope to contribute to a more balanced view, one that recontextualizes the abstract in human experience and at the same time highlights both common sense and the meanings of life as lived in families.

Notes 1. The metaphor of the lens is probably more appropriate than either of the others—tapestry and puzzle—that appears in the realm essay. It is also much more common; the literatures are studded with such lens usage. Considering the following examples representing lens as self, story, theory (or whatever else one read last night), paradigm, and positivistic inquiry generally. (1) “You are merely the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as a lens does. If you seek yourself, ‘your rights,’ you prevent the oil and air from meeting in the flame, you rob the lens of its transparency” (Hammarskjöld 1964, 155). (2) “I’m referring to the stories you make about your life, the stories you tell first to yourself and then to other people, the stories you use as a lens for interpreting experience as it comes along” (Bateson 1993, 41). (3) “[T]he previous night you were re-reading material on loss and mourning. Using that lens, you discover that the therapeutic conversation highlights information relevant to that model” (Sluzki 1992, 217). A sharper statement on theory as lens is Twiss and Conser (1992, 32): “[T]o see the world accurately

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from the standpoint of a given tradition . . . it is clearly necessary to put aside any and all distorting ‘lenses’ that might be associated with opinions about the truth or falsity or illusory quality of religion . . . and about how various theories might explain religions in terms of psychological or sociological mechanisms.” (4) Hoffman’s (1990) piece “Constructing Realities: An Art of Lenses” comments that “even the choice of sensory modalities in psychotherapy is socially derived.” Formerly, the key word was “feeling,” but now, she says, “more recent cognitive models have given primacy to ways of ‘seeing.’” Describing her own processes of “seeing” she identifies “three powerful new lenses. One is social construction theory. The second is what I call a second-order view. The third is gender. Social construction theory is really a lens about lenses” (Hoffman 1990, 4). (5) In “pity this busy monster, manunkind,” E. E. Cummings (1954, 397) reminds us that the positivistic progress we experience through the use of ever-stronger lenses is, if not illusionary, at least non-linear and not readily interpretable: . . . lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself.

2. Harris (1990, 52–54) distinguishes domains from networks and defines kinship as cutting across several domains. Domains, he says, denote “areas of social life . . . in a given culture,” and may be seen as rough parallels to social institutions. Thus, “one of the characteristics of modernity is conventionally held to be the separation of the different domains—of the state from civil society, of the family from the economy, of religion from the family and the state.” In contrast, “it is characteristic of kinship relations that they are not confined to a single domain. Kinship is not a domain word, whether domains are distinguished ‘etically’ by the observer as among functionalists or ‘emically’ by members of the culture concerned.” 3. On the basis of an exhaustive review of the anthropological literature, Donald Brown (1991) concludes that there are universal human traits, or generalizations that apply to the entire human family. Many of these universals are well-documented in several generations of anthropological research. However, and here Brown shows how the dominant paradigms in a field determine what its practitioners accept as real, in anthropology it has not been politically or intellectually correct to study universals as such, nor to work from paradigms that assume the existence of universals. Instead, paradigms of relativity and diversity have prevailed: the study of universals has been effectively tabooed as an unintended [?] consequence of assumptions that have predominated in anthropology (and other social sciences) throughout much of this century. From 1915 to 1934 American anthropologists established three fundamental principles about the nature of culture: that culture is a distinct kind of phenomenon that cannot be reduced to others (in particular, not to biology or psychology), that culture (rather than our physical nature) is the fundamental determinant of human behavior, and that culture is largely arbitrary. This combination of assumptions made

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universals anomalous and very likely to be rare; to admit or dwell upon their existence raised troubling questions about anthropology’s fundamental assumptions. (6)

Although these assumptions limited research on universals, the accumulated evidence, much of it originally oriented to support the paradigms of diversity and relativity, now suggests that it is cultural relativism and not the existence of universals that is bracketed within clear limits (D. Brown 1991, vii). 4. Wilson (1993, 15–23) comments that what is remarkable historically and crossculturally is not that there are violations, but that in the aggregate they are so few. Given the effort and self-sacrifice involved in caring for children, what merits explanation is why deviant neglect is the exception rather than the rule. See also Pollock’s (1983) refutation of the notions that parents in traditional society did not love their children very much and that good mothering is an invention of modernization. 5. In modern society media emphasis on instances of such normal deviance may exaggerate its apparent incidence, making families appear more deviant than they are, statistically speaking. 6. Beaver’s (1972: 689–90) commentary on Melville’s Moby Dick is a revealing parallel to Beutler et al.’s imagery of threads and tapestry. Although an immense body of literary scholarship makes it possible for the commentator to analyze each thread in the Melvillean tapestry, “to decode the text, unravel the threads, reveal the pattern (turned inside out) and trace the jumbled loops to their several links and knots,” yet according to Beaver this exercise in reduction and deconstruction, this magnification of minutiae misses the essence of the novel. Moby Dick is best understood on its own terms, holistically, rather than from the etic vantage point of external scholarship: “For the maze itself is the pattern, only to be traced from within . . . Moby Dick is symbolically self-contained and forms its own best and sufficient commentary.” Presumably the reader’s understanding is enhanced by access to both reductive and holistic scholarship. In families too, we believe, the patterns may be unraveled, decoded, and analyzed from external perspectives, but their ultimate richness, or at least a different richness, must be comprehended from within. The same point, justifying a hermeneutic, interpretive approach to understanding, and arguing that to understand other people’s worlds, researchers must become members of their groups, is made by Habermas (1981, 165) as translated and quoted by Fuchs (1993a, 167): Understanding a symbolic utterance generally requires participation in processes of communication. Meanings . . . can only be decoded from inside. The symbolically prestructured reality is a universe that remains inaccessible and incomprehensible to an observer who is unable to communicate. The lifeworld is accessible only to a subject who makes use of his capacity to speak and act. He gains access by participating in the communication of members, and by becoming a virtual member of the group.

7. A review of the “dimensions” of evil and transcendence (Moehle 1978) offers definitions of transcendence from selected literary figures, social scientists, and

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political philosophers. They include a return to communion with the inner self and a rejection of the alienated self (D. H. Lawrence), the “recognition and rejection of falsehood” (Anton Chekhov), “the ethical imperative for survival as a human—as a moral being” (Alexsander Solzhenitsyn), the restoration of mental health (Sigmund Freud), whatever is “conducive to the development and expansion of consciousness and conscience” (Rollo May), predispositions that facilitate the full realization of one’s “embryonic human qualities” (Erich Fromm), behavior that facilitates social interaction and the well-being of society (George Herbert Mead), and forces that foster resistance to totalitarian dehumanization and protect unique human qualities (Hannah Arendt) (Moehle 1978, 22, 30, 43, 79, 104, 118–19, 172–73). 8. The epigraph of Palmer’s “Introduction” is a verse from Frost’s “Two Tramps in Mud Time” wherein vocation and avocation are separate eyes that “make one in sight.” Palmer’s text substitutes “heart” and “mind” for Frost’s “love” and “need” pair. He begins, “Many of us live one-eyed lives.” In Cummings’s work, the “one-eyed lives” phrase is an immediate reminder of his many celebrations of the transcendence of nature, and of love, over the poverty of reductionist science, and especially of the following stanzas (Cummings 1954, 189–90): what’s beyond logic happens beneath will; nor can these moments be translated: i say that even after April by God there is no excuse for May . . . (While you and i have lips and voices which are for kissing and to sing with who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch invents an instrument to measure Spring with? . . . )

9. The power of the heritage of rationalism and positivism in children’s everyday lives is reflected in the accounts given to Hoffman (1992) of transcendent experience in childhood. A common theme in these accounts is that children were afraid to tell anyone of their experiences for fear of being laughed at or thought odd. Sometimes an initial telling elicited negative feedback such that the child did not again attempt to share the experience with friends or adults. Some examples: Suzanne writes that she tried to explain a dazzling childhood experience to her mother and was puzzled by her mother’s indifferent reaction; finally “I decided to keep it to myself. But I also began to fear that there was something wrong with me.” Marsha did not share her experience “for fear of being misunderstood or ridiculed.” Ellen recalls, “I never revealed to anyone exactly what I had experienced. Somehow I felt uneasy they would judge it or try to invalidate it.” Lana tells that because she tried to share her experience with parents they “dubbed me a liar for years afterward” (Hoffman 1992, 32, 49, 75, 148). 10. Much of the artistic tension in the film Lorenzo’s Oil is generated by the incompatibility between the values and definitions held by medical scientists doing research on an incurable disease, and those of the parents of a child afflicted by the

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disease. Saul (1993, 86) offers a historical instance of the incompatibility of human and modernist values in a description of rationalist manager supreme Robert McNamara: “[T]he untouchable simplicity of his advanced logic rarely takes the human factor into consideration. To do so would cause an unprofessional distortion in his conceptual framework.” 11. This problem of the family scientist, intent on illuminating a family situation or “niche” despite its unseen connections to everything else, is well stated in Stephen Jay Gould’s (1987, 181) account of the intellectual dilemma facing professional ecologists, who . . . must live in tension between two approaches to the diversity of life. On the one hand, they are tempted to bask in the irreducibility and glory of it all—exult and record. But, on the other, they acknowledge that science is a search for repeated pattern. Laws and regularities underlie the display. . . . Many ecologists have escaped this tension by focusing their work on a single approach—exultation or explanation—and by treating the other side with territorial suspicion and derogation.

12. Walt Whitman would have called them “flashes and specks.” In “There was a child went forth,” he wonders “Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and specks? Men and women crowding fast in the streets, if they are not flashes and specks what are they?” (Whitman 1954, 291)

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After a terrible labor, beginning with five hours of diarrhea and vomiting, the baby’s heartbeat dropped, and I was rushed off to an emergency delivery. Against all expectations, a cesarean was not necessary; a high forceps delivery brought Michael out. But he was clearly in bad shape and the anesthesiologist, after suctioning him out, whisked him off to an intensive care unit without even letting me see him— despite protests from the obstetrician. . . . In the midst of my grief and anxiety, I formed a passionate attachment to Michael. I felt again the urgent sense that I wanted this baby to be all right. I could feel the particularity even in the womb, and now it was even more intense. It would not be better for him to die if he were brain damaged. I didn’t want to know anything about the possibility of such consequences. I only wanted him to be okay, to live. When I visited him, I focused all my energies on extending healing, love, and security through my hands. And I was rewarded by seeing his overworked heart slow to a better rhythm under my touch. After a week, he had improved enough that I could hold him and nurse him for the first time. After three agonized, exhausting weeks I was able to bring him home. He became a strong and healthy baby with no physical effects from his ordeal. . . . Once Michael was home I was overwhelmed by joy and by chaos. Over and over again I wondered why no one had told me how wonderful it was to have a baby. I fell in love with Michael with a passion and intensity that took me completely by surprise. Part of the astonishing joy was being consumed by a love that had no quid pro quos, no contractual dimension, no fairness or reciprocity issues. I realized that I had been plagued by anxieties about my capacity for such feelings,

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at the same time that I was unsure whether they were possible for anyone. I saw myself as obsessed with self-protection, vigilantly guarding the precarious balance of equal power relations with Joe, wary and subtly hostile toward those with power over me. But now I reveled in an all-consuming attentiveness to Michael’s needs, an endless fascination with the bond between us. I felt fulfilled to overflowing with my love for him: There was no issue of what I was “getting back.” I had never had that experience before and it felt like a miracle that sustained itself day after day. I think there is something miraculous about the love one can feel for a baby, how it can bring out the best in you beyond what you thought was possible. And I think there was also something in my particular psyche that made the experience so powerful, so unexpected. But I also think that part of the wonder of having a baby is that when one falls in love like that, one experiences a kind of relationship whose possibility is subtly but relentlessly denied by the pervasive market mentality of negotiated self-interest as the foundation of human affairs. I never experienced my absorption in Michael as selflessness (a truly bizarre term for a virtue), although it did provide me with my first taste of what could happen when ordinary care for myself seemed completely unable to have a claim compared to the needs of the baby: I realized in the first week home with him that days had gone by without my finding time to brush my teeth. I remember this sometimes when I hear stories of women who go for years and years without attending to their own needs. But for me self-sacrifice was not what the intense focus on Michael was about. I realized this early on when another mother of an infant Michael’s age referred to nursing as “a nice thing to do for your baby.” This struck me as the most extraordinary way of referring to what I experienced as one of the most pleasurable and satisfying experiences of my life. Nursing, like so many other choices, was not something I did “for” Michael. I made these choices because they were what I wanted. At least in the early years, I was able to attend deeply to his needs by following my own heartfelt desires. My wants were not, of course, identical to his, but they were intertwined. My need to be with him was related to his need for me. But I did not experience myself as giving up my needs for his, but as following a thread of passionate desire in my relationship to him. Being tuned in to Michael in ways that kept our needs and desires intertwined may have come in part from my intense efforts to connect to him in his first precarious days of life in the incubator when I comforted and healed him with my hands. But some of the capacity for tuning in was also the result of a kind of discipline. I especially remember the pull to watch TV or read when I was nursing. But I learned that if I kept my attention on him and our interaction, it was rewarding and fulfilling. And if I were distracted by thoughts of all the other things I ought to be doing rather than relaxing and enjoying holding him after he had eaten, I would

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lose a precious connection as well as pleasure. Learning that the connection was not just automatic, that it took a kind of effort and discipline, was a crucial lesson that has remained important (though more complicated to implement). Although I never exactly felt like I simply “had” the time to focus on my baby—there was always the pull of work I was behind on, both academic and household—I was grateful that I had enough support (first from Joe and then from Merilyn, our nanny) to be able to learn the lesson of the link between connection and focus. I think it was in part my success in being tuned in to my children when they were infants that made infancy the time of passionate engagement that it was. The astonishing joy of infancy ultimately brought its own dilemma. The surprise of the intensity of the pleasure and passion brought with it a kind of anger and resentment: The question of why no one had told me about this was not just rhetorical. I felt a sort of sense of collective betrayal by my feminist sisters. Why hadn’t I read dozens of stories and articles about this special joy, why hadn’t all my friends, colleagues, and acquaintances with children raved to me about their experiences? Sometimes people are puzzled when I tell them about this sense of not having been told; after all, the culture is full of various forms of glorifying motherhood. But, in fact, I think there is relatively little detailed depiction of the special bond of infancy. And I must have dismissed the depictions of motherhood (however ostensibly positive) in popular culture as a kind of propaganda for the patriarchal nuclear family. The sources I would have believed, feminist literature and associates, seemed to me to have been silent on the subject. Why had they kept it from me? Of course, I have finally come to realize that not everyone experiences infancy the way I did. My closest friend who had had children before I did loves being a mother, but simply did not have my experience of the early years as an explosion of unlooked-for joy. . . . In the beginning I told everyone within earshot how wonderful it was having a baby. . . . but gradually I became anxious about the message I was sending. Was I subtly (or not so subtly) implying that no woman should miss this experience? And did that, in turn, imply that a woman without children was not a real or full woman? Was this the “pro-natalism” some feminists were concerned about? . . . The related issues seemed highly charged and once I focused on them, I could not find a way to be forthright about my own experiences without running the risk of causing inadvertent pain. . . . I did not want to make a woman feel bad if her feelings were more ambivalent than my own. In the end, I find myself complicit in the silence that had so angered me in the beginning. (Nedelsky 1999, 310–12)

 This remarkable memory of the “joy of infancy” subverts the contemporary Western image of love as vehicle for self-fulfillment. It demonstrates the

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power of benevolence, or willing the good of another, over the equivalence and reciprocity that characterize the dominant rational choice and exchange models of behavior. According to Confucian philosophy, benevolence is exemplified in the love between parent and child. Indeed, that love is the motive that makes it possible for one to love others outside the family (Lau 1970, 41). Recent neuroscience confirms the Confucian insight: If a parent loves him in the healthiest way, wherein his needs are paramount, mistakes are forgiven, patience is plentiful, and hurts are soothed as best they can be, then that is how he will relate to himself and others. . . .Twenty years of longitudinal data have proven that responsible parenting confers apparently permanent personality strengths. . . . The unimpeachable verdict: love matters in the life of a child. (Lewis, Amini, and Lannon 2000, 160, 199)

Modernist social science has never been comfortable with love. Even after Alfred Kinsey’s sex research helped to create a large and apparently ever-expanding market for books on human sexuality, studies of love, as ordinary people understand love, were rare. Bertrand Russell’s (1929, 118) statement that “the prevailing attitude of most communities toward love is curiously twofold: on the one hand it is the chief theme of poetry, novels and plays; on the other hand it is completely ignored by most serious sociologists, and is not considered as one of the desiderata in schemes of economic or political reform” fits the contemporary scene as aptly now as when he wrote it. The love Russell extolled included, but was not limited to, romantic love. He said it was good for romantic love to be a motive for marriage, but stressed that “the kind of love which will enable a marriage to remain happy and to fulfill its social purpose is not romantic but is something more intimate, affectionate, and realistic” (76). Except for romantic love between mostly unmarried couples, which from the 1980s on became the main focus of psychological research on love,1 Russell’s assessment of the social science of love still holds. Altruistic love generally, and family love in particular, including love between husband and wife, between parent and child, between siblings, and among close kindred, continues to be neglected by social researchers. Inchausti’s (1991, 120) characterization of family life as “a residual plebeian idealism that is fading fast but dying hard” includes the idealism of family love. He quotes a marriage homily of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in which the new couple is told that “their love had brought them to marriage, now they were to let their marriage bring them to love.” Neither Inchausti nor Bonhoeffer found it necessary to multiply definitions beyond the point that family love

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was “a love born after and through commitment,” and “a love on the other side of love.” Inchausti (1991, 123) sees plebeian postmodernism as “shared affirmations,” and characterizes the champions of this ethic as “ordinary people committed to the spiritual traditions that have defined their cultures.” No characteristic of these spiritual traditions is more central than love. These definitions are at odds with the spirit of therapeutic individualism, with its emphasis on love as, above all else, self-fulfilling. Yet if family love is simply instrumental, an aspect of the individual’s creation of self, then commitment need not be part of the package. A spouse or child, then, is a consumption item, to be used and put aside when one’s “developmental task” requires a new relationship (Gallagher 1996, 226–27). In the popular wisdom, love is the essence of family. The idealized location of love in families is among the reasons people offer that families are important, and many people consider love the primary, most unique attribute of families. The family is the one social unit where love is normative. To say love is normative does not mean that it is normal or even that loving ways are typical. But people say that family members should love each other, and families where manifestations of love are visibly absent tend to be regarded as unfortunate or pathological. In this chapter we consider love’s priority and our sense of its appropriate place in family studies. Following a statement on the centrality of love in human society, we turn to the “language of love,” looking at definitions of love, specifying its components, and comparing several typologies of love. Then we review aspects of the social science of love, revealing a continuing neglect of family and altruistic love by researchers and clinicians, growing support for alternatives to the traditional family, and the emergence of the study of close relationships. We introduce several theoretical approaches that seem especially suited to the study of altruistic love in families. Finally, we sketch a preliminary composite “paradigm of family love” and consider some of its implications for future work.

The Priority and Universality of Love2 The popular media brim with advice about love, hopes and longings and complaints about love, and memories of love. It is “one of the most talkedabout and longed-for of human experiences in the Western world” (Henslin 1980, 3). It is estimated that “more ink has been spilled about love than any other topic, except perhaps God” (Hendrick and Hendrick 2002, 1059).

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Although much of that outpouring of print celebrates romantic love, popular definitions of love also include the unconditional, accepting love of kindred and the ideal of continuing attachment to home and family. The major world religions all stress the overriding importance of love in the grand order of things. A century ago William James concluded that religious devotion increased love for others, not only among Christians, but generally among all the world’s religions. Charity and brotherly love, he wrote, were found “in Stoicism, in Hinduism, and in Buddhism in the highest possible degree.” Love for others, or charity, was a natural consequence of the “faith-state”: Religious rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder, cosmic emotion, are all unifying states of mind, in which the sand and grit of the selfhood incline to disappear, and tenderness to rule. The best thing is to describe the condition integrally as a characteristic affection to which our nature is liable, a region in which we find ourselves at home, a sea in which we swim; but not to pretend to explain its parts by deriving them too cleverly from one another. Like love or fear, the faith-state is a natural psychic complex, and carries charity with it by organic consequence. (James 1902, 279)

Best-selling author and psychotherapist Deepak Chopra, whose work is described as a fusion of Eastern wisdom and Western practicality, writes that “There has never been a spiritual master—not Buddha, Krishna, Christ, or Mohammed—who wasn’t a messenger of love.” It is human nature to love: “Despite all the evidence to the contrary, in some profound way we were created for love to the very depths of the human soul. This spiritual vision of human nature has prevailed against all odds. Its roots go back in India more than two thousand years to the Vedic scriptures” (Chopra 1997, 10, 29). Perhaps no twentieth-century psychoanalyst was more identified with the study of love than Erich Fromm. Among his most powerful statements on its priority is this extract from The Art of Loving: The full answer [to the problem of existence] lies in the achievement of interpersonal union, of fusion with another person, in love. This desire for interpersonal fusion is the most powerful striving in man. It is the most fundamental passion, it is the force which keeps the human race together, the clan, the family, society. The failure to achieve it means insanity or destruction—self-destruction or destruction of others. Without love, humanity could not exist for a day. (Fromm 1956, 18)

For some time the accepted Western academic view was that romantic love was the creation of European civilization, a position identified with De-

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nis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World (1940). Evidence from several fields, including sociobiology, anthropology, and history, has increasingly weakened that position. Evolutionary biologist David Buss (1988, 116) countered this Eurocentric thesis, showing that “acts of love have existed among humans long before the linguistic category of love was invented. . . . The fact that linguistic categories lag behind the performance of clusters of acts for which they were named does not imply that the phenomena in act form did not exist prior to the cultural invention of the label ‘love.’” Harvard sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson (1978, 69) agrees, noting that although “the processes of sexual pairbonding vary greatly among cultures . . . they are everywhere steeped in emotional feeling. In cultures with a romantic tradition, the attachment can be rapid and profound, creating love beyond sex which, once experienced, permanently alters the adolescent mind.” Having confirmed the ubiquity of loving emotions between the sexes, Wilson abandons the field, for “description of this part of human ethology is the refined specialty of poets.” We turn, then, to poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz (1995), who distinguishes “amatory sentiment” from the “ideal of love adopted by a society and a period,” and asserts the following: There is no people or civilization that does not possess poems, songs, legends, or tales in which the anecdote or the plot—the myth, in the original meaning of the word—is the encounter of two persons, their mutual attraction, and the labors and hardships they must overcome to be united. Their encounter requires, in turn, two contradictory conditions: the attraction that the lovers experience must be involuntary, born of a secret and all-powerful magnetism; at the same time, it must be a choice. In love, predestination and choice, objective and subjective, fate and freedom intersect. The realm of love is a space magnetized by encounter. (33)

The amatory sentiment occurs in all times and places. “In its simplest and most immediate form it is the passionate attraction we feel toward one person out of many.” For Paz, “the existence of an immense literature whose central subject is love is conclusive evidence of the universality of the amatory sentiment.” He distinguishes the idea of love from amatory sentiment. Societies differ in the extent to which reflection on love becomes an ideology, an aesthetic, and an etiquette. But even for the cultural complex of courtly love, the Eurocentric position is wrong. It happens that cultures of love have existed in the Islamic world, in India, China, and Japan. Indeed, it seems that “wherever a high courtly culture flourishes, a philosophy of love springs forth” (34–38).

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Paz (1995, 53) agrees that poets and writers are better guides to an understanding of the emotions generally, and love in particular, than are scientists and philosophers. “What poets, dramatists, and novelists have told us about love is no less precious and profound than the meditations of the philosophers. And frequently it is closer to the truth, closer to human and psychological reality.” In a similar vein, Lewis, Amini, and Lannon (2000, 2, 230) locate poetry at the interface of feeling and understanding, that is, at the same place where emotional life, and love, take place. “We demand too much,” they write, “if we expect single-handed empiricism to define and lay bare the human soul. Only in concert with art does science become so precise.” Child development research is clear about the necessity for families, and parents in particular, to be providers of love. From the earliest hours of life, love as communicated through care and gentle touch is essential to wellbeing. Early research (Harlow 1958; Skeels and Dye 1939) on children in orphanages, and even on baby monkeys, showed love, expressed in nurturance and touching, to be necessary for normal growth and development. Decades of research have substantiated the finding that making an infant feel loved and cared for is the single most important factor helping that child get a good start in life (Belsky 1990; Bowlby 1983; White 1985). More recently, it has been learned that a caring, affectional bond between the child and her mother or caretaker is necessary to the normal development of the child’s brain (Lewis, Amini, and Lannon 2000). Parent and child “engage in an exquisite dance of mutual emotional attunement,” a dialogue of “processes of alignment, attunement, and resonance” that “shapes the ability of the child’s nervous system to self-regulate emotional states” and prepares the parentchild system for language-learning and more advanced dialogue (Seikkula and Trimble 2005, 470; Siegel 1999). Perhaps the simplest approach to the priority of love is to assume that it is something everyone knows, or should know. Thus, Berscheid (1988, 360) began an essay on the definitions, varieties, and dynamics of love, with the statement that “the worthiness of the enterprise of understanding love,” both for individual happiness and with reference to the survival of the human species, should be obvious to “anyone with even half a human brain and two eyes to look about.” Berscheid’s barbed emphasis of the obvious may reflect her frustration at the unwelcome controversy and “public reproach” attending her own early research on romantic love. To us it serves as a reminder that the testimonials on the priority of love cited above do not represent a consensus in psychology, sociology, or any of the social sciences. World religions give a high

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priority to love, and so do people generally, yet love is not a key variable in any of the dominant theoretical models that presently inform community and family research. The prevailing paradigms are grounded in conflict, economic exchange, reciprocity, survival of the fittest, individual advantage, self-expression, and self-actualization, but not love. Students of love may now without public reproach do research and publish in specialized journals, but that does not mean their work is considered “mainstream” by their peers. Not long ago psychologists of emotion (Shaver, Morgan, and Wu, 1996) found it necessary to plead in print that love be promoted to the status of “basic emotion,” like anger, sadness, happiness, and fear. Part of their argument was that, in the minds of lay people, love was a prototypical emotion. Questions on “family ties” and “happiness and fulfillment” in national surveys of family relations are another way of estimating the priority of family love in daily life. In 1989 a national sample of adults having at least one living parent was asked about what they had done for their parents in the past year, and what their parents had done for them. Among the options were the statements “told you that they loved you,” and [you] “told them that you loved them.” Eighty-six percent of the adult children said their parents had told them that they loved them, and 89 percent said they had told their parents that they loved them. Asked about relationships with parents and siblings, the proportion of adults reporting “warm and affectionate” relations was 70 percent for their fathers, 91 percent for mothers, and 87 percent for their siblings. The researchers reported that “women continue to act as the glue that holds extended families together. Of all the kinship bonds studied, the mother-daughter relationship proves to be the strongest one. It is a bond that spans generations” (Gallup 1989, 152, 155, 158). In 1997, asked to rank on a ten-point scale how important their children were to their personal happiness and fulfillment, 81 percent of fathers with children under eighteen chose the highest possible ranking (10) and an additional 10 percent chose the next highest ranking. Relationships between fathers and adult children were only slightly less important, with 61 percent choosing the ten score and 13 percent the next highest rank. Among adult men whose mothers were living, 64 percent ranked the importance of their relationship with mother at the highest rank possible, and 12 percent more chose the next highest rank (Gallup 1997, 231–32). A 2002 survey showed that 96 percent of adult Americans ranked their families as the most important aspect of their lives, of the nine aspects measured (family, friends, religion, hobbies and recreation, community activities, leisure time, work, money, and health). A later survey that year found 72 percent of American

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adults “very satisfied” with their family life, again a higher rating than for any other aspect of life (Gallup 2003, 1, 360). Another source of insight on the priority of love provides a useful counterweight to the overrepresentation of college undergraduates in the scientific study of love. For several decades, researchers have studied the phenomenon known as the near-death experience (NDE), in which people who have been clinically dead and then resuscitated report that while they were dead some conscious part of themselves left their body, experienced certain sensory and interpersonal experiences, and then returned to the body. Research by the Gallup Poll organization revealed that such experiences also occur among some people who come close to death under other circumstances. It is estimated that millions of adult Americans have had such experiences (Gallup and Proctor 1982). Thousands of persons who have experienced NDEs have been interviewed, and there is now an extensive research literature on “parting visions” (Morse 1994) and the near-death experience.3 Whatever one may think of such events, they represent perceived experience that merits interpretation. Relevant to the priority of love is a surprising consistency in NDE reports, and also in the post-NDE lives of persons reporting such experience. According to a summary analysis of near-death experiences (Lundahl and Widdison 1997, 53–59, 232–33), “almost every NDEr stresses the importance in this life of trying to cultivate love for others;” they report that people are intended to “add to other people’s lives . . . we should love them and serve them;” and that the things that matter are “related to how we help others, to how we interact with family and friends, and to the love we extend to others.” Consistently, persons having had an NDE say they learned that they were “to love others, to have compassion, and to forgive.” In addition, they report changes in their own lives in the direction of becoming more loving, spending more time with family and friends, and being less materialistic (Sabom 1998; Fox 2003; Greyson 2006).

The Language of Love: Definitions and Types Some languages are better languages of love than others. English is particularly challenged in the range of meanings attached to that single syllable. Even so, the spiritual tradition of love within Western culture has not been a linguistic puzzle to people generally. John Wilson (2000, ix) begins his book on “personal love” with the statement that “since love is so important, it is a little odd that almost everything written about it takes its nature for granted, as if we all knew what love was.” But that oddity, he continues, reflects an

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important truth, that “not just anything counts as love, ‘love’ does not mean just whatever we want it to.” When Wilson or Inchausti, Martin Luther King or Mother Teresa talk about love, they are tapping into a core concept of human experience that their listeners understand, not in an academic sense, but in the accumulated experience that Inchausti (1991, 123) calls the “legacy of personal virtue that runs like an underground stream beneath the great violent expanse of world history.” Pitirim Sorokin (1948, 58) had a similar confidence in popular understanding when, introducing a discussion of forms and gradations of altruistic love, he said that “without any pedantic definition, through our own direct experience we know what constitutes love or altruism. In most cases we can unerringly point out what kind of conduct is altruistic or egoistic, and we instantly recognize the sublimity of a given act of altruism or the callousness of an observed act of selfishness.” People have different conceptions of love, but to simply note the differences is not the same as wanting to know if one’s ideas are right or reasonable. Even to the relativist, words must mean things; total relativism applied to language makes communication impossible. Obviously cultures and subcultures influence people’s ideas of love and the way they interpret and express it, and not only as a result of language differences. Still, there seem to be commonalities across cultures, as well as over time in a single cultural tradition. Beall and Sternberg’s (1995) statement that it is impossible to understand love outside the cultural frame in which it occurs is probably too strong. As to the meaning of love in the Western tradition, whether we focus on Wilson’s “love between equals” or Mother Teresa’s affirmation of love and compassion, the important thing about love is “there is something to be right or wrong about” (Wilson 2000, ix; original emphasis). Several writers have attributed some of the difficulty in understanding love to the poverty of the English language. “Our language has thousands of words for the different parts of a car,” wrote John Lee (1988, 39), but only one word for the satisfying and fulfilling interpersonal relationship we call love.” He tried to correct the situation, identifying six “styles of love” corresponding to primary and secondary colors, and attaching Greek labels to make up for deficiencies in English terminology. Another attribution of love problems to language is Robert Johnson’s (1993, 6) oft-quoted statement that Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persian has eighty, Greek three, and English only one. This is indicative of the poverty of awareness or emphasis that we give to that tremendously important realm of feeling. . . . If we had a vocabulary of thirty words for love . . . we would immediately be richer and

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more intelligent in this human element so close to our heart. An Eskimo probably would die of clumsiness if he had only one word for snow; we are close to dying of loneliness because we have only one word for love.

Johnson’s argument that the number of discrete terms for something correlates with a culture’s ability to deal with it does not take account of the possibilities of linguistic adaptation to a limited noun or set of nouns by adding modifiers. It may be cumbersome, but English-speaking Americans manage to deal with the snow in their lives by adding the adjectives wet, driving, sticky, dense, dirty, blowing, etc. Similarly, as in Lee’s extension of love into six categories, we manage to distinguish types of love, sometimes with gestural or contextual additions and sometimes with modifiers. Further, we use many synonyms or related terms to denote types of love. Relevant synonyms include affection, attachment, devotion, and fondness; related terms include liking, regard, adoration, emotion, yearning, ardor, respect, and loyalty. Writers on love generally lament the complexity of their subject and the daunting range of meanings associated with the concept. Disclaimers range from Scott Peck’s (1978, 81) statement that “no one has ever, to my knowledge, arrived at a truly satisfactory definition of love” through Timothy Jackson’s (2003, 1) weary assessment that “No end of ink, sweat, tears, and blood has . . . been spilled in trying to fathom what, concretely, love demands of individuals and groups.” Pitirim Sorokin (1967, 3), in the midst of arguably the most committed effort ever by a sociologist to know and harness the power of love, compared it to an iceberg: “Only a small part of it is visible, and even this visible part is little known. . . . love appears to be a universe inexhaustible qualitatively and quantitatively.” We deal with the inexhaustible by dividing it. Facing the iceberg, we offer working definitions and construct typologies. If “the extent of the variation in popular usage of the term love over time and across individuals bodes ill for any attempt to force the term into static categories” (Beach and Tesser 1988, 331–32), then perhaps we accept that the dynamic, contingent nature of the concept precludes any but provisional definition. Even so, there may be commonalities across global definitions, and comparisons across typologies of love may highlight types or equivalences, even if one author’s set of components does not exactly match another’s. The range and commonalities of definitions of love are illustrated in the sixteen definitions in Table 3.1. This is an interdisciplinary set, drawn from the works of philosophers, theologians, sociologists, psychologists, and psychotherapists. It is illustrative rather than representative, but it does include several of the more important works on love. These are definitions of holis-

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tic or global love unless specified otherwise, although some are from books on romantic love, and others from writings on altruistic or agape love. All the writers represented acknowledge that love is larger than their particular depiction of it. Table 3.1. Illustrative Definitions of Love Russell 1929, 122–23, 127 “Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives. . . . Nature did not construct human beings to stand alone. . . . Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing life has to give. . . . In order to have the kind of value of which we are speaking, love must feel the ego of the beloved person as important as one’s own ego, and must realize the other’s feelings and wishes as though they were one’s own.” Fromm 1956, 26, 47 “Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. . . . The most fundamental kind of love, which underlies all types of love, is brotherly love. By this I mean the sense of responsibility, care, respect, knowledge of any other human being, the wish to further his life.” Sorokin 1967, 6, 11, 13 “[Love is] a unifying, integrating, harmonizing, creative energy or power . . . [L]ove is the experience that annuls our individual loneliness . . . on the social plane love is a meaningful interaction—or relationship—between two or more persons where the aspirations and aims of one person are shared and helped in their realization by other persons.” Levinas 1969, 256, 261 “Love aims at the Other; it aims at him in his frailty. . . . To love is to fear for another, to come to the assistance of his frailty. . . . To be for the Other is to be good. . . . The fact that in existing for another I exist otherwise than in existing for me is morality itself.” May 1969, 309 “Love and will are both forms of communion of consciousness. Both are also affects—ways of affecting others and our world. This play on words is not accidental: for affect, meaning affection or emotion, is the same word as that for affecting change. An affect or affection is also the way of making, doing, forming something. Both love and will are ways of creating consciousness in others.”

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Peck 1978, 81, 83 “I define love thus: The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. . . . Love is an act of will . . . both an intention and an action.” Cancian 1987, 70 “Enduring love between adults is: a relationship where a small number of people both (1) express affection, acceptance, and other positive feelings to each other, and (2) provide each other with care and practical assistance. Love also includes (3) commitment—an intention to maintain the affection and the assistance for a long time, despite difficulties; and (4) specialness—giving the loved person priority over others. . . . [T]he new images of love add the qualities of promoting each other’s self-development, and communicating and understanding each other’s personal feelings and experiences.” Brümmer 1993, 153, 159, 163 “Love is not merely a feeling or emotion but also a purposive commitment to adopt a complex pattern of actions and attitudes in relation to the beloved. . . . [Love is] a policy commitment in relation to the beloved . . . in which the personal integrity of both partners is to be maintained.” Paz 1995, 260–61 “Love is not the search for the idea or the essence; neither is it a path toward a state transcending idea and nonidea, good and evil, being and nonbeing. Love seeks nothing beyond itself—no good, no reward. It does not pursue a final aim above it. It is indifferent to any sort of transcendence: it begins and ends in itself. It is an attraction exerted by a soul and a body, not by an idea. By a person. That person in unique and endowed with freedom; in order to possess that person, the lover must win over that person’s will. Possession and surrender are reciprocal acts.” Martin 1996, 1 “Love is a way to value persons morally, and to be valued in return. More accurately, love encompasses a wide variety of virtue-structured ways in which persons value each other as having irreplaceable worth. The valuing is moral because it . . . [affirms] the moral worth of persons, but primarily because it must be understood in terms of moral virtues and their corresponding ideals.” Lewis, Amini, and Lannon 2000, 207, 208 “Loving is mutuality; loving is synchronous attunement and modulation. . . . Love is simultaneous mutual regulation, wherein each person meets the needs of the other, because neither can provide for his own. Such a relationship is not

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50-50—it’s 100-100. Each takes perpetual care of the other, and, within concurrent reciprocity, both thrive.” Dillon 2001, 63, 156 “Love is the force that takes us beyond ourselves toward each other and the selves that emerge through that relation. . . .To love is to put oneself at risk. Not to love is to turn the risk of catastrophe into a certainty. . . . [Love is] the relationship that confers meaning, the relationship that, more than any other, defines our relationship to the transcendent whole of human existence.” Oehlschlaeger 2003, 73–74, 211 “A loving directedness toward others is part of the real structure of existence; the fulfillment of our lives lies in our becoming the love that we are through action with, among, and for real others. . . . [T]he authentic form of love [is that] wherein an I addresses a Thou directly with the affirmation, ‘It is good that you exist.’” Jackson 2003, 15 “Love appreciates the plenitude and ambiguity of the world, balancing affirmation of what is believed to be worthy or sacred with resistance to what is believed to be ugly or evil. Love itself is the greatest, but not the only good . . . strong agape emphasizes putting charity first as personal action and disposition rather than merely discovering it to be first as human capacity and need. There is a performative aspect to love; it is productive rather than merely appraisive. . . . Love makes the good by enriching whomever it touches. . . . Love seeks to elicit those virtues in self and others without which human flourishing is impossible.” Rempel and Burris 2005, 299 “[Love is] a motivational state in which the goal is to preserve and promote the well-being of the valued object.” Linares 2006, 112 “Relational nurturing [love] is a set of cognitive, emotional, and pragmatic elements that combine to make human interaction a suitable substrate for growth, development, well-being and mental health. . . . [R]elational nurturing is equivalent to . . . complex love . . . a love that ceases to be a purely affective phenomenon and one that embraces loving thought, feeling, and action.”

Comparing definitions in Table 3.1 yields several useful conclusions. First, even this brief, selective set of definitions communicates the multifaceted nature of love: it is relationship, responsibility, motive, thought, commitment, attraction, emotion, action, or some combination of these. Second, note the

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emphasis across many definitions on some version of effort, force, action, purpose, or will. In addition to several that mention relationship explicitly are the definitions that stress purposive commitment, intention, and propensity to act. A third common element, perhaps the strongest, is the emphasis upon another person or persons. Love is “aimed” at the other. It nurtures, cares and provides for, unifies with, values, enriches, preserves, promotes, embraces, is attuned to, or addresses an other. Fourth, that “address,” that extension of self toward one or more loved ones, is directed to their well-being, benefit, growth, development, thriving, and preservation. Finally, the ideal of mutuality and communion in love suggests that the one who loves shares in the flourishing, productive development that love creates. Several of the definitions are explicit that the thriving, integrity, or fulfillment being sought is mutual. Love redounds to benefit the lover as well as the loved one. We said above that one way to define love is to list its components: it then may be described as the aggregate composed of these parts. It is instructive to compare the differing components or dimensions identified by writers on love (see Table 3.2). Sorokin (1967, 3) begins his analysis of the inexhaustible universe of love by naming seven aspects or forms of love, and his entire introduction to the “manifoldness of love and its main aspects” consists of a description of these seven categories. Rollo May (1969, 37) takes a similar approach, identifying four kinds of love as part of the Western tradition, then defining “every human experience of authentic love” as “a blending, in varying proportions, of these four.” Table 3.2. Typologies of Love: Dimensions, Types, Components, and Forms Nygren 1953, 58, 211 Fundamental motifs Agape Eros Dimensions of love (expressions of the opposition between motifs) God’s love for us Our love for God Our love of our neighbors Our love of ourselves Fromm 1956, 38–63 Objects of love Brotherly love: love among equals Motherly love: love for the helpless Erotic love: craving for union with one other

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Self-love Love of God Lewis 1960, 31–141 Kinds of love Affection (storge, affection of parents for children or children for parents) Friendship (philia) Eros, or need-love (eros) Charity or gift-love (agape) Sorokin 1967, 3 Aspects of love Religious Ethical Ontological Physical Biological Psychological Social May 1969, 37 Kinds of love Sex or lust, libido Eros, drive of love to procreate or create Philia, friendship, brotherly love Agape, love devoted to welfare of the other Berscheid and Hatfield 1978; Hatfield 1988 Basic types of love Passionate love Companionate love Beach and Tesser 1988 Components of love in marriage Commitment Intimacy Cohesion Sexual interaction Lee 1988, 42–48 Primary love styles Eros (passionate physical attraction)

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Storge (affectionate, companionate love) Ludus (roving, game-playing, pluralistic love) Secondary love styles, reflecting the primary styles in combination Mania (desperate, obsessive love) Pragma (pragmatic, sensible, reasoned love) Agape (selfless, giving, altruistic love) Sternberg 1988; 1997 Components of love Intimacy Passion Commitment Kinds of love generated by interaction of the components Non-love Liking Infatuated love Empty love Romantic love Companionate love Fatuous love Consummate love Brümmer 1993, ix–x, 39–146 Romantic love Neighborly love Eros (need love) Agape (gift love) Paz 1995, 142–61 Elements of love Exclusivity Obstacle and transgression Domination and submission Fate and freedom Body and soul

Paz distinguishes love and friendship, although he allows that love may turn into friendship. “It [friendship] is, I would say, one of its denouements, as we see in certain marriages. Love and friendship are rare, extremely rare, passions. We must not confuse them either with passing affairs or with what people very often call ‘intimate’ relationships. I said earlier that love is tragic; I add here that friendship is a response to tragedy” (Paz 1995, 140–41).

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Paz attempts a serious definition of love, “a system of the erotic passions,” although he believes it is impossible to succeed because, quoting Dante, love is an accident or a contingency. Still, it is useful to identify its elements and distinctive features. For Paz, love has five basic features or necessary conditions: exclusivity, obstacle/transgression, domination/submission, fate/ freedom, and body/soul. The nature of these elements, he writes, demonstrates “love’s contradictory, paradoxical, mysterious nature. . . . But these elements cannot be separated; they exist in constant struggle and reconciliation with themselves and with others. . . . There is continual transmutation of each element: freedom chooses servitude, fate becomes choice, the soul is the body and the body soul. We love a mortal being as though he or she were immortal” (Paz 1995, 159–60). With the recent efflorescence of research on romantic love, typologies based on quantitative analyses of people’s definitions of love have been added to the classification schemes derived from clinical work and the older deductive historical and linguistic schemes. Much recent social psychological research has been devoted to creating instruments for measuring love, clarifying the types or styles of love identified by those instruments, and assessing love’s predictors and correlates. Most of this work has focused on close relationships among college students and young adults. Love in this perspective is a “construct” reflected in various “scales.” Dominant models in this research include Lee’s (1977, 1988) typology of six love styles and Sternberg’s (1987, 1988, 1998) triangular theory of love. Both typologies have received substantial support in the literature (for Lee, cf. Hendrick and Hendrick 1986, 2000; for Sternberg, cf. Acker and Davis 1992; Aron and Westbay 1996; Sternberg 1997). Efforts to determine whether the various “love scales” measure similar aspects of love under different names (Matsuda 2003) suggest that erotic love, variously labeled as “love,” “passionate love,” “eros,” and “passion,” is a single underlying dimension, while the aspects of love labeled as “liking,” “companionate love,” “storge,” and “intimacy” are more complex, involving two or more latent dimensions. Summaries of the social psychological literature on romantic love (Hendrick and Hendrick 2000) include efforts to encourage couple therapists to draw upon “the new field of close relationships research” (Hendrick 2004); recommendations that counselors adopt a holistic approach to love, paying attention to more of its dimensions than one (O’Sullivan and O’Leary 1992); and appeals that the love scales be tested on populations other than college students (Myers and Shurts 2002).

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That the public considers family love a part of the broader concept of love is illustrated in research on the popular prototypes of love. Fehr and Russell (1991) asked university students to “list as many types of love as come to mind.” Eighty-four students listed 216 “types” of love. Of the ten mentioned most frequently, “friendship” was first, followed by sexual, parental, brotherly, sibling, maternal, passionate, romantic, and familial. Notice that half the types mentioned are varieties of family love. In a second study, students were asked to rank how good each of twenty subtypes was as an example of love. Heading the students’ lists were maternal love and parental love, and four other types of family love ranked in the top ten “good examples” of love. In a third study, students were asked to distinguish “genuine cases of love” from possible types of love they thought did not belong in the category “love.” Only two of the ten possible types of love offered for ranking were varieties of family love, yet these two, “a mother’s love” and “a brother’s love” were among the four types of love least likely to be denied membership in the category love. Comparing the definitions of love revealed in their studies to the definitions commonly used by psychologists, Fehr and Russell (1991, 435) conclude that in the general population, “love is organized around several prototypes: love of a parent for a child, love between romantic partners, love between old friends, love between siblings.”4 In sharp contrast is the dominant academic focus on romantic love. Typically, attempts to define love and distinguish among its types reflect, in one way or another, the influence of three Greek words for love: eros, philia, and agape (see Table 3.2). In contemporary usage eros (sexual or romantic love) is sometimes opposed to agape (love for humanity), but even in classical usage these forms overlapped sufficiently that eros properly cannot be opposed to either philia or agape: “[I]n Greek, verbs and nouns related to philia and agape describe a wide array of marital, familial, and other relationships, some of which do involve—more so in Mediterranean cultures than in northern European ones—intimate personal contact” (Faraone 1999, 29). In other words, in its original meaning eros included aspects of family love. Broadly defined, it represents much of the emotional glue that holds families together: [I]n its original sense eros is the love that desires—that desires, above all, union with the beloved. This incorporation of another being into the boundaries of the self is at the heart of every good—and every dysfunctional—family. The closest modern equivalent we have is the psychological concept of “attachment,” which suggests, if faintly, the similar urgent fusion of need, desire, and love. Eros describes not only the relation between husband and wife, but even more dramatically between parent and small child.

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It is eros that drives the sacrifices, celebrations, jealousies, anxieties, and triumphs of family. It is eros that explains the huge efforts children make to please even the most unloving parents. And it is eros that describes why any rational adult would ever make the enormous donation of the self required to raise children, or for that matter, to stay married. (Gallagher 1996, 15)

The position that eros and agape are related forms of love and not opposites is also Sorokin’s (1967, 4–5), who sees agape love as “inherent in the very nature of love” and encompassing rather than excluding eros. Most “systems of love,” he says, include both forms because ultimately they are inseparable.

The Social Science of Love: Neglect and Abuse The scholarly neglect of love is a long-term pattern. Paz comments that modernity has generated wide-ranging assessments of its own historical and moral health in the fields of “economics, politics, law, natural resources, diseases, demography, the general decline of culture, the crisis in the universities, ideologies,” but In none of these studies . . .—the exceptions can be counted on one’s fingers—is there the slightest mention of love, its history in the West and its present situation. I am referring to books and studies on love properly speaking, not to the abundant literature, from essay to treatise, about human sexuality, its history and anomalies. Love is another matter, and its omission says a great deal about the frame of mind of our era. (Paz 1995, 164)

There is some irony in the neglect and negative attitude toward love by twentieth-century sociologists. It is not well known, but August Comte, the theorist who invented sociology and created the doctrine of positivism, emphasized the critical importance of love in his classic statement of the principles of sociology, Cours de Philosophie Positive (1830–42). He wrote that universal love . . . is certainly far more important than the intellect itself in . . . our existence . . . because love spontaneously uses even the lowest mental faculties for everyone’s profit, while egoism distorts or paralyzes the most eminent dispositions, which consequently are often far more disturbing than efficacious in regard to happiness. (Comte [1830–42] 1975, 362; quoted in Pickering 1997, 31)

William Goode’s (1959, 41) pioneering article, “The Theoretical Importance of Love,” limited the concept to romantic love, “a strong emotional

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attachment, a cathexis, between adolescents or adults of opposite sexes, with at least the components of sex desire and tenderness.” His survey of the literature of love acknowledged a sizable body of poetic, humanistic, literary, erotic, and pornographic literature that treated love as “a sweeping experience.” Most social scientists who had written about love, often in the context of marriage counseling, viewed it as a poor basis for marriage. Some few acknowledged its positive functions in society, either in holding couples together or providing necessary social structure. Anthropologists, Goode said, had largely ignored love as an important element in the societies they studied. Most seemed to view romantic love as a pattern limited to the United States, and disparaged it as illusionary—“Love exists for the savage as it does for ourselves—in adolescence, in fiction, among the poetically minded” (Lowie 1931, 146)—or naive “in any ordinary population the percentage of individuals with a capacity for romantic love of the Hollywood type [is] . . . about as large as that of persons able to throw genuine epileptic fits” (Linton 1936, 175). Perhaps reflecting in anthropology a continuation of the practice of ignoring the existence of love, neither “love” nor “romance” appears in the index to Donald Brown’s (1991) review of the entire anthropological corpus for human social and cultural characteristics that may be considered universal. There is, however, brief reference to “altruism” and “the evolutionary puzzle of how altruism could evolve.” More recently, there are some shining exceptions to the long-term neglect of love in anthropology.5 The most striking example of social scientific resistance to the study of love is the treatment by his professional colleagues of one of the greatest sociologists of the twentieth century, Pitirim Sorokin, when he turned his attention from theories of social change and other widely shared sociological interests to the sociology of love. Sorokin was the first chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Sociology, and may be the most widely published sociologist of all time.6 Convinced that “only the power of unbounded love practiced in regard to all human beings can defeat the forces of interhuman strife, and can prevent the pending extermination of man by man on this planet” (Sorokin 1967, vi), he devoted the last years of his career to trying to establish a science of altruistic love. Operating under the auspices of the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism, which he established, directed, and secured funding for, he published a series of books in the “prophetic” stance, which violated the value neutrality and other norms of the “priestly sociologists” who dominated the profession (Johnston 1995, 125–27). His colleagues were embarrassed, and Sorokin was ostracized. Years later, responding to a paper on altruism, one of the Harvard students of the time remembered:

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It was clear to everyone, even to a not-very-observant undergraduate, that Sorokin was, at that point, seen as a professional pariah that had caught some weird “altruism virus” and gone over the edge of professional respectability. He and his good friend Carle Zimmerman were assigned offices in an entirely separate and isolated corner of the building, suitably insulated from the rest of the faculty. . . . No one wanted to risk having their own reputations tainted with the “A” word. . . . The academic world is not any kinder to scholars who dabble in Love and Altruism and all of that unmanly, sissy stuff today than they were in the 1950’s. (Broderick 1992)

Sorokin devoted years of research and published half a dozen books on altruism in an effort to help humanity “desperately looking for a way out of the deathtrap” (Sorokin 1948, 3). The reception of his work by other social scientists revealed “little interest in either social reconstruction or altruism,” and “cynicism and criticism were followed by an indifference that combined with hostility” (Johnston 1995, 214). The Research Center in Creative Altruism ended with his retirement in 1959. Almost a half-century later, many of its objectives would be incorporated into the mission statement of the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love founded in 2001 under a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton would be among the universities in line seeking grants from the Institute for the study of altruism,7 and there is growing scholarly interest in the topic (Sprecher and Fehr 2005; Underwood 2002; Post et al., 2003). In 1985 Reuben Fine, a psychotherapist, published The Meaning of Love in Human Experience. He seems to have been unfamiliar with Sorokin’s effort to change the world through the scientific study of love and the application of the principles of love in human affairs, for Sorokin is not mentioned in his extensive bibliography. But Fine, from within the worldview of his own healing profession, arrived at a policy position very similar to Sorokin’s: “Real love can flourish adequately only in a love culture; hence the efforts of reformers should be directed primarily at transforming the hate culture into a love culture.” The concluding sentences of Fine’s book might have been penned by Sorokin: Since the proper study of humankind is humankind, within the study of humankind central significance should . . . be placed on the role of love in the individual’s life. By doing so, all the sciences of humankind, from psychology to history, economics to anthropology, would be revitalized and given a positive direction that they now lack. (Fine 1985, 371)

We have said that the type of love that has received the most attention from social scientists is romantic love, specifically love as it relates to “close”

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personal and sexual relationships. Yet even that interest is fairly recent. Conveners of a 1984 conference on love noted “an academic aversion to any serious dialogue on the subject” and “a profound reluctance to expose love to any rigorous examination” (Gaylin and Person 1988, vii). One might date the emerging respectability of the social science of love from the birth of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships in 1984 or the publication by a prestigious university press of The Psychology of Love (Sternberg and Barnes 1988), a collection of essays on love and social science theory. Introducing that volume, Zick Rubin (1988, vii–viii) described how, as late as 1968, love was seen as a topic to be avoided by serious psychologists. Now, wrote Rubin (viii) “researchers are stalking romantic love” with concepts and methods borrowed from such diverse fields as infant-parent attachment, cognitive psychology, personality, psychometrics, evolutionary biology, social network analysis, cultural anthropology, behavioral physiology, philosophy, and religious mysticism. Concluding the volume, Ellen Berscheid (1988, 360) recalled that in the 1970s, “the psychologist who studied love automatically stained his or her scientific mantle.” Scientists publicly identified with such “frivolous” research were targets of disapproval from peers and perhaps official scrutiny as well. Subsequent interdisciplinary attention to close relationships has produced several specialized journals and a body of theory and research sufficient to suggest the emergence of a new discipline (Hendrick, 1989; Hendrick and Hendrick 2000; Noller and Feeney 2006). However, only some of the work on close relationships has much bearing on the sociology of love, traditionally defined. Increased attention to romantic love and sexual bonds usually has not translated into research on love as a variable within marriages and families. To judge from the contemporary professional literature, scientific interest in love, per se, ends when a couple marries. Then attention shifts to issues like marital satisfaction, adjustment, stress, expectations, communication, sexual activity, role definitions and performance, but not love. Yet, if we expand the focus from romantic love to family love, evidence for the universality of love is even more compelling. Here, too, we confront a Eurocentric myth about family emotion, this one modernist rather than medieval. It is the idea that good mothering is an invention of the post-Enlightenment West, a consequence of both cultural and emotional evolution. Illustrative of this position is Edward Shorter’s (1975) The Making of the Modern Family. Building on Philippe Ariès’s (1962) notion that there was no conception of childhood until the seventeenth century,8 Shorter (1975, 168– 69) argued that in traditional society “mothers viewed the development and happiness of infants younger than two with indifference.” His position is that

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mothers in traditional society did not love their children, that maternal (and paternal) love is “an invention of modernization.” Seventeenth-century European mothers did not “put themselves in their infants’ tiny shoes,” and they failed the “sacrifice test” of being willing to reorder their priorities in favor of their infants. Evidence for this position includes the high rates of mercenary wet-nursing of infants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, accounts of “apparent absence of bereavement in the face of an infant’s death,” the willingness of mothers to abandon their children, give them away, or hire them out, and the practice of swaddling, whereby the baby’s movements were constricted, limiting its capacity to interact with or bother anyone. Shorter (1975, 191, 195) praised the “revolution in the quality of mothering” among the middle classes in the last years of the eighteenth century, an additional rise in “middle-class maternal sentiment” in the mid-nineteenth century, and the completion of “the great transformation of mothering” by the beginning of the twentieth century. This depiction of an historical evolution of good mothering, including the intensification of maternal emotional ties to their infants, suggested that maternal “instinct” was mythical, and that modern mothers, whatever their failings, were better than the bad mothers of the past (Pollock 1987, 11). Shorter’s documentation of negative child-care practices and attitudes demonstrates the power of culture. Nothing guarantees that customary practices approved by a society’s adults will necessarily benefit its children. However, it does not follow from parents’ participation in practices inconsistent with their children’s welfare that the parents do not love their children. A contemporary commentator on this issue is psychiatrist Juan Luis Linares (2006, 112–13), writing on the obstruction of love by power: All parents believe that they love their children, even those who abuse and cruelly mistreat them, or those whose disconfirmations drive their children toward psychosis or whose disqualifications lead them into depression and suicide. This is why it is difficult for an observer ever to be totally convinced that such parents do not love their children, despite the sense of astonishment that comes with witnessing the most obvious and harsh abuse, violence, disconfirmation, or disqualification.

Reuben Fine (1985, x, 1, 15) distinguishes “love cultures” which “foster the experience of love,” from “hate cultures” that encourage hatred and violence. In love cultures, social relations are characterized mainly by love and affection; in hate cultures, conflict and antagonism prevail. In contrast to Shorter’s association of modernity and the evolution of “good mothering,” Fine casts Western civilization, including the United States, as a hate

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culture. Germaine Greer (1984, 2), writing about American attitudes toward children, agrees: “Historically, human societies have been pro-child; modern society is unique in that it is profoundly hostile to children. We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.” Shorter (1975, 182) claimed that “Because traditional mothers had to sacrifice income in order to breast-feed, we have in maternal nursing a clear sign of the valuation they placed upon their child’s health: no nursing equals low value.” Yet we would be unwise to argue, especially from an historical distance, that parents in love cultures love their children more than do parents in hate cultures. We would shrink from applying a similar “clear sign of valuation”—“Day care equals low value”—to contemporary mothers, in better economic circumstances, who choose to bottle-feed their infants, or who leave them to be tended by others. Similarly, we might question the future historian who rated our civilization as caring little for its children on the basis of figures on the number of children daily drugged into easy manageability or shunted off to electronic babysitters. The view that parents in traditional families did not love their children or sacrifice for them was challenged by other historians (Greven 1977; Laslett and Wall 1972; Macfarlane 1986; Pollock 1983, 1987; Orme 2001) and the present consensus emphasizes the continuity of basic parental emotions and dispositions: Most parents, we are now told, did indeed love and care for their offspring to the best of their ability, and it is recommended that “instead of searching for the existence or absence of emotions such as love, grief, or anger, we should concede that these emotions will be present in all cultures and in all communities, and seek instead for the varied ways in which they were perceived and expressed in particular societies. (Pollock 1987, 12–13)

The neglect of family love as a proper object of social scientific inquiry is ironic in view of the lengthy multidisciplinary debate over whose worldview shall inform the study of humankind, that of professionals or of their clients/ subjects. This controversy, represented in the “emic-etic” debate in anthropology (Feleppa 1986; Harris 1976), the “grounded theory” versus “explanatory theory” issue in sociology (Glaser and Strauss 1967), and in discussions of hermeneutics in social interpretation generally (Ricoeur 1981) and in therapy in particular (Parry 1991), has served to legitimate the worldviews of those people who are the objects of social research or of applied “improvement” programs. On the one hand is the affirmation of the merit of trying to

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see things from the perspectives of people generally, and the demonstrable interest of ordinary people in the subject of love. On the other hand are the theoretical models imposed by the norms of contemporary social science, which mostly ignore love as an explanatory variable. Some psychotherapists would challenge that last statement. Reuben Fine (1985) casts Sigmund Freud as “the great theoretician of love,” and holds up the profession of psychoanalysis as the exception to the rule that most philosophers and theoreticians have had little to say about love. He explains their neglect of love as a reflection of the “hate cultures” in which they lived and worked: “Many philosophers have not even been aware that love must apply to human beings; many others have not even discussed the subject. . . . Philosophical detachment may help to avoid pain, as among the Stoics, but it will not lead to loving human relationships” (xii). Fine’s prescription for healing hate cultures is education and psychotherapy. He identifies the therapist as a purveyor of love, for whatever apparent problems bring people to therapists, in the end it turns out that the underlying problem is love. “Sooner or later it becomes clear that there is a lack in their love lives, and that the problem cannot be satisfactorily resolved unless the love problem is remedied. Hence the therapist is somebody who teaches others how to love” (xi, 105). Freud’s treatment of love bears little resemblance to the definitions of love considered thus far. For Freud, the “power of love” is what makes a man “unwilling to be deprived of his sexual object,” and makes a woman “unwilling to be deprived of the part of herself which had been separated off from her—her child.” Love as positive feelings between parents and children or brothers and sisters is seen as “aim-inhibited love” or affection (Freud 1962, 48–49), displaced from its original objects by the pressures of civilization. Both Freud’s admirers and critics agree that love, as he described it, is starkly different from the popular meaning of the term. Michael Levine (2000, 232, 242) suggests that philosophers have been unwise to neglect psychoanalytic theory in analyzing love, for it seems to clarify much that is puzzling in nonpsychoanalytic accounts. The love Freud explicates includes attention to narcissism, projection, displacement, wish fulfillment, and relevant aspects of early childhood psychosexual development. What it is not, says Levine, is congruent with the popular ideal of either romantic or altruistic love. Levine agrees with Freud that these popular conceptions of love are illusions and misconceptions: “An account of love that specifies caring for the other for their own sake, desiring their company and enjoying it, and taking an interest in their projects, an account along just these lines, describes an emotion found among creatures only remotely similar to ourselves. None of these features of love figure prominently in Freud’s account” (241).

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Freud biographer Martin Wain agrees. “Sex was Freud’s substitute for love. . . . In the Freudian formula it became love. . . . By recognizing in sex the materialization of love, he supported the age’s materialism.” For Freud, love lacked any element of transcendence. “In psychoanalysis love became the tangible act of sex, having lost its spiritual robe.” The family, and by extension the society, were no longer sites of love, if they had ever been. They were sites of conflict and competition, as they had always been in reality, said psychoanalysis, and this was also true in the individual. Freud reduced love to the benefits people sought from each other; it was nothing more than self-love. (Wain 1998, 228–29)

Whether such a view of love could serve as the basis for a “love culture” informed by therapists teaching others how to love (Fine 1985) remains an open question. Two decades later, despite a dramatic expansion of psychological research on romantic love, the concept of love continues to be neglected in therapy. Stephen B. Levine, a psychiatrist who practices in a center for marital and sexual health, observes that it is his patients, not his teachers in psychiatry nor the texts he studied, who have convinced him that love is relevant to marital and sex therapy. He remembers that although his teachers and texts were concerned about relationships, “the word love was not, and still is not, often invoked” (Levine 2005, 143). Levine says he understands the reasons for therapists’ neglect of love, for “love has too many meanings and nuances, too many avenues of defeat, and is too abstract for us to focus upon it at length.” However, he now believes that shrinking from that complexity is a mistake, and urges therapists to treat the everyday language of love as an opportunity rather than an impediment. Although “careful scrutiny of our decisions to love threatens to illuminate our deceptive, ambivalent, contradictory natures,” at the same time such illumination is essential for successful therapy. “Rather than to retreat in cynicism or fear, I hope that a careful consideration of these interlocking meanings of love will help clinicians to efficiently discern their patients’ meanings. It may, in particular, help us to listen more insightfully” (Levine 2005, 150). Psychotherapist Juan Luis Linares (2006, 111) also attributes the continuing neglect of love in clinical theory to the complexity of the concept. “The various psycho-therapeutic models,” he writes, “have avoided treating love as the central phenomenon of the human condition, or . . . have relativized its importance in numerous ways, simplifying it or reducing it to an instinct.” That is understandable, he suggests, “because it is a difficult concept to deal with, one that is replete with poetic, literary, philosophical, and religious

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connotations—intense and reductionist connotations, all of which imply important, at times sublime, simplifications.” Despite its complexity, however, Linares has incorporated love into his own therapy, because it is “universally agreed” that love is important. For him, “it makes sense to regard family and couple therapy as a process of restoring the loving bonds that have been partially or completely severed.” Alan Tjeltveit’s (2006) attempt to explain why psychologists have made such modest contributions to the understanding of love also points to the professional ambivalence whereby psychologists are both “drawn to love” but also “deeply suspicious about love, concerned about its negative affects, and unclear about what method, if any can be employed to understand it.” Factors contributing to the neglect of love by psychologists are their “customary methods, the language we employ, our sense of our history, and our aspirations,” all of which are bound up in an ongoing “ambivalence toward love” (8–9). Further evidence that love is neglected in clinical work comes from a study of married couples in Zurich, Switzerland who were asked to evaluate influences or “themes” they felt to be decisive to the quality and stability of their relationship. The researchers sought to identify every potentially important factor that might explain “aspects and levels of a couple’s connectedness.” They finally settled on nineteen possible influences on couples’ overall well-being. Those nineteen factors, along with measures of marital quality and well-being, were assessed in a random sample of married couples and a convenience sample of couples in therapy. Aware of the definitional problems associated with the concept “love,” the researchers specified that love described “a deep emotional bond, mutual caring and attraction, trust and closeness.” When love turned out to be “the single most important variable related to the couples’ overall well-being” and their “pre-eminent reason for staying together,” the authors expressed surprise at its neglect in the literature. With few exceptions, they report, research on marital quality and stability does not consider love, it is not discussed in articles on couples therapy, and research instruments used to measure marital quality usually do not ask about it. Their explanation for the absence of love in therapeutic research and practice echoes Tjeltveit’s explanations of the absence of love in the writings of Christian psychologists. First, it is difficult to define, having “a tremendous range of meaning” including attitudes, emotions, and behavior. Second, contemporary marital therapy builds on “traditional approaches,” and these have tended to focus on interaction patterns rather than “intrapsychic processes.” Third, and this is a curious reason coming from therapists whose profession

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historically involved revealing unconscious motivations, “psychotherapists may tend to avoid speaking about love, since this theme may touch upon the crucial fundament of the relationship.” Fourth, it seems that love is not pragmatic, real, or discrete enough. Although therapists may define love as important in the context of relationship fantasies, it is “generally not directly addressed when dealing with the ‘here’ and ‘now.’” Finally, in good psychotherapeutic form, they address the subconscious of the therapists. Lacking other rational reasons for this patently irrational oversight, “It must be assumed that this attitude [toward love] exists because of subconscious fears and a lack of therapeutic concepts rather than as a result of positive decision-making” (Riehl-Emde, Volker, and Willi 2003, 265–66). As a corrective, it is recommended that therapists take love more seriously, incorporating it “actively into diagnostic and therapeutic procedures of couple therapy.” Love, “including its historical, sociocultural, and psychological aspects” must become part of the standard curriculum for training family therapists, “in order to prevent this ‘blind spot’ from being bequeathed to future generations of therapists” (Riehl-Emde, Volker, and Willi 2003, 266). These explanations of researchers’ neglect of love, especially family love, sound plausible, but do not explain why, when opposing forces have weakened and it is now respectable and safe to study love, only romantic love and, to a much lesser extent, altruistic love, are topics of interest. Why does family love, whether between husband and wife or between parents and children, continue to be neglected? A few reasons suggest themselves. Romantic love may be easier to study than marital love, for the primary subjects have been university undergraduates, and these days most undergraduates are unmarried. Or, romantic love may be more interesting to researchers and the editors of journals. It may fit the dominant theoretical orientations better than family love. It may be more in line with the ideology of the times, more “politically correct.” It may have more intrinsic interest or dramatic appeal than the more settled, even staid, “family romance” or companionate love. An additional reason is offered by Gallagher (1996, 222) who sees the marginalization of the traditional family as a dominant characteristic of contemporary American life. Indeed, that our present civilization has managed to merge marriage and what used to be called “free love” into a single category, is, for Gallagher, one of its most remarkable achievements. Historically, romantic love outside of marriage was in many ways the very opposite of marriage, yet as a society we have so reduced the permanent duties and obligations associated with marriage that it has become, like premarital and extramarital sexual experiences of varying duration, merely “a relationship.”

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Today’s researchers can argue that they haven’t ignored family love, it is included among the “relationships” they study, and is essentially no different. Western society has reduced the institution of marriage to a category among “marriage alternatives,” one of many “lifestyle choices.” Here the history of Freud’s impact on modern society is seen to mesh with the continuing marginalization of marriage. If Freud “reduced love to the benefits people sought from each other,” then relationships were at the mercy of personally defined “benefits.” “With the flight of the spiritual, the material—as sex, pleasure, worldly success—was all that remained,” and if the struggle for material is the meaning of life, then “pleasure became a spiritual quest, recognized and fortified by Freud through sex as the materialization of love” (Wain 1998, 229). The ideal of therapeutic individualism (Bellah et al. 1985) is grounded in Freudian materialism. “Freud provided a halfway house between the religion no longer believed and some new testament based on a world without God and with science” (308). Conventional marriage is an uneasy, sometimes unwelcome resident in that house. The new priests were the scientists and intellectuals, their authority that of credentialed expertise. About 1970, “the weight of expert opinion shifted decisively against traditional marriage and toward being in favor of divorce and other alternative lifestyles” (Gallagher 1996, 202). Much of the modernist elite—teachers, public intellectuals, marriage counselors, and social scientists generally—sided with the counterculture that maintained traditional sexual norms and marital commitments were out-of-date. According to one review of the academic literature of the period, “It is hard to convey, without seeming to exaggerate or distort, the nearly voyeuristic focus in the literature on ‘marriage alternatives’ such as ‘swinging,’ group marriage, open marriage and the like.” In addition, use of the word “marriage” declined noticeably, as it became “just one form of ‘coupling and uncoupling’ or one possible ‘intimate lifestyle’” (Whitehead 1992, 6). This conclusion is supported by a review of textbooks for sex and family life courses covering grade school through college levels. By the 1990s most texts for these courses had little to say about marriage, and what they did say usually was not positive. The texts did not denounce marriage, they simply marginalized it, and devoted their pages to legitimizing “any kind of sex between consenting adults in private, if each partner is non-exploitative and the act is voluntary.” It is concluded that “the student influenced by experts like these will have much to say about every possible human sexual combination except for marriage, the one around which most people center their lives” (Gallagher 1996, 203–4). An example of explicit marginalization of families is Scanzoni et al.’s (1989) The Sexual Bond. In an overt call for family professionals to use their

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authority ideologically, the authors asked, “What business are we in?” and answered that family professionals were to be “developmentalists,” actively creating new family definitions and moral norms. Specifically, “applied professionals” were encouraged to replace the concept of family in social science discourse with the construct “sexually bonded primary relationship.” Insofar as their work roles placed them in contact with the public, they were urged to discredit conventional family values in favor of the morality of expressive individualism. The public was described as backward, its “simple-minded” conceptions limiting scientific progress and progressive family policy. Applied professionals were to bridge the gap between the “highly sophisticated” vision of sexual bonding held by family professionals and the values of the lay public by invoking the medical model. The traditional “conjugal family model,” having “lost its relevance,” was to be discarded as an ideal. Family professionals were to work for its replacement by new standards in the name of health and freedom. Those standards were, first, that “any and all situations/relationships” that people considered to be “family” were to be recognized as family, for the “healthy” definition of family was maximum diversity. Second, a healthy relationship was one in which change was recognized as the “ultimate constant.” Healthy people had the right to initiate changes in intimate relationships simply because “they wanted to.” Third, applied professionals were to teach their public in contact—students, patients, clients—that healthy people accepted “relevant contemporary morality.” By definition, the moral and philosophical principles undergirding the “conventional family paradigm” had lost their relevance, and “unexamined conformity to the existing social order is not a sign of health.” It followed logically that it was the stable, traditional relationships that were “sick” (Scanzoni et al. 1989, 257, 260–61, 268–73). Therapeutic individualism tends to make love and marriage “temporary by definition,” for both are reduced to means for achieving personal growth (Gallagher 1996, 227). Noller’s (1996) overview of evidence for “the love that supports marriage and family” shows that cultural beliefs about romantic love as blind, external, and uncontrollable coexist with beliefs at all stages of relationships that commitment and companionate or friendship love are important. Despite high rates of marital instability, most people continue to tell researchers that love means commitment and permanence, although they are less confident than they once were that these goals are attainable. Most people also believe in some version of the romantic love ideal. These contrasting models or “vocabularies of love” are not blended, but continue to coexist in “awkward tension” (Swidler 2001, 251).

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Perspectives on Family Love Despite the inhibiting factors listed above, several writers have included altruistic love in analytical models that may be applied to families. We will review some of these approaches, beginning with the anthropological heritage of altruism as a variable in the study of kinship. Altruism and the Rule of Amity The term “altruism,” literally “other-ism,” was coined by sociologist Auguste Comte in an attempt to replace “love” with a scientific term shorn of theological connotations. It is a much narrower term than love, referring to unselfish concern for others or, more technically, to behavior in which voluntary costs to the donor yield benefits to the recipient (Jones 2000; Kerr, Godfrey-Smith, and Feldman 2004). The widely observed human tendency to prefer, and sacrifice for, close family members and near kindred over more distantly related others is characterized in sociobiology and evolutionary biology as the principle of kin selection. Kin selection is said to be evolution’s way of maximizing the survival of one’s DNA. It is believed to operate in service of “inclusive fitness,” a theory explaining individual behavior directed to maximizing the odds that one’s biological relatives will survive to pass along their genes (e.g., by assuring the survival of my relatives I assure that at least some of my genes will survive) (Wilson 1975).9 In The Moral Sense, James Q. Wilson (1993, 15) cites as “the two most striking facts about human societies” that “each is organized around kinship patterns and that children, no matter how burdensome, are not abandoned in large numbers.”10 Wilson’s quest for what is universal about human nature rests on an examination of “fundamental dispositions” and the human characteristics rooted in those dispositions. If they exist, writes Wilson, “we would expect them [the dispositions] to be so obvious that travelers would either take them for granted or overlook them in preference to whatever is novel or exotic.” He identifies two fundamental dispositions from which the universal but easily blunted moral senses11 derive. They are “the affection a parent, especially a mother, bears for its child” and “the desire to please that the child brings to this encounter.” Our moral senses are forged in the crucible of this loving relationship and expanded by the enlarged relationships of families and peers. Out of the universal attachment between child and parent the former begins to develop a sense of empathy and fairness, to learn self-control, and to acquire a conscience that makes him behave dutifully at least with respect to some matters.

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Those dispositions are extended to other people (and often to other species) to the extent that these others are thought to share in the traits we find in our families. (Wilson 1993, 226)

In other words, concern for others sufficient to generate sacrifices for them, as well as the other moral senses, grows out of the “universal attachment between child and parent.” However, the principle of family altruism does not explain sacrifices for non-kin or other living creatures. Yet “sympathy for persons who are not offspring and creatures that are not human is a characteristic of almost all humans.” Such general altruism, Wilson (1993, 43–44) explains, stems from the moral sentiment of sympathy and the inborn capacity for attachment or affiliative behavior. Both of these emerge from the universal attachment that characterizes normal loving relationships between parent and child. Altruism includes obligatory action or duty, and “prescriptive altruism” is the basis of kinship morality. Meyer Fortes (1969, 237) calls this kinship principle “the rule of amity.” It is an “ethic of generosity” that governs social relations among kin. Under this rule, “kinsfolk are expected to be loving, just, and generous to one another and not to demand strictly equivalent returns of one another.” In practice, this means that in many societies, kinsfolk have “irresistible claims” on one another for hospitality, support, consideration, and protection. People are expected to share freely with their kin, not because they are coerced or have contracted to do so but because they are kin. The prevalence of the rule of amity, even in complex societies, means that “the intergenerational family remains central and critical compared to other arrangements in nurturing recognitions of human frailty, mortality, and finitude” (Elshtain 1990, 65). Consequently families are caretakers of last resort in times of crisis or failure of other support systems (Perlman and Duck 1987). The rule of amity also incorporates a social norm of reciprocity or reciprocal altruism. Nowadays we sometimes refer to the effects of the rule of amity and of the irresistible claims of kindred as social capital, and the beneficient use of that capital is evidence of love. Social capital in this context means a willingness to sacrifice for kindred. For example, studies of African-Caribbean diasporic communities reveal that social capital grounded in kinship is often an essential resource in the migration, education, and social support of family members. Members of African-Caribbean families who migrate to Britain, America, or elsewhere continue to celebrate their relatedness and their “roots.” Their family connections comprise a helping network scattered across the world, and “loyalty, as members of a shared lineage, can be assumed and trust guaranteed” (Chamberlain 2006, 111).

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This social capital is not limited merely to members of one’s immediate family, and connections and knowledge often prove to be more important assets than wealth: For all the families here the ties of consanguinity and affinity—across a complex kinship pattern which spread across the world—were given the highest priority. . . . Indeed, the spreading or dispersal of material and emotional resources throughout the diasporic trajectory of each family provides diversity and security, strength and opportunity. When the family is both the source of belonging and the resource for survival, then identity is both portable and secure. (Chamberlain 2006, 111–12)

The prescription that kindred should love and support each other does not mean they always do. Everywhere close kinship ties may be characterized by rivalry, envy, and hostility as well as generosity and love (Fortes 1969, 238–39). Among the Amazonian Yanomami, amity exchange is said to be “as much an exchange of hostility as a dynamic mechanism of social reproduction” (Overing and Passes 2000). But it is love, not its opposites, that is normative within families, that is “the rule.” Donald Brown’s (1991, 105–7) review of anthropological universals in human society lists sentimental attachments to kin, along with kin altruism and nepotism, as “thoroughly familiar features in world ethnography.” This does not mean that altruism is natural or inherent in the human species, but that most societies define such behavior among kindred as necessary to survival. Jones (2000) suggests that because altruistic behavior is functional for group survival, it is supported not only by the altruism inherent in kin selection, but also by social pressures or “group nepotism.” Thus social constraints from the wider society are added to pressures from the kin group and to hypothetical biological impulses favoring altruism. Jones holds out the possibility that apparent “higher motives” may all be explained by biological and social constraints oriented to survival: “An evolutionary perspective suggests that we should be as skeptical about the moral claims of ‘higher’ motives as of lower ones; moral sentiments are at best a fallible guide to morality. . . . Neither does the present theory imply that individuals as individuals will feel any special affection for fellow ethnics or get along badly with members of other ethnic groups” (794). Grants and Exchanges: The Economics of Love Economic models rarely include love as a variable, although it may be treated as an item of exchange or a source of value. One approach to love as an

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element in economic models refers to the activity of love as both product and process of production. Erich Fromm (1986, 8–9), considering the relevance of the classic theorists to the problem of “ennui in modern society,” contrasted social activity (“something that brings the powers inherent in people to expression, that helps give birth, that brings to life both our physical and emotional, both our intellectual and artistic capacities”) and passivity (a state of being “driven by forces one does not control . . . [one] cannot act but can only react”). Fromm illustrated what he meant by activity by quoting Karl Marx on love: If you take as your point of departure the human being as human being and his relationship to the world as a human one, then you can give only love in return for love, trust in return for trust, etc. . . . If you want to influence other people, then you have to be a person who genuinely stimulates and challenges others. Each of your relationships with people—and with nature—has to be a specific expression of your own true, individual life appropriate to the object of your intentions. If you love without awakening love in return, that is, if your love as love does not produce a loving response, if the expression of your being as a loving person does not make you loved, then your love is powerless and brings unhappiness.12

Here Marx treats love as an activity. Marx’s model stresses the generative power of love: genuine love will elicit love in return, and it is not productive unless it does so. Fromm contrasts the active and productive nature of love as Marx defined it with the tendency in contemporary society to focus on being loved rather than giving love. Marx’s actor stimulates and challenges others. To the modern person, says Fromm, “it rarely occurs . . . that he can create anything through love.” His usual and almost exclusive concern is to be loved, not to emanate love himself, not to awaken love in others through his love for them and so to create something new, something that had not existed in the world before. That is why he thinks that being loved is purely a matter of chance or something you can make happen by buying all sorts of things that will supposedly make you lovable, everything from the right mouthwash to an elegant suit or an expensive car. (Fromm 1986, 9)

Some theorists of love would argue that unrequited love is also productive. That moves us to a second approach to love as activity, Kenneth Boulding’s (1973) treatise on the economics of love as exhibited in grants and exchanges. The term “grants” refers to generous, altruistic behavior of give and take.13 A grant is a one-way transfer of resources, a gift without expectation

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of return, although there may in fact be a return. Grants in families may be economic (giving money or goods), interpersonal (giving of one’s time, sharing knowledge, providing care or encouragement), or both. In contrast to grants are “exchanges,” the type of resource transfer that prevails in the public sphere, in markets, schools, and governments. Exchange involves a two-way transfer of resources. One expects a return for what is given, a “good grade” for study efforts, pay for a day’s work, rewards for services provided. In contrast to the altruism of grants, exchange is egoistic, self-interested behavior where the goal is to assure that the transfer of resources results in individual gain, or at least that the transfer involve resources of roughly equal value. Exchange generally requires either a formal or informal contract to protect the self-interest of both giver and receiver. These two approaches to the “giving/getting compact”—the grants that flow from altruism and caring and the contracts oriented to exchange and profit—reflect a fundamental difference between family and market systems.14 For Boulding (1973, v), to study the implications for social life of that fundamental difference reveals “how things come to hold together and how they fall apart.” Grants are not expected to generate a return, but that does not mean that the giver receives nothing back. When an integrative system operates as it should, all members are givers and all are receivers. This is the phenomenon of reciprocity, the basis of the ethic of reciprocal altruism (Boulding 1973, 25). In systems based on grants the reciprocity is often indirect, complex, and relatively open. That is, person A may give to B, who gives to C, who gives to D, who gives to A. The influence of grants multiplies and spreads like the proverbial ripple on the water. With benevolent grants there is no “scorekeeping” to assure the equivalence of resource transfers, to keep the transfers in a particular time frame, or even to assure that eventually the links of giving reconnect to an original granter. Another important difference between grants and exchange systems is that grants require sacrifice while exchanges do not. This distinction is particularly important in understanding the dynamics of resource transfers in families, and their relationship to family love. Sacrifice is the element with integrative power. It generates solidarity in families and communities. Systems of exchange require little sacrifice, and therefore exchange “has no such power to create community, identity, and commitment” (Boulding 1973, 28). Grants vary in integrative power, depending on their motivation, the nature of the grant, and the degree of sacrifice involved. Voluntary grants given with love generally carry greater integrative power, especially in the

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short term, than nonvoluntary grants given grudgingly. Also, interpersonal grants that involve the giving of self—sacrifices of personal attention, time, and involvement—seem to have greater integrative power than economic or “monetized” grants. This is especially true when the economic grants are perceived as substitutes for grants of self (Bivens 1976; Foa 1971). Grants create feelings of benevolence and identification partly because they create “an almost unconscious sense of obligation” in the recipient. But it is the giver much more than the receiver who feels the integrative power of grants. Grants given with love increase the giver’s capacity to love and at the same time generate love for the receiver. Of course, grants work best when they are reciprocal, for then the processes of developing love also tend to be reciprocal. “A gift helps to create the identity of the giver, and a gift . . . identifies the giver with the recipient” (Boulding 1973, 27). The power of sacrifice to bind the giver to the receiver is seen when sacrifice is excessively one-sided or misplaced (in what Boulding calls the “sacrifice trap,” or “throwing good money after bad”). Examples include the pathological attachments of some wives to abusive husbands and the often intense attachment to family of exploited housewives. Boulding was one of the first economists to explore the implications of types of economic transfer for family solidarity, altruism, and love, but most current work on altruism, intergenerational grants, and exchange does not cite him.15 Gary Becker’s (1974, 1981, 1991; Becker and Tomes 1986) extensive work on the economics of the family is the more typical grounding for recent work on family altruism, exchange patterns, and public and private economic transfers. A Psychobiological Model: Love and Limbic Resonance Among the most promising theories of love is Lewis, Amini, and Lannon’s (2000) psychobiological approach, based on an integration of clinical experience—the authors are psychiatrists—with the recent findings of neurodevelopment, evolutionary theory, psychopharmacology, neonatology, experimental psychology, and computer science. Their approach is based on a modernistic faith that, in love as in physics, the universe is governed by law: “Because it is part of the physical universe, love has to be lawful. Like the rest of the world, it is governed and described by principles we can discover but not change” (5). Many of their principles are foreshadowed by attachment theory (Bowlby 1983; Ainsworth et al. 1978) and are compatible with propositions based in child development research (Bronfenbrenner 1990). However, neither of these precursors to their psychobiological “general theory of love” is as well

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grounded in psychological research on emotions and neuroscientific studies of brain function. Nor are they as well-integrated with personal emotional experience and literary efforts to convey the nature and meaning of love. Lewis, Amini, and Lannon (2000, 14-15) celebrate the importance of the accumulated common wisdom about love. Their general theory is an extension of that wisdom, enriched by the hard science of the brain and a genuine interdisciplinary reach: Long before science existed, sharp-eyed men and women told each other stories about how people are, stories that have never lost their power to enchant and instruct. The purpose of using science to investigate human nature is not to replace those stories but to augment and deepen them. Robert Frost once wrote that too many poets delude themselves by thinking the mind is dangerous and must be left out. That principle is mirrored in the study of the brain, where too many experts, out of plain fear, avoid mentioning love. We think the heart is dangerous and must be left in. The poetic and the veridical, the proven and the unprovable, the heart and the brain . . . exert their pulls in different directions. Where they are brought together the result is incandescence. Within that place of radiant intersection, love begins to reveal itself. (15)

The theory derives, in part, from the failure of Freudian theory in clinical practice and a pragmatic search for efficacious alternatives. “When we sought to make use of the Freudian model and its numerous offshoots . . . we discovered that efficacy was not among the model’s advantages. When each of us came to grapple with the emotional problems of our patients, we saw that the old models provide diagrams to a territory that cannot be found anywhere within a real person” (Lewis, Amini, and Lannon 2000, 9). Their general theory of love includes the following propositions. (1) Humans, in company with all mammals, have a second, middle, or limbic brain, which is “the center of advanced emotionality.” (2) The limbic brain specializes in interpreting the emotional state of other mammals; babies come “hardwired” with the capability to interpret maternal emotions. (3) Although they may not be aware of it, mothers teach their babies about the world using the “universal signals of emotion.” Long before an infant can interpret language, maternal emotions are communicated to her, for “limbic states can leap between minds, feelings are contagious.” (4) “Somatic concordance” or limbic regulation, whereby the open loop structure of human physiology requires emotional input from others, is essential to health. “Limbic regulation mandates interdependence for mammals of all ages.” (5) Limbic regulation directs brain development; and “relevant [limbic/emotional] experience is a necessary

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part of the process that leads to the brain’s final structure.” Love changes the young brain forever, and so does the lack of love. (6) “Emotional reality (or its illusion) is collaborative. . . . We all embody an emotional force field that acts on the people we love.” (7) A lack of, or inappropriate limbic regulation in infancy and childhood can cripple people emotionally, but because humans remain “open loop” to a degree, emotional relearning in adulthood is possible, though difficult. (8) “The result of the limbic interaction between patient and healer is so efficacious that only the most powerful medications can be definitively proven stronger. . . . Psychotherapy changes people because one mammal can restructure the limbic brain of another” (Lewis, Amini, and Lannon 2000, 24–25, 60–61, 64, 84–87, 89, 157, 162–63, 174–77). Numerous direct, testable hypotheses follow from these propositions. Among them are that children do better with two parents (Amato 2005), that parental time invested in children is essential to the children’s emotional welfare, that “parents who receive inadequate love have less to give—to anybody, including their children,” and that “the emotional fate of children is inextricably bound to the ability of their parents to love one another—a skill that is falling into disrepute” (Lewis, Amini, and Lannon. 2000, 203–4). Several of these propositions are in conflict with prevailing cultural notions about children and parenting. Lewis, Amini, and Lannon recognize that some cultural practices will persist even in the face of evidence that they are harmful, for societies are governed more by fashion, the media, habit, and profit than by the findings of science. They acknowledge that contemporary American culture “promotes as self-evident the notion that employable adults must have jobs and careers, that children do fine with less.” To the evidence from the psychobiological research, these authors add the authority of their extensive clinical experience with emotionally handicapped adults whose pathologies derive from inadequate limbic regulation in childhood. They criticize contemporary society for choosing ignorance about the importance of parental love in child development (202). They distinguish between the process of loving and the state of being “in love,” and lament the neglect of the former. Society has wrongly emphasized being in love, it “fawns over the fleetingness of being in love while discounting the importance of loving” (206). How does the difference play out in life? Being “in love” is necessarily impermanent, it merely begins the dance, while “true relatedness has a chance to blossom only with the waning of its intoxicating predecessor.” Loving is limbically distinct from in love. Loving is mutuality; loving is synchronous attunement and modulation. As such, adult love depends critically

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upon knowing the other. In love demands only the brief acquaintance necessary to establish an emotional genre but does not demand that the book of the beloved’s soul be perused from preface to epilogue. Loving derives from intimacy, the prolonged and detailed surveillance of a foreign soul. (Lewis, Amini, and Lannon 2000, 207)

They quote Walker Percy (1992) to the effect that modern humanity is “sick unto death” with the loss of something they cannot identify. The mysterious, missing element, they say, is “a deep and abiding immersion in communal ties.” Love is “the tether binding our whirling lives,” and when the center does not hold, “all of us are flung outward, singly, into the encroaching dark.” We suffer economic prosperity and emotional recession; our culture is “an extended experiment in the effects of depriving people of what they crave most.” What, biologically, we crave most is not the excitement of being “in love,” but the operation of the “timeworn mechanisms of emotion [that] allow two human beings to receive the contents of each other’s minds” (Lewis, Amini, and Lannon 2000, 37, 205). Twilight of the Image of Love: Modernity, Mammon, and the Self It is unusual for the reflections of poets to yield a theory of social change, but Octavio Paz is an unusual poet. His book The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism is both a history and a social psychology of the relations between sex, eroticism, and love. He likens his effort to geography, for “a sketch of the boundaries between love and the other passions [is] . . . a sketch of the kind that traces the outline of an island in an archipelago” (Paz 1995, 127). Paz identifies two “mornings” of modernity: one beginning at the French Revolution and lasting perhaps half a century, and the other beginning with the scientific and artistic awakening preceding World War I and ending with World War II. Both of these periods he casts as “Luciferian,” after the angel of evil, the rebel angel of light. After 1950, Paz suggests, Lucifer abandons the century, and there are no great aesthetic or poetic movements, only revivals of the past. “The works of the second half of the twentieth century are different from and even contrary to those of the first half.” By contrast to the “ambiguous, violent light of Lucifer,” the works of the second half of the century are “twilight works.” Compared to the rebellion and innovation of the earlier period, the present is “simplistic, superficial, and merciless.” “Having fallen into the idolatry of ideological systems, our century has ended by worshiping things” (Paz 1995, 186). What place, he asks, does love have in such a world? The question is crucial; we must confront the present and give it a face.

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Paz describes several trends of late modernity. One is the trend toward commodification of everything. Another, the consequence of the anti-establishment revolutions of the late 1960s, is erotic freedom. Many observers expected that increased freedom would mean the decline of prostitution and pornography. On the contrary, says Paz, in recent time erotic freedom has been “expropriated by the powers of money and advertising; and we have seen twilight creeping over the image of love in our society” (Paz 1995, 194). Paz asserts “an indissoluble link between what we call the soul and what we call the body.” But with the large-scale commodification of sex, the idea of the soul, so essential historically to the notion of romantic love, has been marginalized. Formerly beauty was seen as an attribute of divinity; today it is an aspect of marketing. Modernity desacralized the body, and advertising has used it as a marketing tool. . . . Capitalism has turned Eros into an employee of Mammon. Sexual servitude is added to the debasement of the human image. . . . No one ever dreamed that commercial dealings would supplant libertine philosophy and that pleasure would be transformed into an industrial machine. . . . In the past, pornography and prostitution were handicrafts, so to speak; today they are an essential part of the consumer economy. . . . Now an institution, they have ceased to be transgressions. (196–97)

A related trend is the modernist faith in technology and science. The Greeks taught that pleasure and death were related. Sexuality, linked to reproduction and life, was a response to death. Today sexuality and death are linked once more with the appearance of AIDS among us, but our defenses are weak because (1) we have been lulled into a false security thinking nature was our servant, and ignoring its other face, and (2) our societies have lost the moral authority to regulate sexual behavior.16 Families and religion used to regulate sex, but “family morality, usually closely allied to traditional religious beliefs, has collapsed.” The media, in the mode of merchandising everything with sex, is in no position to counsel moderation. [I]f a new erotic ethics does not come into being, our lack of defense against nature and its immense powers of destruction will continue. We believed we were the masters of the earth and the lords of nature; now we are helpless. In order to recover our spiritual strength we must first recover our humility. (Paz 1995, 201)

Finally, there is the “twilight of the idea of the soul.” The idea of a soul has disappeared from the worldview of most scientists and many citizens.

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Many attributes formerly seen as constituting the soul are now, according to the psychologists, located in the brain. “So the body, without ceasing to be a body, has turned into a soul.” And if the soul has become the body, what has the person become? Is he or she a mere perishable body, a totality of molecular interactions? A machine, as the specialists in the field of artificial intelligence believe? In that case, once we gain the necessary knowledge, we will be able to reproduce it and even improve upon it. A human being, having ceased to be the image and likeness of divinity, now also ceases to be a product of natural evolution and enters the category of industrial production: it is something manufactured. . . . Our tradition told us that every man and woman was a unique, unrepeatable being; the modern age sees not beings but organs, functions, processes. (Paz 1995, 203–4, 207)

According to Paz, these trends threaten the foundations of civilization. They also represent a “twilight of love.” Love disappears, for it becomes only another commodity for sale, and love is impossible without the person of the beloved. “More and more, through different hypotheses and theories, we make the soul depend on the body, make it one of the body’s functions.” At the same time, the “new physics” tells us that the cosmos is no longer substance, but a flux of energy, time, and space: “Nothing we see is real, and what is real is invisible. . . . All these changes have altered the idea of love to the point of making it, like the soul and matter, unknowable” (Paz 1995, 205–6). Paz’s formulation raises important issues. To what extent has the “twilight of the idea of the soul” entered popular consciousness? Do his notions reflect the sensitive consciousness of the public intellectual or do they represent the public opinion? Does disbelief in the traditional idea of the soul foster weak romantic commitments, as phrases like “soul-mate” and “body and soul” cease to be meaningful? As to the commoditization of sex and love, what are the consequences of the worldwide sex industries for families and couples? To what extent are the ideals and practices of love, both romantic and family love, debased as Eros becomes “an employee of Mammon” and “sexual servitude is added to the debasement of the human image” (Paz 1995, 196). The critical task facing the philosophers, artists, and scientists of our time is the reinvention of the person: Although love continues to be the subject of twentieth-century poets and novelists, its very heart—the concept of the person—has been wounded. The crisis of the idea of love, the rise of labor camps, and the ecological threat—these

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are concomitant facts and all closely related to the twilight of the soul. The idea of love has been the moral and spiritual leavening of our societies for a millennium. . . . Today it is threatened with dissolution. Its enemies are not the age-old ones, the Church and the morality of abstinence, but promiscuity, which turns love into a pastime, and money, which turns love into a form of slavery. If our world is to recover its health, the cure must be twofold. Political regeneration must include the resurrection of love. And both love and politics depend on the rebirth of the concept that has been the focal point of our civilization: the person. . . . To reinvent love, as the poet seeks to do, we must reinvent the human person. (Paz 1995, 212)

A Sociological Approach: Commitment versus Therapeutic Individualism In Habits of the Heart, Bellah et al. (1985) contrast two ways of understanding love relationships. Both reflect important themes in Western cultural traditions; each may be seen as an aspect of the American heritage. One, growing out of traditional religious views of love and marriage, emphasizes the commitments and obligations that accompany love. This approach, strongly held by evangelical Christians, in fact reflects the obligations associated with marriage and family in most of the world’s major religions. The other approach, which Bellah et al. characterize as a “therapeutic attitude,” stresses individualism and self-actualization. In its pure form, it “denies all forms of obligation and commitment in relationships, replacing them only with the ideal of full, open, honest communication among self-actualized individuals” (Bellah et al. 1985, 101). A key difference between these types is the self-other orientation. The assumptions of the therapeutic model reflect a belief in a free, autonomous self. In the traditional model, the self is familial and interdependent. Individualism in American society is seen to take two related forms, utilitarian and expressive. Under utilitarian individualism, the dominant philosophy of the competitive market economy, people have a right—even an obligation—to maximize their own interests. This is the characteristic capitalist perspective that justifies social inequality. At the individual level, it tolerates putting others down in order to “get ahead,” maintaining that “in a society where each vigorously pursued his own interest, the social good would automatically emerge” (Bellah at al. 1985, 33). Expressive individualism differs in that it celebrates experience, not possession, but it is individualism just the same. Freedom is defined as the opportunity and capacity to lead life in one’s own way, without having to conform to prevailing standards or patterns. Expressive individualism assumes that

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freedom from the values and moral constraints of traditional authority is essential to full personal autonomy. The self becomes the ultimate arbitrator of right or wrong. The claims of others are seen as impediments to freedom of choice, or at least secondary in priority. Bellah et al. (1985, 98–99, 109) see expressive individualism as a “therapeutic attitude” that reinforces tendencies toward individualism already present in the culture. They point to “the assumption that social bonds can be firm only if they rest on the free, self-interested choices of individuals” as a core tenet of the therapy literature. This view of the widespread acceptance of the therapeutic paradigm accords with Gerkin’s (1984, 12) documentation of its emergence as “the primary mode for consideration of human individual and relationship problems” and “a social process that [has] permeated every nook and cranny of American life.”17 The basic values of the society, exhibited in the literature of its intimacy—sex and marriage manuals—are those of expressive individualism: communication, sharing, relationship, and “an almost overwhelming sense of individualization” (Brissett and Lewis 1979, 64). In the “open,” “closed,” and “random” family typology familiar to many family professionals (Constantine 1986; Kantor and Lehr 1975), the random family is the clearest example of expressive individualism. Its guiding image is “novelty, creativity, and individuality,” and “the individual is . . . paramount because individual creativity is the source of the family’s variety.” The preferred “open” family—the “image of adaptability, efficacy, and participation”—is also individualistic and thoroughly therapeutic, “above all else dedicated to communication, to open and authentic sharing in a search for joint solutions to the problems of family living” (Constantine 1986, 20). Love in the therapeutic mode strictly limits the obligations of both parties (Bellah et al. 1985, 100–101). Sacrifice, which involves real costs to the self, is incompatible with the therapeutic ideal of love. Sacrifice tends to be motivated by commitment to moral ethics or to purposes larger than, or at least beyond, the self. The therapeutic attitude rejects such external commitments: love for others must, of necessity, be conditional—conditioned on the extent to which the “relationship” fulfills the needs of self. Opposed to therapeutic individualism is another dominant orientation to love and family life, one Bellah et al. find represented, among other places, in traditional Christian thought. It is the expectation that love in families will be altruistic, unconditional, and enduring. This orientation invokes the language of obligation and duty to ensure that necessary nurturance and care of family members continues even when such activities are neither pleasant nor personally rewarding. The ideal of altruistic commitment is at odds with expressive individualism in at least five ways.

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First is a reliance on sacred writings or traditional moral principles rather than the self to determine right or wrong. Such principles are said to provide a larger purpose for loving than the ephemeral pursuit of personal happiness. Generally, they attribute sanctity to the marriage bond and define commitment to marriage and family as a way of being obedient to God. The conviction that “God is love” has ramifications for how love is defined in family relations, and justifies love and sacrifice in all personal relationships. The altruistic approach finds virtue in unrequited and unconditional love, and in the giving of self and one’s goods without expectation of recompense. A second difference relates to the therapeutic assumption that self-love precedes love for others. In the altruistic perspective, whether one loves self or has a positive self-image is, at best, beside the point, and at worst, self-defeating. Love is a duty and an obligation, not an opportunity for selfenhancement (Burr and Christensen 1992). A third distinction involves the relative priority given to duty as opposed to feeling, will, and emotion. In the paradigm of altruism and commitment, the “warm, comfortable feelings of love” are important, but where a choice must be made between feelings of love and the obligations of love, “the tension is clearly resolved in favor of obligation” (Bellah et al. 1985, 94). In the model of commitment, obligations are not just to one’s spouse and children, but also to one’s community and religious belief. Expressive individualism validates feelings as the ultimate legitimators of action, but in the paradigm of altruistic commitment feelings are at least partly subject to choice and will, and it is assumed that one can exert sufficient control over personal feelings to shape the self. A fourth difference is the attitude toward sacrifice. The paradigm of commitment affirms sacrifice as a good thing, not a situation where one is cheated by not receiving fair return on an investment. The very definition of love is “a willingness to sacrifice oneself for others” (Bellah et al. 1985, 95). In contrast, the therapeutic orientation rejects sacrifice as a loss of self or of freedom. Finally, in the paradigm of commitment, family unity is a desirable goal. Husbands, wives, and children are counseled to “become as one,” and family strength derives from interdependence, not independence. This idea runs counter to the individualistic goal of the mature, loving adult as an autonomous self who needs no one, and also to the utilitarian goal of successfully maintaining a competitive edge. It is incompatible with the historic American experience of utilitarian individualism that produced a marital relationship of reciprocal exchange, a dichotomy of husband the “head” and wife the “heart” of the home. The contrasting altruistic ethic is that husbands and wives are of one heart and one mind, rather than splitting the two between

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them. In this model, ideal marital relations are not power struggles for relative advantage, but efforts at mutual service. The ongoing tension between these competing orientations to love and marriage, and how that tension plays out in individual lives, is a fertile area for research. Talk of Love, by one of the coauthors of Habits of the Heart, reports on continuing efforts to answer some of the questions raised there, notably “what is required for a good relationship, whether love involves obligation or sacrifice, and where love fits into the larger scheme of life’s meanings” (Swidler 2001, 1). Maternal Love, Preservative and Attentive Sara Ruddick (1984a, 1984b, 1989) offers a typology of maternal love that is useful in thinking about the place of mothering within the general paradigm of family love. Ruddick sees two kinds of maternal love emerging from the interests and demands of maternal practice. These types are neither feelings nor expressive skills, but rather a combination of attitudes and processes that foster children’s growth and development. Ruddick calls these ideal types “preservative” and “attentive” love. Preservative love is a commitment to protect the life one has borne, or the life for whom one is responsible, and to behave in ways that improve its chances for survival. It has more to do with duty and commitment and a sense of visceral, cross-generational identity than with a mother’s positive or negative feelings. Whereas the myths of motherhood define mother love in terms of feeling, Ruddick distinguishes preservative love from the conscious feelings of liking, admiring, being satisfied with, or enjoying the company of one’s child. She acknowledges that the feelings mothers have for their offspring are complex and often ambivalent. Mother love can be “intermixed with hate, sorrow, impatience, resentment, and despair; thought-provoking ambivalence is a hallmark of mothering” (Ruddick 1989, 68; cf. Rich 1976). Preservative love has more to do with a perceived responsibility and commitment to assure a child’s safety and survival than with liking the child, and it dictates behaving in responsible, life-sustaining ways despite feelings that might motivate one to act otherwise. Not the least important characteristic of preservative love is its sheer doggedness, a willingness to persist in maternal behavior despite impossible odds, historical fact, and manifest probabilities of failure. Preservative love may reveal itself as maternal irrationality, an ignoring of apparent odds in the service of even an infinitesimal possibility of a favorable outcome. It is “a matter-of-fact willingness to accept having given birth, to start and start over again, to welcome a future despite conditions of one’s self, one’s

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children, one’s society, and nature that may be reasons for despair” (Ruddick 1989, 74). At the same time a mother is watchfully holding her child close to protect life, she must also distance herself enough “to see the child’s reality with the patient loving eye of attention” (Ruddick 1989, 224). Attentive love seeks to understand what the child is going through and how best to help foster its growth. Such love requires looking closely, but not too closely. It involves loving without “seizing and using” the child to satisfy selfish purposes. It requires the exercise of self-restraint when one would like to make things easier for the child, and allows the child to experience the growth that comes from stretching, exploring, and risking. Attentive love is patient and empathetic, active and demanding. It is particular, attending to this child in this time and circumstance. “It demands full commitment to the situation, with all one’s senses and other capacities there, alive and straining and alert” (Lee 1986, 83). Maternal attentiveness includes an emotional component beyond the cognitive, and involves communication beyond words. It exemplifies limbic resonance, the “silent reverberation between minds [that] is so much a part of us that . . . it functions smoothly and continuously without our notice.” Obviously, maternal attentiveness has implications for a child’s well-being in the moment, protecting her from threats to physical and psychological trauma. It also has vital long-term implications, because the quality of the emotional communication, the “wordless harmony” between mother and child, is bound up in the subsequent psychological health of the child. “Raising children attentively, thoroughly, and patiently immunizes their brains against stress like Salk’s potion protects their bodies from polio” (Lewis, Amini, and Lannon 2000, 64, 214). Maternal love, incorporating both preservative and attentive love, exhibits itself in maternal watchfulness, wakefulness, and wariness as children encounter the challenges and perils of daily life. At its best, it involves a balance between constraints and opportunities for experience. It is “scrutinizing,” discerning, making judgments about whether to control and protect or to risk. The discerning process is limited by the mother’s inability to control the child’s will, dominate the environment, or predict outcomes. It also is constrained by knowledge, technology, cultural myths, and perceptions of causality and reality. Given these limits, maternal love requires humility and a measure of fatalism, a willingness to persevere in selfless behavior despite exhaustion and an inability to control outcomes (Ruddick 1989, 72–73). While maternal love may be the model of attentive love that comes first to mind, attention as a component of love is not limited to mothering or par-

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enting. Part of the nature of love is a heightened attentiveness to the welfare of love’s object. Marital love is also accompanied by changes in the focus and intensity of attentiveness, including more time spent thinking about and interacting with the spouse, and increased salience of the spouse in awareness generally (Beach and Tesser 1988, 343). Relevant to the power of preservative and attentive love are two other important aspects of love, namely its effects on the capacity for awareness and understanding. Margaret Olivia Little has made the case that “caring,” rather than being an impediment to accurate observation and diagnosis, increases the odds that we will apprehend correctly relevant aspects of a situation involving issues or people we care about. In contrast to the recommended stance of science, wherein the impartial observer sees everything but cares about nothing, is the position of the committed seeker, whose caring increases her ability to see clearly those aspects of a situation relevant to the welfare of those she loves. Little’s philosophical argument is about seeing moral responsibilities clearly, but it applies as directly to personal claims—what is the situation affecting my child, and what is the right thing to do for her?—as to philosophical decisions. In order to see clearly, “in order to discern . . . fully and properly, one must have certain desires and emotions. Caring, being outraged, being moved to act—all these are parts of discerning . . . clearly” (Little 1995, 127). Mothers, parents, lovers, and friends are more apt than those who are personally disengaged to see clearly and act in ways that assure the well-being of persons they love: Emotional distance does not always clarify; disengagement is not always the most revealing stance. To see clearly what is before us, we need to cultivate certain desires, such as the desire to see justice done, and the desire to see humans flourish, but we must also, more particularly, work at developing our capacities for loving and caring about people. (Little 1995, 124)

Also, under some circumstances the emotion of love may increase one’s capacity to know or enhance the process of knowing. We have already referred to the role of love in facilitating nonverbal, limbic communication between mother and child. Little (1995, 131) hypothesizes that caring may play a larger part than simply heightening our motivation and sharpening our senses, that “it might be that affect is revealing of truth.” That is, an attitude of love, in itself, may be conducive to enlightenment. There is a long tradition in philosophy, reaching back to neoplatonist metaphysics but augmented by Augustine, that love influences knowledge both by increasing motivation and by “purifying the soul’s ‘eye.’” More important in reference to maternal thinking is a third way that love illuminates: it conforms the lover to the

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beloved. Consider how this idea from Plotinus and Augustine applies to the special empathy of maternal love: “One becomes what one loves. . . . Love deepens our knowledge of what is loved. When something partially known is loved, then that very love results in its being better and more fully known” (Gaybba 1992, 99–100).

A Model of Family Love: Illustrations and Implications We have reviewed several theoretical approaches relevant to the study of family love. Most of them include, or are compatible with, the altruistic component of love, i.e., a willingness to sacrifice self-interest to advance the well-being of others. These are not six distinct orientations, but rather overlapping views, with substantial intersection in the concept, “altruistic love.” They all point to variables and relationships that merit increased attention from students of family love. One application of our overview of alternative theoretical approaches is to combine concepts and propositions in questions that may guide research. Here are ten illustrative examples. (1) How do people’s definitions of altruistic behavior and its underlying motivations differ from the various explanations offered by scholars? Or, stated differently, what are the opinions of the general populace about the sociobiological explanations of altruistic love? (2) What mix of grants and exchanges best maintains or enhances kinship amity? (3) What are the consequences for family solidarity of an exchange/contract model of family responsibilities, as opposed to a grants model? (4) How good an index of love is perceived sacrifice? (5) In families, how do the donor’s perceptions of sacrifice differ from the recipient’s? Must the sacrifice be acknowledged for it to exert its bonding power? (6) As family grants designed to strengthen family love, are some types of offering, such as time, more efficacious than others? Are some counterproductive? (7) How, in the context of mainstream therapeutic materialism, has the notion of the binary self survived? How is the recent interest in “spirituality” as a variable in psychology and counseling (Walsh 1999; Rivett and Street 2001; Wendel 2003) related to the “disappearance” of the soul in models of the self? (8) Is maternal attentiveness qualitatively different from other kinds of attentiveness in social interaction? Are the stereotypical models of maternal attentiveness empirically supported? (9) What are the correlates in children’s behavior of differentials in parental attentiveness? (10) What are the most effective ways of “transmitting” or “extending” love from family to non-family settings?

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Perhaps a more effective application of the several theoretical orientations to love is a combined or holistic approach. What might a paradigm of family love look like, drawing upon the frameworks reviewed above? Let us propose a synthesis, a paradigm of family love, involving three propositions about attributes of love necessary to healthy individual and family life. First, love is accepting, or generous. Second, it is enduring. Finally, it is otheroriented, familial, or altruistic in the sense that it aims to foster the wellbeing of others. The core of this model is the altruism of kinship. The emphasis is not on love as emotion, but rather as a set of moral responsibilities. In this approach, love is action, nor mere feeling. In fact, the degree to which emotions are congruent with the responsibilities (mostly ascribed) of love is an empirical question. Moreover, because emotions can be made to serve/follow actions (Homans 1974), it is accepted that love may follow action, rather than lead. Emotion alone is a very slender reed upon which to base a relationship. The thing that makes other groups “family-like” is the extent to which they manifest aspects of the morality of kinship. To mistake the emotions for the actions is to miss the great secret of family life, which is not that everyone loves, or cares, but that everyone belongs, is bound to and identified by, a larger whole that, among other things, defines, supports, obligates, grants, requires, and provides meaning. Try as we may to differentiate ourselves, in the end, we belong: ugly and wretched, battered and rejected, proud and condescending, humble and nondescript, we belong. The moral framework of the family provides a place, a niche, that is ours. We may spend our lives trying to escape it, but that niche expresses us, awaits us, obligates us. If we think of love in the sense of fostering growth, cross-generational connections are an essential part of it. The preservation of and never-ending responsibility for life is a cross-generational obligation. Dorothy Lee (1986, 81–82) makes this point in her account of how everyone will rally to save a child’s life, but not everyone is there across the child’s lifespan, taking responsibility to care, nurture, and love the saved one. The family is the only unit that has consistently borne that obligation, and it is a moral obligation that extends throughout life. The alternative groups, lifestyle enclaves, interest and occupational groups, all play their parts and tend to fade from the scene. The family remains. We return, now, to the three key propositions. (1) Family love is generous, or accepting. Here we might have said unconditional, but the term is misleading. Family love has standards, does uphold conditions, if only those of belonging to a kinship group. The conditions are generous, even transcendent.

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Love is accepting in that it refers to a relationship rather than a reward for behavior, and because it is generous and accepting, it is self-sacrificing. It does not depend on the self-interest of the one who loves. It does not “keep score.” One deserves and receives family love simply because of who she is, because she belongs. Ideal family love is neither permissive nor indulgent. Both of these attributes may reflect motives of self-interest rather than altruism, and may foster self-indulgence in the receiver. Participants in family love experience opportunities to learn altruism and attentiveness by giving, and by receiving and giving in return. Love’s integrative potential is only achieved when it is conceived as bi- or multi-directional, not unidirectional. (2) Family love is enduring. To create and preserve a life means “to take on a lifelong responsibility, a lifelong relationship” (Lee 1986, 82). This is especially true for the choice to mother, but also characterizes family love generally. Wendell Berry (1987, 113) has observed that “Neither marriage, nor kinship, nor friendship, nor neighborhood can exist with a life expectancy that is merely convenient.” In families, “to propose temporariness as a goal . . . is to bring them under the rule of aims and standards that prevent them from beginning.” Whether the expectation of continuity characterizes kinship groups more than other social institutions is an empirical question, but the popular definition includes the stereotype that while other kinds of relationships may fail us, the love of family should not. There is an expectation that family ties—especially those of “motherhood” and “blood relation”—will endure. (3) Family love is other-oriented. It is focused on the well-being of the other. Other-orientation refers to the “launching power” of love, its association with nurturance of the whole person, and with affirmative social and developmental outcomes. Other-orientation does not require a loss of self; if one is to love others simply because they are, one must also simply be. One must endeavor to be a whole person, capable and complete. “And this is not selfish. It is vital, in fact indispensable, for the relationship. The one thing that a woman or any person has to give to the world and to the people with whom she is intimate is her individual person—her self in growth, in adventure, in search, in reaching out to her environment. She owes it to her family, to society, to develop this” (Lee 1986, 78). Where the self-interest model states one must love self before loving others, or attend to the needs of self before serving others, the model of family love sees the needs and growth of self and other as connected. It is system-oriented, not reductionistic. Self is enhanced in loving others. It is not that one will love others after finding self, but rather, that in the process of forgetting one’s fears, insecurities, and self-serving motives, one becomes

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free to pay attention to the needs of others. Along the way, one’s confidence in personal capabilities increases. Implicit in the discussion of acceptance, endurance, and other-orientation is that family members are necessarily interdependent. The kinship and conjugal ties that bind them extend without apparent limit into the future, and so do their responsibilities to care for each other. Family love as a variable is distinguished from many of its synonyms not only by the expectation of continuity across generations, but by an implicit affirmation of sacrifice as a positive social process. In an earlier chapter we noted that the word “sacrifice” often carries negative connotations, and people tend to focus on the pathologies and pitfalls of unreciprocated altruism. What is less noted, and what Fortes, Boulding, Bellah, and Ruddick emphasize, is the integrative power of sacrifice, and the associated dynamics that enrich the giver, the receiver, and often the wider community as well. It is important to distinguish between the sacrifice of self-interest that characterizes family love, and the sacrifice associated with “martyrdom” or deprivation. The sacrifices integral to family love are voluntary grants motivated by love. In contrast are grudging gifts offered because it is felt that one should experience pain and suffering, or given in an effort to “buy” the love of others, or extorted by social norms and coercion. The sacrifice motivated by family love enriches the giver. “Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness” (Fromm 1956, 19). The paradigm of family love emphasizes voluntary commitment rather than fate, the will rather than the emotions, and service rather than accidents of birth or lineage as determinants of love in families. Love is a product of action, effort, and social process. The mother loves her child not only because she is her child, but because the mother has sacrificed to bear and raise her. The child loves her mother not only because her mother has sacrificed for her—the love of gratitude—but also because she has helped her mother—the love of shared experience and of sacrifice. The utility of the paradigm of family love is that it highlights a set of family variables and the dynamics among them in ways that reorder and revalue many of the commonly accepted facts of family life. It opens a different, but no less real view of family processes. Both expressive individualism and altruism are firmly grounded in the American psyche, and both influence families, but the former has been much more acceptable as a model for the interpretation of family processes. Both are “emic” models that derive from the deeply held beliefs of the people being studied, but one has been clothed

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in academic respectability for so long that its users may not recognize its paradigmatic, rather than “objective,” nature. We have observed that most mainstream family theory is grounded in utilitarian economics and expressive individualism. Generally the concepts “love” and “altruism” are neglected in favor of alternative constructs such as attachment, affection, bonding, responsivity, and caring. All of these lack the affirmations of continuing obligation, sacrifice, and commitment, the connotations of loyalty and perpetuity carried by the word “love.” The meanings of the word “love” extend beyond the merely observable; it is a good example of the inadequacy of words. The alternative constructs further limit and constrict it. That is, they miss a great deal of what, to many people, is the heart of love. By contrast, the paradigm of altruistic family love affirms those connotations, emphasizes the variables of sacrifice, commitment, and transcendence implicit in them, and highlights the need to examine and understand these family attributes and their implications in the lives of those who say they love. One’s choice of an explanatory model is an analytical and interpretive decision, a matter of paradigmatic integrity and not necessarily an expression of personal belief. That is, one does not have to believe in altruistic commitment to examine its assumptions and their implications for family life. To the degree that continuity, sacrifice, and other-orientation are among the ideals of family love held by ordinary people being studied, they qualify as variables meriting attention under the “grounded theory” or “emic” approach to interpretive relevance. There is one way that the paradigm of altruistic commitment—though not necessarily of family love—is already very much a part of the family literature. That is as a negative alternative to the “open,” “free,” ideal of family and emotional relationships referred to earlier. Its appearance in this context illustrates the power of central paradigms in family research and family therapy. For example, the widely used family systems model that classifies families as random, open, closed, or synchronous (Constantine 1986; Lewis and Spanier 1979) reflects the paradigmatic orientation of its creators, as may be seen by close attention to the labels and descriptions applied to the various family types. The terms “closed” and “open” are themselves loaded terms. A bias inherent in the typology as typically presented becomes much more apparent if one asks, “closed” to what and “open” to what? We have here an instance of the practice recommended by Scanzoni et al. (1989) to validate “contemporary” morality by designating it as “healthy” and to stigmatize its more traditional alternative as “unhealthy.” In fact, each of these family types is “open” to certain inputs and innovations and

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“closed” to others. To illustrate a possible application of the paradigm of family love, note that if this same typology had been introduced by theorists working from an altruistic perspective, the labels “open” and “closed” might have been affixed just opposite to the presently accepted version. For in its ideal type, the expressive individualist “open” family is “closed” to certain lessons of history and tradition, and closed to a commitment to family life that supersedes self interest. Similarly, from the perspective of an altruistic paradigm, many of the alleged “freedoms” of the “open” family may be seen as stresses and costs. This family may dissipate energy “reworking roles” and assessing structural alternatives that might have been evaluated more efficiently and humanely by learning from the experience of older family members, family traditions, religious values, or history. Ideally, a “traditional” family, bound by altruistic love and an agreed-upon “pattern for living,” is “open” to certain securities and freedoms associated with adherence to culturally validated principles, and “closed” to certain other alternatives. Another problem in applying a paradigm that explicitly devalues cultural authority and tradition is an exaggeration of the degree of “closedness” in the stereotypical traditional family. Working from the alternative paradigm of family love, much that appears to be “closedness” in contemporary analysis may turn out to be paradigmatic astigmatism. That is, so-called “closedness” may be a manifestation of a particular ethnic culture, and whether that culture “frees” or “enslaves” is a matter of personal values and point of view, not scientific fact. As Florence Kluckhohn (1958, 68) once noted, cultures free people to do some things and limit them from doing others. Depending on the cultures being compared, an “individualistic” lifestyle may be a good deal less free than a “traditional” pattern. This is not the place for a more extensive critique of the open-closedrandom paradigm of family process from the point of view of altruistic familism. Rather, it is offered as an example of how widely accepted “objective” tools of analysis may, from a different point of view, seem biased and culture-bound. With a paradigm change, the world shifts. Let us offer, briefly, one more example of how applying the paradigm of altruistic love may change accepted notions of what goes on in families. Today “housework” provides one of the few remaining opportunities for family members to do personally serving work for each other. However, housework is often viewed negatively, as a necessary evil to be avoided whenever possible and endured if unavoidable. It is generally not seen as tied to family love and family solidarity in any meaningful way. Yet under certain conditions doing housework is actualizing and integrative for children (Goodnow 1988;

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Wallinga and Sweaney 1985). Indeed, viewed through the lens of family love, housework may be actualizing and integrative for all family members. In this perspective, variables like integrative service, family work, family love, attentive love, sacrifice, commitment, and obligation take their place alongside the more familiar concepts of satisfaction, intimacy, communication, role definition, and equity. What is needed in contemporary studies of family process is an openness to ways of looking at things outside the standard professional interpretations, and a greater willingness to acknowledge that one’s professional reality is itself a social construction having, perhaps, no more intrinsic validity than that of one’s client or research subject. A recognition of the “dozens if not hundreds” of theoretical perspectives held by psychotherapists and family therapists (Sadler and Hulgus 1991) necessarily brings with it an awareness that a particular professional perspective or combination of perspectives may be incomplete, inapplicable, or inappropriate. Perhaps there may follow a greater willingness to give credit to “grounded” perspectives that involve “unscientific” concepts like love and sacrifice. As we imagine the feelings and experiences of the mothers and fathers of the world, the model of altruistic commitment seems at least a viable alternative to the model of economic exchange as a way of representing what parents do and feel, and how they relate to their families. The serious study of family love has been neglected by family theorists and practitioners from the beginnings of the family disciplines. The systematic study of altruism in families is one way to begin to remedy that neglect. Finally, the continuing conflict between the dominant secular paradigm in the social sciences and the various worldviews of people who think love is more important than self-interest deserves critical attention. It has been suggested that the excessive materialism of Western culture is difficult to avoid or supplant because “our culture has progressively eliminated every alternative that in previous times used to give meaning and purpose to individual lives” (Csikszentmihalyi 1999, 823). Having denied or discredited other sources of meaning, the West accumulates. It is not surprising that Pitirim Sorokin’s attempts in the 1950s to study love scientifically were scorned, for his assumptions challenged not only the assumptions of modernist social science but also the basic philosophical underpinnings of secular materialism and therapeutic individualism generally. The theories of Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, and Durkheim emphasized material reality, competition and conflict, survival of the fittest, rational control, and the power of evolutionary and social variables that made individual conscious choice largely irrelevant. According to this secu-

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lar materialist mind-set, life was accidental, without ultimate meaning, and mostly misinterpreted by the mass of humankind. Neither family love nor altruistic love figured positively in any of these theoretical perspectives. That love was central to the traditional religious worldview displaced by modernist science made it especially suspect. To advocates of secular materialism, Sorokin’s (1967, vi) insistence that love was the antidote to social problems and the only protection against “the pending extermination of man by man on this planet,” was an affront. Although the modern Western mind-set still prevails, the social scientific study of love is now tolerated. It is not clear whether that tolerance reflects the inroads of postmodernism, that the economic and social conflict models have become so dominant that love researchers are dismissed as irrelevant or harmless, or that enough respected scientists and clinicians have come to agree with Sorokin about the priority of love that it is now an acceptable minority position. There is some consensus among that minority that if we are to limit the negative human consequences of the decline of love, then families are the place to concentrate our attention. Yet current institutional practices and media culture continue in the direction of individualism, hedonism, and economic maximization. It seems that many of us are too well-paid to be able to afford relationships. Economists have demonstrated that as the value of one’s time goes up, it becomes increasingly irrational to spend time in non-economic pursuits. “The opportunity costs of playing with one’s child, reading poetry, or attending a family reunion become too high, and so one stops doing such irrational things” (Csikszentmihalyi 1999, 823). The outlook for children in the United States, and in much of the rest of the world, is less favorable now than it was a generation ago when Reuben Fine (1985) characterized Western civilization as a hate culture and Germaine Greer (1984) described the United States as a society that did not like its children and was despised by them. More recently, we have therapists driven to write on love because they have concluded that “for many reasons, the expressions of love in our world have been shutting down” (Lakritz and Knoblauch 1999, xv) or because they have observed that our society pays more attention to the vegetable content of school lunches than to the stability and quality of love in children’s lives, and as a result produces emotionally malformed adults (Lewis, Amini, and Lannon 2000, 211–17). Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1999), who envisions a “positive psychology” where psychologists would be as committed to improving human happiness as they now are to repairing damaged psyches, makes the point cleanly: “If we are so rich, why aren’t we happy?”

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Notes 1. Since Harlow (1958, 673) lamented “the apparent repression of love by modern psychologists,” there has grown a substantial research literature on the subject. Its primary focus has been romantic love and the liking-loving nexus associated with scholarly interest in “close relationships” beginning in the 1980s (Hendrick and Hendrick 1989). Its typical subjects have been young adults, generally college students. For a good overview of the field see Hendrick and Hendrick (2000) and Noller and Feeney (2006). 2. For a philosophical and theological defense of the precedence of love both as antecedent to other philosophic goods and as an immanent, actualizing force generating itself and other life-affirming virtues and tendencies see Timothy Jackson’s The Priority of Love (2003). The book is organized around two key questions about love’s priority: What does it mean to call love of God the greatest commandment, and what does love’s primacy mean for other human values? 3. See, for example, Basford 1990; Valarino 1997; Ring 1980, 1985; Sabom 1998; Fox 2003; Osis and Haraldsson 1986. 4. These findings were corroborated in a later study (Fehr 1999) of lay conceptions of commitment, where highest levels of commitment were expressed as due one’s children, spouse, marriage, family, self, parents, and “romantic partner,” in that order. See also Fehr 1994. 5. See Notes on Love in a Tamil Family (Trawick 1990) and The Anthropology of Love and Anger (Overing and Passes 2000). 6. Sorokin wrote thirty-five books, over four hundred articles, and by the mid1960s there were almost sixty published translations of his work (Johnston 1995, 269). 7. Among its first books was republication of Sorokin’s The Ways and Power of Love. 8. For further reading, see Pollock’s (1987, 310) list of other proponents of the evolutionary thesis and of historians with opposing views. 9. Evolutionary biology also attempts to explain the paradox of collateral altruistic behavior, “when some individuals subordinate their own interests and those of their immediate offspring in order to serve the interests of a larger group beyond offspring.” Present theorizing suggests that such behavior in ants and bees is explained by an “ecological natural selection operating at the level of the colony,” i.e., the interests of the colony override the interests of individual insects and their kin. The interests of the “higher of two adjacent levels of biological organization”—that is, of families over individuals, and of colonies over families—are presumed to prevail (Wilson 2005, 159, 163-64). James Q. Wilson’s (1993, 44) comment about evolutionary biology’s explanatory power as applied to human kin selection also applies to collateral altruistic behavior: “Evolutionary biology provides a powerful insight into human behavior at the level of the species, but it fares less well at the level of daily conduct . . . because evolutionary biologists ordinarily do not explain how a selected

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trait governs behavior in particular cases.” Campbell (1975, 1111) disagrees with sociobiologists who apply the term “altruism” to self-sacrificial traits said to be adaptive for groups but costly to individuals. Such definitions, he argues, have a built-in bias, for altruistic sacrifice often turns out to be advantageous both to the individual and the group. 10. Wilson (1993) deals with “some amendments” to these generalizations, including societies that practice infanticide, but insists that, in terms of known history, these generalizations are rightly accepted as facts. 11. Wilson considers at length four examples of a common, that is, cross-cultural moral sense: sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty. He (1993, xiii) notes other examples not included in the book, such as integrity, courage, and modesty. He does not mention love, and it does not appear in the book’s index, but it would certainly overlap considerably with sympathy. Love is mentioned in connection with “bonding” in a chapter on families. Synonyms of love for which there are index entries include “altruism,” “attachment,” and “bonding.” 12. Fromm cites as source Marx’s Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts (MEGA I, 3, p. 149). 13. Boulding identifies two types of grants: one, gifts, arises out of “love” and is at the heart of “integrative systems”; the other, tribute, arises out of “fear” and is at the heart of “threat systems.” He also distinguishes between benevolent and malevolent grants, or grants given with the intent to bless and those given with intent to harm. Here we have focused only on benevolent grants arising out of love. See Boulding (1973) for an elaboration of grants arising from other motives. 14. Held’s (1990) “Mothering Versus Contract” is a thoughtful analysis of the differences between these systems, and of the social implications of the paradigms they generate. 15. Boulding’s impact on grants economics is summarized by Wray (1994). 16. Camille Paglia takes a similar position regarding the modernist view that we can control nature, and specifically our sexual natures, in contrast to being controlled by them. “Sexual freedom, sexual liberation. A modern delusion. We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first. . . . Conventional marriage, despite its inequities, kept the chaos of libido in check. When the prestige of marriage is low, all the nasty daemonism of sexual instinct pops out. Individualism, the self unconstrained by society, leads to the coarser servitude of constraint by nature” (Paglia 1991, 3, 14). Her entire first chapter, “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art,” is relevant. 17. See also Glasser and Glasser’s (1977) earlier account of the pervasive influence in family therapy of the individualistic paradigm.

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Chris wonders what we should do next. Nothing tires this kid. The newness and strangeness of the motel surroundings excite him and he wants us to sing songs as they did at camp. “We’re not very good at songs,” John says. “Let’s tell stories then,” Chris says. He thinks for a while. “Do you know any good ghost stories? All the kids in our cabin used to tell ghost stories at night.” “You tell us some,” John says. And he does. They are kind of fun to hear. Some of them I haven’t heard since I was his age. I tell him so, and Chris wants to hear some of mine, but I can’t remember any. After a while he says, “Do you believe in ghosts?” “No,” I say. “Why not?” “Because they are un-sci-en-ti-fic.” The way I say this makes John smile. “They contain no matter,” I continue, “and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people’s minds.” The whiskey, the fatigue and the wind in the trees start mixing in my mind. “Of course,” I add, “the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people’s minds. It’s best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you’re safe. That doesn’t leave you very much to believe in, but that’s scientific too.”

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“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Chris says. “I’m being kind of facetious.” Chris gets frustrated when I talk like this, but I don’t think it hurts him. “One of the kids at YMCA camp says he believes in ghosts.” “He was just spoofing you.” “No, he wasn’t. He said that when people haven’t been buried right, their ghosts come back to haunt people. He really believes in that.” “He was just spoofing you,” I repeat. “What’s his name?” Sylvia says. “Tom White Bear.” John and I exchange looks, suddenly recognizing the same thing. “Ohh, Indian!” he says. I laugh. “I guess I’m going to have to take that back a little,” I say. “I was thinking of European ghosts.” “What’s the difference?” John roars with laughter. “He’s got you,” he says. I think a little and say, “Well, Indians sometimes have a different way of looking at things, which I’m not saying is completely wrong. Science isn’t part of the Indian tradition.” “Tom White Bear said his mother and dad told him not to believe all that stuff. But he said his grandmother whispered it was true anyway, so he believes it.” He looks at me pleadingly. He really does want to know things sometimes. Being facetious is not being a very good father. “Sure,” I say, reversing myself, “I believe in ghosts too.” Now John and Sylvia look at me peculiarly. I see I’m not going to get out of this one easily and brace myself for a long explanation. “It’s completely natural,” I say, “to think of Europeans who believed in ghosts or Indians who believed in ghosts as ignorant. The scientific point of view has wiped out every other view to a point where they all seem primitive, so that if a person today talks about ghosts or spirits he is considered ignorant or maybe nutty. It’s just all but completely impossible to imagine a world where ghosts can actually exist.” John nods affirmatively and I continue. “My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn’t that superior. IQ’s aren’t that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quants are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know.” “What?”

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“Oh, the laws of physics and of logic . . . the number system . . . the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.” “They seem real to me,” John says. . . . So I go on. “For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravitation existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity.” “Of course.” “So when did this law start? Has it always existed?” John is frowning, wondering what I am getting at. “What I’m driving at,” I say, “is the notion that before the beginning of the earth, before the sun and the stars were formed, before the primal generation of anything, the law of gravity existed.” “Sure.” “Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in anyone’s mind because there wasn’t anyone, not in space because there was no space either, not anywhere—this law of gravity still existed?” Now John seems not so sure. “If that law of gravity existed,” I say, “I honestly don’t know what a thing has to do to be nonexistent. It seems to me that the law of gravity has passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single attribute of nonexistence that that law of gravity didn’t have. Or a single scientific attribute of existence it did have. And yet it is still ‘common sense’ to believe that it existed.” John says, “I guess I’d have to think about it.” “Well, I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself going round and round and round and round until you finally reach only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense. “And what that means,” I say before he can interrupt, “and what that means is that the law of gravity exists nowhere except in people’s heads. It’s a ghost! We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.” . . . “But I’ll repeat it for you,” I say. “We believe the disembodied words of Sir Isaac Newton were sitting in the middle of nowhere billions of years before he was born and that magically he discovered these words. They were always there, even when they applied to nothing. Gradually the world came into being and then they applied to it. In fact, those words themselves were what formed the world. That, John, is ridiculous. “The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. Mind has no matter or energy but they can’t escape its predominance over everything

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they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don’t get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. It’s that only that gets me. Science is only in your mind, too, it’s just that that doesn’t make it bad. Or ghosts either.” They are just looking at me so I continue: “Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn’t a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It’s run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.” (Pirsig 1999 [1974], 38–44)

 Much of this chapter concerns the search for new meanings, the viability of old ones, and the meaning to families of “realities” beyond empirical measurement. At the outset, it seemed appropriate to quote Robert Pirsig’s reminder that we are no more intelligent than peoples who have preceded us, and that science offers visions as “ghostly” as the spirits the Native Americans knew. Our position, and Pirsig’s, is not as far from modernist science as it might seem. The intent of a proposed wider perspective is additive; it does not deny the physically demonstrable. Ralph Burhoe (2005, 799–800) agrees that “science has dispelled our beliefs in ghosts pretty throughly,” yet in a piece entitled “True Spirituality in the Light of the Sciences” says that “my science tells me that ghosts are indeed necessary. The only problem is to discover and believe in ghosts that are as valid or useful as the invisible forces (gravity, magnetism, etc.) imaged in the scientific world view.” We shall argue that much family spirituality involves such valid and useful invisible forces. For Burhoe, spirituality includes discernment of the whole, and it is something beyond reason. It can be cultivated, and is reflected more in religious communities than in the pragmatics of scientific method, and more in what he calls “culturetype” or cultural heritage than in genetic heritage. He acknowledges that for spiritual experience positive measurement is of limited efficacy, for while “the term spirit has always denoted something real . . . it denotes something more than what is usually called material, that is,

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something more than the entities that naturally appear directly or fully to the senses of vision and touch” (Burhoe 2005, 805). This chapter is about that “something more,” the attitudes and processes designated as spirituality. We begin by sketching trends in the recognition of spirituality as a force in personal well-being and social life, then turn to issues of definition, and the relation between religion and spirituality. A growing scholarly interest in spirituality is grounded in evidence that it is associated with positive physical and mental health outcomes, both for individuals and families. In that context, we discuss recent work on family sanctification and family spirituality. Finally, we revisit one of the types of family transcendence introduced in Chapter Two, the family as context for encounters with the sacred.

Trends: A Resurgence of Spirituality There is a remarkable literature on contemporary spirituality, reflecting what one writer has called a “new spiritual resurgence,” “a phenomenon that defies human comprehension . . . a movement of our time motivated or driven by a creative evolutionary force . . . over which we humans have little or no control” (Ó Murchú 1998, 12). Our society is said to be in “deep spiritual crisis.” It is experiencing “a decisively critical stage in the history of human consciousness and culture” (King 2001, 1–2). Announcing these dramatic culture shifts, the heralds of “irreversible” change slip easily from talk of change in present civilization to visions of a world civilization profoundly different from anything that has preceded it (Forman 2004, 1). One might presume the anticipated changes to be technologically driven, perhaps by the information explosion or improved transportation and communication, and maybe, ultimately, they are. But these writers are not talking about information or world society as global village. The topic is death of the old gods and the emergence of a new spirituality. The term “spirituality” serves as “a universal code word for the search for direction at a time of crisis” (King 2001, 3). The God of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism has been found wanting. An enthusiast of the new order writes that “It was probably inevitable that that God would die,” for “He” was too enmeshed in traditional ideas and structures to survive “the cultural shifts that were undermining those very structures.”1 Needing better models and myths, society has entered a “period of a thousand new religions.” From the “drugged and tie-died New Age,” it is claimed, has evolved today’s “saner and more mature answer,” grassroots spirituality2 (Forman 2004, 207–8).

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This affirmation of the new spirituality is not atypical. In The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality, Paul Heelas et al. (2005) report a test, using British and American data, of an hypothesized “massive subjective turn of modern culture” from congregational religion to a new associational, subjective-life spirituality. They find evidence for the anticipated shift in certain “key sectors of the culture,” but in the wider society, despite a trend toward subjective-life spirituality, most people still are served by congregational religion. The authors predict that the new spirituality will continue to undermine traditional religion (75, 149). In Spirituality for the Skeptic, Robert Solomon (2002, xii) celebrates the emergence of a “nonreligious, noninstitutional, nontheological, nonscriptural, nonexclusive sense of spirituality” in contrast to the negatives he associates with organized religion—self-righteous, belief-based, dogmatic, antiscience, other-worldly, uncritical, cultist, and kinky. Ursula King (2001, 2) announces in Spirituality and Society in the New Millennium that while the world faiths possess rich spiritual resources and a heritage of vision and empowerment, their “tainted” history of “injustice, tribalism, violence, and the violation of fundamental human rights” means that today’s seekers can no longer return to the spiritualities of the past or adapt them to present urgent needs. In their place, she says, we must discover a new kind of spirituality. Generally unremarked is that such a sense of crisis and newness has been a stable element in American life for centuries. Frank Kermode (2000, 26) quotes Karl Jaspers to the effect that “to live is to live in crisis.” Kermode reminds us that the old paradigms of pending apocalypse continue to influence our images of ourselves and present time: “The age of perpetual transition in technological and artistic matters is understandably an age of perpetual crisis in morals and politics.” From the standpoint of the present, it is always difficult to tell which cultural shifts are meaningful, which truly innovative, and which represent the familiar continuity of what Kermode (29) calls “the apocalyptic types—empire, decadence and renovation, progress and catastrophe” as ways of making sense of the world. Sociologist Robert Wuthnow (1998, 3–8) takes a similar, measured view, seeing religion and spirituality in America as changing emphasis, but not in critical decline. The shift he sees is from a “spirituality of dwelling” toward a “spirituality of seeking.” The spirituality of dwelling emphasizes habitation, the sanctity of order and space, the protection of sacred space, and is congruent with fixed commandments and established order. It seeks to maintain solitary moral communities grounded in stable family forms. By contrast, a spirituality of seeking emphasizes a diversity of spiritual gifts, restless wandering, the mystery and unpredictability of reality, an ambiguity or inaccessibil-

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ity of sacred space, relative freedom from constraint, and differentiated moral communities and family forms. The old verities of order and place are in flux, and in a chaotic world people must more actively seek the sacred. For Wuthnow (1998, 10), the turn to a spirituality of seeking is a response to the continuing challenge of secularization, from which “some people revel in the fact that God is silent; some thrash about wildly in their attempt to rediscover the sacred; and some dig in their heels, arguing all the harder for the importance of older ways of understanding the sacred.” He finds neither the spirituality of dwelling nor that of seeking as compatible with present needs as a third variety, a “practice-oriented spirituality” that combines some of the best characteristics of both. “Spiritual practice invokes the tradition of hard work, individual initiative, and responsible civic participation,” he writes, but also encourages reflection and contemplation (17–18). Another assessment of America’s religious and spiritual condition at century’s end also adopts a spatial metaphor, speaking of “domains of American life,” “reconstructions of religious space,” and the fact that, for Americans, the existence of space has meant “freedom to move, whether physically, socially, or inwardly” (Roof 1993, 156). Wade Clark Roof sees religion as a continuing vital force in American life, not the shrinking, continuing “disenchantment” that modernist theorists have predicted, but an energizing force reshaping the social space of religion such that some aspects of it seem unfamiliar. According to Roof’s study of the religiosity of the baby-boom generation, the “boomers” continue to look to organized religion for the traditional rites of passage at birth, marriage, and death. At the same time, “popular culture is saturated with spiritual concerns,” and these differ from the religious patterns of the past. A “safe, comfortable, sentimental religiousness” has been replaced by a “truer, healthier suspiciousness” that guides the quest for ultimacy and significance. If anything, we can expect continued, perhaps increased spiritual vitality as the baby-boom generation experiences mid-life transition and reexamines its loyalties and values. And despite the changing forms of religious and spiritual expression, “the perennial human concerns—for sharing, caring, and belonging—are as real today as ever before” (Roof 1993, 166–67). The new religious space is pluralistic and has a much less recognizable family-religion connection than the old space. It exhibits new forms of spirituality, reflecting increased choice and reduced institutional space. There is a “craving for holism” in reaction against the traditional split between body and spirit, and an increased interest in exploring religious and spiritual options. The new spirituality expresses itself in highly ideosyncratic, diffused

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forms. Its mode is more psychological than theological, and its orientation individualistic rather than communal. It tends to stress personal experience, feelings, inner states, and individual autonomy in religious matters (Roof 1993, 162, 166–67). Despite the talk of evolutionary forces and irreversible shifts, spiritual crisis and resurgence, the impacts of the new spirituality on organized religion have been less debilitating than predicted. Some denominations have experienced sizable losses, others have posted gains. Overall, there have been modest declines in public religious involvement since the 1960s (Wuthnow 2007). Demographically, at least, America remains theistic and predominantly Christian, its religiosity somewhat more diverse than in the past. National polls reveal that 95 percent of married couples and parents in America report a religious affiliation (Marks 2004, 217). Eighty-six percent of adults interviewed in 1999 said they believed in God, and 79 percent agreed that “There will be a day when God judges whether you go to heaven or Hell” (Gallup 1999, 281–82). Yet the connection to organized religion seems more fragile than before, even shallow, and the number who follow “alternative spiritualities” is much larger. The numbers indicate that American Christianity is more individualistic, superficial, and theologically illiterate (in the sense of adherents understanding its tenets) than it used to be (Smith and Denton 2005; Reeves 1996). New forms of spirituality reflect a wider range of options for religious involvement. These trends suggest a culture shift toward the “postmaterialist” values of “peace, egalitarianism, environmentalism, and quality of life” that Roof (1993, 166; 1999, 58–59) characterizes as postmodern spirituality, and Smith and Denton (2005, 262) cast as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, arguably “the new mainstream American religious faith for our culturally post-Christian, individualistic, mass-consumer capitalist society.” The spirit of postmodernism is reflected in diversity and innovation. As such it emphasizes the present over the past, and tends to understate the relevance of historical and traditional wisdom. David Tacey (2004, 60) manifests this attitude in his certainty that the old forms will not work. Instead, “the spirit simply needs a new language and a new imagining to make it part of the postmodern intellectual landscape.” At this, he is not far from sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who, having demonstrated in Modernity and the Holocaust the limitations of modernism with respect to morality and the security of humanity, seemingly rejects the possibility that some of the answers needed for a workable postmodern ethics might be found in existing religious moralities. Bauman repeats Joseph Weizenbaum’s conclusion that

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“no less is needed than the appearance of a new ethics, an ethics of distance and distant consequences, an ethics commensurable with the uncannily extended spatial and temporal range of the effects of technological action. An ethics that would be unlike any other morality we know” (Bauman 1991, 220-21; emphasis added).3

Spirituality and Religion It is not yet well understood how traditional religions fit within the restructured religious space of the postmodern era. Formerly, “religious and family symbolism were closely intertwined—indeed, one might say families created religious space. The family was an extension of the church, the place where faith and practice were lived out.” In postmodern society, the family-church connection is attenuated, and spiritual energies are more apt to be expressed in personal and diffuse forms (Roof 1993, 161, 166). There is evidence that people who themselves were “raised religious” are not as committed as were their parents to religious instruction in their homes (Wuthnow 1999, 211). Family prayer and scripture reading are less common, and national surveys suggest that the spiritual lives of American youth are largely reflective of the spiritual practices in their homes: “What the religious and spiritual lives of youth will look like is what the religious and spiritual lives of their parents do look like. Parents and other adults . . . most likely ‘will get what they are’” (Smith and Denton 2005, 261). Roof (1999, 217–18) suggests that “of all the changes in American religious life since World War II, perhaps the most consequential in the long run has to do with religion and family.” He places the transmission of religious heritage squarely within the family, for it is here that moral virtues are taught and modeled, many ritual practices are observed, and “great stories embodying trust, respect, love, honesty, integrity, fairness, responsibility, and other values are shared and practiced” (217). What happens, Roof asks, “when families must compete with peer groups and the media? Or when families lack coherent stories?” Or when problems within families complicate or negate the storytelling that constitutes religious culture? There have always been families that failed to socialize their children acceptably into the common culture. But substantial changes—for example, increases in divorce rates and in births outside of marriage—have complicated the transmission of moral and religious values between generations. And because families have changed, the nature of the family-religion connection has changed. Today there are more interfaith marriages, more blended families, and more single-parent families. Mothers are more likely to be employed

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outside the home, and grandparents are playing a larger role in raising their grandchildren (Roof 1993, 162–63).4 Changes in family structure and public religious values during the 1960s included the emergence of religious pluralism, an anti-Christian turn among theologians, and a substantial shift in public moral values. Repercussions of these changes continue to ripple through American life, and “of all the moral codes overturned, none were shaken more than those dealing with sexuality, gender, and family life.” The baby-boom generation grew up during a time of countercultural turmoil and unusual criticism of the old order of family and religion. It is not surprising that as adults, they adopt “‘multiple strategies’ and contradictory directions of change to cope with the contrasting dilemmas they confront,” both in family and religious life (Roof 1999, 223, 274). Even within evangelical churches, the secular self-culture is making inroads, and “experience, egalitarianism, and this-worldly development” seem to compete successfully against the more traditional emphases on sacrifice and self-denial (Woodhead 2001, 117). The conceptualization of spirituality seems to have moved from the former “primarily normative” theological interpretation toward an anthropological interpretation, one that “affirms the spiritual potential of every human being, and sees the process of spiritual growth as closely related to that of an individual’s psychological development and maturation” (King 2001, 6). In this view, spirituality is strictly limited to the this-worldly resources of natural and social context and the human potential available to the individual self. It involves “the search for becoming fully human, and that means recognizing the rights of others and striving for an equal dignity and respect for different races, sexes and classes” (6). In short, to be spiritual is to respect diversity and seek self-fulfillment (Smith and Denton 2005, 175). According to theologian Dominic Corrywright (2001, 201) New Age spirituality is a “revolt against traditional Christ-based theology” or “rejection of traditional doctrinal religions.” He describes spiritual experience as typically not an epiphany, but rather a process, partly rational, perhaps involving peak experience, whose result is that prior religious beliefs and doctrines are superseded by a new worldview. In Corrywright’s model, “spirituality comes to be seen not as dependent on specific religious doctrine or religious tradition, but as engagement with the natural and social world by investigating alternative religious traditions and through personalized spiritual practices.” Although this definition favors the new and the different, the continued attachment of Americans to organized religion suggests that awakened spirituality also may mean appreciation for and heightened involvement in existing faith communities.

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Spirituality used to be defined as part of religion, and some writers (Pargament 1999; Schreurs 2002) continue to view religion as the broader concept. However, the traditional “religion subsumes spirituality” view has become the minority position. Spirituality is now associated with virtually every form of self-actualization, along with many of the positive human characteristics formerly associated with religion.5 People see a difference between religiosity and spirituality, but most see them as overlapping or supplemental rather than competing alternatives. Most Americans—at least three in five—consider themselves both religious and spiritual (Marler and Hadaway 2002). Most spiritual people are religious, and most religious people define themselves as spiritual. Religion is seen to enrich spirituality. It is spirituality enacted, practiced, and organized. But it is not the same thing. “Spirituality is, above all, about a connection between the individual and some larger, usually supernatural, reality. Religion is the expression of that connection” (295). Essentially there are three positions here: That religion subsumes spirituality, that spirituality subsumes religion, and that they are so intertwined that attempts to separate them are fruitless. Pragmatists who adopt this third perspective use the terms in tandem, writing of “religion and spirituality” (Mueller et al. 2001; Josephson and Wiesner 2004; Smith and Denton 2005; Boyatzis et al. 2006) or “R/S” (Kloosterhouse and Ames 2002), thereby sidestepping debate over which concept is broader. Some see the relation between the two as competitive or conflictual, with religion waning as spirituality increases. They contrast spirituality with religion, often in ways that associate religion with negative and spirituality with positive characteristics and outcomes, e.g., “the religious, moral and spiritual breakdown of our time has to do with religion and not with spirituality” (Ó Murchú 1998, viii); or “We must acknowledge that the old way of conceiving faith as some external cultural object has broken down, and rediscover faith in an entirely new way, not through received belief, but through the lived experience of the spirit” (Tacey 2004, 192; emphasis added). In this perspective, “‘religions,’ Western and Eastern, modern and ancient, have been ‘downgraded’ to subsets of the broader category of spirituality” because they are now “options” or “choices” on one’s spiritual journey, to be chosen and used along the way, but as helps or tools rather than lifelong companions. “St. Paul originally ‘put on’ Christ, but we no longer ‘put on’ religion, we ‘try it on’ for size and taste. If we are not satisfied we become detached and critical or move out and onwards” (Tacey 2004, 43). When they are not cast as positive spirituality versus negative religion, the distinction may be drawn between personal spirituality and institutional

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religion, in line with the long-accepted division of religiosity into intrinsic and extrinsic. Thus, Richards and Bergin (2005, 22) identify religion with “theistic religious beliefs, practices, and feelings that are often, though not always, expressed institutionally and denominationally (e.g., church attendance, participating in public religious rituals, reading sacred writings).” By contrast, spiritual refers to “invisible phenomena associated with thoughts and feelings of enlightenment, vision, harmony with truth, transcendence, and oneness with God,” and spirituality is “a search for and harmony with God and the sacred.”6 We said earlier that the “reconstruction of religious space” in the American religious landscape (Roof 1993, 164) includes the emergence of new forms of spirituality. Part of an apparent decline in organized religion (Putnam 2000) may be accounted for by increases in spirituality, broadly defined, outside the realm of religion, such as the spirituality of contact with nature or aesthetic appreciation (Miller et al. 2006). “Spirituality” has become a fashionable concept denoting meaningfulness beyond traditional definitions of “the sacred.” Some usages seem designed specifically to “rescue” spirituality from religion7 (Sinclair et al. 2006, 467). For example, a review of the spirituality literature within palliative care concludes that “spirituality is emerging largely as a concept void of religion, an instrument to be utilized in improving or maintaining health and quality of life, and focused predominantly on the ‘self,’ largely in the form of the patient” (464; emphasis added). David Spangler’s (1993, 80) metaphoric contrast of New Age and traditional religions is directly relevant. Like Huston Smith, Spangler uses a metaphor interpretable as “horizontal” versus “vertical.” Christianity is compared to a cathedral, its architecture “unified in the person of Jesus Christ,” while New Age spirituality is “more like a flea market or county fair. . . . [with] . . . jesters and jugglers, magicians and shamans, healers and mystics, and the inevitable hucksters eager for a quick sale before packing up and moving on.” At the fair the architecture is horizontal, not vertical, and the rejection of the vertical is explicit. There is no hierarchy of organization at the fair; its horizontal network amounts to “a chaos of overlapping institutions and practices” (Corrywright 2001, 198), all on the same horizontal plane. Theologian Ewert Cousins (2000, 90-91) applies the horizontal-vertical metaphor to human responsibility in this “Second Axial Period,” when “the future of consciousness” and perhaps of life on earth, depends on our rediscovery of the “collective and cosmic” spirituality of “the primal peoples of the pre-Axial Period.” Yet Cousins’s assessment of what we must learn from primal peoples seems not to include their awareness of transcendent beings or powers higher than themselves.

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The essential consciousness, he writes, will be global in both horizontal and vertical perspective. Horizontally, it will involve the cultures of the earth in “creative encounters” capable of producing a “complexified collective consciousness.” From these encounters and their outcomes, from world religions greatly transformed, will derive “the unity of the human community.” Vertically, Cousins’s metaphor sees the necessity for humanity to “plunge their roots deep into the earth,” to establish “a stable and secure base for future development” and a global consciousness that is “organically ecological.” The vertical reach, however, is limited to the downward thrust, more firmly binding us to the earth and its systems. Apart from a suggestion that the “wisdom traditions” in world religions may help to create a “new, ecologically sound, holistic humanism,” there is no hint in Cousins’s “spirituality for the New Axial Period” that anything is to be gained by looking beyond the skin of the bubble.

Definitions In its original usage spirituality denoted the desire for access to or connection with “higher” powers outside the self. The term originates in Christian philosophy, referring to the yearning of the soul for closer communion with God and to acts of worship and devotion intended to foster such communion. In the postmodern present, reference to the yearning or seeking remains, but the objects sought now include anything that yields meaning in life, especially meanings associated with accessing one’s “true self,” or knowing and actualizing that self. The mantra of New Age spirituality, “only connect,” more often refers to connection with an internal metaphysical construct or aspects of nature than with higher beings and forces. The wide range of definitions of spirituality dilutes the power of the term (good reviews of the literature on the meanings of spirituality include Helminiak 2006, Chiu et al. 2004, and Pargament 1999). One review (Roehlkepartain et al. 2006, 4) notes increased interest in the “domain” of spirituality, but “no consensus about what ‘this domain’ really is.” Our own overview of the literature suggests that extant definitions of spirituality may be classified by whether their orientation is (1) humanistic/sophic (modernist or postmodernist, but in either case, human-centered); (2) theistic/mantic or deity-centered; or (3) inclusive, composite/eclectic, essentially open and unfocused, centered neither on the human self nor transcendent higher powers. Humanistic/sophic definitions limit the term to aspects of life independent of reference to God or higher powers. These are “horizontal” definitions,

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centered on aspects of human nature and experience. They are modern, or sophic, in that they are limited to the senses and emotions of the individual psyche and its relations to externalities as perceived via those senses and emotions. For example, Helminiak (2006, 197, 202) insists that spirituality “represents something that is inherently and simply human, not divine or otherworldly,” and sees any reference to higher powers, God, or “Godsubstitutes” such as the sacred as “prevalent and debilitating errors” that impede the development of an explanatory psychology of spirituality. Crawford (2005, 11–13) emphasizes “self-construction” and criticizes the dualisms and boundedness that characterize modernity. Heelas et al. (2005, 3, 5) stress the sacralization of subjective life, and the implicit rejection of constraints accompanying external laws, whether scientific or moral, that oppose the priority of the self’s “deep connection” and “unique experiences.” Wright’s (2005, xviii, 4–5) inclusive definition makes no reference to transcendent meanings or connections; all relationships and experiences referenced fall within the personal and social realms. Tacey (2004, 38–39, 41) emphasizes diversity, pluralism, and connectedness, but these are experienced and interpreted on one’s own terms, and the “intensely inward” and individualistic nature of this spirituality explicitly rejects direction from above, or from anywhere beyond the individual conscience. Van Ness’s (1996, 4–5, 7) humanistic definition is useful because it clarifies how a non-transcendent relation to the cosmos is possible in an explicitly “nonreligious context of existential and cosmic meaning.” “Outward-facing” spirituality means that one thinks about the cosmos, making it “an intentional object of thought and feeling.” “Facing inward,” life is spiritual to the extent that we are engaged in projects of knowing, developing, or transforming our “enduring and vital selves.” Theistic/mantic or vertically oriented definitions affirm the possibility of connection or harmony with forces beyond the self, and attunement to “ultimate” or “governing” powers. Hierarchy is very much a part of these definitions. It is implicit in Dyson et al.’s (1997, 1186) reference to “self, others and ‘God,’” in Schreurs’s (2002, 25) explicit linkage of spirituality to attitudes and actions with reference to the Divine, and in Callen’s (2001, 15, 17) emphasis on “lived encounter” with divinity. Hill and Pargament (2003, 65) link spirituality directly to “the sacred,” and while they allow that the sacred may include more than God, the divine, ultimate Reality, or the transcendent, these “higher” realities clearly shape the concept. McLeod and Wright’s (2008, 119) statement that spirituality has to do with “an awareness of the divine, the sacred, or some higher value,” and Richards and Bergin’s (2005, 22) reference to attunement and harmony with “Divine Intelligence”

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are congruent with Huston Smith’s (1981) notion of a “participatory” attitude toward that which is beyond or above us, rather than a refusal to acknowledge the possibility of its existence. Composite/eclectic definitions allow a broad range of components of spirituality, both secular and sacred. Thus Woods’s (2006, xix) definition mixes the “infinitely malleable” character of humanity along with “everything that pertains” to that humanity. Other composite definitions have spirituality everywhere, innate and all-encompassing (Fukuyama and Sevig 1999, 5), a source of meaning, understanding, awareness, and personal integration (Roof 1999, 35), a process that relates one to the world or to anything beyond the present context (Burkhardt 1989, 70), and a range of value-related experience, from a sense of meaning and purpose in life through altruism and an awareness of the tragic (Elkins et al. 1988, 10–12). We have said that the theistic/mantic definitions are most compatible with Huston Smith’s plea for an alternative to the modern Western mindset, and with our definition of family transcendence as including the family as context for encountering the sacred. When we use the term without further specification in the remainder of this chapter, we mean “spirituality” to denote seeking and relating to that which is sacred, holy, or divine.

The Family-Religion Connection For much of the past century, the study of families and of religion proceeded separately. Sometimes family researchers collected basic information on religious affiliation or participation, and sometimes students of religion asked about family characteristics, but the primary focus was usually one or the other, and not families as context for religiosity or religious practice as integral to family life. Two decades ago Darwin Thomas (1988) highlighted this separation, called for attention to the microcosm of religion as lived in families, and offered some illustrative beginnings. Shortly thereafter, in a decade review for the Journal of Marriage and the Family, Thomas and Marie Cornwall (1990) renewed the call for research on the religion-family connection. Despite that auspicious beginning, the decade review for 2000 in Journal of Marriage and Family contained no follow-up piece on religion-family studies, and only very recently has there been a serious effort to answer Thomas and Cornwall’s question on just what it is about religion that generates positive outcomes for families. A growing accumulation of studies supports the linkage between family religiosity and well-being (Richards and Bergin 2005),

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but teasing out the operative factors and the processes involved has only just begun (Boyatzis 2006; Boyatzis et al. 2006; Lambert and Dollahite 2006; Olson et al. 2002; Marks and Dollahite 2001; Snary and Dollahite 2001). The academic and professional context within which the family-religion connection had been neglected changed dramatically in the 1990s. There was heightened interest in religion and spirituality in several clinical and therapeutic disciplines, most notably psychology and nursing, but also in counseling, psychotherapy, medicine, and social work. Among the factors driving the increased interest in religion and spirituality were (1) growing empirical evidence that lived religion made a difference in people’s physical and mental health;8 (2) a trend toward increased public interest in spirituality, especially non-traditional spirituality among members of the baby-boom generation dissatisfied with mainline institutional religion; (3) a growing diversity in forms of religious worship and spiritual understanding in an increasingly diverse American population; and (4) a changed emotional and intellectual climate that, expressed as political support for diversity, resulted in formal associational codes of professional ethics that mandated support for religious diversity in professional treatment settings. Thus popular sentiment in support of pluralism made its way into the bureaucratic job descriptions of helping professionals. There is now formal recognition in statements on professional ethics in medicine, social work, psychology, and marriage and family therapy that ethical care includes respect for religious diversity. Helping professionals are warned of the need to be sensitive to the spiritual needs of patients and their families.9 However, one of the serious challenges to incorporating spiritual counseling into treatment is that professionals and the public differ in spiritual and religious outlook. Briefly stated, religiosity and spirituality are not evenly distributed in the population. Studies of professionals in the caring professions show them as far less likely to believe in a personal God than the general population. Doctors and patients differ significantly in recognizing the importance of spiritual issues in treatment, in feeling “close to God,” or in thinking that religion is important in the doctor-patient relationship. Compared to the general population, doctors are more likely to report being atheists, agnostics, or having no religion (Klitzman and Daya 2005). This poses a serious ethical problem for the professionals, whose rejection of traditional theism may make them unsympathetic to their believing clients. Indications of this problem include the negative attitudes among professionals toward the term “religion” in contrast to “spirituality” (Wendel 2003, 168).

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Patient spirituality is related to positive health care, prevention, and wellbeing outcomes, and most physicians are aware that spirituality enhances health and therapeutic outcomes among their patients. Patients indicate that they would like their physicians to talk with them about their religious beliefs and practices and take their religious orientations into account in their treatment (McCord et al. 2004). Yet despite “striking evidence of the importance of spirituality,” most physicians do not discuss religion or spirituality with their patients (King and Crisp 2005, 399). In family therapy, contemporary standards require that “to provide ethical care, family therapists must be able to facilitate spiritual or religious discussions within the context of therapy” (Hoogestraat and Trammel 2003, 413– 14). Nursing has a longer history of acknowledging the spiritual dimensions of good care, especially in the context of helping patients and their families deal with dying and bereavement (Holloway 2006; Barnum 1996). Therapists who have not examined their own religious and spiritual orientations may be unaware of their influence on their clients’ attitudes, and those unfamiliar with clients’ beliefs and religious practices often are unsure as to appropriate interventions. Typically education in matters religious and spiritual has not been part of therapists’ training. Efforts to bring practicing therapists up-to-date include the development of diagnostic instruments for assessing the religious and spiritual situations of their clients (Hodge 2000, 2005; Frame 2000; Koenig 2004), and high-level appeals that family therapy include spiritual and religious discussions (Hoogestraat and Trammel 2003; Wendel 2003; Doherty 2003). There is also a movement to improve professional education by requiring coursework and training experience in religion and spirituality (Hage 2006; King and Crisp 2005; Miller et al. 2006).

Family Sanctification Mahoney et al. (2003) have proposed that a major factor explaining the welldocumented relationship between religiosity and positive family functioning is the process of family sanctification. They observe that religion involves people’s relationships to the sacred, and that “part of the power of religion lies in its ability to infuse spiritual character and significance into a broad range of worldly concerns.” Among the “worldly concerns” that organized religions define as somehow relevant to the divine order are marriage and family life. Mahoney et al. are at pains to distinguish their “psychospiritual” definition of sanctification from its theological counterpart. They also distinguish sanctification from the eclectic definitions of “spirituality” applied to

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aspects of social context, activity, or person that are so labeled only because they are seen as sources of “meaning.” Sanctification has to do with the sacred, whether or not that sacred is defined theistically. It is “a psychological process through which aspects of life are perceived by people as having spiritual character and significance,” and what gives something “spiritual character” is that “its point of reference [is] . . . the sacred” (221). Sanctification can occur two ways: through the processes of perceiving “manifestations of God” and through the attribution of “sacred qualities.” According to the former, an object, process, or person may be seen as somehow representing or associated with one’s ideas and experience of God. In “manifestations of God” there is reference to a specific deity. In contrast, the attribution of “sacred qualities” involves belief in and respect for characteristics of supernal existence—the miraculous, the eternal, the transcendent— without explicit acknowledgment of deity (Mahoney et al. 2003, 221–22). All the world religions, in somewhat different ways, sanctify marital relationships, parent-child relationships, and responsibilities to kindred. Most religions emphasize the spiritual significance of the parent-child bond (Mahoney et al. 2003, 222–23). For Roman Catholics and many other Christian faiths, marriage is seen as a sacrament. Among the Hindu, marriage and childbearing are part of one’s spiritual evolution. Only married life qualifies as real “life” (Trawick 1990, 39), and even the daily preparation of food takes place in a context of “domestic worship” that involves cooking for family deities as well as the living family members (Ghosh 1995, 11). Mahoney et al. (2003, 227–28) constructed and tested scales to measure effects of “manifestation of God” and “sacred qualities,” and found that family members reap numerous psychological benefits from the sanctification of family processes, including a deeper sense of meaning from family life, increased pleasure or fulfillment from family relationships, a sense of the durability of conjugal and parent-child relationships, decreased anxiety and ambiguity about family roles and relationships, and enhanced personal spirituality. They point also to the positive results of the heightened “investment” likely in sanctified relationships, leading to greater willingness to forgive, sacrifice for, and accept family members, and to the avoidance and resolution of family conflicts. On the other hand, there are risks associated with the sanctification of family process. Religiosity generates both costs and benefits, and failure in the sanctified realm has higher psychic costs than secular failure. Uneven religiosity among family members may strain relationships, and unrealistic expectations and denial may hamper assessment and ameliorative efforts (Mahoney et al. 2003; Pargament 2002). Even so, the concept of family sanctification seems a promising approach to the

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problem of identifying what it is about family religion that produces so many positive personal and social consequences. In seeking answers it is tempting for social scientists to fall back on Durkheim’s functional definition of the sacred as “things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions,” along with his view that belief in supernatural beings was not an essential element of religion. For Durkheim, religion is a “unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things,” and anything can be made sacred (Durkheim 2001, 36, 46). That is, sanctity is produced by the definitions people hold of things, not the nature of things themselves. From this modernist perspective, assuming that all attributions of sanctity to supernatural powers or beings are human constructions, it still follows that sanctification of marriage and family would have positive effects. For how is the sanctity of sacred things maintained? By the deference, respect, special care, attention, thought, and effort devoted to them. We approach the sacred with reverence, we stand in awe of its power, we enact in rituals and acts of personal devotion our conviction that the sacred object is indeed worthy of our ministrations. Obviously, things we care for and care about, that we respect and devote attention to, have a better chance of working well and surviving than things we treat with little respect, attention, or care. It should be no surprise, then, that marriages and family systems thus set apart and cared about, even if only minimally sanctified, manifest higher levels of well-being and survival than more secular families. The relative advantage of sanctified families may be increased if we move beyond Durkheim’s position that societies define sanctity and that all religion is based on the sacred-secular distinction. For Durkheim was wrong in expressly rejecting a concern with the supernatural as the universal basis of religion. His argument that there were “great religions in which the idea of gods and spirits is absent” (2001, 32) was based on a mistaken conception of Buddhism, and contemporary thinking on the nature of religion favors the position Durkheim thought to displace. Thus, Stark and Finke (2000, 89–90) insist that “religion is concerned with the supernatural; everything else is secondary,” and observe that even Talcott Parsons (1951, 369–70), while seeming to accept Durkheim’s definition, substituted “supernatural” for Durkheim’s “sacred” in his own definition of religion. Stark and Finke comment that “it was one thing for Durkheim to claim that when people worship the gods, they are really worshipping society, but it was rather too much to conclude that they don’t even know what gods are.” If family sanctification includes not only the respect and “caring for” due sacred objects and systems from family members, but also the possibility of

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divine assistance from “above,” “the Spirit,” or God, then the relative advantage of the sanctified household is increased. Thus, Dollahite and Lambert’s (2007, 297–98) study of marital fidelity in “highly religious” middle-aged couples of the major Abrahamic faiths (Christians, Jews, and Muslims) found that “many couples reported what they considered divine blessings and guidance that helped their marriage.” A Presbyterian wife said that “My actual experience of God at those times is what carried me through to stick with it, to stay the course,” and a Muslim husband said that “We talked about God providing the guidance for the marriage. . . . So, unless you have a relationship with God you’re not going to follow that guidance.” A Baptist couple explained that “We’re each individually seeking to understand God, and who he’s made us, and seeking to learn to live out a life that’s pleasing to him. We bring that into the marriage so that the marriage is strengthened” (Dollahite and Lambert 2007, 300). Apparently religious belief and observance sanctify marriage and support marital fidelity, thus producing the well-documented positive association between religious observance and faithfulness in marriage (Atkins, Baucom, and Jacobson 2001). A sanctified family is a family whose members believe that their relationship transcends the profane or material, and that God or other higher powers or forces have an interest in them as a family unit. Goodman and Dollahite (2006, 141, 153) found that “many religious couples are committed to their marriage in large part because they believe that God desires them to be,” and they regularly seek his assistance in their families. All of their respondents mentioned at least one of three specific beneficial outcomes in their marriages—increased stability and unity, growth and motivation, or happiness and peace—as a result of perceived divine interest and involvement with them. Positive consequences of the sanctification of family relationships have been demonstrated in other aspects of family life, including the reduction of marital conflict (Lambert and Dollahite 2006; Mahoney et al. 2003; Curtis and Ellison 2002); family generativity, or the moral responsibility to connect with and care for extended kindred and the next generation of the family (Dollahite, Marks, and Olson 2002; Hawkins and Dollahite 1997); parenting generally, communicating with adolescent children (Dollahite and Thatcher 2007; Smith and Denton 2005; Caputo 2004); and nurturing children with special needs (Olson, Dollahite, and White 2002). However, there is also evidence that the impacts of family sanctification vary with other aspects of family religiosity, such as whether deity is viewed as loving and supporting or punishing and rejecting. While “under normal circumstances, religion appears to benefit and may often enhance family

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functioning . . . it may have the opposite effect for some families facing significant challenges” (Dumas and Nissley-Tsiopinis 2006, 306).

Family Spirituality Although much health care and caring work impacts families and not just individuals, there are relatively few studies of health, spirituality, and the family. In the field of palliative care, for example, the subjects of spirituality and health research are typically individual patients only. Rarely are family members involved, despite the professional obligation to care for patients’ families as well as patients themselves. Studies of the needs of family members and carers appear in writings on bereavement, but “the idea that [family] spiritual needs are only a reality post-mortem is a troubling understanding of health and is in stark contrast to . . . clinical experience” (Sinclair et al 2006, 468). Much of the impetus behind the creation of “family spirituality” as a meaningful concept has come from health care professionals committed to holistic care. Their focus on the implications of care for entire families, not just individual patients, led to the finding that some families are better than others at coping with disease, bereavement, and other life crises. These more resilient families also tend to manifest “positive spirituality” or “spiritual well-being,” in which “family members express satisfaction with their relationships, beliefs, circumstances, and display a strong sense of connectedness with each other, their God/Higher Power, universe, environment, and others” (Tanyi 2006, 290). Family spirituality is much broader than individual spirituality, combining the distinct spirituality of the individuals comprising the family and the spiritually relevant processes generated at the unit or family-systems level. There are collective meanings, connections, futures, rituals, tensions, and other experiences in addition to the perspectives and experiences of individual family members (McLeod and Wright, 2008; Tanyi 2006). Like individual spirituality, family spirituality may be expressed as “vertical,” relating to deity or higher powers, or “horizontal,” relating to the social or environmental context. As with worldviews, family spiritualities oriented to the vertical generally subsume the horizontal (Tanyi 2006, 288–89). What does family spirituality look like? Health professionals report that spiritual families are resilient in the face of trauma and tribulation. But family resilience is an outcome. What processes produce that outcome? Some preliminary answers appear in qualitative studies, such as Diana Garland’s (2003) Sacred Stories of Ordinary Families, and Nancy Fuchs’s (1996) Our

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Share of Night, Our Share of Morning: Parenting As a Spiritual Journey. Each of these builds upon the author’s personal experience plus interviews with more than one hundred others. Garland, a social worker, studied the processes of faith and spirituality in family life, seeking insights that might help families connect with the sacred. Fuchs, a rabbi and director of a religious studies program, interviewed mothers and fathers about their lives with their children, asking “what they had learned about their spiritual lives from being parents” (Fuchs 1996, xiv). We may also profit from sources based in less systematic data collection, including Thomas Moore’s (1994) Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship; Gina Bria’s (1998) The Art of the Family: Rituals, Imagination, and Everyday Spirituality; and Lorraine Wright’s (2005) Spirituality, Suffering, and Illness. Moore calls his field “depth theology,” and his writing reflects vast interdisciplinary experience. Bria (1998, 2), an anthropologist, combines an ethnography of her own family, observation in “imaginative families and friendships,” and immersion in the literature to produce “fresh water from old sources: play, ritual, imagination, story.” Wright’s book, drawing on a career in nursing and family therapy, is described as a “practical guide for negotiating the crossroads where spirituality, illness, and healing meet.” Family spirituality, reflected in these studies and others we shall cite, manifests the following characteristics: (1) It is oriented to the sacred, to experience beyond the “wholly rational and material” (Holloway 2006, 836); (2) It is active and effortful, manifest in religious practice (prayer, worship, ritual activity) and good works; (3) It reflects and generates love; (4) It is shared, within families and across generations, in stories; (5) It is meaningful and identity-affirming, linked to beliefs about the ultimate nature of things and the family’s place in that order. Family texts—narratives grand and small, stories, memories, family images and myths, rituals, traditions religious and secular—celebrate the family’s uniqueness, locate the family in time, and orient it to the future. As for “religious language” in helping families recognize and express spiritual experience, Fuchs (1996, xx) writes that her goal “is not to convince you to speak my language. Rather, it is to encourage you to speak some language, to urge you to cobble together out of your past and your present a world of images and stories and gestures and acts . . . that allows you to enliven your own journey.” Wright observes that the family is “key to both the experience and practice of spirituality.” People’s most fundamental convictions about life are formed in its care giving relationships. Family beliefs, rituals, stories, and metaphors like “soul” and “self” contribute to family solidarity and the spiritual strength

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of family members. She maintains that the “biopsychosocial spiritual being is more captured in the label soul” than in the secular “self.” “Soul thrives on a spirituality that is not only transcendent but also grounded in the spirit of the family, linked to generations of traditions, values, and stories” (Wright 2005, 75–77). Love both permeates and generates family spirituality. Garland (2003, 58, 83) concludes a chapter on positive spirituality and family solidarity—“What is it that binds people to one another, that holds them together through the rough patches that come in every family’s journey?”—with an affirmation of mutual love. “Wrapped around all the goals these families talked about was the expectation that they will go on loving one another.” Rose’s (2001, 200, 204) survey of definitions of spirituality among religion professionals found that most “saw spirituality as always including an element of love.” He buttressed this finding with statements from a Buddhist monk that spirituality was the development of “loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic or appreciative joy, and equanimity,” and from a female shaman that “spirituality is beyond separation. The heart, not the brain.” And Fuchs (1996), in an epilogue summarizing the main findings of her exploration of parenting and spirituality, takes issue with a statement that too simplistically relates family spirituality to love: “Everything that has happened in the past is an illusion. Only the love given and the love received are real.” On the contrary, It is all real. The walks in the woods. The spit-up. The birthday parties. The nights in the emergency room. The anger at the kids for growing up too slowly, for growing up too quickly, for never putting the tops back on the markers. The separations, physical and emotional, premature and long overdue. The drudgery. The exhaustion is real too. And then there is the sheer wonder of it all. (181)

In a chapter entitled “The Family of the Soul,” Moore introduces the idea of the “imaginal” family, the image of what families are like that people bring to their own family experience, that influences their family patterns and relationships. Family cultures are both “shaping influence” and resources that family members draw upon in coping with life. They are essential to the development of healthy connectedness. “In the extended sense, ‘family’ is no mere metaphor, but a particular way of relating. . . . It always provides a fundamental relatedness that doesn’t depend upon attraction or compatibility” (1994, 72). Spirituality may be generated in family process, but the relation is reciprocal: families are nourished by spiritual experience. “In order to have a satisfying life of the soul, we need a rich experience of family, at home and

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in every aspect of life; but in order to appreciate the family in depth, we need a general intensification of soulful living.” How to accomplish this? Family members must attend to both needs, consciously working to bring more “soulfulness” to dealings with family and at the same time turning to family more frequently for individual “soul needs” (Moore 1994, 74). The power to enhance family spirituality lies in imagination: “A deep image of family, residing effectively in our hearts and imaginations, can help us work and live together in ways that no rational principle can.” In marriage, we respect and attend to “the realm of fate and providence where a spiritual attitude respecting destiny and other transpersonal factors creates a much deeper intimacy.” We tend the “marriage soul” by attentiveness to each other’s dreams and by validating “the indwelling spirit of our partner and of the marriage” (Moore 1994, 61, 64, 72). As to the wider family, the imagination needs to be fed with images that manifest the family’s sacredness. Moore points approvingly to Native American tradition that it is the sacred power of the family that holds the world together. A family’s potential influence on its members “goes far beyond any measurable authority or influence.” This power is transcendent, ineffable, profound, and mysterious. It is part of the nature of families. “No psychological or sociological analysis can explain its source, but religion can attest to it.” It may be a power for good, or for evil, but in either case it is located, and concentrated, in families. It “reaches beyond human effort. . . . Something magical . . . a magic that we can employ effectively with respect and humility” (Moore 1994, 75, 79–80). We care for the soul of the family by honoring its sacredness. We celebrate family rituals, hold family gatherings, affirm both the individuality of the family members and the collectivity of the whole, rally around family members in times of trouble or stress, and tend each “particular cultural hearth.” Regions, subcultures, and organizations all have their ways of doing things, and a healthy family has its stories, its patterns, its heroes and villains, its “history, myth, and . . . ever-present resource for imagination.” The healthy family keeps its stories alive, renews its culture in rituals and gatherings, resists attempts by outside institutions to unduly absorb its time and its members, and values the “family spirit,” weaving it “consciously and artfully further into our lives” (Moore 1994, 85, 88–89). Diana Garland’s Sacred Stories of Ordinary Families is about family faithfulness. Garland looks for “faith as a dimension of family life,” and finds it “embedded in family stories.” Sacred stories, she says, “connect us to a sense of meaning and purpose in our own lives, and to the great truths of

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our faith.” The key to family spirituality is the family story: “A family is the current incarnation of a story that extends into the past and will have more chapters to come. Telling family stories turns memories into present reality and holds that reality as foundation for the future” (Garland 2003, 12, 25, 27). Stories of other times, and other families, become family stories through their retelling. “Every time we tell a story, we own it a little more” (Sheridan 1996, 14). Family spirituality involves the processes by which families affirm who they are. Family stories convey many things, among them something that may be compared to melody. The story is not the melody, but it contains and expresses the melody. The melodies of family stories represent “the meaning and purpose of shared lives and the faith family members have—in one another, in what they value together, in God.” Stories, and the melody of meaning they contain, express family identity: “This is who we are.” “Storytelling, like singing, means joining our voices, except we do so by interrupting, correcting, and building on one another’s words, telling a story together that becomes, in the process, our story, our song.” (Garland 2003, 3). Garland says her stories describe how families “seek to live their faith in everyday life, how they find meaning and purpose in their lives together, and how they have experienced God in the midst of ordinary life.” As one reads these stories it becomes clear that an aspect of family spirituality is the ability to recognize “small miracles,” situations that “sound like a coincidence to an outsider, but for the family it was God at work.” To Garland, they reveal that “God finds us, is there with us, even when we ourselves may not be looking for some experience of the Holy, in the everyday tasks of family life” (Garland 2003, 27–28, 165, 175). Gina Bria, writing, she says, both as an anthropologist and a person of faith, sounds a similar theme in setting down five “universal elements of spirituality” distinct from institutional religion. These are “capacities . . . found in all spiritual development, no matter the culture, time, or place.” These abilities may be cultivated. They are exercises in relationship, processes oriented vertically in that they assume “a Creator who made good things, however much we have mucked them up along the way,” and also “that we can always get back to the essential good of things, no matter where we find ourselves.” These “capacities” include (1) an attunement to nature and the world generally, a love of life while recognizing both its goodness and its dangers; (2) the capacity to observe, to see and understand, which, when families “walk together” and share observations and insights yields “common appreciation” and “congregate discovery”; (3) the ability to listen spiritually, “eavesdropping on life,” a kind of listening that helps us recognize

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intimations of the divine; (4) the ability to create, whether in being able to put things back together, or to assemble new things: “Putting things back together again is not just an expression for restoration, but recognition that we live among broken things, including broken relationships, and that is where family spirituality comes in. It is the salve to the busting-up life delivers us every day;” and (5) the ability to respond with gratitude, to see and hear and know the good in life, and to “respond naturally with awareness, acknowledgment, and appreciation” (Bria 1998, 72, 75, 78, 84, 89). Having developed their joint capacities to observe and listen, to see and share, families are more receptive to encounters with “extraordinary reality”: We can’t force it, but we can wait for it, watch for it—we can learn how to spot it. And why should we want to do that? Because we are not just physical bodies, physical families, we are spiritual families too. We live in a reality that is not only ordinary, but extraordinary. When this extraordinary reality shows itself in those moments of insight and awe, we respond, we are stricken with how miraculous life is. . . . Not only must we be willing to recognize that moment but have the faith to let go, to trust the next moment will arrive, it awaits us. We must be looking forward to the next time when the sacred will show itself to us. (Bria 1998, 84–85)

In some ways, this attentiveness to life parallels the attentiveness of love we considered in Chapter Three. But that is not surprising, given that love is a significant component of spirituality (Drobin 1999; Rose 2001).

“Extraordinary Realities”: Encounters with the Sacred Our choice of examples of family spirituality was guided by a definition of spirituality compatible with the theistic/mantic definitions discussed above. By a “spiritual” experience, we mean an interaction or encounter that is informed by family members’ beliefs in or experience of the transcendent. The experiences we shall consider are not “religious” in the sense that they involve religious ritual or congregational activity. However, they are religious in the sense that they reflect and inform people’s beliefs about ultimate reality and “higher powers.” They are spiritual in the sense of Bria’s statement quoted above, that they were times when “the sacred showed itself to us.” One of our objectives is to identify ways that spirituality influences family members and alters the nature of family experience. We will illustrate four types of experience: (1) the sanctification of everyday life, or prosaics; (2)

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encounters with the sacred that provide comfort and support in times of bereavement, tragedy, or stressful events; (3) intimations of family continuity or assurances of ultimate family well-being; and (4) reassurances, callings, and commitments anchored in transcendent family experience that motivate service, sacrifice, and endurance. First, a note on the “family” in stories of family spirituality. We consider that a spiritual experience qualifies as family-relevant if it involves family members at either end of a meaningful sequence. That is, family spirituality includes spiritual experience involving family members that may influence a family member’s later life. It also includes individual spiritual experience that subsequently impacts other family members. Garland (2003, 4) would include an additional criterion: a sacred story qualifies as a family story if the presence of family members, real or imagined, affects the way the story is told. For family stories, “the family is actually present as the audience in the head of the storyteller, silently judging, correcting, and interrupting.” Prosaics Among the key research questions in Loren Marks’s (2004, 222) study of family relationships and religious experience was, “What religious practice is most significant and central in the lives of highly religious parents?” The typical answer was not a family ritual or tradition, but a reference to daily practice, to lived religion in the ongoing ordinary day-by-day life of the family, to “practicing what you preach” in daily family interaction. The sanctification of family relationships means that the many acts of helping and caring and cleaning and coping that comprise family life are meaningful. Mahoney et al. (2003, 224) remind us that “most religions offer guidelines about how family members should treat one another,” teaching that family members should “care for each other with dignity and respect, make sacrifices for one another, and forgive one another for wrongdoings.” In a sanctified family, parents “view parenting in a divine light,” and caretaking takes on a spiritual dimension. Motherhood may still involve “worlds of pain” (Rubin 1976), but pain in sanctified context is meaningful. Thus, a struggling “stay at home” mother (Niemann 2003, 18–20) does not deny her pain, because “staying at home with small children is very, very hard: sometimes ‘battle’ is not too strong a word for this life.” She admits the loneliness, the sense of futility, the frustration of unused education, the financial sacrifices, and the “incredibly boring” times associated with fulltime mothering of her three children. Yet, on balance, she feels that “despite everything, staying at home can be a reward in itself,” and wonders “how to persuade someone else that my growing satisfaction with my occupation is

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anything more than a quirk of my personality?” The answer lies in the sanctification of parenting: Like so many other full-time mothers I have learned the obvious: for my children, not just anyone will do. Even the best teacher, the kindest day care worker, cannot replace me, my attentive presence. No matter how closely someone may agree with me and my husband, she cannot guide and nurture our children as we can. No one else can parent our children. It is God’s gift to me and to John, ours alone. If we care about how our country’s children are raised, and who raises them, I think this point is where we have to start. And may He who turns the hearts of the fathers toward their children bless all parents, in all walks of life. It is the toughest job we’ll ever love. (Niemann 2003, 20)

If family spirituality doesn’t make the boredom and the sense of futility easier, it increases people’s capacity to bear them. It transmutes meaningless drudgery into sacrifice for loved ones. Moreover, life in a sanctified context may heighten feelings of caring and sharpen the moral sense (Little 1995). Meaning then is revealed in the quotidian. Rachel Remen (2000, 171) says “there is a deep river of truth that runs beneath our daily experience,” and “sometimes tapping into it in the simplest of ways will have profound and moving outcomes.” In a chapter entitled “Kitchen Linoleum as Holy Ground,” Garland (2003, 165) writes of spiritual experience as families carry out their ordinary, everyday responsibilities, that “God finds us, is there with us, even when we ourselves may not be looking for some experience of the Holy, in the everyday tasks of family life.” Similarly, Fuchs (1996, 183) concludes that spirituality in family life “is not something huge and distant and elusive. Instead, it is tucked within the moments, the ordinary activities of waking, of eating, of going to sleep. Sometimes, we are fortunate enough to notice.” Leo Tolstoy celebrated the spirituality accompanying prosaic family activity in several works, including the novels Anna Karenina and Father Sergius. Gary Saul Morson (1988, 522), writing on prosaics as an approach to study the humanities, states Tolstoy’s principle that “lives generally are saved or ruined by innumerable prosaic moments, which together shape the self and all its subsequent actions.” Morson describes the quest of Father Sergius, who seeks sainthood by systematic effort, “grand gestures and noticeable acts of self-sacrifice,” but is frustrated in his quest because no matter how much he imitates the lives of the saints, he is proud of his humility. Father Sergius finally meets a true saint, and “discovers that she and everyone else is unaware of her exceptionality”:

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She is a mother who supports her daughter and her daughter’s neurasthenic husband and who reproaches herself for not going to church. She lives a life of daily kindnesses that are entirely undramatic, undiscerned, and inimitable. Sergius learns that one cannot become a saint by imitating a model, and that true holiness, which never fits a pattern, grows out of the particular situations of daily life. Saints are prosaic and never recognizable as saints. (Morson 1988, 522)

Tolstoy generalized prosaics to evil as well as good, showing that evil happens more from negligence, from not paying attention to the little things, than from either grand or banal desires: Evil happens not because we subconsciously wish it, but simply because we do not pay attention, because we omit to develop the habit of evaluating and correcting “the tiny alterations” of our thoughts moment to moment. . . . Tolstoy knew that it is good that demands energy, like the moment-to-moment conscientiousness of a good mother. (Morson 1988, 23)

Comfort and Support Earlier we noted that much of the scientific interest in religion and spirituality as they impact the family is a result of growing evidence that they provide positive benefits to families who experience stress, illness, tragedy, and loss. That literature is well-reviewed elsewhere.10 Here we will illustrate and encourage research on one of the less-studied aspects of family spirituality, namely transcendent experience involving family members that apparently is intended to provide comfort and support. National surveys suggest that between 30 and 40 percent of American adults have experienced life-changing spiritual experiences (Richards and Bergin 2005, 143). Generally such experience seems not to be associated with psychopathology but rather to promote healing and positive change. The nature of the spiritual experience varies, and may include “hearing” the voice of God within one’s mind; receiving spiritual impressions, visions, insights, or dreams; experiencing the presence or influence of God, angels, or spirits, or deceased loved ones; feeling loved and forgiven by God; receiving inspiration or guidance when facing difficulties; feeling awe, gratitude, or oneness with God, reality, or the universe; and receiving impressions or warnings that bring comfort or protection to self and loved ones. Such experiences have typically been ignored or downplayed by modernistic science, but they are too much a part of human experience to remain “off-limits.” Under what is called the “new Zeitgeist” in some of the natural and behavioral sciences, inquiry into such matters has become legitimate (Richards and Bergin 2005, 49, 143–44; cf. Benore and Park 2004).

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Narrative accounts of these experiences do not qualify as proof, but in conjunction with the survey data on their frequency, the case can be made that they merit attention. Moreover, given the extreme scientific hostility toward spiritual realities until very recently, “the extent and quality of the current empirical findings are stunning.” Despite that evidence, and the “considerable impact” of the quantitative findings now available, the main foundation of a spiritual perspective is said to be the “careful study of individual cases using qualitative procedures”11 (Richards and Bergin 2005, 136–37). In the sense of subjecting that which is “above us,” to positivist measurement—that is, in demonstrating via naturalistic technique the realities of spiritual existence, or in measuring the “vertical” or mantic with the instruments of “horizontal” or sophic assessment—we may be forever disappointed. Melvin Morse, who arguably knows as much as anyone about the phenomenon of parting visions, does not anticipate “proof” that will satisfy the hardened skeptic. It is my firm opinion that such proof will never exist, not the kind of proof for which most people are looking. I have never encountered or heard of a case that provided hard evidence in near-death research. Ideally, such a case would involve an angel leaving behind a heavenly trinket made of a metal that does not exist on Earth and stamped “Made by God.” I have stopped expecting or looking for this sort of proof. (Morse and Perry 1994, 159)

What Morse has learned about proof, however, is that it comes not to modernistic specifications, but “in a better understanding of what is reality” [and] “not in expecting that the laws of nature will suspend themselves.” He is convinced that a study of parting visions, near-death experiences, and other spiritual encounters will support “a new understanding of the nature of reality.” His conclusion about truth and method is very close to Richards and Bergin’s (2005, 137) position that qualitative and spiritual ways of knowing are necessary to understand spiritual realities. There is no reason to assume “one-size-fits-all” methodology, or that naturalistic methods of inquiry are suitable for spiritual data. In Parting Visions, Morse assembled accounts of spiritual experiences relating to the passing of loved ones. In addition to narratives collected from patients and others known through his medical practice, he interviewed mothers of babies whose deaths were diagnosed as sudden infant death syndrome. Morse defines the “parting vision” as a spiritual encounter intended to bring comfort to the people left behind, typically close family members. Such encounters seem not predictable in terms of the apparent religiosity of the person having the experience; they happen to believers and non-believers

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alike. For some, they seem to be a response to genuine pain, sorrow, or felt loss; for others, they are intimations of losses to come. What is consistent in reports of parting visions and related near-death experiences is that they foster positive change in the people who have them. Following such encounters, people become more accepting of life, less fearful of death, and more dedicated to loving and serving others. Also, their sense of the importance and transcendence of family ties is heightened. Consider, for example, the story told by Lila Morgan, the adult daughter of professional baseball player and New York Mets coach Ralph (Red) Kress. In 1962 her father, having been bothered by indigestion, had a complete medical examination and was told he was fit. Shortly thereafter his daughter awakened in the night to find her room filled with a white light. She relates that I could never explain it. I paint oil paintings, and I could never paint it either. The room filled with this light and I heard a soothing voice say, “I’m going to take him.” The voice said it over and over again until I said, “Did he do anything wrong?” “Oh, no,” said the voice. “He is going to be with me.”

She says although the voice had seemed “filled with love, she sat up in bed, feeling ‘as cold as death.’” She thought the voice had been talking about her husband, who was lying beside her. Then the telephone rang, and her grandmother told her that her father had just died. Lila tells that I hate to say this, but I felt so good. . . . I felt wonderful. I felt at peace. “Don’t worry,” I told my grandmother. “I know it’s okay.” . . . [She remembers] My dream saved my life. I was an only child and I lived for my father. I even looked like him. If this hadn’t taken place, I would have been devastated. . . . It was a relief to hear someone say that he was going to care for my father. (Morse and Perry 1994, 25–26)

This account is interesting not only for its immediate and positive impact on Lila herself, but its ramifications in the family. The grandmother, who has just lost her son, is also a recipient of the comfort communicated to the daughter. Presumably Lila’s “vision” was a source of strength to the entire family in the aftermath of her father’s death. Family spiritual experiences are like love and service: they strengthen the individual and the family, and may be seen both as an outcome and generating source. Less dramatic but perhaps equally powerful in its effects on a loved one’s later life is the farewell to his little granddaughter Rachel by her deeply

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spiritual grandfather. He had been an Orthodox rabbi and was a scholar of the mystical teachings of Judaism. His private times with his granddaughter were filled with love and holiness and respect for life, God, and the prophets. She loved him deeply. When he told her he was dying, she asked what that meant. She remembers his answer, and attests its relevance to her life: “I will be going somewhere else. . . . Closer to God.” I was struck dumb. “Will I be able to visit you there?” I said, filled with distress. “No,” he told me, “but I will watch over you and I will bless those who bless you.” Almost fifty-five years have passed, and my life has been blessed by a great many people since then. Each of you has my grandfather’s blessing. (Remen 2000, 12–13)

A family benefit of the increased respect and tolerance for spiritual experiences of all kinds, is that people are more willing to share them. Until the Gallup organization revealed that millions of Americans had had neardeath experiences and as many as one-third of adults had had life-changing religious experiences (Gallup and Proctor 1982; Richards and Bergin 2005, 43–44), people often were unwilling to talk about such events even within their families, lest they be considered strange or crazy. Edward Hoffman (1992) says that the childhood spiritual experiences he collected often had been kept from others, even close family members, because his respondents were worried about what people would think, or because when, as children, they had tried to share the experience, parents or other family members had shushed them or seemed uncomfortable at their telling. Morse concludes that the purpose of “parting visions” is to comfort the living, but that the cultural and scientific rejection of such events has been so powerful that even people who have been healed by their visions sometimes in retrospect doubt them. Deathbed visions, he writes, “empower the dying patient and his family and provide a meaning to the events that helps heal the grief.” In spiritual families, that empowerment and healing ripples outward, and forward in time, adding meaning to future family events. Not only the people who experience parting visions, and those close to them, but “even those who only hear about them receive these benefits as well” (Morse and Perry 1994, xv, 46, 110). Morse says that he himself has been transformed by his research: The fact that my father, who has died, or my wife, if she dies before me, will be present to help me when I die is enormously reassuring. We are comforted in dying by those same images and people who loved us during our lives. . . . I try to spend a lot more time with my family. I have taken to heart what one little girl told me she learned from her near-death experience: “It’s nice

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to be nice, Dr. Morse.” The knowledge that when we die we perceive another reality that quite literally sheds light on this one somehow motivates me to be a better person. (Morse and Perry 1994, 154, 158)

Thus the spiritual experience that manifestly calms and comforts at the time of loss serves also as motivation for living a life of love and service, and may ease one’s own passage from life. Sometimes it is the understanding of death, and not of loss, that seems intended as the primary function of the experience. Hoffman (1992, 114–15) repeats the story of Stan, a middleaged man whose family ran a mortuary in a small Colorado town when he was growing up. At about age nine, the boy had been “constantly pondering the questions I had concerning death: Where do dead people go? Do they just go into a hole in the ground? What does it feel like to be dead?” One day he was thinking about what it must feel like to be dead, and tried to imagine where his grandfather who had passed away now was, and what he was feeling. I pictured in my mind a dark, lonely, black expanse of “nothing and no one” forever and ever. A terrible and chilling dread came over my entire body. But then instantly it vanished. It was replaced by a warm, comfortable, and bright feeling—and a kind and loving presence. I seemed to hear my grandpa saying, “See Stan, it’s all right. I’m just in a place that’s different.”

Stan commented that “From that day on . . . I never again had a fear of death. I knew that I would still ‘be’ after I died. I would just be different” (Hoffman 1992, 115). One wonders how Stan’s knowledge affected life with his family, and what he taught his children. In all of these experiences, the impact on the wider family remains to be charted. The narratives rarely go beyond the particular experience, yet surely the story has meaning for close kindred and their posterity. Also interesting is that most near-death and parting vision accounts seem independent of institutional religion. It is not that they don’t reflect the beliefs people have about the hereafter—many of them do. But they are clearly family stories, bearing upon a child’s relationship to her parents, a mother’s responsibility to her children, or a grandfather’s ongoing love for his descendants. Although they may strengthen or alter prior conceptions about life after death or other religious beliefs about the continuity of the soul, divine love, and the nature of God, the most probable connection of these stories to institutional religion seems to be their impact on religious participation.

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But here the evidence is mixed. Researchers agree that the common message from persons who have experienced a near-death experience (NDE) is that people should love and serve each other. They also agree that following an NDE people tend to change their priorities and live more fulfilling, other-oriented lives.12 What the researchers do not agree on is whether the changed life includes increased participation in organized religion. Gallup and Proctor (1982) and Michael Sabom (1982, 129–30; 1998, 140–41) conclude that one of the main consequences of an NDE is that religious beliefs are strengthened, and church participation increases, especially for persons belonging to traditional Christian denominations. Kenneth Ring and several of his associates (Ring 1985, 143–64; Atwater 1988; Sutherland 1992) argue that following an NDE people reduce their commitment to formal religion, define themselves as spiritual rather than religious, and lean toward believing in reincarnation. Further research is needed on this issue, and on the effects of such experience on other family members.

Intimations of Continuity A striking implication of the many reports of glimpses “outward” is the continuity of family ties. One of the foremost students of the process of dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1999, 83–84), concluded from her research that “no one can die alone.” One reason this is so, she says, is that there are spiritual beings—“guides” or guardian angels—who accompany us throughout life. More important here is her second reason: “We will always be met by those who preceded us in death and whom we have loved—a child we have lost, perhaps decades earlier, a grandmother, a father, a mother or other people who have been significant in our lives.” It is a frequent finding in near-death research that the person having the experience is met by close relatives. However, Kübler-Ross’s assurance on this point is based on evidence from her own independent research. Her work included observation of dying children, injured in family accidents. She writes that she often sat with critically injured children, who had not been told that other family members had been killed in the same accident, or perhaps who were also in critical care in other hospitals. Nevertheless, “they were invariably aware of who had preceded them in death anyway!” I sit with them, watch them silently, perhaps hold their hand, watch their restlessness and then, often shortly prior to death, a peaceful serenity comes over them. That is always an ominous sign. And that is the moment when I communicate with them. And I don’t give them any ideas. I simply ask them

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if they are willing and able to share with me what they experience. They share in very similar words. As one child said to me, “Everything is all right now. Mommy and Peter are already waiting for me.”. . . In thirteen years of studying children near death I have never had one child who has made a single mistake when it comes to identifying—in this way—family members who have preceded them in death. (Kübler-Ross 1999, 86–87)

The desire that family ties might continue beyond death seems a common human yearning, occasionally expressed in literature. Statements of such hope range from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s (1952 [1850]) “and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death” through the vision of her family’s future stated by Edmund Gosse’s dying mother, “We shall be one family, one song. One song! One family!” (Gosse 1984, 50). William Wordsworth’s (1952 [1807], 260–66) “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” casts the continuity backward in the following lines: Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home.

Some spiritual experiences, including NDEs, likewise foreshadow or anticipate family ties, revealing family members not yet on the scene. In a variation on Life After Life (Moody 1975), the book that began the current discipline of near-death studies, the collection Life Before Life (Hinze 1993) contains accounts of mothers’ experience with their unborn children. It is the parting visions and near-death experiences, however, where the relatives abound. Departed fathers, mothers, grandparents, siblings, children, husbands, and wives are frequent visitors, guides, or greeters in these spiritual encounters. The continuity of these family ties, at least in the short-term or in the “margin” between this life and the next, is one of the obvious lessons from these experiences. The finding is too common to document at length. Here we limit ourselves to two particularly revealing encounters. The first is instructive because of the “mix” of relatives it reveals. Dr. Michael Sabom

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(1998, 37–47) describes the near-death experience of Pam Reynolds, which occurred during a brain operation requiring a surgical operation known as hypothermic cardiac arrest, in which the blood was drained from her head, her body temperature reduced to sixty degrees, and her heart and breathing stopped. Sabom (38) states that the documentation of events surrounding Pam’s near-death experience is the most detailed of any on record. For us, what is interesting is that while she was clinically dead, her brain waves “flattened into complete electrocerebral silence” and her brain-stem function no longer active, she experienced her conscious self leaving her body. She had the usually reported sensations of looking down at her body, of moving toward light and traveling through a tunnel-like environment to a context of incredibly bright light where “I began to discern different figures in the light.” Among them was her grandmother. Then there were other relatives, recognizable, all concerned about her. I recognized a lot of people. My uncle Gene was there. So was my greatgreat-Aunt Maggie, who was really a cousin. On Papa’s side of the family, my grandfather was there. . . . They were specifically taking care of me, looking after me. They would not permit me to go further. . . . It was communicated to me—that’s the best way I know how to say it, because they didn’t speak like I’m speaking—that if I went all the way into the light something would happen to me physically. They would be unable to put this me back into the body me, like I had gone too far and they couldn’t reconnect. So they wouldn’t let me go anywhere or do anything. (Sabom 1998, 44–45)

At the end of the experience, it was an uncle who accompanied her back to the “tunnel,” and the process of returning to her body. What is fascinating about this account is the apparent continuing responsibility of relatives for one of their own, beyond the limits of the conjugal family. With respect to family sanctification generally, there is the unanswered question of the impact of the experience on Pam’s relationships with living relatives, and among her own family. A second experience highlights conjugal attachment. Morse recounts the mid-nineteenth century parting vision of Mormon pioneer Jedediah Grant, whose infant had died while the family was crossing the plains. The child’s mother, ill at the time, had been greatly worried that animals would dig up the grave and eat the body. The mother died soon after. A few years later, Jedediah himself sickened and died. On his deathbed, he told his associate Heber C. Kimball of his near-death experience:

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He said to me, Brother Heber, I have been into the spirit world two nights in succession, and of all the dreads that ever came across me, the worst was to have to return to my body, though I had to do it. He [Grant] saw his wife, she was the first person that came to him. He saw many that he knew, but did not have conversation with any but his wife, Caroline. She came to him and he said that she looked beautiful and had their little child, that died on the plains, in her arms, and said, “Mr. Grant, here is little Margaret; you know that the wolves ate her up; but it did not hurt her, here she is all right.” (Kimball 1974, 135–36)

One wonders how the retelling of this experience changed the family behavior of Grant’s descendants, and the extent to which it is part of a continuing tradition that helps to sanctify families among his posterity. Finally, we want to change the approach to family continuity slightly, applying it forward from the visionary experience and noting the implications not only for the immediate family of the person having the experience, but also for their close associates. Here again, as in the previous experience, there is religious context in that the persons involved are part of a religious community, but institutional religiosity does not seem to play an explicit part in the experience. In this case, we have some knowledge of the implications of the experience for the extended family. The family is that of Rachel Remen’s grandfather, the Orthodox Jewish rabbi and student of mystical Judaism. The transcendent experience is a vivid, unforgettable, repeating dream: A few years before the first of the pogroms that swept through Poland and Russia in the early part of the twentieth century, my grandfather awoke one night from a dream that disturbed him deeply. Death had reached out a great black wing and extinguished the lights in all the synagogues in Eastern Europe. He knew most of them by name, and he had watched in horror as they were snuffed out, one by one. He could not get this dream from his mind and yet he did not understand it. When, a few weeks later, he dreamt it for the second time, he took it to be a message and a warning. Gathering up his family and his entire congregation, he had immigrated to America. (Remen 2000, 83–84)

Reassurance, Calling, and Commitment Instances of reassurance, calling, and commitment growing out of family spirituality range from the fairly prosaic sense of commitment to relationships and tasks one might not otherwise choose, but which one does because deeply convinced that is what one ought to do, to the belief that one is called to a particular mission or activity as a result of spiritual experiences associated with family members. This is a fairly undeveloped area of family

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research. We have no quantitative norms to report, other than the sense of those who study such phenomena that reassurance to the living about departed loved ones and motivation to continue on, generally in a more loving and serving mode of life, are frequent outcomes. Summaries of the meaning of such experiences are remarkably similar. For example, “We are all here to grow in wisdom and learn how to love better” (Remen 2000, 85), and “If there is a single message that characterizes the near-death experience, it is love. It fills the next world and engulfs those who go there and experience it” (Lundahl and Widdison 1997, 268). Sometimes the love felt during a parting vision or NDE can alter intensely painful experience, such as the death of a family member by accident or disease, in ways that mold the sense of loss into a sense of calling. There are many such tales in the recollections of physicians who serve dying children and their families.13 We repeat two of them here. The first, from Morse’s Parting Visions, suggests that the experience of loss may itself be a sanctifying experience. Martha, divorced mother of four, lived with her mother and together they were raising her children. Unexpectedly her mother died of a heart attack. Martha took the death very hard. She felt “destroyed” by the loss. About a year later, two of Martha’s children were killed in an automobile accident. She and her close relatives were devastated by the loss of these “babies” of the family. Martha seemed to be the only one in the family who could control her emotions, and she managed many of the funeral preparations alone, including dressing the children for burial. At the funeral home, left alone with their bodies, she undressed them, then finally broke down and sobbed. Suddenly she noticed that her mother was standing in the room next to her. She was smiling as she placed a comforting hand on her daughter. “It’s okay,” she said to Martha. “They are here with me now. I’ll take care of them.” This vision at this time was like a spiritual rebirth for Martha. She had lost so much in the past year, but in just these few seconds it was behind her. “When my mother appeared to me, I suddenly understood everything,” said Martha. “I knew what would happen when I died and I knew what my goal on earth should be.” For Martha that goal is to help other people, especially those in need of spiritual renewal. As a direct result of this vision she now works in nursing homes as a nursing assistant. She takes great pride in working with people who are very senile or dying. Jobs like these are among the most challenging in society. Such work involves extremely difficult tasks, such as feeding people who are too old to swallow well, or changing diapers for those who are too feeble to leave their bed. These occupations have a very high burnout rate. Yet Martha

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has done this type of job for more than twenty years now and says she would be completely comfortable doing it for twenty more. It is the vision she had of her mother that keeps her going. She feels that it is her job to relay to the sick and dying what she has seen. (Morse and Perry 1994, 109–10)

A second example of a sense of calling linked to family spiritual experience is from a friend and colleague of Rachel Remen. She lost her fifteenyear-old son in an accidental drowning. She told how, in the first hours after his death, she had been criticized for getting a cup of tea, and had learned that in the emotional position she occupied, “I could do nothing wrong: this had struck me to a place of such depth that everything I did or said or thought or felt in response was completely true. This was beyond rules, beyond judgments. This was all mine.” What is striking in her case is not the sense of insulation from social rights or wrongs, but the impetus to action generated by her son’s death, a thrust to serve that has both healed the mother and helped many other victims of loss: She works now with groups of people who have cancer, helping them to move through their grief and losses in order to connect back to the place in them that is coherent and whole. Speaking of this she says, “For me, the loss of my son went from a singular event to something that is woven into the fabric of my being. It is always present to me, part of my work, part of my experience. Having experienced that deep a grief, that suffering, I am no longer afraid to go back there. I have been around it and with it and come through it and I know it very well. I have also somehow survived it. I think the people in my groups know this. They know that I am not afraid to go back to that place of grief or suffering, to acknowledge our losses and their deep significance, if that is where we need to go. I think it brings a kind of safety to the room.” She pauses thoughtfully: “It is also very affirming to return to that place because it is a place that has enormous meaning for me. Sometimes it is as if I get to be with my son again, sometimes in those moments when there is that kind of grief in the room.” (Remen 2000, 11–12)

Our final family spiritual experience is heavier on reassurance than motivation from loss, but it too involves the loss of family members. It comes from the reminiscences of Gus Bighorse (1990), a Navajo grandfather who was born in the mid-nineteenth century and lived until 1939. He was among the Navajos who survived the period of the Long Walk, when most Navajos were rounded up by Kit Carson and the United States military and marched across New Mexico in the dead of winter to the reservation at Fort Sumner.

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There about half of them perished from sickness and malnutrition before they negotiated a treaty with General William T. Sherman that allowed them to return to their ancestral lands. Gus Bighorse managed to avoid the roundup, and was one of the leaders of the hundreds of Navajos who hid from the military until 1868 when their fellow tribesmen returned. In the tense period preceding the Long Walk, Navajo people were the targets of raids by soldiers whose mission was to exterminate or relocate the Navajos. Gus Bighorse was about sixteen years old when he returned from hunting to find that in his absence soldiers had come and killed both his parents. Later, chosen to be one of the leaders of the Navajo people who had avoided capture, and responsible for finding places for them to hide, he felt he was being guided in his decisions: “Sometimes I think the Great Spirit is guiding me, telling me, ‘Don’t go there, go this way.’ I think it is my father’s spirit guiding me. I mean my real father—and my Father Sky” (Bighorse 1990, 22). A sense of the spirituality among these fugitive Navajos, hidden behind Navajo Mountain, is apparent in Bighorse’s account of their prayers for the safety of their relatives at Fort Sumner, and for the soldiers as well: They pray that these captured Navajos will come back to their homeland safely, soon be free. At this time there are lots of medicine men. They pray every time before they eat—the whole family, all the time praying for the safe return. . . . They do this every day and every night, before the sunset and after the sunset. . . . And they pray for the warriors that are protecting them and for the white people who are holding all those people captive, pray to soften the white soldiers’ hearts to let these people go free. (Bighorse 1990, 44–45)

At Fort Sumner, among the captives, the same spirit of prayer prevailed. The Navajo leader Barboncito and his warriors encouraged the people, “‘Keep on praying,’ he tells them. ‘The Great Spirit is listening, so pray’” (Bighorse 1990, 51). Their prayers are answered, and the Navajos are allowed to return home. Bighorse no longer has the responsibility to care for his people, and he feels the loneliness of his status as an orphan once more. The rest of his life is not particularly notable, probably little different from that of the average Navajo man of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He works hard, marries, is twice widowed and remarries, and at the end is no longer lonely but enmeshed in family, surrounded by his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. He tells the story of his life to his children, one of whom will remember well and write it down for his posterity, and for us. Among the things he says about his life is a statement

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of gratitude for the “guidance” he has received, and for his long life. What makes his story relevant here is an account of a repeating dream he has in his old age. The dream is particularly meaningful because Bighorse is a traditional Navajo, and the Navajo worldview does not include a belief in the immortality of the individual human soul (Reichard 1977). Nevertheless, it is plain from Bighorse’s telling that for him the dream is real, a reassuring, spiritual encounter. Sometimes I have a dream about a man with white hair and a white beard, and his gown is white. . . . And he comes to me and says, “I will come again, when your hair will be as white as me.” He comes to me once in a while, not all the time. I always think I’m not ready yet. Sometimes I think he is the one guiding me all my life—saves me, and now he doesn’t want me to suffer. He wants me to go where I won’t ever suffer from old age. This man comes to me and says there are old people that come to the end of their journey, and they’re living someplace else. And they are kind to everybody that comes to that place. I think there’s another world for these old people. He wants me to go there; so I’ll be going over there, and that will be my last journey. (Bighorse 1990, 97–98)

 Given the postmodern distrust of meta-narratives, it may be that the systematic accumulation of stories, and an honest attempt to wring meaning from them, is the most that responsible researchers can do. Morse and Perry (1994, 32–33) recognize that an accumulation of stories, by itself, does not science make. On the other hand, recent advances in qualitative analysis seem to be moving us in the direction where we can at least have confidence in what the stories, holistically and individually, seem to be telling us. Careful qualitative analysis can remove some of the troubling threats to validity that are inherent in interpreting data from contexts beyond the control of the researcher. And as postmodern philosophy decenters and raises serious questions about even quantitative data and the controlled experiment, we may actually be in a better position to learn from real life, working from a theoretical position that questions the universal as well as the particular. We began this chapter with ghost stories, and a narrative line that led from there to issues of the reality of that which is beyond measurement, yet essential to our worldview. In conclusion, we emphasize that the story, the particular story, is the postmodernist datum par excellence. Over-arching

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narratives are suspect, language is both the source of all meaning and at the same time a medium of bias and distortion. Texts mislead and misrepresent, perceptions are both personally and culturally suspect, and measurement turns out to be a tool with its own modes of refracting the partialities it engages. At last, we are reduced to the witness of persons we trust, and reliance on truths we feel. In the postmodern wilderness, it is family stories that sustain us.

Notes 1. Announcements of the death of “that God” seem premature. As of mid-2000, 85 percent of the U.S. population was classified as Christians. Estimates of total “adherents” of the five largest theistic world religions (Christians, Muslims, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Sikhs) total 53 percent of the world’s population (Richards and Bergin 2005, 8, 80). Gallup surveys of U.S. adults show 90 percent who say they never doubt the existence of God, 80 percent who believe that God still works miracles, and 70 percent who believe in life after death (Reeves 1996). 2. As for the announcements of irreversible change and dramatic “world shifts,” there is some wisdom in another commentator’s view of the heritage of “the sixties,” but in this case we are talking of the 1860s. Nancy Frankenberry’s (1996, 103) reading of history convinces her that American intellectual culture had become secular by the end of the nineteenth century, in the aftermath of the Civil War, with a growing acceptance of the theory of evolution, the progress of industrialization, and the pluralism and anti-sectarianism associated with the arrival of millions of European immigrants. What Wuthnow (1998, 166) describes as “the quest to overcome estrangement” among average Americans he interviewed in the 1990s may well represent popular reaction to a century in which national life was dominated by secular intellectual elites. 3. Bauman makes an effort to create an ethics equal to the postmodern challenge in his (1993) Postmodern Ethics. 4. This is a good place to emphasize that family change does not necessarily mean collapse or decline. Whether it is a good thing for grandparents to have a larger role in rearing children than was usually allowed them in the nuclear family of the West in the twentieth century is an open question. We have noted elsewhere (Bahr, DéChaux, and Stiehr 1994, 159) that while examination of several key indicators suggests that the traditional nuclear family is “in trouble,” the trends in intergenerational contact and support indicate continued family vitality. “This apparent incongruity is partially resolved by the observation that some of the behaviors apparently destructive to the ‘traditional family,’ such as divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing (and, under some circumstances, abortion and solitary living), actually increase the need for intergenerational contact and support.”

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5. As an example, Robert C. Solomon (2002), whose “summary Hallmark-card phrase” definition is “spirituality as the thoughtful love of life,” devotes a book to philosophical variations on the definition of spirituality. He begins by stating that one does not have to be religious to be spiritual, and that “belief in God does not constitute spirituality.” What does seem to constitute spirituality is every human virtue and positive cognitive, emotional, of holistic experience, plus nature and the cosmos as perceived, specifically including, in only the preface, introduction, and first chapter of his book, “our grandest passions, love in particular,” “our sense of humanity and camaraderie,” “our sense of family,” “fate,” “the grand and thoughtful passions of life and a life lived in accordance with those grand thoughts and passions,” including “love, trust, reverence, and wisdom, as well as the most terrifying aspects of life, tragedy, and death,” and “the process of transforming the self.” Spirituality is “all-embracing, including much (if not all) of Nature and the natural world,” “the subtle and not easily specifiable awareness that surrounds virtually everything and anything that transcends our petty self-interest,” “[the practice of] philosophy,” “thinking positively,” “self-actualization,” a “larger sense of life,” and “living beyond oneself, discovering a larger self”, or “achieving what the Buddhists and Taoists refer to as ‘no self’” (Solomon 2002, xii, xvi, 6–7, 11–12, 16, 20, 23, 27). 6. At least four trends affect usage of the concepts religion and spirituality: (1) Usually spirituality is identified as the broader concept, and religion narrowly; (2) The two terms are increasingly differentiated, in contrast to earlier usage that saw them as largely overlapping; (3) Whereas formerly religion included both extrinsic and intrinsic dimensions, now spirituality is viewed as “personal, relational, dynamic, and functional,” while religion is “external, institutional, static, and substantive”; and (4) There is a tendency to view religion as negative and spirituality as positive (Richards and Bergin 2005, 21–22). 7. Joseph Hoffman (1997, 10), editor of Modern Spiritualities, contributes an insightful irreverence when he warns that the term “spirituality” is “dangerous because unlike the rising sun, four-cornered earth, and three-personed god, it has ‘policy implications’”: School principals and boards of education in America and Britain wring their hands over a lack of “spiritual” development (by which they often mean appropriate conduct or better English-language skills). Church leaders deplore the loss of spirituality in their congregations, by which they mean the attraction of shopping malls over churches. Baptists, Unitarians, and (even) secular humanists “bounce” the word as though there is nothing left to guesswork in its meaning. In the United States particularly it vies with school prayer as a politically safe alternative to what the courts have seen as enforced religious observance, safe because, unlike prayer, no one quite knows what spirituality is.

8. The substantial research literature supporting the positive effects of religion and spirituality on family well-being and the ability of families and individuals to cope with disease, death, and other challenges of life includes Harris, Thoresen,

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McCullough, and Larson (1999) on the effects of spiritually and religiously oriented health interventions; Mahoney et al. (2001) on links between religion, marriage, and parenting; Ross (2006) on the nature of spiritual care in health care; Hebert, Weinstein, Martire, and Schulz (2006) on religion and spirituality and the well-being of informal caregivers; Marks (2006) on religion and family relational health; Chiu et al. (2004) on spirituality in the health literature generally; Martsolf and Mickley (1998) on spirituality and particular nursing theories; and Rivett and Street (2001) on spirituality in the family therapy literature. 9. Respecting clients’ religious orientations has been institutionalized as essential to ethical therapy. The American Psychological Association’s (2002) guidelines on multicultural education in the training and practice of psychologists states that spiritual and religious orientation is one of the critical dimensions of cultural identity, and their statement Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct requires psychologists to acquire the training necessary to ensure competence in matters relating to religion and spirituality or “to make appropriate referrals in cases where competence is lacking” (Hage 2006, 304). The American Academy of Family Physicians’ (2003) Recommended Core Educational Guidelines on Medical Ethics offers guidelines on how family physicians are to deal with the belief systems of patients and their families, including the need for physicians to have “an understanding of cultural, social, and religious customs and beliefs that differ from his or her own” (King and Crisp 2005). The code of ethics of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (2001) states that therapists provide professional assistance to persons “without discrimination on the basis of race, age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability, gender, health status, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation,” and also states that marriage and family therapists are “to be aware of their influence with regard to the client.” Although in the past it has often not been seen as an important part of therapy, under present standards, by definition, “to provide ethical care, family therapists must be able to facilitate spiritual or religious discussions within the context of therapy” (Hoogestraat and Trammel 2003, 413–14). 10. For a summary and critique of the relation of the spiritual and religious factors to physical and mental health see Richards and Bergin (2005, 129–36). Koenig et al.’s Handbook of Religion and Health (2001) summarizes over 1,600 studies and reviews and provides strong support for the positive religion-health connection. See also Koenig’s Handbook of Religion and Mental Health (1998), and Koenig (2002), Plante and Sherman (2001), and Pargament (1997). 11. Richards and Bergin (2005, 137) report the use of “parallel quantitative procedures” in some instances, in an effort to go “beyond the merely anecdotal” to establish “spiritual validity.” They consider the narratives of spiritual experience “as stimuli to readers’ spiritual understanding and way of knowing rather than as ‘proof’ in the logical or scientific sense. This spiritual ‘way of knowing’ is essential to a theistic strategy. . . . [W]e wish to reaffirm the importance of qualitative and spiritual ways of knowing for the understanding of spiritual realities.”

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12. According to Morse and Perry (1994, 135) death-related visions cause substantial personality change. “From a single brief experience, controlled studies have shown a decrease in neurotic anxiety, a perception of life having meaning and purpose, an increased sense of one’s spiritual life, a belief in an afterlife, and even a healing of addictions. Carefully conducted studies have shown that people who have near-death experiences, for example, use fewer over-the-counter drugs, eat more fresh vegetables, give more money to charity, and do more physical exercise than those who haven’t had them.” 13. See, for example, the works of Diane M. Komp (1992, 1993, 1996), Rachel Naomi Remen (2000), Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1999), and Melvin Morse with Paul Perry (1994).

CHAPTER FIVE



Family Work

I grew up in a little town in northern Utah, the oldest daughter in a family of 13 children. We lived on a small two-and-a-half-acre farm with a large garden, fruit trees, and a milk cow. We children loved helping our dad plant the garden, following behind him like little quail as he cut the furrow with his hoe and we dropped in the seeds. Weeding was less exciting, but it had to be done. I was never very good at milking the cow. Fortunately, my brothers shared that task. In the autumn, we all helped with the harvest. I especially loved picking and bottling the fruit. It required the hands of all 13 of us plus Mom and Dad. We children swarmed through the trees picking the fruit. My dad would fire up an old camp stove where we heated the water to scald the fruit. My mother supervised putting the fruit in jars, adding the sugar, putting on the lids. My youngest sister remembers feeling very important because she had hands small enough to turn the peach halves if they fell into the jars upside down. That job kept her busy because she had to keep up with all of us big kids peeling peaches and dropping them into jars. When the harvest was complete, I loved looking at the freezer full of vegetables and all the jars of fruit. They looked like jewels to me. My mother did not leave home to earn money. She spent her day caring for the children and for our home, and helping neighbors when needed. My father was a professor; he taught automotive technology at the university, and he often took us with him to his auto shop to play around while he worked. I played, but my brothers watched Dad’s every move, and learned to fix cars as they worked along with him.

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Caring for our large family kept all of us busy most of the time. Mother was the overseer of the inside work, and Dad the outside, but I also remember seeing my father sweep floors, wash dishes, and cook meals when his help was needed. My mother taught each of us—the boys and the girls—to cook, clean, and sew. Some mothers were afraid their children might ruin the sewing machine. Not my mother. It was more important to her that we learn to do things for ourselves and for each other. As children we often worked together, but not all at the same task. While we worked we talked, sang, quarreled, made good memories, and learned what it meant to be family members, good sons or daughters, good fathers or mothers, good citizens. As a child, I didn’t know there was anything unusual about this life. My father and mother read us stories about their parents and grandparents, and it was clear that both my father and mother had worked hard as children. Working hard was what families did, what they always had done. Their work was “family work,” the everyday, ordinary, hands-on labor of sustaining life that cannot be ignored— feeding one another, clothing one another, cleaning and beautifying ourselves and our surroundings. It included caring for the sick and tending to the tasks of daily life for those who could not do it for themselves, not only children and the infirm, but plants and animals as well. It was through this shared work that we showed our love and respect for each other—and work was also the way we learned to love and respect each other. When I went to graduate school, I learned that not everyone considered this pattern of family life ideal. At the university, much of what I read and heard belittled family work. In lectures, in professional journals, and in the talk of liberated graduate students, I was told that family work, including nursing babies, cooking, cleaning—all the ordinary, everyday work of caring for a family—was a waste of an intelligent woman’s time. One might choose to be a mother and care for her family as a sideline, but the work that really mattered was paid work done away from home. Historians reminded us that men had long been liberated from farm and family work; now women were also to be liberated. One professor taught that assigning the tasks of nurturing children primarily to women was the root of women’s oppression. We read articles that said women who nurtured their own children and received no pay were really no different from servants or slaves. They were slaves to their husbands and to their children. I was told that women must be liberated from these onerous family tasks so that they might be free to work for money. I learned firsthand of the power of this ordinary work not only to bind families but to link people of different cultures when I accompanied a group of university students on a service and study experience in Mexico. The infant mortality rate in many of the villages was high, and we had been invited by community leaders to

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teach classes in basic nutrition and sanitation. Experts who had worked in developing countries told us that the one month we had available to do this was not enough time to establish rapport and win the trust of the people, let alone do any teaching. But we did not have the luxury of more time. In the first village, we arrived at the central plaza where we were to meet the leaders and families of the village. On our part, tension was high. The faces of the village men and women who slowly gathered were somber and expressionless. They are suspicious of us, I thought. A formal introduction ceremony had been planned. The village school children danced and sang songs, and our students sang. The expressions on the faces of the village adults didn’t change. Unexpectedly, I was invited to speak to the group and explain why we were there. What could I say? That we were “big brother” here to try to change the ways they had farmed and fed their families for hundreds of years? I quickly said a silent prayer, desirous of dispelling the feeling of hierarchy, anxious to create a sense of being on equal footing. I searched for the right words, trying to downplay the official reasons for our visit, and began, “We are students; we want to share some things we have learned. . . .” Then I surprised even myself by saying, “But what we are really here for is, we would like to learn to make tortillas.” The people laughed. After the formalities were over, several wonderful village couples came to us and said, “You can come to our house to make tortillas.” The next morning, we sent small groups of students to each of their homes, and we all learned to make tortillas. An almost instant rapport was established. Later, when we began classes, they were surprisingly well attended, with mothers sitting on the benches and fathers standing at the back of the hall listening and caring for little children. Because our classes were taking time from the necessary work of fertilizing and weeding their crops, we asked one of the local leaders if we could go to the fields with them on the days when we did not teach and help them hoe and spread the fertilizer. His first response was, “No. You couldn’t do that. You are teachers; we are farmers.” I assured him that several of us had grown up on farms, that we could tell weeds from corn and beans, and in any case, we would be pleased if they would teach us. So we went to the fields. As we worked together, in some amazing way we became one. Artificial hierarchies dissolved as we made tortillas together, weeded together, ate lunch together, and together took little excursions to enjoy the beauty of the valley. When the month was over, our farewells were sad and sweet—we were sorry to leave such dear friends, but happy for the privilege of knowing them. Over the next several years I saw this process repeated again and again in various settings. I am still in awe of the power of shared participation in the simple, everyday work of sustaining life. Helping one another nurture children, care for the land, prepare food, and clean homes can bind lives together. This is the power of family work.

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This power, available in every home, no matter how troubled, can ease the turmoil of families, and help heal a troubled world. (Bahr and Loveless 2000)

 Today a man feels “free” if he can avoid any kind of physical labor. A woman is considered “free” if she chooses a career over mothering at home, freer still if she elects not to bear children. In almost every facet of our prosperous, contemporary lifestyle, we strive for the ease associated with freeing ourselves from essential work. The more abstract and mental our work, the more distanced from physical labor, the higher the status it is accorded. Better off still is the person who wins the lottery or inherits wealth and does not have to work at all. Our homes are designed to reduce the time we must spend in family work. An enviable vacation is one where all such work is done for us—where we are fed without preparing our meals, dressed without washing our clothes, cleaned up after wherever we go, whatever we do. Even the way we go about building relationships denies the power inherent in working side by side at something that requires us to cooperate in spite of differences. Rather, we believe we “bond” with our children by getting the housework out of the way so the family can participate in structured “play.” We improve our marriages by getting away from the house and kids, from responsibility altogether, to communicate uninterrupted as if work, love, and living were not inseparably connected. We are so thoroughly convinced that the “relationship” itself, abstract and apart from life, is what matters, that relationships free from lasting commitments—to marriage, children, or family labor—are becoming the ideal. At every turn, we are encouraged to seek the freedom to enjoy life’s bounties without working for them, and where we are not obligated by responsibilities to children or kinfolk. How does ordinary, family-centered work like feeding, clothing, and nurturing a family—work that often seems endless and mundane—actually benefit our lives? The answer is so obvious in common experience that it has become obscure: Family work links people. On a daily basis, the tasks we do to stay alive provide us with endless opportunities to recognize and fill the needs of others. Family work is a call to enact love, and it is a call that is universal. Throughout history, in every culture, whether in poverty or prosperity, there has been the ever-present need to shelter, clothe, feed, and care for each other. Ironically, it is the very things commonly disliked about family work that offer the greatest possibilities for nurturing close relationships and forging family ties. Some people dislike family work because, they say, it is mindless. Yet chores that can be done with a minimum of concentration leave our

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minds free to focus on one another as we work together. We can talk, sing, or tell stories. Working side by side tends to dissolve feelings of hierarchy, making it easier for children to discuss topics of concern. Unlike play, which usually requires mental concentration as well as physical involvement, family work invites intimate conversation between parent and child. We also tend to think of household work as menial, and much of it is. Yet, because it is menial, even the smallest child can make a meaningful contribution. Children can learn to fold laundry, wash windows, or sort silverware with sufficient skill to feel valued as part of the family. Since daily tasks range from the simple to the complex, participants at every level can feel competent yet challenged, including the parents with their overall responsibility for coordinating tasks, people, and projects in a cooperative, working whole. Another characteristic of ordinary family work that gives it such power is repetition. Almost as quickly as it is done, it must be redone. Dust gathers on furniture, dirt accumulates on floors, beds get messed, children get hungry and dirty, meals are eaten, clothes become soiled; the work is never done. When compared with the qualities of work that are prized in the public sphere, this aspect of family work is another reason to devalue it. However, each rendering of a task is a new invitation for all to enter the family circle. The most ordinary chores can become daily rituals of family love and belonging. Family identity is built moment by moment amidst the talking and teasing, the singing and storytelling, and even the quarreling and sorrowing that may attend such work sessions. Some people think that family work is demeaning because it involves cleaning up after others in the most personal manner. Yet, in so doing, we observe their vulnerability and weaknesses in a way that forces us to admit that life is only possible day-to-day by the grace of God. We are also reminded of our own dependence on others who have done, and will do, such work for us. We are reminded that when we are fed, we could be hungry; when we are clean, we could be dirty; and when we are healthy and strong, we could be feeble and dependent. Family work is thus humbling work, helping us to acknowledge our unavoidable interdependence; encouraging, even requiring, us to sacrifice “self” for the good of the whole. Family work is a link to one another, a gift that transcends time, place, and circumstance, that has the power to transform us spiritually as we transform others physically. This daily work of feeding and clothing and sheltering each other is perhaps the only opportunity all humanity has in common. Whatever the world takes from us, it cannot take away the daily maintenance needed for survival. Whether we live in wealth, poverty, or struggle as

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most of us do in day-to-day mediocrity, we need to be fed, clothed, sheltered, and cleaned. And so do our neighbors.

The Study of Household Work In the past generation the study of household labor or “housework,” formerly notable by its absence from family research, has emerged as a mature specialty. Presumably its emergence is associated with the continuing increase in women’s paid employment, political trends favoring gender equality, and the rise of women’s studies devoted to illuminating women’s subordination and domination (D. Smith 1987). Most of this work has represented paradigmatic continuity rather than innovation, in that it has applied prevailing scientific methods and dominant theoretical frameworks—notably rational choice and economic exchange—to work in the home, as if work in family settings were no different from work in other contexts. Typically building on the assumption that housework and child care are drudgery, to be avoided if possible, this body of literature has framed the study of domestic work—we prefer the term “family work”—in issues of efficiency and productivity, power and equity. When the discourse has included a moral element, usually it has been an appeal to fairness and gender equity, or an affirmation of the often implicit norm that everyone should do his or her share of undesirable work. Rarely has recognition that families provide a special context for work, and generate unique “products,” led to moral discourse on the meaning and importance of family work. Instead, the family has been seen as one more context where modern technologies, theories, and research modes are applied with little regard to the social impacts accompanying that application (Postman 1993), or to the lack of fit between prevailing scientific theories and the special milieu of normative nurturance, caring, obligation, and commitment represented in much family work. In this chapter we will urge that housework in families be viewed as “human action undertaken in regard to other human beings . . . [where] matters of what is fair, right, just and virtuous are always present” (Fenstermacher 1990, 133). While the literature on this subject often involves considerations of fairness and justice, issues of the virtue, goodness, or the transcendent value of family work are usually neglected. Yet family work is the essential labor of life, the activity of nurturing and caring that makes social life possible. “Our moral lives are based in particular loyalties and relations” says Hauerwas (1981, 165), and “if we are to learn to care for others, we must first learn to care for those we find ourselves joined to by accident of birth.” Since “human relationships, whatever else they may be, are moral in character and

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consequence” (Clark 1990, 265), words that carry the “burdens of morality,” namely, “trust, care, obligation and responsibility” must have place in the discourse (Thomas 1990, 267). In this chapter we call attention to their rarity, and argue for an expanded discussion of the virtues of family work. There is great variety across cultures in the organization and performance of family work. Here we will be less concerned with how housework is done, or how families structure the doing of household tasks, than with the ways family professionals have studied family work, the paradigms they have applied, and the research questions they have asked. We are concerned with the conceptual lenses that are applied in the study of family work, for theoretical frameworks may enlarge or limit the field, and in much recent scholarship have tended to mask its moral meanings. Home Economics and Household Work Early interest in the study of family work grew out of changes in the nature of work to be done and in people’s ideas about who should do it. Although the work experience of American families differed by class, ethnicity, and region, the prevailing ideology of preindustrial American families had as a defining feature the interpenetration, if not unity, of work, family, and community (Bellah et al. 1985). Prior to the industrial revolution most household work was shared by the entire family. Tasks were divided along gender lines, but there was considerable interchangeability and overlap. More importantly, while there was division of work by function, the disparate tasks belonged to a common sphere and enterprise, that of the household (Bell 1981; Cowan 1987). From about the mid-1700s on, major changes in economic and family organization accompanied industrialization and urbanization. The advent of factories and wage work, the migration of farm families to cities, and advances in household technology (e.g., the coal stove, milled flour, the electrification of homes, the invention of “labor-saving” appliances) all contributed to a growing division of labor by sex. Many women worked in paid occupations, especially in the early stages of industrialization, but according to the emerging ideology, men, not women, were to work outside the home. Housework came to be seen as a distinctive form of labor, the cultural opposite of wage work (Cowan 1976; Ferree 1990). Among middle- and upper-class whites a powerful gender ideology reinforced the sexual division of household labor as being natural (Ehrenreich and English 1978; Boydston 1990), and an entire code of conduct emerged supporting what has since been called the cult of motherhood and domesticity. The phrase “cleanliness is next to godliness,” which had originally

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referred to moral cleanliness, was reapplied to housework contexts. Cleaning became a moral duty, and it was not uncommon to judge a woman’s moral state by the orderliness of her house (Davidson 1986). The notions of the “sacred child” (Zelizer 1985), of home as “haven in a heartless world” (Lasch 1977), and the “male provider” (Bernard 1981; Hood 1986) all have their roots in this era. The scientific study of housework began in this milieu of “separate spheres.” Tasks formerly bearable because shared among family members became more burdensome when defined as the proper province only of women. Migration to the cities meant that many families found themselves living in squalid urban settings, lacking space and opportunity to apply homemaking skills learned on family farms. Urban women, especially in wage-earner families, were increasingly seen as lacking the skills necessary to manage family life in the city and as needing help to negotiate the transition from traditional to modern homemaking (Clark 1909). The professionalization of home economics in the early 1900s provided experts whose mission was to help mothers change their ways (Ehrenreich and English 1978; Brown 1984; Bahr and Bahr 1995). The pervasive Victorian sex-role ideology extended into the early 1900s, and deflected attention from the study of the division of family labor per se. It was taken for granted that household work was women’s work. What was begun, however, was the study of home management and the related education of housewives. Growing public concern about family life and family problems coincided with the advent of scientific management in the workplace. It seemed appropriate to apply the principles of scientific management and economic efficiency to the conduct of family life as well (Gilbreth 1912). At the pivotal annual Lake Placid Conferences (1899-1908), where the professionalization of home economics occurred, there were dissenting voices suggesting that scientific management might not mix with meaningful family life, but the dominant position prevailed. Home economics set a course that it has held for almost a century—the application of the principles of science and industrial production to families. Part of the intellectual legacy of the Lake Placid Conferences was the position that human beings were passive recipients of information who needed to be educated in efficient, rational living by technical experts. The older traditions wherein subcultural and family norms regulated social process were seen as inferior to the ways of knowing based in science and rational management. Family ethnic and religious traditions and traditional family processes and values were deemed inferior to the rationality of the management expert.

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The early study of home management evolved through stages that paralleled prevailing national market philosophies (Brown 1984). Scientific principles of economy of time and motion implemented in factories by efficiency experts were extended to the simplification of household work. Across the first measured century (Caplow, Hicks, and Wattenberg 2001) efforts were made to measure almost every aspect of American life, including the daily processes of family maintenance and production. Over the years the justifications for measurement changed, and so did measurement techniques, as ever more subtle dimensions of family life were subjected to reduction and analysis. Efficiency experts counted the number of separate actions involved in household production, say, the number of steps taken by a housewife canning beans. Among the outcomes of such research were more efficiently designed kitchens. Early on there was also interest in measuring time use. In December 1917 the Journal of Home Economics published “The Length of the Housewife’s Day,” which tallied the number of hours a retired couple spent doing housework. Soon studies of time use, especially the housewife’s, dominated the measurement of family work. The purpose of these studies, at least initially, was to describe household work with an eye to simplifying it and reducing the time it took, so that women would be freed to pursue other interests, such as education in managing the home more efficiently (Hunt 1901, Walker and Woods 1976). Ironically, as scientific management reduced the physical burden of household work through better organization of time, efficient space utilization, and the use of “labor-saving” technology, the status of the housewife, as she came to be known, declined relative to persons, especially husbands, who earned income by market work. In reaction to that decline came time-use studies assessing the economic value of household work. These were conceived as a way to raise the status of the homemaker by showing the dollar value of her work. There were also efforts to include the economic value of household production in national economic indicators (Reid 1934). Later, such studies aimed to provide data to justify legal and public policy decisions favorable to women, and at the same time to help women decide how to allocate their time between home and outside employment (Walker 1973, Walker and Woods 1976, Hauserman 1983). Most of the intended benefit from assigning dollar value to family work did not materialize. Economists reasoned that as status was associated with money earned, documenting the economic value of work done at home would increase homemakers’ status. Perversely, it did not have that effect, but rather showed that outside work paid better, and generated real money, not unspendable “dollar value.”

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Thanks to the new technologies, one woman could now do “housework” that had previously required many hands. What formerly had been shared work, done in the company of others, increasingly became solitary, lonely work. What once had been seen as necessary, and therefore important work, now became drudgery and burden. Justifications for research on the division of family work grew more political, focusing on its gendered nature, on fairness in the division of family labor, and the continued exploitation of women. Some family theorists saw efforts to assign market value to family work as contributing to its devaluation. It was argued that emphasis on the economic value of housework blinded both researchers and family members to other less easily measured, yet more meaningful dimensions of family work (Beutler and Owen 1980; Brown 1982). Economists could assign dollar value to a mother peeling potatoes, but not her simultaneous watchful care of a toddler. And neither time-use nor dollar-value metrics could quantify the meaningfulness of a father rocking his baby, singing the lullabies his mother had sung to him, or of a mother’s efforts to tailor her family’s talents and needs to available neighborhood resources. Business expanded, service industries became more important in a post– World War II economy, and scientific management became more central to industrial production. The influence of the management paradigm extended far beyond the workplace. By the 1960s it was a major orientation in the study of household work. At about the same time, the discipline of home management shifted toward ethical relativism. There was growing emphasis on the need for family members to identify personal values, goals, and standards suited to a diversity of acceptable lifestyles. Home management professionals thereby extended their purview to family decision-making, family values, and the selection of goals and standards, topics not previously given priority in the efficiency paradigm (Riebel 1960). Functionalism, Resource Theory, and Other Economic Models For several decades, specialists in home economics were the only professionals to study housework seriously. Not until mid-century, when functionalist social theory focused attention on the division of labor in the isolated nuclear family, did other social scientists pay much attention to family work. Then, studies of the division of household labor in the context of resource theory had the countervailing effects of providing a body of knowledge about housework while at the same time trivializing it. With the “new home economics” of the 1970s came sophisticated studies of household labor from the standpoint of formal economics, work that received academic acclaim

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but did little to raise the status of family work or appreciation of its moral value. In the 1950s the study of household work was framed in terms of the division of labor, a concept drawn from sociology, industry, and economics. Earlier scholars had considered work, occupations, and stratification as important topics but did not define housework—unpaid work done primarily by women—as labor, and did not study it systematically (Oakley 1974; Ross 1987). According to the functionalist theory of Talcott Parsons (1959), household work was properly divided according to a “natural” division of the sexes into functions best suited to their biological capacities and family roles. Following prevailing Western ideology, he identified an instrumental role for men and an expressive role for women as efficient, functional, and structurally inevitable. Parsons said that sharing work was less efficient than dividing it according to natural ability, and that progress toward maximization of efficiency could only occur by specialization. Thus, he justified the division of family labor by sex and the specialization of women in home and family activities. Blood and Wolfe’s (1960) landmark study of family dynamics and household task performance began with the assumption that most family work— maintenance functions necessary to “keep things going”—was unskilled work requiring no particular training or talent and worthy of no particular reward. “Most household tasks,” they wrote, “are humdrum and menial in nature; the chief resource required is time.” According to their resource theory of the division of labor, rationality and economic considerations tended to override the effects of sex role socialization. If the family was a rational economic system, gender equality was possible, “For the criterion which governs the contemporary division of labor is not custom but equity, and an equitable division of labor depends on the resources of time, energy, and skill which each family member can contribute to the common task” (Blood and Wolfe 1960, 73–74). The key issue in resource theory is relative power conceptualized as a function of external resources, especially income. Like home management, resource theory assumed the rationality of maximization, but with a different emphasis. Home management experts sought efficiency in task performance, while resource theorists maintained that housework should be divided rationally between spouses on the basis of skills and available time. Also, they encouraged the rational application of power differentials, stating that the marital partner with greater resources (education, occupation, and income) would have more power and therefore dominate decision-making. It also was assumed that production work (employment) was more important than

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maintenance work (housework), and thus the resource theorists continued the trivialization of housework—in economic terms, “housework as a source of disutility” (Brines 1993, 337)—and by association, the work of women (Hiller 1984; Ross 1987). As with the functional approach of the Parsonians and the efficiency criteria of home management specialists, there was little attention to family environment as moral or as a setting qualitatively different from other social groups. Principles of resource theory were also applied by Lopata (1971) and Oakley (1974), who defined housewife as an occupation, an important ideological and methodological innovation that countered the trivialization of housework. Once again there were efforts to raise the status of family work by assigning dollar value to the activities of homemakers, generally by assigning a market replacement dollar value (what it would cost to purchase the service) or the opportunity cost of market wages foregone (Hefferan 1982). Becker’s (1976, 1981) application of classical microeconomic theory to families proposed that couples arranged the household division of labor to maximize family economic well-being. Successful families, he maintained, determined the combination of commodities that maximized utility, and the division of labor that created these commodities most efficiently. This formulation, like Parsons’ functionalism, justified inequitable gender arrangements in service of family utility. While many aspects of Becker’s theory were controversial, its treatment of household production as a topic worthy of scholarly research was a major contribution (Berk and Berk 1983). Gender Theory In the 1970s and 1980s came numerous feminist studies of family work. Many of these continued the typical devaluation of housework, but some emphasized its essential social value. Here we do not attempt a systematic review of feminist theory, but rather summarize some themes that characterize feminist literature on family work. As others have observed, any attempt to capsulize movements and literatures as diverse as those labeled “feminist” inevitably falls short. “The current temper among feminists now seems to be to recognize increasing diversity—among analyses and among themselves,” wrote Johnson (1993, 128). The usual feminist critique of the division of family labor during the past two decades or so rests on the assumption that sex-role ideology, both in families and in the larger society, reflects a dominance/submission relationship between the sexes. This hierarchal arrangement is rooted in the kind of work assigned to each. It is typically assumed that gender relations are contentious, and that unequal power, in men’s favor, has given them the advantage in the

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marketplace and the family (Ferree 1990). This inequality has kept women dependent on men’s resources. Also assumed are the low status of family work and the desirability of personal power and independence. Family work has low prestige and is stigmatized as work to be avoided if possible. The more independent (powerful) either partner is, the less likely it is that he or she will perform these low-status maintenance functions. Much feminist writing on family work tends to emphasize equity and power relations, and seems more concerned about fairness and caring as burden than about the growth-producing aspects and beyond-equity moralities of the work. “Analysis of power is central both to feminism and to understanding gender relations in families,” wrote Thompson and Walker (1995, 851). According to Shelton and Agger (1993, 25–27), “radical feminism . . . [focuses] on male power and male-dominated culture as a source of women’s oppression.” As a consequence, Diamond and Quinby’s (1988, 194–95) appeal for an increased emphasis on nurturance in feminist thought had to confront the processes whereby “the language of control became so fundamental to feminist discourse.” Many feminist studies that seemed to show how families worked together to survive ultimately arrived at the position that family work was the source of women’s oppression. For instance, Boydston’s (1986) depiction of how women contributed to the economic well-being of their families in the late 1800s argued that their work benefited men more than women, Orleck’s (1993, 168) description of militant housewives in the Great Depression celebrated their politicization of “the home, the family, and motherhood,” and the main intent of DeVault’s (1991, 12) innovative study of “feeding the family” was not to celebrate the necessity of this type of family work, but rather to show “how women are recruited into the work of feeding, and also how feeding work contributes to women’s oppression.” A strong feminist argument against the traditional division of labor based on male dominance compared women’s household work to slavery. As with the slave, it was said, the wife’s service to the household was unlimited and unpaid, and she had no public or external existence except as mediated by the husband (master). In this view, the only difference between the position of slaves and wives was in the “social meaning attributed to their lives of service” (Mann 1988, 198). Mann (1988) appealed to the moral position of equity, decried the unjust condition of women in the home, and suggested that one way to improve their situation was to conceptualize women’s activities within the family as having productive value. She also proposed redefining acts of personal service as legitimate acts of rational, purposive behavior between equals. In line

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with resource theory and economic models of the division of family labor, she invoked rationality, asserting that personal service within the family for both men and women must be an act of rational choice equivalent to alternative choices in the public sphere. A related feminist approach is based in the ideal of distributive justice, defined as an appropriate sharing of economic resources. Social comparison theory and the distributive justice framework (Dixon and Wetherell 2004; Himsel and Goldberg 2003; Thompson 1991) move beyond the fifty-fifty equity principle to include other factors that may contribute to women’s sense of fairness. They root perceptions of fairness in terms of norms or definitions that legitimate unequal division of family work, standards of comparison (those to whom one compares one’s situation, usually a spouse or same-sex outsider), and “outcome values” (definitions of what is appropriate and expected by significant others or in the subculture generally). Women are encouraged to identify unfair arrangements, respond to injustices, and push for change. Feminist scholars have demonstrated that gendered extrahousehold work is related to the gendered division of family work, and have described the networks women establish in carrying out child-care responsibilities. Beyond the family, it is mostly women who are responsible for social ties linking families to other families and to institutions such as schools, the workplace, and government (Doucet 2000, 2001; Balbo 1987; Di Leonardo, 1987). Much feminist literature focuses on issues of power and dependence, equity and justice, but there are many other possibilities. The notion that family work is the source of oppression only makes sense in a paradigm that a priori privileges the market and the polity over family settings. There may be relevant alternative norms such as those underlying caring relationships—standards of obligation and reciprocity—that cast family work in a different light. Paying attention to relationships increases the likelihood that distributive principles other than equity or advantage may apply, such as the moral constraints of commitment and obligation (Goodnow 1988; Goodnow and Warton 1991). Johnson and Lloyd (2004) point to the figure of the enslaved housewife as a defining element in second-wave feminism, not so much a figure that had to be rejected, as one that made the feminist subject possible. The insistence that women leave the captivity of home and homemaking is now challenged by strains in feminist thought that recognize domesticity as representing the “enshrinement of humane and communal values” in ways that challenge the assumed priority of self-interest. If work in the home is rendered visible, it is thought, then the feminist project of “selfhood” can be fulfilled in the hon-

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est addressing of human needs, and “selfhood is formed precisely by a robust engagement with the social relationships of everyday existence, including those of domestic life” (155–56, 160). Explaining the Gendered Division of Family Work Since the 1980s, there has been a “veritable explosion” (Greenstein 2000, 322) of studies of the continuing gendered division of household work despite women’s increasing presence in the workforce and their often equivalent or larger contributions to family income. Initially it was believed that as women joined the labor force and couples’ participation in outside employment equalized, there would follow a corresponding redistribution in family work. Over the past generation men’s performance of household tasks has increased considerably (Fisher et al. 2007), but the expected equalization has not occurred. Men are doing more cooking, cleaning, and child care than they used to, and women are doing less than before. Still, in most families the division of housework remains uneven, with women doing about two-thirds of the tasks. And yet most women do not define such unequal division of labor as unfair (Robinson and Milkie 1998; Bianchi et al. 2000; Sayer 2005). Facing a “revolution stalled” situation, researchers shifted from documenting continuing inequalities to studying the processes that perpetuate the gendered division of household work. A continuing focus on instrumental or “material issues” (time and resource availability, relative power, and personal commitments to gender ideology) has expanded to include the symbolic, relational aspects of domestic work. Now the family division of labor is recognized “not only [as] a rational resource-determined or gender role attitudedetermined activity, but an activity filled with wider symbolic, interactional, and relational meanings” (Sanchez and Kane 1996, 139). Researchers assess the processes that shape relevant definitions and expectations, including perceptions of fairness (Hawkins, Marshall, and Meiners 1995; Lavee and Katz 2002) and elements of gender identity such as what it is to be a husband or wife, mother or father (Kroska 1997, 2004; Dixon and Wetherell 2004), who women compare themselves to, how much they enjoy household work, and how competent they see themselves, as opposed to their partners, in this work (Grote, Naylor, and Clark 2002). Coltrane’s (2000) comprehensive review of the 1990s literature identifies seven distinct, sometimes overlapping, theoretical perspectives in the study of domestic labor.1 It stresses beginnings more than achievements, for most of the empirical studies explain little of the variance in the gendered division of housework. Coltrane concludes that “we are just beginning to understand why men do so little and to specify the conditions associated with men doing

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more.” We do know, he says, that the division and performance of household labor is much more complex than anticipated: [A]lthough we cannot yet adjudicate between most competing theories, we are better able to understand that household labor embodies a set of complex material and symbolic practices that constitute and reproduce daily life. . . . The task before us is thus to specify in more detail how the performance of housework in different families is implicated in various cultural, economic, and gender-reproductive processes. (1226–27)

Six years later, speaking of the child-care component of family work, Gaunt (2006, 524) reached a similar conclusion: “The most solid conclusion that can be derived from this great body of literature is that no single predictor exerts a predominant influence on fathers’ involvement. Rather, variables associated with father involvement apparently act together.” Most reviews of the literature (Sanchez and Kane 1996; Bianchi et al. 2000; Geist 2005) identify three or four major conceptual approaches. They include (1) the relative resources and economic dependency arguments (spouses negotiate housework responsibilities with regard to the resources brought to the exchange process, the spouse having the most resources, or who is least economically dependent on the other, does the least housework); (2) the time availability hypothesis (the more one’s time is allocated to outside work, the less time one gives to housework); (3) the gender ideology approach (the more one identifies with traditional family roles, the more housework the woman does and the less the man does); and (4) the deviance-neutralization hypothesis (the more a couple’s economic role behavior differs from majority patterns, the more they will try to counter that deviance by enacting patterns of household labor that manifest conformity to majority norms) (Greenstein 2000). All of these models devalue household work, the economic/bargaining perspectives by the assumption that it is rational to minimize one’s housework, and the gender perspectives by the assumption that the norms of “appropriate femininity and masculinity” mean that “it is more acceptable for women to adopt ‘masculine’ behaviors, such as doing paid work, than it is for men to adopt ‘feminine’ behaviors, such as doing unpaid work” (Sayer 2005, 287). There is some support for the expected pattern of household economic exchange (the more income wives bring to the relationship, the less housework they do) up to the point of approximate equivalence of income. That is, housework tends to be shared most equitably when income contributed to the relationship is most equitable (Brines 1994; Greenstein 2000; Bittman et al. 2003). But in couples where the wife’s income is greater than the

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husband’s, another dynamic seems to come into play, either a male “acting out” of gender roles in which the proportion of housework done by husbands declines as their wives’ contribution to family income surpasses their own, or a mutual, more traditional gender role display, oriented to “neutralizing” the couples’ apparent deviance in outside work and income (Greenstein 2000). Relevant here is Gupta’s (2006, 2007) finding that women’s absolute earnings are more important than husbands’ income in predicting women’s housework performance. He finds little evidence for either the economic exchange (relative resources) nor the gender display explanation of the division of household labor, and speculates that women “buy out of” some of their family work responsibilities. Similarly, Kan (2008), in a British study for the period 1993 to 2003, found that both relative resources and genderrole attitudes affected the division of household labor, but no evidence for “doing gender” among economically independent women or economically dependent men. Researchers have looked beyond the family’s view of itself in their efforts to explain the continuing unequal division of household labor, adding ecological and political variables to the mix. Thus, it is argued that the tenacity of women’s “second shift” pattern is partly due to the “geographical landscape,” for the “suburban condition complete with low-density singlefamily homes, sprawling shopping malls, and commercial corridors geared toward domestic convenience helps to sustain the second shift” (Johnson and Johnson 2008, 490). The growing availability of large national and international data sets, some of them panel studies, has made it possible to look at the effects of varying national contexts on household work. Country differentials in political and economic gender inequality, including rates of paid employment, are shown to affect the household division of labor. That is, female empowerment at national levels influences how couples divide household work at the family level (Breen and Cooke 2005; Hook 2006; Knudsen and Wærness 2008). Comparative multinational studies of cohabiting and married couples support time-availability, relative resources, and gender-ideology perspectives, and reveal more egalitarian division of family labor in countries where gender equity is greater (Davis, Greenstein, and Marks 2007). But individual and family-level effects are greater than the effects of national context. Data from panel studies have enabled the study of changes in men’s and women’s housework hours, employment, and gender display as they experience transitions to different life course stages (Gupta 1999; Evertsson and Nermo 2007; Cunningham 2007, 2008). There is evidence for relative stability across the life course for men’s housework time but substantial variation

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for women, with the transition to parenthood a time of sizable increases in women’s housework time (Baxter, Hewitt, and Haynes 2008). Eichler and Albanese’s (2007) critical assessment of the assumptions underlying much of the research on the gendered division of housework is an important conceptual contribution. They combine a good literature review with qualitative data from a Canadian study of work and lifelong learning to produce a new definition of housework and a nuanced treatment of its varying dimensions. Their critical review of the literature identifies several assumptions about the nature of housework implicit in the way housework has been measured. They evaluate these assumptions in a case study that involves both mail surveys to women’s groups and discussions with sixty-six adults from diverse backgrounds in eleven focus groups. Focus group participants were asked about particular household tasks and also were encouraged to talk about aspects of housework that might be “invisible” even to themselves, such as “thought work” that might accompany physical work. The findings suggest that four key assumptions of the literature on housework are incorrect, and the prevailing operational definitions of housework too narrow. Here are the implicit assumptions that their data refute, along with a reformulation that brings the revised assumption closer to the family experience revealed in the focus group discussions. 1. “Housework is performed exclusively by wives and husbands (women and men) within their own homes.” Not so. It turns out that housework is exchanged across household and family lines, and a great deal of “cross-household work” occurs. Reformulation: “Housework is performed by more people than husbands and wives. It is performed both for one’s own household as well as across households.” 2. “Housework consists primarily of a set of repetitive physical tasks.” Not so. When respondents got past the routine “cooking, cleaning, and child care” cliches and were encouraged to talk about what they actually did, much family work turned out to be mental, emotional, or both, along with administrative and educational effort. Among the types of housework that emerged were provision of emotional support, maintaining contact with kin and friends, conflict resolution, crisis management, planning, managing and organizational work, and a spiritual dimension. Reformulation: “Housework consists of more than a set of repetitive physical tasks.” 3. “Housework includes child care, but does not include care of adults.” In real life care work and housework overlap. The researchers ask, “Why

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is care for small children included in housework and care of adult children or other adults excluded, when some of the work may be identical?” They conclude that these are “two sides of the same coin: both involve the same work, but when categorizing the work as housework, it is the activity that is emphasized, while care work puts the stress on the relational aspect of the work.” Reformulation: “Household work includes care of adults as well as children.” 4. “Housework remains largely stable over the life course.” In fact, both the nature of the household and the person doing the work change, such that cleaning the house in one situation may be very different from doing so five years later. “Some of the changes have large effects on how household work is performed—even though the label of the activities performed may not change.” Reformulation: “Household work changes over the life cycle” (Eichler and Albanese 2007, 232, 235–36, 243–44, 247). Here is their definition of household work, consistent with the reformulated assumptions and the several dimensions identified in their research: “Household work consists of the sum of all physical, mental, emotional and spiritual tasks that are performed for one’s own or someone else’s household and that maintain the daily life of those one has responsibility for” (Eichler and Albanese 2007, 248).

Critique of Current Explanations We have highlighted several ways that the study of household work is presently conceptualized. All of them are modern, in the sense that they invoke rationality, technical and technological solutions to human problems, empirical measurement, and efficiency. Most reflect an underlying economic model that treats families like other social organizations. Only in the recent turn to study of the possible effects on housework of family relational patterns and symbolic meanings is there the suggestion that family work may not be reducible to economics and exchange. With the exception of the Eichler and Albanese reformulation, to the extent that moral considerations enter these frameworks, it is primarily as issues of economic equity and distributive justice or concern about exhibiting conformity to gender and parenting norms. Most of these approaches to the study of household work can be questioned both empirically and philosophically. Role differentiation, exemplified in the structure/functional arguments put forward by Parsons and

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associates, has been assailed on the grounds that gender is not an essential but a constructed trait. It is constructed actively within historical and social locations, among them the contexts of household labor, where “gender relations are produced and reproduced on a daily basis” (Berk 1985, 165). Moreover, research on instrumental and expressive traits has failed to establish these or other characteristics as sex-specific. Empirical support for both resource theory and the new home economics is, at best, equivocal. The variables of ability, opportunity, rational specialization, and maximization of utility implicit in functional and economic accounts are poor predictors of the division of household labor. When women enter the labor force, men adjust to this change by only modest increases in their household work. And a wife’s added income does not seem to translate into sufficient power to enable her to escape the primary responsibility for family work (Kroska 1997; Tichenor 2005). Contrary to theoretical expectations, it is often husbands in higher status occupations who perform more household tasks, and a wife’s employment status tells very little about how family roles are negotiated (Bittman et al. 2003; Coltrane 2000). In other words, couples do not apply purely rational decision rules in allocating household labor. Nor does the notion of economic exchange seem a sufficient explanation. One problem in such positions is the assumption that economic and non-economic resources in the family are interchangeable. For example, formulations of the new home economics build on the assumption that market-produced goods and services are adequate substitutes for their home-produced counterparts. But often there is an essential non-economic dimension of home-produced goods and services that makes them noncomparable and not interchangeable with market-produced goods (Brown 1982). The addition of gender ideology and symbolic interactionist explanations improves the situation somewhat. It seems likely that “focusing on ‘moral dimensions’ of how women and men think and believe they ought to enact their mothering and fathering practices can lead to greater understandings of why it is that some dimensions of domestic responsibility remain persistently gendered” (Doucet 2001, 347), but that promise remains unfulfilled. Calls for attention to the meanings of family work and to motivations beyond economic maximization and control are promising, but like the economic models, are partial in the sense that family work is viewed only from the standpoint of the interests of the worker (e.g., to manifest good mothering or to reduce external perceptions of deviant role performance) rather than from the standpoint of other family members or the family collectively.

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The Meaning of Housework In modern society, the work most highly valued and rewarded is paid work. Usually one’s dominant identity stems from an occupational role, and the value of one’s time, or anything else, is the dollar value assignable to it. Family activities and relationships, traditionally not valued in economic terms, tend to be undervalued. Marks (1977, 934) wondered why anyone would want to participate in family activities defined as dirty work or a waste of time. He argued that the devaluation of noneconomic activities derives from an ideological agenda, which, when accepted, supports the system of stratification it purports to pull down. In other words, conflict and power in relationships are defined as fundamental, and then appealed to as means of solving the problem of conflict and power in relationships. Contractual discourse, implicit or explicit, dominates prevailing approaches to family work. Yet, if there is more to human society than economic struggle and conflict, contractual discourse may be inapplicable to much social analysis. Neither sex equality nor the progression from a traditional to an egalitarian society are self-evident social goals. From a rational maximization and equity approach, solving conflicts is a technical problem, not moral decision-making. Yet defining right and wrong in terms of pragmatics (“it doesn’t pay”) has its limitations. Given the assumptions underlying the economic models, moral issues may be excluded by definition. The only ethical problems may have to do with decision-making consistent with personal preferences, or identifying challenges to self-actualization. Any serious treatment of the division of household labor in today’s society cannot avoid consideration of paid domestic help, and the accompanying issues of morality (Hom 2008) and ethnicity that it raises. Until recently, whatever the theoretical model, its use and interpretation has mainly reflected the Western, largely white, middle-class worldview of the majority. When nonwhite groups have been studied, “women’s work” has generally been defined in mainstream perspective. For example, most studies of family work among American blacks have framed the issues in rational, modern terms, in line with white experience, rather than considering the possibility of special meanings or ways of seeing family work that might be embedded in black experience (cf. Broman 1988; Wilson et al. 1990). Coltrane (2000, 1222–23) observes that not until the 1990s did household labor studies begin to “take race seriously.” He reports “unique patterns of labor allocation in Black families when extended kin are included” (Spitze and Ward 1995; Padgett 1997), cites some work on the division of family labor among Hispanics, and a few studies of other minority families (Coltrane 2000, 1223).

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More recent research includes Penha-Lopes’s (2006) exploration of the childhood socialization patterns relevant to the well-established finding that black husbands and fathers do more housework than men of other ethnic groups, and studies of ethnic differences in the “motherhood wage penalty” and the “fatherhood wage premium” (Glauber 2007, 2008). A frequent assumption, often implicit, is that housework is menial, tedious, boring, and to be avoided if possible (Kamo 1988; Rabuzzi 1982, 94). The recommended means for avoiding it varies from one approach to another. In an economic explanation, the way to avoid housework is to buy comparable goods and services, or to earn enough money to negotiate a division of family labor that frees one from household tasks. A political answer appeals to social power, which may be found in increased status, income, or education relative to one’s spouse, and to understanding the implicit “rules” by which injustice occurs and applying them in one’s favor (Mainardi 1980; Thompson 1991). A relational approach seeks explanations for the acceptance of irrational or inequitable arrangements in the give-and-take of family communication, gender definitions, and perceptions of norms and sanctions. Perhaps the most influential devaluation of housework was Simone de Beauvoir’s account in The Second Sex of its part in the oppression of women: Such work has a negative basis: cleaning is getting rid of dirt, tidying up is eliminating disorder. And under impoverished conditions no satisfaction is possible; the hovel remains a hovel in spite of women’s sweat and tears. . . . And for even the most privileged the victory is never final. Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition. The clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present. (de Beauvoir 1952, 451)

Variations on that theme characterized feminist writing for decades. Women endured the tedium, loneliness, and apparent worthlessness of homemaking, it was said, because they were dominated by men (Ferree 1990, 1984). A terse summary was Mainardi’s (1980, 99,102) statement that “the essential fact of housework . . . is that it stinks,” and that men avoided it because they “are not accustomed to doing monotonous, repetitive work which never issues in any lasting let alone important achievement.” Delphy and Leonard’s (1992, 1) Familiar Exploitation justified their “new approach to understanding the subordination of women in western societies” because under the prior approach “all the bad things about family labour have kept getting lost.”

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Resource theorists also have painted housework as an unmitigated negative that anyone with power and money would avoid (Hood 1983). Evertsson and Nermo (2007, 455) stated as “an implicit assumption in the sociological relative resource perspective . . . that most people want to avoid housework,” and Shehan, Burg, and Rexroat (1986, 407) agree that “the nature of housework is inherently isolating, restrictive, unskilled, repetitive, devalued, low in status, and consequently, not very rewarding.” Some feminist writers have taken a more balanced stance. Iris Marion Young (1997, 148–49) agrees that de Beauvoir “is surely right that much of what we call housework is drudgery, necessary but tedious, and also right that a life confined to such activity is slavery. But such a completely negative valuation flies in the face of the experience of many women, who devote themselves to care for house and children as a meaningful human project.” Young points to aspects of “homemaking” that may justify such drudgery, such as “preservation” (“endowing things with living meaning, arranging them in space in order to facilitate the life activities of those to whom they belong, and preserving them, along with their meaning”) and the sense of home as a “critical value” incorporating the ideals of safety, privacy, and individuation (one’s “place to perform the activities of life”). Young agrees that much housework represents oppression for women, but disagrees with feminist writers whose image of “home” is mostly negative. On the positive side, “the idea of home and the practices of homemaking support personal and collective identity in a more fluid and material sense, and . . . recognizing this value entails also recognizing the creative value to the often unnoticed work that many women do” (164). There is also empirical support for a more benign view of family work. Many women say they enjoy or experience personal fulfillment in family work. In an early national survey Wright (1978) found that almost half of women expressed “unqualified liking” for housework. Among the reported benefits of full-time homemaking were free time and a lifestyle less hectic and complicated than that of employed women. Grote, Naylor, and Clark (2002, 512), trying to explain wives’ satisfaction with less than equitable division of household labor, proposed that “wives simply may expect to do more family work and may enjoy performing family tasks more than husbands. Even if wives do not enjoy family work for its own sake, some wives may enjoy the outcomes of performing these tasks because they are done in the service of the people they love.” A Dutch study (Van Berkel and De Graaf 1999, 794) reported wives’ high enjoyment ratings (“pleasant” and “very pleasant”) for preparing meals (53 percent) and grocery shopping (46 percent), lower ratings for “doing the laundry” (31 percent), and unsurprising

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low rates of enjoyment for bathroom cleaning (9 percent) and kitchen cleaning (14 percent). Robinson and Milkie (1998), in a national trend study, predicted that over the past two decades women would have “disinvested psychologically from housecleaning,” but their hypothesis was not supported. In fact, 27 percent of women in 1995 said they “really enjoy” housework, and younger women had a greater affinity for it than the middle-aged. Obviously, people vary in their enjoyment of work of any kind. Even tasks generally seen as unpleasant are more pleasant for some than others. An essential point is Shehan, Burg, and Rexroat’s (1986) conclusion that women’s perceptions of family work vary greatly, and it is wrong to assume that all women react to housework in the same way. Housework, like other activities, is inherently neither positive nor negative, neither fulfilling nor unfulfilling. It varies in meaning and in the perceived benefits associated with doing it. Informed discourse on the proper division of family work and why it is worth doing necessarily includes reference to meanings and moral contexts. It is argued that women experience “relationship distress” because family work is not evenly divided by sex, but there is also “women’s paradoxical contentment with an unequal division of family work” (Grote, Naylor, and Clark 2002, 510). Reacting to research results showing that some women found housework fulfilling or did not find an inequitable division of labor oppressive, Berheide (1984, 53) suggested that such women “may be suffering from a form of false consciousness” and concluded that “to improve their lives, women must fight loved ones who are resisting change in order to protect their privilege not to do housework.” But here is an alternative position, from an article entitled “Women’s Liberation through Housework” (Corey 2007): In the land of the living, maintaining a home is a worthwhile and creative pursuit, not just a series of menial tasks best contracted out to a weekly maid service. Keeping a tidy house needn’t be an exercise in pointless, mind-numbing tedium, regardless of what girls of my generation were taught. Many of us for a few decades there refused to admit it, but deep down, we have a perfectly respectable desire to create an attractive, peaceful haven for our families and ourselves. . . . Perhaps, as an end in itself, the work can be meaningless and soul-sapping. But when the purpose is to provide a restful place where our families can recharge their batteries and enjoy time together . . . well, that elevates housewifery to the status of a vocation.

Apart from theoretically and politically oriented resistance, there are continuing individual resistances to the moral obligations of family work, resistances associated with the personal search for freedom, autonomy, and

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self-satisfaction. Marks (1977) suggests that personal resistance to participation in group activity is not due to shortage of time (people seem to be able to find time for some things and not for others) or energy (some activities actually produce a feeling of expanded energy), but to low commitment. He proposes that commonly voiced appeals to scarce time and energy used to justify non-participation are really veiled complaints about the levels of commitment that organizations such as families require. Such appeals to the scarcity of time and energy are “tailor-made to serve as culturally honorable excuses for the under-committed” (932). Men may resist doing housework, but women sometimes facilitate men’s resistance by “gatekeeping” practices that discourage male participation (Allen and Hawkins 1999; Fagan and Barnett, 2003; Gaunt 2008). Additionally, men’s resistance may be attributed to the levels of psychic investment required for good providing (or good homemaking), to the competing demands of status attainment, to maintaining gender identity, or to other attitudes and values (Ferree 1991; Brines 1994; Kynaston 1996; Gaunt 2005). Acknowledging the legitimacy of these forms of resistance supports the prevailing negative view of housework. By continuing the discourse on how housework may be minimized or avoided, we perpetuate the problem rather than helping to solve it.

Toward an Expanded Moral Discourse We have reviewed a literature that, in the main, has avoided or discounted the moral dimensions of family work. In large part, this neglect derives from the nature of the prevailing economic-oriented paradigms. However, as Foucault (1973, 352–53) explained, economic models, however useful, do not constitute human science nor treat essential matters of meaning and moral integration: [E]ven though man is, if not the only species in the world that works, at least the one in whom the production, distribution, and consumption of goods have taken on so great an importance and acquired so many and such differentiated forms, economics is still not a human science. . . . There will be no science of man unless we examine the way in which individuals or groups represent to themselves the partners with whom they produce or exchange, the mode in which they clarify or ignore or mask this function and the position they occupy in it . . . the way in which they feel themselves integrated with it or isolated from it, dependent, subject, or free. . . . The human sciences . . . [are] an analysis that extends from what man is in his positivity (living, speaking, labouring, being) to what enables this same being to know (or seek to know)

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what life is, in what the essence of labour and its laws consist, and in what way he is able to speak.

Another affirmation of the moral blindness of mainstream theory is Inchausti’s (1991, 3, 12) invoking of “plebian postmodernism,” an approach intended as a “corrective response to the failure of both positivism and liberalism to establish a valid universal history.” This orientation assumes that “our true being resides . . . all around us, perpetually at hand in our families, our pasts, our public and private lives, our rites and our works, and in our possibilities and responsibilities.” In place of sterile economic functions and the expertise of technicians and change agents in service of grand theory, it posits a “humanity [that] is neither a fiction nor a birthright but an ethical accomplishment,” and asserts “an ethic that honors the concrete deed before the abstract stance and the claims of the family before the fictions of the state” (12–13). Central to the moral discourse made possible under such “plebian postmodernism” is an exploration of the meanings and moral implications of family work, both for families and the wider society. Work is a matter of life and death. Without the production of food, human society cannot survive. If life has meaning—if survival has moral value over non-survival—then the production and distribution of food has moral dimensions. So does preparing and serving food, as shown in Bellah’s (1990, 230–31) identification of the moral relevance of mealtimes and microwave ovens: [M]icrowave meals for children . . . now make it possible for children, quite literally, to feed themselves. If, as I believe, the family meal is the family sacrament and if it is also the place where children learn the terms of civil discourse, what happens to the family when commodification, the colonization of the family by the economy, reaches this extent?

Another way to illustrate the sort of cultural blinders that have prevented students of housework from seeking alternative meanings is to refer to Dorothy Lee’s (1959) reanalysis of Raymond Firth’s data on the Tikopia. She was uncomfortable with the terminology, including “obligation,” “duty,” and “unpleasant tasks,” that Firth applied to the work of the Tikopian villagers: Raymond Firth, the ethnographer, answering the unspoken questions of western readers, spoke of obligations, duty, fear of adverse opinion, as motivations. I did not like his choice of words, because he spoke of the obligation to perform unpleasant tasks, for example, and yet the situations he described brimmed

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with joy. Now I saw that the Tikopia did not need external incentives. . . . I went back to Raymond Firth’s books . . . and read each detail without placing it automatically against my own conception of the self. And so I was able to see a conception of identity radically different from mine; I found a social definition of the self. . . . And here I found work whose motivation lay in the situation itself, a situation which included the worker and his society, the activity and its end, and whose satisfaction lay in social value. (Lee 1959, 28–29)

By acknowledging the ethnocentric and historical embeddedness of our gender ideology, and of prevailing ideas about the division of household labor, we stress how intertwined these concepts have become, and how they have shaped our thinking on the nature and the meaning of housework. In contrast, the moral discourse we propose moves beyond the “gender factory” concept of housework, and points toward a reconceptualization of family work based on moral obligation. How did it happen that the cult of domesticity and the “haven in a heartless world” renditions of women’s family life were replaced by a contrasting model whose prevailing theme seems to be “Aren’t we glad we no longer have that antiquated notion about the rapture of housework?” (Cowan 1976). It is accepted as self-evident that housework is demeaning, a source of subjugation and inequality. It is now well-documented that contemporary American society has made this dramatic ideological shift, but its meaning has been largely unexamined. Our own experience, vicarious and personal, suggests that the view of family work provided by prevailing paradigms is excessively bleak and manifestly incomplete. A meaningful alternative approach is to move beyond what seems an excessive, even unhealthy focus on family work from the perspective of self—beyond models that assume self-interested orientations to equity, power, resources, gender identity, reputation, and self-interest—to seeing family work as oriented to the welfare of the person or collectivity served. Stated differently, we would add to the present near-exclusive focus on the self-oriented struggle over who will be “burdened” by such work, some attention to the intent of family work to benefit others, and the concern of persons who do family work for the welfare of the persons they care for. In an era when objectivity and rationality are recognized as incomplete, if not suspect, justifications for particular social practices and power arrangements, the proposed approach provides necessary balance to the standard assumptions of self-interest economics and maximization. Families exist because family members care about each other. The prevailing models of the division of family work generally do not take this concern for the other into account.

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Coltrane (2000, 1215) identified two types of morality theories, the conservative or religious versions which emphasize positive aspects of family work and downplay the associated conflict and inequality, and the liberal and feminist varieties which “suggest that power, inequality, and love are uniquely intertwined within the household economy, religion, and the general culture.” Other ways the division of household labor may be relevant to moral concerns include “responsibility theory,” which refers to definitions of what constitutes “good” caregiving, norms on who should be responsible, and the importance of ascertaining the needs of the other and shaping care accordingly (Piercy 1998; Leslie, Anderson, and Branson 1991). Doucet (2001, 330, 333) argues that domestic responsibility is both material and moral. It is moral in the sense that family work is enacted in a context that includes norms about how a good son or mother or father ought to behave, and where the performance of family responsibilities is subject to sanctions. Domestic responsibilities, she writes, are carried out in situations where “women and men believe they are being observed and judged in the social world within which they take on domestic responsibility. To add ‘moral dimensions’ to the picture is to bring in an understanding of how people believe they should act and how they think others will view these actions.” Another moral aspect of family work is the performance of household work by children. Much of the work itself is essential to family well-being. The interaction associated with doing it, and with sharing the skills necessary to do it well, provides an important context for family ritual, communication, and joint action. There are few activities better suited to “quality time” between parents and children than working together on meaningful, essential tasks. Participating in family work fosters helpfulness, value congruity, and a cooperative spirit. White and Brinkerhoff (1981, 797) refer to the “ubiquitous and value-laden features” of children’s work in family settings, and Harris argues that children’s identities, their emotional ties to family members, and their sense of kinship obligation grow out of common participation in the essential activities of shared family life: Familial relationships arise out of reproductive activities involving interaction by persons living in proximity and are therefore emotionally charged. . . . The most stringent obligation exists between elementary family members. . . . All other kin relationships involve weaker obligations . . . because the parties have never shared common household membership experiences. . . . The natural (i.e. spontaneous) sentiments generated by reproductive activities when they occur within nuclear family households, are culturally transformed into obligations and tied to family statuses. (Harris 1990, 74, 76)

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Here a discrepancy should be apparent. On the one hand, studies based in economic frameworks argue that doing housework is a waste of time, and even demeaning for adults. Other analysts say that doing housework fosters responsibility, moral development, self-control, family commitment, and prosocial behavior, especially among children (Goodnow 1988; Wallinga, Sweaney, and Walters 1987). Family Work as Relationship It is important, then, to be alert to the alternative meanings of household work. In our opinion, the most obvious factor neglected in the extant research on family work is the meaning of the work in terms of benefit to family members served. Decades ago Blau and Scott (1962) introduced the criterion of cui bono (who benefits?) into research on complex organizations, but the concept has not seemed useful in family theory dominated by models assuming self-interest. Asking “who benefits?” by family work forces attention to the meaning of the work in terms of intent and impact on other family members. This alternative approach begins with the proposition that family work is intended to serve, or benefit, someone. If that someone is the worker only, there is no problem of inequity or distress, no reason to raise issues of fairness. Typically, however, family work serves others, perhaps spouse or children, or it may serve both the worker and others. Most family labor studies take as the point of analysis the person doing the work. But family work typically involves at least two possible standpoints, two points of reference where assessments of costs and benefits are appropriate. The question, “Who does family work?” points to the doer; “Who benefits?” focuses attention as well on those served. Most of the issues associated with doing family work also pertain in some way to the recipients or beneficiaries of the activity. Yet present orientations to family labor neglect the receiving side of the equation, the others who presumably are benefited by the work, and the relationship between worker and those served. The predominant theories assume economic individualism—the worker is primarily interested in minimizing his or her effort—and ignore the costs of such self-orientation to those for whom the work is done. The research has focused on the doers of work, their resources, attitudes, costs, and distresses, but not the needs and orientations of the others served by their work. The same criticism applies to the gender and symbolic interaction perspectives on household work. When economicbased predictions are not supported, we have turned to models of “doing

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gender” or of counteracting possible attributions of deviance, again from the viewpoint of the family worker concerned about his or her gender identity or reputation as a parent. An exception is Goodnow and Warton’s (1991) emphasis on face-to-face interaction in sharing household work. They write of interaction between children and adults, but their suggestions apply equally well to interaction among adults who share housework responsibilities. They identify a form of guided participation in which one party is the “teacher” and the other is the “learner.” In this way participants “construct a shared definition of a task . . . [and] bring about transfer of skills and responsibility” (47). Among the most critical factors affecting shared participation in family work is the warmth of the relationship between the parties. A focus on the moral and transcendent value in face-to-face interaction moves the study of family work beyond exchange or contractual obligations, and is more compatible with a “social covenant” orientation. As described by Elshtain (1982, 446), a social covenant approach, as opposed to notions of contract, takes into account both human needs and civic virtue. It acknowledges relational loyalties, and is “sustained by moral suasion, not enforced by coercion.” Goodnow (1988) defined work as an activity with the following features: it calls for effort, is regarded as useful, and involves relationships with other people, usually toward a goal that requires cooperation. Lee (1959) showed that among Pacific Islanders and American Indians, practical and personal work, such as obtaining and preparing food and building and maintaining homes, involves the processes by which value and meaning enter the experience of family members. Shared participation in such tasks creates and reinforces a social definition of the self. Bellah et al. (1985) distinguish between work as job, as career, and as calling, a distinction useful in considering the meaning of work. A job is defined by economic success and stability of income, whereas a career is cast in terms of achievement and advancement, prestige, power, competency, and self-esteem. As a calling, work is a practical ideal combining activity and personal character such that one’s work becomes “morally inseparable from his or her life. It subsumes the self into a community of disciplined practice and sound judgment whose activity has meaning and value in itself, not just in the output or profit that results from it” (66). Work as a calling ties us to those we serve: “The absence of a sense of calling means the absence of a sense of moral meaning” (71). Anthropologists have identified a variety of alternative meanings of family work and community work, including work

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as the joy of participation, and work as the reaffirmation of ties to family, community, heritage, and the earth (Lee 1986). Work in the family context is distinctive in its sense of stewardship accompanied by solemn obligations, intense loyalties, and moral imperatives (Elshtain 1990). In other words, “goals . . . in the workplace are primarily individualistic: social recognition, wages, opportunities for advancement, and self-fulfillment. But the family is about collective goals . . . , building life’s most important bonds of affection, nurturance, mutual support, and long-term commitment” (Blankenhorn 1990, 10, 12). A few examples will support this point. Berheide (1984) observed that most people feel strong emotional attachments to household members for whom they have labored. Goodnow and Warton (1991) reported a positive association between working for others and caring about them. Parents studied by White and Brinkerhoff (1981) said that working together doing household chores was a way to integrate the family and build family cohesiveness. Youngs (1995, 16–17) remembers helping her father on late night and early morning barnyard rounds on the family farm. She writes that “I absolutely detested getting up and leaving a warm bed to go out into the frosty air.” But as they worked together, “the relationship we developed from these times together was simply unforgettable; it was to make a compelling difference in my life.” Sometimes the redefining potential of a paradigm shift is apparent even in economically oriented studies. For instance, in many families a man’s participation in housework is defined by him as a favor to his wife, not an activity to be valued in its own right (Ferree 1990; Hochschild 1989a). Yet helping another may be transmuted to personally satisfying activity under a shift in outlook whereby, as expressed by a father in Coltrane’s (1989, 483) sample, “he would sometimes derive pleasure from cleaning the bathroom or picking up a sock if he looked at it as an act of caring for his family.” If doing housework is an expression of love and caring, then strict accounting of “who does what” and an insistence on equity (partner A is expected to express precisely as much love as partner B) may violate its spirit, shifting the motivational context from altruism to self-interest. Conceptualizing household work as moral interaction in a communal relationship encourages expanding the discourse to include dimensions of work not considered in economic or power models. Among these are characteristics of relationships such as responsiveness to family traditions, attention to learning opportunities for family members, fulfillment of obligations to kindred, and sacrifice for others. Unlike the contractual world of applied

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economics, in family settings the ideal contribution often is a volunteered gift rather than an enforced tribute (Hochschild 1989a). Family Work as Spiritual One of the most interesting findings in Eichler and Albanese’s (2007) exploration of popular definitions and assumptions about household work was the identification of a “spiritual” dimension, something they had not expected. They report that “one of the surprises in our study that we did not anticipate and about which we asked no direct questions was the emergence of a spiritual dimension of housework.” This dimension emerged explicitly from the discussions of five of their eleven focus groups. The women who led lives on the edge, in terms of disability or low income, in particular, volunteered information about spirituality that we had not expected, thus exposing one of our own implicit assumptions, that spirituality would be irrelevant in this context. . . . Spirituality was treated as a reason for and a way to care for themselves and the people around them. . . . spirituality was intricately linked with care work and self care. . . . For some, it seemed that the care work they performed was done not only to fulfill an obligation to others but rather to fulfill a deeper spiritual need within themselves. (242)

This spiritual dimension is related to our concept of the moral relevance of housework. Eichler and Albanese define spirituality as “anything that gives meaning to one’s life,” and the comments they quote clearly tie their respondents’ spiritual housework to the needs of others and their views of goodness and transcending self. One woman said, “I made a commitment with myself to develop a life of compassion.” Another spoke of her role in her extended family as the person “with the spiritual connection with home.” Others saw “helping friends and family as part of their personal spiritual goal or path” (Eichler and Albanese 2007, 242). A recent book-length exploration of housework as sometimes spiritual, sacred, or transcendent is Alice Peck’s (2007) Next to Godliness: Finding the Sacred in Housekeeping. Selections range from Homer and Hawthorne through Goethe, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Martin Luther King, Jr. There are chapters on the spiritual dimensions of “washing the dishes,” “laundry,” “sweeping,” “the natural order of things,” “housework,” “making home,” “workspace,” “guests and holidays,” and “big messes.” Introducing the housework chapter, Peck writes that “giving of ourselves through cleaning our homes can be a way for us to get closer to our partners, children, loved ones, as well as the Divine,” and quotes novelist Jessamyn West to the point that “‘putting a room to rights’ does for her ‘soul what prayer does for others’” (71).

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Morality, Love, and Family Work As long as worth is defined by power, and power is defined by resources, discourse on family work cannot escape market and political interpretations. Even putting dollar value on family work fails to achieve the intended effect of raising its status, and only returns us to the assumption that worth is defined by cash value. Bellah et al. made this point strongly, insisting that “the prevalence of contractual intimacy and procedural cooperation . . . threatens to obscure the ideals of both personal virtue and public good” and that “a change in the meaning of work and the relation of work and reward is at the heart of any recovery of our social ecology” (Bellah et al. 1985, 127, 289). Treating family work in moral context reduces the salience of cost-reward analysis, and may even make such analysis irrelevant to considerations of meaning and purpose, tradition and ritual, obligation and honor. In the moral context, economic costs and benefits are sometimes relevant, but often they are weak motivators more characteristic of persons acted upon, or driven to act, than of persons whose actions are voluntary choices with reference to obligations, sentiments, customs, and commitments. It seems likely that models of technical equality or even equity of distribution have severe limitations as predictors of household division of labor because they do not incorporate the milieu of moral obligation. As Berry (1990, 135) reminds us, “Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.” Of course our call for moral discourse has political implications. It is a feminist truism that “the personal is political,” but it is not only political. A moral perspective privileges other variables, and our plea for a postmodern grounding of moral discourse in a diversity of cultural settings implies that power issues will be implicated in family work in many ways. It is in our emphasis on morality in the microcontext, and on families as the necessary place to begin to “invite” all family members to do family work, that our position differs most sharply from many feminist perspectives. At issue is the meaning of morality. An appeal for moral discourse is an appeal for discussion about the rights and wrongs, the “oughts” and “ought nots” of an activity. A moral discourse on family work is necessarily linked to a moral position about what life is for, that is, to a “parochial” set of ethnic or subcultural standards. In the absence of an ethic about what life is for, and therefore what people ought to be doing, there is little basis for moral discourse of any kind. A moral approach to gender and the division of family work encourages attention to the needs of those served in addition to the needs of the worker

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and the relationship between worker and those served. We propose a substantial shift in orientation to family work, an insistence that the relational nature of the work involves consequences for, at a minimum, two points in the family work relationship: the self (the doer) and the other (recipient or potential beneficiary). Too much attention to the self obscures the reality that family work is ideally oriented to others who need attention and who will benefit from clean surroundings, well-prepared meals, or other “good parenting.” It is a truism that family work is intended to benefit others. Yet, until now, researchers have almost universally focused on difficulties encountered by the family worker, and not on the meaning of the work to those who are intended to benefit from it, or whose well-being may depend on the family worker’s abilities, attitudes, and effort in doing the work. It is the analysis of family work in the micro-context that, in our judgment, deserves increased attention. For morality seems to be constructed in intimate, interpersonal settings in a context of confronting and knowing the other (Wilson 1993). It is “inextricably tied to human proximity” and “seems to conform to the law of optical perspective. It looms large and thick close to the eye. With the growth of distance, responsibility for the other shrivels, moral dimensions of the object blur, till both reach the vanishing point” (Bauman 1991, 192). An overemphasis on justice or equity in interpersonal relationships may lead to the neglect of weightier matters, and possibly reflects a lack of understanding of moral work, of morality, and of the conditions that foster growth. We contest the view that the essence of family work is burden, and that the essence of morality is that everyone be forced to share this burden fairly. In an alternative view it is those who do not do the work of caring who are deprived, i.e., if men do not participate willingly in the work of caring, it is they who are disadvantaged. We would not ignore justice, or other desirable virtues, but we are more concerned with the meanings and benefits of family work. The conception of morality we favor sees love and justice as interdependent, but love, not justice, comes first. Among those who ground morality in love are Murdoch (1970; 1993), Selznick (1992), and Berry (1987). The morality of love is directed at fostering growth, as in Ruddick’s (1989) “attentive love.” Murdoch (1970, 23) gives high priorities to justice and freedom, but views them as mediated by love, and the justice she describes is not the justice of force of law, bureaucratic or universalistic, but rather is encompassed in one person’s “loving view” of another. Her position is consistent with Strike’s (1991, 217–18) idea that “justice is appropriate to human relations when two conditions are

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present—competition and absence of benevolence. . . . When people care for one another’s welfare, there is little need to think about justice. But justice is of concern in human relationships when people are in competition for resources and when benevolence cannot be taken for granted.” Hawkins et al. (1993, 542–43) have urged the replacement of the usual macro-level domestic-democracy perspective by a micro-developmental approach, because the latter highlights the need for both men and women to be involved intimately in daily family work to further their own development. Greater paternal participation need not be a reluctant personal sacrifice of patriarchal privilege for the sake of social justice; instead, it can be viewed as an important step in one’s personal growth. Similarly, a developmental perspective on fatherhood calls attention to the necessary interconnections between men and women rather than to their inevitable separateness . . . [and] encourages women and men to assist each other in the process of becoming more fully human. . . . [I]t emphasizes what fathers gain by greater participation in the daily work of the home rather than what they sacrifice. It also casts wives in a nonadversarial position that is more likely to motivate change in fathers than is a conflictual one.

Such a generative, developmental approach emphasizes not power, but love. It treats family work as opportunity rather than burden, as a way to become fully human. It does not demand, but rather invites (Lee 1986, 15) an exploration of how shared participation in family work enhances the moral development and general growth of parents and children. For “if women are deformed by their role, then, insofar as the roles are divided, men are deformed by theirs. Degenerate housewifery is indivisible from degenerate husbandry” (Berry 1981, 294). Elsewhere Berry (1987, 117–18) offers a pragmatic solution to the problem of levels of analysis, and at the same time highlights the place of love in the morality of family work: The smallest possible “survival unit”. . . appears to be the universe. . . . But of course it is preposterous for a mere individual human to espouse the universe—a possibility that is purely mental, and productive of nothing but talk. On the other hand, it may be that our marriages, kinships, friendships, neighborhoods, and all our forms and acts of homemaking are the rites by which we solemnize and enact our union with the universe. . . . Moreover, they give the word “love” its only chance to mean, for only they can give it a history, a community, and a place. Only in such ways can love become flesh and do its worldly work. (emphasis added)

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Conclusions If we define some tasks essential to life as demeaning drudgery while other, less vital activities are seen as intrinsically rewarding, we will continue to misunderstand families, family work, and their place in the good society. Similarly, equating personal worth with production, whether at home or in the marketplace, has led to economic pathologies like assessing an employed mother’s value by the size of her salary. Moral discourse on family life and family work encourages attention to the cultural and personal meanings of activity, interaction, and sentiment. It invites attention to the principles and orientations that invest activities with value, and encourages distinctions in the valuation of events and activities that are not possible when, for example, assessing the value of housework means converting everything to hours spent and the marketbased dollar value of goods and services produced. Viewing family life in the post-economic, postmodern context that we propose, one has no difficulty, as Elshtain (1990, 65) expressed it, “distinguishing between the moral weightiness of, say, polishing one’s Ferrari and sitting up all night with an ill child.” Neither the value of the family work nor the benefits it confers are self-evident and unidirectional. Outside of the market framework, the benefits of service enrich both the server and the served. In historical perspective, women’s work in the home represented not strictly work, but a way of being. Following industrialization, “women’s household service alone remained from the tradition of reciprocal service by family members” (Cott 1977, 71). Women continued to have a family calling by virtue of their contribution to the common good, and a widely recognized consequence of that calling has been recognition of their moral superiority (Bellah et al. 1985, 88). The moral discourse we propose reappropriates the image of family work as a calling, but need not continue its traditional division by sex. Instead, it emphasizes the inherent worth of all activity essential to life, in accordance with Bellah et al.’s (1985, 111) statement that “the obligations traditionally associated with ‘woman’s sphere’ are human obligations that men and women should share.” It is family work, work essential to the physical, mental, and spiritual maintenance of a family group, that merits the status of a calling. Shared in ongoing family process, it produces many of the stories and rituals that celebrate family identity and reinforce affectional ties. Among the pleasurable products of this “fundamental and inescapable” work are strong bonds of kinship and friendship and lifegiving “rituals of remembrance” (Berry 1989, 113; 1990, 142).

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Finally, it should be apparent that in moral discourse on the family, the concept of division of labor is less appropriate than that of shared participation in family life, for it is “the nature of division sooner or later to destroy what is divided” (Berry 1981, 289). In the end, the issue is not so much the nature of housework itself, but the ways “it links, or fails to link, individuals to one another. . . . We discover who we are face to face and side by side with others in work, love and learning” (Bellah et al. 1985, 56, 84). Such meanings are surely relevant to the contextual analysis of family work. Theoretical models that frame family work in positive as well as negative terms—paying attention to local meanings and the nature of family work as essential life-support activity— may help illuminate its role in reinforcing human identity, establishing viable social networks, and transmitting the definitions, aspirations, standards, and skills that make up human cultures. We have said that the dominant philosophical and theoretical perspectives that have guided teaching and research on family work have tended to ignore ethnic and class differences, or have applied the same assumptions to families of all kinds. What we are proposing would take into account both the context and the meaning of work in families, and by so doing would allow discourse on variations in the ways family work is structured. Inherent in a consideration of the moral implications of family work is latitude for and appreciation of variations in what is done and how it is done. Although our proposal is mainly a theoretical one—an argument for an alternative orientation or worldview, for beginning the discourse at a different place—it does have implications for research. It points to an emphasis on people’s definitions of the situation as well as on the meanings they find in, or attribute to, activities and events. It means more attention to grounding our work in the contexts, worldviews, and especially the language of the people we are trying to understand. Attention to the moral dimensions of housework in families should mean that researchers become more sensitive to the distortions and losses that occur as they fragment and denature family experience, imposing alien technical language and conceptual frameworks. There is presently a resurgence of interest in qualitative methodologies, including ethnography, participant observation, and the study of family stories and personal narratives. Such approaches seem appropriate to the study of the moral dimensions of family work. So do any methods that emphasize local and familial perspectives, and encourage close attention to lived experience and the meanings people give to their lives and their work. However, we do not urge the adoption of any particular method. Doing ethnography does not guarantee that one will shed preconceptions,

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and even a constructivist approach must begin somewhere. The problem is one of perspective, not procedure.

Notes 1. Coltrane’s (2000) seven categories were (1) gender construction; (2) economic and exchange perspectives (including Becker’s “new household economics” as well as the resource-bargaining perspective and the economic dependency model); (3) institutional approaches that focus on the influence upon the household division of labor of developments in the formal and informal economies, the state, and other institutions; (4) socialist/feminist theories that highlight the negative consequences for women of both capitalism and patriarchy; (5) morality theories oriented to the social necessity and positive aspects of family obligations, caring, service, and the interplay of social justice and family work; (6) life course perspectives involving the impacts on family work of variations in family structure, living arrangements, age, and life course transitions; and (7) psychological and socialization theories, including role theory (sex roles, role strain, role conflict), personality theory, and issues of emotional well-being, stress, and marital satisfaction.

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Emotion Work in Families

A time-use study would reveal that I spend precious little one-on-one time with my children in activities beyond those required for our household routine. What it would not reveal is that regardless of what they are doing or what I am doing, I am always “on alert.” Usually I don’t realize this myself until things get too quiet and a “mother alarm” goes off, reminding me to check on my boys. In fact, most of what I do as a mother would not show up on the time-use charts that measure time spent doing household work or caring for children. Technology makes my daily work less strenuous, if not less time-consuming, than it was for my mother and her mother before her. So where is the big energy drain? Especially in the past year or so, since I began writing on the topic of emotion work, I have read the literature avidly. I have searched for “the answer,” for insight, both for personal reasons, and also because I think others who are engaged in nurturing, whether caring for a close friend or family member, or in being responsible for the life of a child, will benefit from a greater understanding of what it is they do as nurturers. My interest in emotion work stems not just from the academic tradition in which I was schooled and have spent my career, but also from my personal struggles and joys as a mother. While not uninterested in the issues associated with the gendered nature of much emotion work—I believe this is work fathers and mothers, husbands and wives should share as equal partners—I have searched the emotion work literature hoping to find insights on what it is that makes emotion work such work. Here I confront the limitations of the term “work,” limitations that impact its utility in clarifying emotion effort in families, for I apply the term in a double sense, neither

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of them corresponding to the usual definition of work as activity generating income. I want to know what makes emotion work effective and meaningful—how does one hit the mark or satisfy the need in the other?—but also I wish to know why emotion work is work in the sense that, at least in my experience, it entails such effort, why it drains and tires one so. I also bring to the literature a curiosity about whether the concept “emotion work,” as currently applied, illuminates both the negative and the positive aspects of caring for home and children, both the satisfactions and the costs beyond the sheer effort expended in physical tasks. Here I have in mind the mixed emotions, sometimes mostly joyful but often heavy-hearted, that accompany or follow the tasks—the complex combinations of physical, cognitive, and emotion effort—that leave me so worn at day’s end. In my mind, a robot could do the physical “work” involved, could be attentive to manifest need, respond with cheers or constructive criticism, invite reports on activities and achievement, record complaints and confidences, dispense reassuring platitudes and praise, and administer hugs on a randomized, event-linked, or needthreshold schedule. And because this imaginary robot has no emotions, but only externally, technologically prompted behavior, I can imagine that the net difference between its energy outlay and my own, for the same set of tasks, might represent that component of my effort that could reliably be designated as “emotion work.” Behavioral definitions of emotion work, that focus on “the act of displaying the appropriate emotion . . . on behavior rather than on the presumed emotions underlying behavior” (Ashforth and Humphrey 1993, 90), would record no difference in the robot’s emotion effort and my own.1 This past, emotionally draining year has forced me to look at the emotion work literature more carefully that I might have otherwise, for much of it can be applied directly to my situation. I read it hungrily, looking for clues that might help me. I have not read everything, but what I have read, especially the research aimed at understanding emotion work in families, seems to lack something; there is a gap, a “negative space” (Daly 2003) that needs illumination. For that part of my work that seems most taxing—the effort to know what my children really need—I have found to be little represented in the writings on emotion work. Much more useful were the works of Sara Ruddick (1984a) on maternal thinking, essays on the good and patient eye of love in the philosophy of Iris Murdoch (1970), and the anthropology of Dorothy Lee (1986). Their writings were relevant to the emotion work I was doing, and I was able to combine some of their insights on love, emotional commitment, and attentiveness to the needs of others with ideas gleaned from the emotion work literature. Ruddick, Murdoch, and Lee help one attend to the difficult and necessary work of knowing others well enough to understand what is necessary for their growth, their learning, their character development, their overall well-being.

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My first son, Alden, is our biological child. He is a striver, competitive, much like his father. He gets grumpy when he is tired, much like me. I recognize some of each of us in him, and that genetic heritage facilitates my knowing him. But with Jonathan, adopted at birth, and now Dima and Anton, adopted at age 9 and 6, there is much more mystery. My emotion work is flawed; time and again, somehow I miss the mark. The boys seem to interpret kind reprimands as approval, and will only take me seriously if my emotion display generates “wicked witch.” And that is how I feel much of the time. There was, and continues to be, frustration with the boys because I can’t figure them out, and therefore often can’t decide which emotional display is best. Often I interpret their resistance as stubbornness, or willful disobedience, and act out accordingly. But in my better moments I wish I knew their history, their genetic history, wish I had long-term knowledge of them as unique individuals, so that I could better honor their personal integrity. More than anything else, it is the effort of attention, the emotional signals that something needs attention and the associated need for thought, assessment, and a “performance” of one kind or another, that exacts its toll. The work of attention is tied to feeling responsible. If you notice need, then morality calls to you to respond. Says philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, “I am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it” (Levinas 1985, 98). In his view, prior to the relativity of culture, I am the Other’s keeper. Aaron Ben-Ze’ev (2000, 12) says that “emotions arise only when we care,” and so I know that I care. An essential, but largely unremarked, part of emotion effort is the evaluation of alternatives and the search for additional options, as one tries to respond and display in ways that meet another’s need. Even after such evaluation, the effort does not always produce the desired result. The intended effect may not be achieved on account of my inability to produce the necessary effectual display, or through misdiagnosis. In my experience, it is primarily mothers who do this work, and it is exhausting. Yet it is also invigorating—when you figure something out. And when you manage to get it right, it is energizing. Even the search for answers can be energizing, illuminating. One needs, to paraphrase biblical language, to develop “a thinking heart.” If we recognize the fundamental importance of the heart-thinking that underlies emotion work, we will be in a better position to teach nurturers how to do it. As it is, we teach them to turn to the experts—but the experts do not know this particular priceless child. Modern experts have devalued and discouraged the thinking of mothers, have taught us not to trust our own insights and emotional intelligence. There are plenty of theories bringing scholarly thoughts to mothers, but ever so few that treat the “heart thought” of mothers, or of nurturers in general. There is much research

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on the stresses and burdens of caring work, but precious little (and that little is precious) that looks at the head/heart work of attentive nurturing. The omission of nurturant thinking from family theory is serious. Rather than interpreting the exhaustion mothers experience as the fruit of oppression, much of it should be recognized as the natural consequence of emotion work in the family. What does nurturing work (mother work and father work, in particular) consist of? Labels help focus our thinking: family work, relationship work, housework, invisible work, emotion work. Thinking over the past year, and re-reading the literature, I keep thinking: This just doesn’t cut it. These questions, these indicators, they do not begin to tap just how truly difficult, and how potentially rewarding, this work is. And they are not getting to the heart of what is the real work, the real emotional effort: it is the work of recognizing need in the first place, of knowing the other well enough to know what kind of work will be most beneficial, effort that will be enabling, rather than creating a disabling dependence. Beyond that critical knowing, there follows the issue of performance, which may require the display of A, while feeling B. Many people give me advice. The experts give me advice. But in the moment of choice, it is I who must do the work. I must decide if my own needs of the moment are selfish or legitimate, must set them aside sometimes even if legitimate because of my sons’ more pressing needs. I must do the hard work of paying attention, of trying to see them more clearly, of reaching to know them well enough that I can be sure of what they really need—what will allow them to flourish and grow up to see the needs of others and want to help them, rather than always indulging their own great need to be needed. Murdoch (1970, 34), building on the work of Simone Weil, identifies attention—“a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality”—as “the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.” It is this loving attention that makes it possible to see the needs of another with some degree of clarity, even to know whether and what emotion effort may be needed. Without the prior work of attention, emotion work in families is likely to misfire, to be self-serving rather than a sincere effort to meet the needs of the other. Or, as in paid work, it may be exhausting in a different way, requiring, in addition to negotiating the ambiguities of perceiving need and appropriate response, the mask of feigned sincerity. I often feel I am a failure. A sense of failure seems inevitable in this mothering work, because even at my best, my view is still limited. It is easier to give up, and not even to try. There is always the temptation to reduce the intensity of my attentiveness and fall back on “rules,” on expert advice derived from the study of thousands of children. But none of those thousands are my boys. And as their mother I feel obligated—no, it is more than obligation—I feel a deep need to learn to teach, guide, help them grow so they can recover from the damage of their past.

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They demand my attention, my thoughts. This is family work, emotion work, the work of attention, the work of love. (Kathleen S. Bahr)

 Work, Emotion, and Display There is a sociological tradition that we clarify to ourselves the rudiments of our own society by examining simpler societies and bringing the findings home, as it were. Thus, Emile Durkheim (2001, 3) justified the study of aboriginal religion—“the most primitive and simplest religion currently known”—not for its intrinsic interest or to satisfy intellectual curiosity but because he believed that the elementary forms of religious life would be more plainly visible in the tribal life of Australian aborigines than among western Europeans. In The Managed Heart, Arlie Hochschild (1983, 68–69) took a similar approach to the study of emotion management, beginning with the presumably superficial emotion work of service workers. In the world of flight attendants and bill collectors, she wrote, where people might simply feign the appropriate emotion, “it is a wonder that we find emotion work at all.” But it is there, and in such settings “emotion work rises more readily to the surface of consciousness where it can be seen and talked about.” After observing emotion work in contexts where it is easiest to see, she said, it might then be possible to make inferences about the deeper “subterranean” emotion work that takes place in families, embedded in “the cement of the most personal bonds.” There the “strongest” emotion work occurs, within the long-lasting personal bonds that connect parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters. Hochschild’s model of the emotion system has had a major influence in the study of emotions in the workplace, where it has generated useful research and refinements in theory. However, her anticipation that the study of emotion work in employment settings might inform our understanding of its workings in families remains largely unfulfilled. Hochschild (1983, 17) defined emotion as feeling, as “a sense, like the sense of hearing or sight” that prompts us to act or respond to a particular stimulus. She coined the phrase “emotion work” to denote the management of feeling and its appropriate display, and said that it was an important aspect of both family work and paid work. There is now a substantial literature on emotion work, much of it focused on emotion management in the workplace and on how the organization of emotion work expresses gender relations. One of the costs of successful conceptualization is that some things are the objects of attention and others are relegated to background or relative

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obscurity. The idea of emotion work stimulated the exploration of a property space roughly identified by the intersection of the folk conceptions of work and feeling. Enthusiasm about getting to know this previously undercharted arena of essential but gendered and undercompensated effort, has, in the main, diverted attention from the problems inherent in the combination of two such ambiguous, insufficiently specified concepts as work and emotion. The literature on work laments the ambiguity of the term, calling for reconceptualization and noting that in many cultures “work” is indistinguishable from what Western society designates as “leisure.” Similarly, the literature on emotions notes the impossible multiplicity of definitions that complicates comparative and cumulative research. The initial locating of emotion work in the world of paid employment, the emphasis on discrepant emotional display, and its ready application to gendered family and work roles, may have slowed its application to other aspects family life. Still, the concept seems promising in family analysis generally, and directs attention to several points of strain, and possible intervention, beyond that of discrepant display. Hochschild located emotion work at the intersection of three discourses— on work, emotion, and display or impression management. We revisit each of these to consider certain unresolved issues of definition and emphasis in light of recent scholarship. In making the case for the utility of emotion work as a framework for illuminating family life, we begin with Hochschild’s definitions, note extensions of the concept by later writers, and draw upon selected family and organizational studies with an eye to their relevance for future research on emotion work in families. Defining Work We cannot talk properly about “emotion work” unless we are clear about what constitutes work. About 1980 there began to be calls for attention to the “hidden” or “invisible” dimensions of family work and household production (Wadel 1979, Beutler and Owen 1980, Daniels 1987). However, measurement of the invisible dimensions of household production proved to be much more difficult than simply accounting for time spent on household tasks. Among the pioneers in this movement was Elise Boulding (1977), who emphasized the human services component of nonmarket productivity, and identified as important dimensions of family work such activities as “waiting for,” being the one “responsible for keeping fun, fantasy and imagination alive,” and tailoring available resources and services to individual need. Boulding asked homemakers to record, in addition to duration on task, who the work was done with and who it was done for. Cato Wadel (1979, 371–72), writing on the “hidden work of everyday life,” critiqued the work concepts

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of both economists and the “folk.” Although laymen’s ideas of “work” were much broader than those of the economists, they were also more ambiguous and confusing. Essential aspects of social life, such as “mutual activities that go into maintaining personal and private relations and the collective activities that have to do with the maintenance of community, democracy and other valued social institutions” were neglected in both. He concluded that the current Western definition of work was lopsided, incomplete, and unbalanced (379–82). Arlene Daniels’s (1987) classic essay on “invisible work” was a major step forward. Daniels said that an uncritical acceptance of the “folk” definition of work by social researchers and governments devalued work in the private sector, work outside the formal economy, and in fact, virtually all activity that did not qualify as “work” because it was unpaid, voluntary, altruistic, “natural” (especially to women), or in other ways “not part of the institutionalized aspects of life represented by salaried jobs and by occupational careers with their expectations of titles and promotions, security and fringe benefits.” She stressed the gendered nature of work as ordinarily defined, noting that the closer its activities to “nurturing, comforting, encouraging, or facilitating interaction,” the more likely it was to be considered the natural domain of women, and to be unpaid. The aspects of such activity that seemed hardest for people to accept as work were “the warm and caring aspects of the construction and maintenance of interpersonal relations” (404–5, 408–9). For Daniels, as for Wadel, the underlying continuum, from which the folk definition of work represented a privileged segment, was activity, reflecting human effort. She wrote that “many kinds of effort and skill” were not recognized in the folk concept of work, and suggested that showing the effort involved in “all the activities where women predominate” might help to legitimate them as work. Women’s activities not normally classified as work but involving effort and attention included family provisioning and food preparation (DeVault 1987), voluntary service in neighborhood and community, and emotion work, at home and elsewhere. These were outside the usual definition of work, and so Daniels (1987, 407–10, 412–13) proposed a revision to bring them in. Work, she said, “should include all the work in the private world of the home, the volunteer work in the public sphere, and the emotion work in both public and private worlds.” Recognition of this wider definition would validate the moral component of work, including the work of “symbolically creating family” and of “making community.” Despite such proposals, almost a quarter of a century on, the narrow economic definition of work as activity performed for pay continues. An overview of the problems inherent in the prevailing definition of work

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quoted a 1980 analyst to the effect that the accepted official definition of work as gainful employment was “completely untenable,” then added that things hadn’t changed much since that judgment was made (Karlsson 2001). Although critics like Wadel and Daniels have urged that the concept be broadened to include various unpaid activities, their efforts seem motivated more by the desire to raise the status of selected activities than to achieve a theoretically defensible definition of work. The problem, writes Karlsson (2001, 2–5) is that such efforts inevitably “widen” the concept, expanding it closer to the point that it includes everything, and becomes meaningless. Most such efforts to expand the concept propose to identify work by an effort or activity criterion. But all human activity involves effort. If only absence of effort represents non-work, then the concept loses any explanatory power. In place of an activity definition, Karlsson (2001, 9–11) proposes a relational concept: “Whether an activity is to be regarded as belonging to the category work, depends on the social relations within which it is performed.” Building upon Kosík (1976) and Marcuse (1973), Karlsson offers an “ontological work concept,” based on the principles that “humans create themselves and their world through work,” and that “work is the doing of human beings in the sphere of necessity.” It is neither specific activity nor the expenditure of effort, but rather a form of “human doing.” Work is defined by its necessity, both existential and social. The next step, Karlsson says, is the development of concepts to cover the various types of social relations that may be considered “necessity.” This elaboration of work forms—“internal social relations that structure the sphere of necessity”—will make it possible to abandon the notion that there is only a single concept of work, which must therefore be broadened (9–12). Unfortunately, Karlsson (2001, 13) rejects the idea that women’s household activities deserve to be included as work, for “in my perspective these are activities, not social relations [to the market] and thereby not work in themselves.” On the other hand, any conceptual system centered on “doing in the sphere of necessity” as the central criterion for work would seem unable to reject the emotion work of caring for family members as necessity. Karlsson allows that there are work forms that are “virtually women-specific,” and that these are structurally coupled to wage work, career work, self-employment, or investment roles. Presumably the work necessary to maintain and socialize emotionally healthy workers would itself qualify as “necessity.” Defining Emotion Confusion about the nature of emotion exists despite, and perhaps also because of, the burgeoning scientific study of emotion. There have been three

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“revolutions” in research on emotion, proceeding independently, in the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, and history/literary criticism. The literature is massive, and serious problems of definition persist. According to one writer, “Western specialists who study emotion cannot even agree on what the term emotion means,” and “there is no commonly, even superficially, acceptable definition of what a psychology of emotions is about.” Further, “no psychologist knows what anger, fear, or shame are independent of folk knowledge, and most studies of these emotions test hypotheses derived from intuition and everyday observations of self and others” (Reddy 2001, 8, 12).2 Jenefer Robinson (2005, 97), after spending a hundred pages assessing the psychological and philosophical literature on emotion, concludes that emotions are processes, in which a rough-and-ready affective appraisal causes physiological responses, motor changes, action tendencies, changes in facial and vocal expression, and so on, succeeded by cognitive monitoring. The function of non-cognitive affective appraisals is to draw attention automatically and insistently by bodily means to whatever in the environment is of vital importance to me and mine.

Then she warns that her explanation of what emotions are and how they function is incomplete, for it is an after-the-fact labeling, an inadequate attempt to fit living process to language.3 One way around the tangle of definitions is simply to state up front the position one takes, and to explain and defend it without assuming an obligation to discredit other views. This is the approach taken in three exemplary attempts to summarize and build upon the disparate interdisciplinary literature on emotions (Ben-Ze’ev 2000, Nussbaum 2001, and Reddy 2001). The definitions offered in the three works differ, but there is a common core that may help us understand emotion work in families. First, the commonly accepted opposition of emotion and thought is increasingly indefensible. Emotions are, at base, indistinguishable from cognition. A large and growing body of psychological evidence reveals emotion and cognition to be “inextricably intertwined” (Reddy 2001, 15; O’Rorke and Ortony 1994, 283). They overlap and feed into each other, such that “emotion is elicited, supported, and regulated by a variety of cognitive processes, many of which are implicit and automatic in nature” (Philippot et al. 2004, 72).4 Reddy’s review of the psychological literature suggests that to the degree that emotions are automatic, they resemble “overlearned cognitive habits.” There is no defensible linear model of cognition; in operation it is messy

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and emotion-riddled, and the basic mental processes of emotion seem indistinguishable from cognition. He concludes that “emotions are not a bridge between body and mind, are not a set of hard-wired arousal systems, are not something radically distinct from reason or thought” (Reddy 2001, 16, 20, 94; Isen and Diamond 1989; Greenwald, Klinger, and Schuh 1995). Martha Nussbaum (2001) and Aaron Ben-Ze’ev (2000) arrive at definitions of emotion compatible with Reddy’s, viewing cognition as an essential and inextricable part of emotion, the former underscoring the point in her subtitle, “the intelligence of emotions.” According to Nussbaum’s “neoStoic” definition: [E]motions are appraisals or value judgments, which ascribe to things and persons outside the person’s own control great importance for that person’s own flourishing. . . . Emotions typically combine these ideas with information about events in the world; they are our ways of registering how things are with respect to the external (i.e., uncontrolled) items that we view as salient for our well-being. (Nussbaum 2001, 4)

Relevant to emotion work in families are three key characteristics: (1) “emotions reveal us as vulnerable to events that we do not control”; (2) “emotions focus on our own goals, and they represent the world from the point of view of those goals and projects”; and (3) “emotions seem to be characterized by ambivalence toward their objects” (Nussbaum 2001, 12–13). According to Ben-Ze’ev, “Emotions typically occur when we perceive positive or negative significant changes in our personal situation—or in that of those related to us. . . . (E)motions signal that something needs attention. . . . Being emotional, which is the opposite of being indifferent, forces the organism to pay special attention. . . . emotional changes are of highly personal significance.” Emotions have four components—cognition, evaluation, motivation, and feeling—and a typical emotion includes each of them. Feeling and thought, or rather “intentionality” and “feeling,” may be distinguished, but both are essential to emotional processes (Ben-Ze’ev 2000, 12–15, 70–71; original emphasis). There is thus a fair consensus that emotion involves thought and judgment, that cognition is an inseparable part of emotion, and that emotion forces or increases attention to persons or things of “highly personal significance” (Ben-Ze’ev), of great importance to our own personal flourishing (Nussbaum), or of high “goal-relevant valence and intensity” (Reddy). There is agreement that emotions involve persons or things near and dear to us, and they involve ongoing appraisal, attention, and judgments with relevance to the well-being of those persons or things. On the basis of these definitions,

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the family would seem the preeminent setting for the study of emotions and emotion work. Indeed, Stemmler’s (2004, 34) evolutionary account of the functions of emotions ties them directly to family, noting that “on a high level of abstraction . . . emotions function to secure survival and procreation of oneself or of one’s kin.” Emotions, unlike moods, are transitory. They happen quickly, and we are not aware of their beginnings. They come and go, and we are emotional about some things and not others. They are “reactions to matters that seem to be very important to our welfare,” and they prepare us to deal with these important matters. “Once they begin, emotions change how we see the world and how we evaluate the actions of others. . . . When we feel a strong emotion our thinking is organized to serve that emotion” (Ekman 2004, 120–21, 126–27). The “positive emotions” (e.g., love, desire, compassion, gratitude, pride) are important sources of interpersonal bonding, and facilitate the development and maintenance of ties between parents and their offspring, romantic relationships, friendships, and small group attachments. They contribute to the attachment process in families (“the experience of intense love serves an informative function to the infant, identifying parents or other primary caregivers and highlighting their proximity”), and are central to communication between children and their caregivers. They provide information, evoke emotional response, and serve as incentives for others (Shiota et al. 2004, 128–29, 133, 135–36, 138; Isen 2004). Much of the literature on emotion work might be characterized as negative in the sense that it stresses the personal costs of emotion work for the worker. Thus we have discussions of “the human costs of emotional labor” (Hochschild 1983), the stresses of the emotion work associated with caring (MacRae 1998), the negative consequences for job-related well-being of women’s family emotion work (Wharton and Erickson 1995), gender inequities associated with emotional management (Guy and Newman 2004; Mastracci, Newman, and Guy 2006), and studies of the relation between stress, emotion work, and burnout (Zapf et al. 1999, 2001). Perhaps, given the long-term orientation of the social sciences to “social problems,” a bias toward costs rather than benefits is to be expected. Perhaps some bias toward the problematic aspects of emotional processes is a natural outcome of responses activated by sudden changes in the conditions of our existence having to do with those persons and things that are of the highest personal significance to us, and that express both our existential vulnerability and our ways of coping with it (Ben-Ze’ev 2000, 15–17). Yet particular emotions have both positive and negative valences, and some students of emotions emphasize their positive contributions to human well-being.5

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Considering Display Hochschild (1983) studied service or public-contact jobs, where emotional labor was an explicit part of the job. Such jobs met three criteria: they required face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact with the public, the “product” to be produced was an emotional state in the client/patient, and the employer constrained workers’ emotions to some degree (147), typically by “display rules” prescribing the appropriate external expression of emotions (Ekman 1973). Hochschild estimated that perhaps one-third of all workers held jobs requiring emotion work, “a dimension of work that is seldom recognized, rarely honored, and almost never taken into account by employers as a source of on-the-job stress.” She was very explicit about these criteria, noting that in a given occupation, say “clerical work,” some workers had contact with the public and therefore did emotion work while others, “whose only contact is with envelopes, letters, and manila folders,” did not (Hochschild 1983, 148, 153). Erving Goffman, whose work undergirds the discourse on impression management Hochschild draws upon, quoted Robert Park’s (1950, 249) commentary on what it means to be a person: “It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person, in its first meaning, is a mask. It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role. . . . It is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves.” In other words, role-playing involves emotion work, and it is not merely one-third of the workers, but rather all but the most solitary of them, whose work lives involve emotion work. Goffman (1959) reminds us that whenever we are in the presence of others we engage in impression management. We have many motives for trying to control the impressions that others receive, and social life consists of performances, defined as “all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants.” We are always performing, and our emotions are necessarily part of our performances. Further, we are always more or less taken in by our own performances, ranged somewhere between sincere and cynical in our belief in them (15, 17–18). If we are always performing, how does one’s performance as an employee differ from performances of private life? Mostly because it is an act for payment, and in contracting for that payment, the worker agrees to add requirements beyond her own to the performance standards. At work an employer’s requirements may take precedence over personal preferences, but work performance is complicated by the presence of two “directors,” the self and the employer.

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As we are “always and everywhere . . . playing a role,” there is always some emotion work going on, for (1) we try to influence the other’s feelings about us, (2) we continually assess the “fit” or believability of our performances, and (3) our emotions tend to adjust themselves to our display. Initially there may be great dissonance—we begin at the inauthentic or cynical extreme, displaying emotions we do not feel—but feedback from our discrepant display, the positive emotions we pretend to have and the false smiles we wear, often nudges our self-perception toward sincerity, and our felt emotions toward a state more congruent with the display. Park describes the melding of mask and self: “In a sense, and in so far as this mask represents the conception we have formed of ourselves—the role we are striving to live up to—this mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be. In the end, our conception of our role becomes second nature and an integral part of our personality” (Park 1950, 250). Thus the relationship between the intentional management of feeling and observable display is more complicated than it seems. The linkage between emotion management (intention to create display) and the display is neither direct, certain, nor always predictable. Hochschild (1983, 247) understood this, and in an endnote advised that not the effect (display) but the active intent was the critical criterion marking the performance of emotion work. As to the visibility of emotional display, The Managed Heart contains instances where the display intended by the subject is essentially no display. The intended effect is maintenance of a previous display, a condition of no change in what is publicly observable. Apparent coolness under provocation, or the feigning of unawareness of provocation, illustrate this condition. While such ability to “hold under fire” may represent enormous emotional effort, because the display continues a previous display, it may be unobservable. From the subject’s standpoint, the apparent “non-display” is a successful performance; from the observer’s, it is a non-event. In addition, subjects vary in their ability to transform intent into display, and observers, family members, coworkers, and supervisors vary in their ability to perceive and interpret emotional display as intended by the worker. Reference to Hochschild’s emotion system variables—display rules, felt emotion, achieved display, and emotional dissonance—as entities, seemingly firmly established, understates their dynamic nature. In the dramaturgical perspective, not only is the world a stage, but the players vary in ability, the scripts are incomplete, and portions of the play are enacted ad lib. Only recently have researchers begun to consider the required display variables as entities perceived, and hence subjective, rather than inscribed and objective (Seymour and Sandiford 2005; Diefendorff and Richard 2003; Kramer and

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Hess 2002). Part of the positive fallout from the “emotional intelligence” literature (Salovey and Mayer 1990; Goleman 1995; Weisinger 1998) has been increased awareness that just as there are good and bad actors, people differ in their abilities to enact and interpret emotion. Organizations may establish firm display rules, but only as those requirements are interpreted and portrayed do they become part of the emotion work system. Further, the display rules of particular occupations and institutions exist within a broader culture of general display and “civility rules.” When researchers refer to “display requirements” without further clarification it is unclear whether they refer only to formal job descriptions, to company culture, to taken-for-granted civility, or all of these.

Redefining Emotion Work Introducing the concept of emotion work, Hochschild spoke of the private “emotion system,” which, she said, consisted of emotion work, feeling rules, and interpersonal exchange (Hochschild 1983, 76). Feeling, she said, was “a form of pre-action, a script or a moral stance” that we experience “when bodily sensations are joined with what we see or imagine.”6 Feeling rules were “standards used in emotional conversations to determine what is rightly owed and owing in the currency of feeling.” They were social norms, enforced by sanction, society’s guidelines on “the type, intensity, duration, timing, and placing of feelings.” Emotion work was defined narrowly, as the effort necessary to produce the desired display (7, 17–18, 56, 85). A subcategory, emotion labor, denoted emotion work for pay. The work of emotion management—producing the emotional displays valued in the workplace—was said to involve dissonance reduction as well as “deep acting” or “surface acting,” for often the required emotional display did not match the emotion felt by the worker. Suppression of the felt emotion and substitution of the required display was seen as stressful to the worker. Later researchers extended the concept beyond the discrepancy between the worker’s feelings and appropriate external emotional display to include effort aimed at managing the emotional states of others. It is “face work,” performed in personal contact. Successful emotion management may involve efforts to change what one feels, what others feel, or both, and its techniques range from pragmatic “faking it” through honest efforts to communicate feelings. The genius of Hochschild’s formulation was that it combined the personal and the social, the “internal” realm of feeling with the “external” world of norms and behavior. Her basic emotional system had four main elements: a

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worker’s personal feelings, norms both organizational and cultural dictating appropriate expression of feeling in “publicly observable facial and bodily display,” the worker’s achieved observable display, and the emotion work itself, the effortful process whereby personal feelings were induced or suppressed in attempting to create the desired display (Hochschild 1983, ix–x, 7). For reference these elements may be labeled “felt emotion,” “appropriate display,” “achieved display,” and emotion work. These elements are not equally accessible to measurement. Felt emotion is an internal state only partially accessible to the worker herself, and it changes as it receives feedback from efforts at display. The achieved display is observable, but imperfect observers may miss or misinterpret aspects of it. Appropriate display is an ideal type, portions of which may be written into formal job requirements, but it also includes tacit cultural norms and informal, unstated expectations that may become visible only when violated. Appropriate display represents a standard toward which emotion work is directed, and against which the product of emotion work—the display achieved—is evaluated. Hochschild (1983, 247) pointed the way to a broader concept than that of “work” as usually understood when she concluded that emotion work should not be assessed by its results, that is, by emotional display or other observable action, but rather by the effort expended: The direct method of cognitive emotion work is known not by the result . . . but by the effort made to achieve the result. The result of any given act is hard enough to discern. But if we were to identify emotion work by its results, we would be in a peculiar bind. . . .We are on theoretically safer ground if we define emotion management as a set of acts addressed to feeling.

In other words, emotion management (emotion work) consists of effort, not outcome. Hochschild recognized forms of emotion work beyond managing the dissonance between emotion felt and emotion displayed, but that dissonance was her central concern. Reference to both feeling-state and the observable display were essential to its measurement. To measure it even roughly, one had to estimate somehow the degree of discrepancy between felt emotion and achieved display. Hochschild hypothesized that the greater this gap, the more likely were negative emotional consequences for the worker. Subsequent research supported that position (Zapf et al. 2001). She devoted an entire chapter, “Managing Feeling,” to describing how emotion work gets done, distinguishing “surface acting” (when one simply feigns an emotion) from “active deep acting” (when one works to change

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one’s emotions to fit the desired display). Both surface acting and deep acting involve conscious management of the gap between feeling and display. Somewhat neglected in the discussion was the possibility of authentic display, where one’s felt emotion and the appropriate expression of feeling are congruent, and no conscious effort at managing emotion is required (passive deep acting). Hochschild (1983, 258) allowed that even when there was no incongruity between feeling and display, some emotional effort was involved: “When we meet no inward resistance, we amplify a feeling: we ‘put it out.’” Other researchers (Ashforth and Humphrey 1993; Kruml and Geddes 2000) identified this third mode of doing emotion work as the authentic expression of felt emotion. In later writing Hochschild (1989b, 440) continued to emphasize that the emotion work was not the achieved display—not the behavior observed or remembered—but rather the effort required to bridge the gap between felt emotion and the display. It was “the work of trying to feel the appropriate feeling for the job” (emphasis added), and then trying to display that feeling. One of the early applications of emotion work to family life expanded the definition to include effort devoted to understanding others (“to have empathy with their situation, to feel their feelings as a part of one’s own”) and to changing their feelings (“making a child feel loved and secure”). In this view, even family love involved emotion work. Altruism, defined in economic terms as a condition in which one’s “utility function depends positively on the well-being of another,” was seen to “presuppose sufficient empathy to genuinely understand what contributes to the well-being of another family member—and that . . . requires emotional work” (England and Farkas 1986, 91). Under this expanded definition, the focus of attention shifted from the gap between felt emotion and achieved display to that separating intention and empathy, or intention and desired change in another person. Concurrent emotion work upon the self, essential to Hochschild’s formulation of emotion work as dissonance reduction, was no longer the primary concern. Daniels (1987, 407–10) extended the concept still further, to include activities relevant to the functioning of families and of interpersonal relations in the public sphere. Family scholars added a new “emotion work” category to the other types of unpaid work done by women in families. Erickson (1993, 888) argued that expanding the concept of family work by adding emotion work to housework and child care would clarify the relation between the division of labor in the family and perceptions of marital quality. In her definition, emotion work was effort aimed at “the enhancement of others’ emotional well-being and the provision of emotional support.” Part of Hochschild’s “emotional

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system” is implicit in this definition. Presumably there is a norm connecting a particular display with enhancement or support of the other, and presumably there is some discrepancy between the emotional state of the worker and the display required by the situation. Even so, Erickson’s emphasis is on the achieved display, the consequence of “effort aimed,” and not the effort itself. Wharton and Erickson’s (1995) exploration of the interplay between emotion work at home and on the job added the “expansion hypothesis” to the literature. The idea is that some activities are energy-producing rather than draining. As stated by Marks (1977, 926), “rather than human beings having to pay a price for their social involvements . . . they come away from [some of] them far more enriched and vitalized than they were when left to their own ‘resources.’” The expansion hypothesis is especially relevant in the study of emotion work, for it is “people-work”—frontline dealing with customers, children, or patients—that is seen as stressful. Yet some people thrive on people work, and some roles, while demanding high levels of attentiveness to the emotional needs of others, are seen as invigorating or energy-producing rather than enervating (Wharton and Erickson 1995, 277). MacRae (1998) extended the definition still farther, to problems of “defining situations and deciding how to apply feeling rules” in caregiving situations, and also to include the efforts of caregivers to maintain positive self-esteem while facing challenges of self-control in dealing with patients or managing family conflict. This designation of all caring work as emotion work was justified by the argument that caring work, whether paid or not, involved both motivation and activity. In both senses it was emotion work because “it requires that the worker has a caring motivation and that her activity transmits to the caree the experience of being cared for, in an emotional as well as a physical sense.” The emotional labor associated with caring was sometimes a cost and sometimes a benefit to the carer, for “caring, whether unpaid or paid, can and does consist of both labor and love.” In any case, caring was said to involve the development of a relationship, and the emotional servicing of people who were strangers did not qualify as caring work (Himmelweit 1999, 32, 35). All these definitions of emotion work treat interaction with one or more others, whether clients, patients, coworkers, friends, children, or marital partners, and they all involve some interplay between one’s emotions and the emotions of these others. There are at least four different emphases here, beginning with Hochschild’s limited initial definition and extending the concept outward. Like many typologies, these four are not entirely mutually exclusive, but represent distinct emphases. The four types are (1) work

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involving the management of one’s feelings and behavior in order to present a proper display; (2) work aimed at understanding others and sharing their feelings; (3) work required to manage, direct, or change other people’s feelings, and (4) work intended to enhance another’s emotional well-being or provide emotional support. These four differ as to the object of the emotion work. In the first, the work is directed primarily toward the self, that the discrepancy between felt emotion and appropriate display may be reduced or surmounted. The aim of the second, shared emotion, involves reducing the discrepancy between one’s own felt emotion and that of another. The third involves the conscious, purposive manipulation of the feelings of others in the service of an external goal, perhaps “keeping the peace” in a dormitory, making a profit at one’s business, or harnessing others’ emotions in the service of a social movement. The fourth is focused on the personal well-being of another person, and issues of display, empathy, or social advantage are secondary to the welfare of that person.

Emotion in the Workplace: Family-Relevant Findings Earlier we spoke of applying findings from research on emotion work in economic organizations to studies of the family. There is substantial interest in emotion work in organizations, and relevant articles and books now number in the many hundreds. By contrast, studies of emotion work in families are relatively few, number in the dozens rather than the hundreds, and most of these consider emotion work in the couple relationship rather than the emotion work of parenting. So there is much to be gained, lost ground to be made up, as it were, if some of the theoretical advances from studies of emotion in the workplace, and also selected findings from the psychology of emotion, can be imported into family sociology. Identified below are ten theoretical propositions, both methodological and substantive, drawn from research on emotion work in the workplace but also relevant to the study of emotion work in families. Our confidence that studies of emotion work in employment settings have something to teach us about emotions in families is grounded in the view that the basic processes of emotion generation and response do not vary by domain, but rather run in parallel (MacDermid, Seery, and Weiss 2002, 407). Whether, in fact, family emotional processes are mirror images of emotional processes at work or somewhat “offset,” much that has been learned about emotion work in the workplace should have its counterpart in family process.

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Occasionally in the literature on emotion in the workplace there are references to the presumably deeper, more authentic emotion work in the family, as the standard against which service work is measured.7 Thus, although service workers work for pay, in many cases the full service requires an interaction as if there were not an economic but a family-like relation. A therapist is expected to be truly interested in the client and not just because he or she is paid for it. Similarly, parents know that child nursing is a job and that the nurses work for money. Nevertheless they wish that the nurses really love their children. (Zapf et al. 1999, 381)

Illustrating regulated emotion management, Tolich (1993, 379) offers family examples: the child required by her mother to kiss her grandmother (“the display of emotion she shows her grandmother is performed by the daughter but conceived and supervised by the mother”), and the husband whose wife demands a “good behavior” promise when her mother visits. In each example the wife/mother acts as regulator of another’s emotions. Global Emotion versus Discrete Emotions Some of the growing interest in emotional processes at work reflects a more general shift in psychology wherein a long-term emphasis on cognition has given way to an emphasis on affect (Briner 1999). For many years occupational psychologists conceptualized workers’ feelings in two ways: as stress and satisfaction. Yet these variables simply reflect whether a worker feels “good” or “bad,” and partly because they are so general, they did not perform well as predictors of desired employment outcomes. Along with the increased interest of psychologists in affective behavior has come attention to more specific emotional states, including general types of affective phenomena (moods, meta-moods, emotions, and emotionally laden judgments) and, within the category of emotions, concern with specific emotions—anger, distress, hope, disappointment, fear, or relief—rather than the rough dichotomy of positive and negative states (Briner 1999). If our purpose is simply to show that emotion work happens, then perhaps we need not distinguish emotions by specific type. But if the intent is to provide a reliable description of what is going on, or of potential effects of emotion work on one’s well-being, then there must be a more careful accounting of the presence and influence of particular emotions. To generalize about “emotion” as if shame, joy, disgust, fear, and love were somehow units of the same stuff, additive and interchangeable, violates both logic and common sense. It also conflicts with research showing that “discrete emotions arise in

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response to separate events and communicate different goals, intentions, and attitudes to others” (Côté 2005, 514). The personal consequences of doing emotion work, including the impact of gender, vary according to the type of emotion being managed (Erickson and Ritter 2001). The fact that discrete emotions may be difficult to separate out does not mean we should not try. The dismissal represented in lumping them together and avoiding the sorting process is likely to yield worse errors. Self-reports of aggregate information, whether they require the cumulation and averaging of similar experience over time or “cross-sectional” cumulation across categories such as discrete emotions, are far less reliable than reports on specific events and emotions (Shields 2002, 32; Scheff 2000). These generalizations yield Proposition 1: We are better served by models that identify specific emotions than by those that treat undifferentiated, generic “emotion.” Dimensionality of Emotion Work When the predicted high rates of emotional exhaustion among service workers did not appear consistently, researchers examined the dimensionality of the emotion work concept. It was posited that there were several dimensions, only some of them associated with negative personal consequences such as emotional exhaustion. Disagreement about the number of dimensions continues, but there is near consensus that emotion work is multidimensional (Erickson and Ritter 2001; Glomb and Tews 2004; Kruml and Geddes 2000; Mann 1999; Morris and Feldman 1996; 1997). For example, one program of research (Zapf et al. 1999; 2001) identified five dimensions of emotion work, three of them related to the type of emotional regulation required, and two referring to the possibilities and problems inherent in the interaction situation. When these various dimensions of emotion work were included in studies of social and organizational stressors and occupational burnout, it was found that emotional dissonance is a predictor of emotional exhaustion, and in combination with organizational stressors such as uncertainty and time pressure, produces high levels of burnout. However, other dimensions of emotion work were unrelated to burnout, and positive emotions and emotional sensitivity were predictors of feelings of personal accomplishment (Zapf 2002; Zapf et al. 2001). Apparently emotion work, like work itself, in essence is neither positive nor negative. Overwork and emotional dissonance are associated with burnout and negative personal outcomes, but the expression of positive emotions generates positive consequences for the self and associated others (Shiota

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et al. 2004; Isen 2004). High levels of emotional dissonance are associated with emotional exhaustion, but displays of positive emotions and emotional sensitivity often accompany feelings of psychological well-being. The impacts upon the self of emotional dissonance and surface acting vary with the nature of the required performance. Whether emotion work has beneficial effects depends on a variety of situational characteristics including the personality of the worker, the context of the interaction, the type of emotional labor (positive or negative), and the components or dimensions of emotion work that are assessed. Accordingly, we have Proposition 2: Emotion work is multidimensional, and the workings of different dimensions may be neither additive nor consistent. Personal Consequences of Emotion Work Hochschild stressed the costs of emotion work to the worker. From much of the research on emotion work in service occupations, we might conclude that social interaction is taxing and emotion work exhausting and alienating (Rubin et al. 2005). Yet from an interactionist perspective, emotion work is the inevitable accompaniment of dealing with others. All of our associations involve some degree of impression management, and both satisfaction and frustration are bound up in the sharing and stimulating of emotions. Sometimes emotion work has positive consequences for workers (Ashforth and Humphrey 1993; Conrad and Witte 1994; Shuler and Sypher 2000). Surface acting and inauthentic display tend to be stressful, but deep acting and authentic display are associated with low stress and good feelings (Brotheridge and Grandey 2002; Côté 2005; Grandey 2003; Kruml and Geddes 2000; Schaubroeck and Jones 2000). Among supermarket clerks, for example, are found both alienating emotion work and a more liberating, freely given and non-alienating performance of emotion (Tolich 1993). This latter is a function of a clerk’s sense of autonomy within the role, even when that role is highly regulated and closely supervised. The research suggests that emotion work in job settings may be stressful or invigorating, burdensome or delightful, depending upon “multiple factors pertaining to the social dynamics of emotion” (Côté, 2005, 525; Eide 2005), including the personalities involved, the challenges of the work to be done, the degree of worker autonomy, and other aspects of context and work conditions. There follows Proposition 3: The effects of emotion work upon workers are intrinsically neither positive nor negative, but rather reflect numerous personal, situational, and organizational contingencies.

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Everyone Does Emotion Work Studies of emotion work in the workplace have found it much more pervasive than was originally thought. It is a feature of jobs generally, not just jobs with high levels of customer contact. The original focus on emotion work with customers or clients has broadened to include interaction with coworkers, found to be as likely to require emotion work as interaction with customers (Erickson and Ritter 2001; Mann 1999; Bulan, Erickson, and Wharton 1997; Pugliesi and Shook 1997). The early emphasis on emotion work as a tool of management has yielded to a recognition that emotion work pervades organizations, and serves varying organizational constituencies. Waldron (1994, 390) suggests that “organizational researchers have too often culled out and discarded large portions of workers’ emotional lives—perhaps the most human and vitalizing elements of work,” and as a result “the emotional costs of work are underestimated and the communication processes through which emotion is created, expressed, and interpreted in the organization are understudied.” Some people do more emotion work than others, and there are differentials by gender, age, personality, and other variables, but whether we limit the definition to Hochschild’s “acts addressed to feeling” or take James’s (1989, 15) more expansive “labor involved in dealing with other people’s feelings,” it appears that all interaction involves emotion, and hence some emotion management. Efforts to measure just how much emotion work takes place at work have reported rates of the expression, suppression, or faking of emotions at between half and two-thirds of all communications (Gibson 1997; Mann 1999), with some emotions generating higher rates of faking or suppression (Erickson and Ritter 2001). We are informed that “interactions with the public and emotion control are required in almost any job” (Brotheridge and Grandey 2002, 31); “emotion has an almost invariable presence in the workplace [and] . . . few conversations at work do not involve emotion” (Mann 1999, 365); “adult emotions are almost always regulated” and “emotional labor is routine” (Bono and Vey 2005, 227–28); “social organization is constituted by emotion” and “all organizational participants exercise ‘invisible’ aspects of emotional work in organizations” (Rafaeli and Worline 2001, 97, 108); and finally, “it is difficult to imagine an organizational role to which display rules would not apply at various points” (Ashforth and Humphrey 1993, 109). These findings generate Proposition 4: Everyone does emotion work. However, because not all emotion work is equally accessible to measurement, references to “invisible” emotion work should alert us to possible deficiencies

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in measurement technique. An important distinction between absent emotion and emotion present but unmeasured appears in Rafaeli and Worline’s (2001, 101) comment that, because only certain emotions are acceptable in business, managers often are unaware that their “advice to be unemotional is really to be differently emotional.” Autonomy/Interaction Control Interaction control, identified as a dimension of emotion work (Zapf et al. 1999; 2001; Tschan et al. 2005) refers to the degree of influence an employee feels she has in interaction with clients. Such control is variously conceptualized as “autonomy” (Grandey 2000; Tolich 1993), “personal control,” (Côté 2005) or “decision latitude” (Erickson and Ritter 2001; Kruml and Geddes 2000). Workers with more interaction control have consistently reported more positive feelings about their work, less emotional dissonance, and fewer negative effects from their emotion work (Bulan et al. 1997, 239, 248; Erickson and Wharton 1997; Morris and Feldman 1997; Semmer 2000). The finding that highly managed service-sector jobs might be both stressful and satisfying, that some workers felt their emotion management was simultaneously regulated and autonomous, led to a clarification of the nature of emotion work. Tolich (1993) proposed that we recognize at least two types of emotion management, regulated and autonomous, distinguished by who controls one’s emotional display. Even in well-regulated occupational settings, there always remain unregulated areas open to individual control, offering opportunity for actualization and innovation, pride of workmanship and feelings of liberation. Thus, 911 dispatchers manifest their autonomy by seeking out satisfying emotion work to enhance their work experience (Shuler and Sypher 2000). Nurses take pleasure in their ability to “make a difference” in patients’ well-being from the emotion work expected as part of their job, but also “offer extra emotion work as a gift in the form of authentic caring behaviour” (Bolton 2005; 2000, 581, 586). There is growing evidence that perceptions of autonomy and control at work are associated with positive outcomes, and that “[W]hen individuals feel they are the authors of their own actions . . . and when they are engaging in activities that are consistent with their own personally held values and interests . . . they exert more effort, are more satisfied, and experience a greater sense of well-being” (Bono and Vey 2005, 231). We have, then, Proposition 5: Perceptions of autonomy or situational control are inversely related to burnout, emotional dissonance, and other negative effects of emotion work.

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Individual Differences Emotion management requires that persons be aware of their emotions, able to recognize the discrepancy between what they feel and what they want to feel or express. Whether the requirement to demonstrate positive emotions one does not feel has negative personal consequences depends, among other things, on one’s emotional “adaptability.” Also, people differ in their perceptions of display requirements, and the extent to which emotion work affects physical health depends on these perceptions as well as formal job conditions. In fact, whether people think they must express or suppress certain types of emotional display may reflect their personal emotional predispositions as much as the objective requirements of the job (Schaubroeck and Jones 2000). Individual differences in emotional sensitivity and response regulation are well-documented (Larsen, Diener, and Lucas 2002). Personality traits affect emotional sensitivity and responsiveness. Individual differences in emotion management develop early in childhood, and have been observed between children with different personality tendencies (Calkins and Howse 2004). Persons scoring high on extraversion are high on positive affect; those scoring high on neuroticism tend to score high on negative affect, and also are more likely to experience negative consequences from emotional dissonance (Isen 2004; Zapf 2002; Zerbe 2000). People learn to regulate emotional display, but some are better at it than others, and there may be leakage (observable ineffective control) or overcontrol (unnecessary suppression of emotion) (Butler and Gross 2004). Studies of emotional intelligence, defined as “the ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotional information,” indicate that emotional abilities are greatly variable (Salovey et al. 2004). Cultural influences magnify the range of possible differences in people’s experience of emotion, the kinds of emotional display they recognize or aspire to, and their abilities to enact “appropriate display” (Tiedens and Leach 2004; Parkinson, Fischer, and Manstead 2005). In work and family settings this means that interpretation of the dynamics of emotion management depends upon careful calibration of the emotion work system with reference to the cultural and social context, applicable display rules, felt emotions, and achieved emotional expression. These findings may be summarized in Proposition 6: The study of emotion work is complicated by individual and cultural variation in people’s perceptions of emotional norms and their abilities to feel, interpret, and display emotion.

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Salience or Identity Involvement in the Role Emotions are activated by signals that persons or things near and dear to us require attention. Apparently the strongest emotions are reserved for things nearest and dearest. In the literature, this notion of emotional salience is couched in the language of self and “identity involvement.” The basic idea is that workers who identify strongly with their jobs are more liable both to identity-enhancing and identity-threatening experience, depending upon whether their role behavior is congruent or incongruent with their valued identity, and also upon the fortunes of the organization with which they identify. The general principle here is investment of self. In human service occupations, often the most committed and idealistic workers are most susceptible to burnout. Deep investment means one is vulnerable to emotional costs, but also to emotional benefits, for “the very dependency that puts one at risk may also function as a source of emotional well-being, providing a sense of belongingness, empowerment, and meaningfulness” (Ashforth and Humphrey 1993, 99–100, 106). Deep involvement or internalization of a role is associated with high authenticity of display, and hence low emotional dissonance (Ashforth and Tomiuk 2000). Research findings on emotion work and personal involvement are mixed, with job involvement sometimes reducing negative consequences of emotion work, sometimes increasing them, and sometimes having no significant effect (Bulan et al. 1997; Erickson and Ritter 2001; Kruml and Geddes 2000; Schaubroeck and Jones 2000; Côté 2005). Apparently, how the emotion work impacts strain, whether to increase or reduce it, is magnified by the salience (job involvement, degree of identification) of the organizational identity to the individual. In other words, Proposition 7: The greater the personal commitment to or identification with an organization or organizational goal, the greater the potential personal benefit or cost of organizational role performance, including emotion work. Effort and Depletion Hochschild (1983, 247) defined emotion work as “the effort made to achieve the result,” not the resulting display. Developmental psychologists who agree with her emphasis on process rather than product include Eisenberg, Spinrad, and Smith (2004, 278), who define emotion-related regulation as “the process of initiating, avoiding, inhibiting, maintaining, or modulating the occurrence, form, intensity, or duration of internal feeling states, emotion-related

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physiological processes, emotion-related goals, and the behavioral concomitants of emotion.” All that initiating, avoiding, and maintaining burns energy. The usual argument is that the negative personal consequences of emotion work reflect excessive, stressful “people work” that overloads personal capacity, drains energy, and exhausts the worker. Eisenberg et al. (2004, 280) cite the concepts of “effortful control” of emotion and “effortful attention regulation,” making the point that simply focusing attention expends effort. Even the minimal emotion work of authentic display, where felt emotion is congruent with the required display, absorbs energy. As everyone does emotion work, and our entire lives, both at work and at home, involve the regulation of emotion, how does it happen that everyone doesn’t burn out? First, recall the distinction between the scarcity or drain theory, which assumes there is a finite amount of emotional energy and that any use reduces the remaining stock, and the expansion theory, which assumes that some activities drain energy and others replenish the supply (Marks 1977). Some emotion work would seem especially well-suited to a “social construction of human energy” assumption (MacDermid et al. 2002, 415). Eide (2005, 21) suggests that “work involving a high degree of emotions and social interactions can be experienced as highly meaningful, learning, and fun,” and that autonomy, authenticity, and altruism (caring, relating) are important positive elements. Other researchers stress the power of positive emotions either as inexpensive (low-drain) or energy-enhancing. Experiencing positive emotions is said to reduce burnout (Erickson and Ritter 2001, 159); interaction with customers and clients turns out not to be harmful; interaction with colleagues is positively beneficial (Bulan et al. 1997, 252); and the display of positive emotions is associated with a sense of personal accomplishment (Zapf et al. 2001, 538). Among 911 dispatchers who experience symptoms of exhaustion, emotion work functions as a source of positive feedback (Shuler and Sypher 2000), and work of a caring or altruistic nature seems especially rejuvenating (Zapf et al. 1999). The implications for families are obvious, and essentially positive. Tice et al. (2004, 222, 224) have demonstrated that emotion work (“selfregulation”) does absorb energy. In various experiments, they found that performance on second or subsequent self-regulation tasks was impaired by the “ego depletion” from an initial task. Sleep and other forms of rest, such as meditation, are effective rechargers. But experiencing positive emotions also counteracts ego depletion: “It is as if positive emotion recharges the self’s batteries, restoring it to something closer to full power and thereby facilitating its ability to control itself again.”

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All this may be summarized as Proposition 8: Emotion work may be experienced as wearying, energizing, or both, depending on the emotions involved, workers’ identification with their roles, and the nature of the task in terms of worker autonomy, authenticity, altruism, and other characteristics. The Ambiguity and Insufficiency of Rules Organizational psychologists have shown that even when companies have very explicit emotional display rules, those rules are always partial in the sense that additional cultural rules are operative. Moreover, there are always areas of ambiguity where neither the formal work rules nor explicit cultural rules seem to apply, leaving room for workers’ interpretation and choice. Beyond that, there are varying degrees of conformity to the display rules, which are understood and interpreted differently. A certain range of variance is tolerated, partly because workers differ in their display skills and their willingness to conform (Briner 1999, 330–31). Much early research on emotion work focused on workers in frontline occupations where display rules were specific and well-defined. However, as it has become apparent that emotion management is at least as frequent in workers’ interaction with coworkers as with the public, researchers have asked how workers perceive the occupational and social rules of emotional display, and to what extent general rules apply in the workplace. Kramer and Hess (2002) collected descriptions of appropriate and inappropriate emotional display from workers in several occupations, and identified several general display rules. However, not everyone perceived these rules, and none of the rules was listed by a majority of respondents. Diefendorff and Richard (2003) compared rule perceptions of employees, their coworkers, and supervisors, and found that supervisor perceptions predicted employee perceptions of some rules but not others; there were sizable differences in rule perceptions among the three groups. Thus, researchers cannot assume that “communal norms” (Strazdins and Broom 2004, 359) apply in specific situations, but rather must identify respondents’ specific definitions of the situation, including their perceptions of the display rules in force. Variability in such sensitivities is recognized in the range of skills included in the emotional intelligence concept. Among them is a specific competence in knowing which rules apply and being able to enact the proper display, in “knowing when to exercise control, in calculating the right degree of control, and in knowing how to express self-control ‘appropriately’” (Hughes 2005, 609). Also, although display rules usually are viewed as tools of management,

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they may also function as resources for workers (Waldron 1994). They are “complex, ambiguous, and malleable . . . resources that can be employed by any social actor to empower him- or herself; they need not function solely as instruments of managerial control” (Conrad and Witte 1994, 426). Accordingly, we offer Proposition 9: Display rules are inherently incomplete and ambiguous, and workers vary in their perceptions of the existence, applicability, and nature of display rules as well as in their willingness and ability to comply. Interpreting Emotion People’s identifications of their own emotional states are said to be notoriously unreliable. Robinson (2005, 91) characterizes an assessment of her own emotional status as hypothetical, for “In attributing to myself certain thoughts, beliefs or ways of seeing . . . I am doing a little after-the-fact folk psychology.” Still, there is no other avenue of access to emotions as experienced, and a personal application of folk psychology may easily be as valid as an after-the-fact external interpretation by a professional psychologist. Such practice accords with Nussbaum’s (2001, 8) observation that students of emotion must “rely on people’s ability to classify pretty reliably experiences of a particular type of emotion,” and with Ben-Ze’ev’s (2000, 5) statement that while emotions have public aspects, “the existence of emotions, like that of other mental states, is relational; it presupposes the existence of someone who feels the emotion. There is no love without lovers, and no fear without a frightened agent.” It follows that there is no emotion work without the intentive acts of a subject, and the most reliable way to learn about emotion effort is to question the subject directly. Both experimental and clinical research suggests that the meanings of emotional display vary by time, place, and circumstance. Not only do the emotions people express and the nature of emotional display vary by culture, but also by ethnicity, occupation, and even family group (Halberstadt, Crisp, and Eaton 1999; Parkinson et al. 2005). Emotion work involves reference to characteristics of the situation and of other persons involved, and an emotional display is the dynamic product of one’s emotional sensitivities and behavior, the responsiveness of the other, and the cultural and organizational context in which the effort occurs. The following statement by therapists applies not only to the therapeutic encounter but to emotion work generally: “The meaning that therapists, clients, and other people assign to emotion displays are [sic] always related to ongoing activities and concerns of people. At the very least, the meaning of emotion displays change when their social contexts change” (Miller and de Shazer 2000, 10).

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These authors claim that therapists, whose job it is to interpret emotions, rely too heavily on labels, their own and their clients’, to interpret emotional behavior. For example, when the same word is assigned to clients’ emotional states, it is assumed that the states are alike. Yet love or anger may have strikingly different meanings from one day to the next. One implication of the contextual contingency of emotion words and behaviors is that researchers cannot be sure that attempts to summarize behavior across situations are meaningful. A smile in today’s context may not mean the same as yesterday’s smile. To take these cautions seriously means that researchers must make their measurements of emotion as person- and situation-specific as possible. It means that the self-perceptions of the emotion worker and of the client/ other are absolutely essential to interpreting the meaning of an episode of emotion work. Finally, the dynamics of emotion work continue to be shaped in memory. To understand the processes involved and evaluate the workings of the emotional system, it is best to measure aspects of the process as they happen, for past, present, and anticipations of the future are implicated in each emotional episode (Briner 1999). Emotions are dynamic, even in memory, and there is evidence that fading memory is reshaped in line with conventionality and gender stereotypes. It is shaped by many other things as well, leading careful researchers to emphasize that self-reports are personal beliefs, not accounts of fact (Shields 2002, 30–32). Thus we have Proposition 10: The meanings of emotional process are time-, place-, and situation-specific, reflecting the perceptions, sensitivities, efforts, and intentions of the actors, both at the time of occurrence and in retrospect. It follows that the more immediate and proximate the measurement, and the more of these elements it is possible to estimate, the more accurate the interpretation. Having summarized the relevant literature on emotion work in employment settings, we now turn to emotion work in families. Here the scientific literature is much thinner. The above generalizations from the better-studied world of emotion at work may serve as guidelines as we evaluate the existing work and plan future efforts to interpret emotion work in its deepest, most meaningful contexts.

Emotion Work in Families The research literature on emotion work in families8 may be divided into three main types: 1) qualitative studies, usually involving both observation

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and interviews, that illustrate family emotion work in process; 2) quantitative studies, usually questionnaire surveys, in which family emotion work is an independent variable predicting marital satisfaction, marital quality, or issues of work-family spillover; and 3) a residual category that includes theoretical essays, content analyses of documents, and autobiographical statements. Much of the writing in all three categories identifies emotion work as essential, often difficult, and deserving to be defined as work and properly credited. Gender Differences and “Invisible” Work Much of this literature is oriented to the reportedly gendered nature of emotion work, often showing that women are the primary providers of emotional support and that they facilitate the emotion work of other family members (Seery and Crowley 2000; Wharton and Erickson 1995). The emotion work of husbands and fathers (beyond that which is perceived and/or facilitated by wives) and the emotion work that children may do for parents or for each other have received little attention. There is an underlying message, subtle in some of the quantitative studies, explicit in several of the ethnographies, that relationships and families are troubled because men do not do their share of emotion work. Much of this writing is compatible with the “deficit model of men” or the “general deficit paradigm . . . evident in much of contemporary family scholarship on men and fathers” (Doherty 1991; Hawkins and Dollahite 1997, 3). For example, we are told that among British couples, “increasingly, women complain of their male partners’ inability or unwillingness to express intimate emotions,” that “men tend to regard women’s dissatisfactions over intimacy merely as irrational ‘whingeing,’ [sic] . . . [and] are equally likely to regard women’s emotion work with children as unnecessary and debilitating ‘fussing,’ or something for which women are ‘naturally’ better-equipped” (Duncombe and Marsden 1995, 151, 165). According to a report on Australian couples, “The experience of sharing domestic work . . . will be different for those who do more than their ‘fair share’ (most of whom are women) from those who contribute relatively little,” and “the gender imbalance in emotional work increases women’s psychological distress” (Strazdins and Broom 2004, 357, 368). The emotion work associated with middle-class mothers’ efforts to facilitate and maintain father-child relationships in their families was studied by Seery and Crowley (2000). Over three-fourths of mothers did this kind of emotion work. They did it, the authors maintain, because of “internalized social prescriptions to act as love’s experts,” even though such norms

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are “potentially self-destructive models of womanhood.” The finding that most of their respondents worked to build solidarity between fathers and their children, combined with the authors’ judgment that “ultimately, each parent bears the primary responsibility for her or his own relationships with children” (123), again suggests that fathers do less than their share of emotion work. The perception that women do more emotion work than men accords with contemporary stereotypes of gender relations, the emotionality of women and the repressed expressiveness of men being “an especially potent set of widely held, rarely questioned bedrock beliefs” (Shields 2002, 15). This position also seems to be supported by most of the quantitative studies (Holm et al. 2001; Stevens, Kiger, and Riley 2001; Strazdins and Broom 2004; Tingey, Kiger, and Riley 1996; Wharton and Erickson 1995), although sometimes the anticipated sex difference does not appear (Erickson 2005; Kessler et al. 2000; Zimmerman et al. 2003). However, the finding that in families men do less emotion work than women seems to be at odds with findings from employment settings showing that everyone, both men and women, does emotion work on the job. An obvious response to this apparent discrepancy is to ask whether family and workplace researchers use the same constructs to measure emotion work. In fact, they don’t. The organizational psychologists have developed indexes of emotional dissonance and typically take display rules into account. In contrast, quantitative surveys by family researchers have generally focused on only one of the four elements of Hochschild’s emotion system, namely achieved display or expressive behavior. “In processing people,” Hochschild (1983, 6) wrote, “the product is a state of mind.” A state of mind (i.e., felt emotion) is also an element in the emotion system doing the people-processing. That being so, one might expect that attention to the states of mind of doers and recipients of emotion work would be central to research and theory in both family and workplace. It is not clear why the family sociologists have not followed the lead of organizational researchers in this matter. Instead, they seem to have found the concept of emotion work most useful as another name for the “invisible” women’s work formerly considered “expressive” or “therapeutic” (Nye 1976; Zelditch 1955), rather than as part of a dynamic system linking personal feelings, normative feeling rules, and interpersonal behavior. None of the operationalizations of emotion work in family research have involved the explicit linkage of a subject’s report of the intent of her emotion effort to either her own or her partner’s perceptions of the specific display acts expressing that intention. Instead, researchers have measured

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only one element of the emotion system, the achieved display. The measurement scales used do not reference display rules or felt emotion at the time of display, and as a result there is no way to determine the meaning of the display, the amount of emotional dissonance, or the emotional effort in surface or deep acting necessary to produce the display. This is not to say that the emotion work scales based on reports of caring or expressive behavior are useless, only that they measure a very different thing from the emotion work described by Hochschild and conceptualized in much of the organizational literature, which takes account of display rules, deception, and dissonance, as well as the achieved display of emotion. Emotion work as measured in the quantitative family studies reflects the implicit assumption that acts of caring behavior are interchangeable and equivalent, each requiring no more emotional effort than the other (that is, they can be summed). In addition, respondents are asked to aggregate behavior; the items do not refer to specific events. Usually the questions are framed “who does this?” referring to an unbounded present, or “who usually does this?” The most commonly used measures of emotion work in families are Erickson’s (1993) fifteen-item emotion work scale and several adaptations of it by other researchers.9 The scale reflects the wife’s perception of her husband’s, and her own, emotion work. As applied to her husband, it represents perceived display, for she has no access to his felt emotion or intentions. As applied to herself, it indicates intended display, her summation of the emotional expressions she thinks she has given off, since she has no way of accessing her own display as an outside observer. The scale consists of items judged to represent the emotional needs of the couple, such as asking how often a partner “confides innermost thoughts and feelings,” “acts affectionately toward me,” “lets me know he has faith in me,” or “gives me compliments” (Erickson 1993, 900).10 Men generally score lower than women on these scales. However, because this approach to the measurement of emotion work does not include the all-important reference to display rules—to the emotional behavior men think they ought to be displaying—it is possible that much of men’s emotion work in marriage goes unrecognized. Erickson (1993, 898) herself noted the possibility that these items were biased in a feminine direction: “Our definitions continue to reflect women’s views of emotional support despite the possibility that men’s instrumental work in the family is an expression of their caring and concern.” The specific behaviors respondents are questioned about—acts such as confiding innermost thoughts and feelings, initiating “talking things over,” offering encouragement, respecting the other’s point of view, expressing con-

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cern for well-being—are not unequivocally linked to any of the primary emotions (e.g., love, envy, jealousy, pride, anger, compassion, grief, shame), and only a few of them bear an obvious and direct connection to that hallmark of emotion, attentiveness. In the end, the analyst has reports of the frequency of various acts of communication or apparent solicitude, acts which presumably bear some unknown relation to specific emotions or combinations of emotions experienced by each of the marital partners. What the use of such scales measuring emotion work means in practice is that we have no way of knowing how much emotion work is going on, for there is no way to judge differentials in emotional effort behind a given display of interest in or support of one’s partner. Moreover, until we know the perceived display rules to which an expression of emotion work is oriented, we have no way of knowing how much emotion work the display entailed. In other words, the apparent deficit in men’s emotion work may be illusory, a consequence of it being made invisible. The particular behaviors included in the emotion work scale may not be part of the “appropriate display” repertoire of men, and men’s definitions about when and how frequently such displays are appropriate may differ from women’s definitions. Everyone does emotion work, but there are individual and group differences in perceived display rules. The use of a behavioral index without reference to rules or effort means that much of the emotion work going on simply doesn’t register on the instrument. Stated differently, much of the emotion work of husbands and fathers—of everyone, for that matter—is made invisible by this mode of measurement. In these quantitative studies, surface acting, deep acting, and emotional dissonance disappear from view. To summarize: Most attempts to quantify emotion work in families have not measured emotion effort or the discrepancy between emotion felt and emotion displayed, but instead have asked only about enactment or emotional display. Whereas Hochschild’s emotion management system specified four key variables, the typical family emotion work scale treats only one, recalled intentioned display, or in the case of reports of spouse’s emotion work, recalled observed display. The problem of estimating emotion effort via these items is exacerbated by treating them as equivalent and summing them. Then the emotion effort involved in sensing that a partner is disturbed about something is set equivalent to that expended in praising him, and verbal compliments are equated with acts of affection. Measurement of emotion work as thus defined removes the “state of mind” elements of the emotion system Findings from emotion work studies in employment settings indicate that there are substantial individual differences in the interpretation of display

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rules even when the rules are specific and written into company policy. In families, the nature of “appropriate display” is more ambiguous and negotiable, and it is probable that partners’ definitions of “appropriate” are often incongruent. Further, to the degree that a partner is attentive to the particularities of a situation, praise may be an appropriate response in one case, initiating discussion in another, and passive listening in a third. To simply ask, “Who initiates discussion” or “who praises partner” sets the sensitive response to a situation equivalent to the “one size fits all” generic approach to emotion management. Assume that John has a positive disposition and finds it easy to praise others; his wife Mary has a more negative personality and tends to view the world pessimistically. Given Mary’s chronic negative attitude, it requires far more emotion work for her to praise someone than it does for John. Hochschild’s emotion management model takes that difference into account. Yet it is precisely this unestimated differential effort—sometimes a partner’s “acts affectionately toward me” behavior is much harder to bring off than at other times—that is lost when only the display, and not the effort required to produce it, is the variable measured. A partner’s acts of affection may sometimes be honest expressions of felt emotion, and therefore represent little emotion work, and other times be sheer facade, the result of effortful surface acting. Such differential effort is illustrated in William Bolitho’s (1926) depiction of the mental preparations of England’s G. J. Smith as the time approached when he intended to murder his wife. He became uncommonly solicitous, greatly inconvenienced himself for her, that he might detest her all the more. Completing a behavioral family emotion work scale the day before the murder, Smith would have earned high scores. Solicitous behavior is not the same as solicitous intent. For fear she should “put him under an obligation” he insists on doing all the housework himself, this lazy man. He does the shopping and insists on her staying in bed late, so that he can hate her. He had all the mean tidiness of routine of the incipient miser, he encouraged a hundred daily irritations of it; and he carefully concealed from her the way he liked things done, so that she could offend him. . . . To the same end, he refused to listen to any account of her life since they parted, pretexting his sensitive remorse; he definitely cut her strand by strand from life in his mind and memory before he killed her. (176–77)

We may make the point another way. The risks involved in trying to measure emotion work by attending only to behavioral display, thereby neglecting felt emotion and display rules, are precisely those of equating all lacrimal secretion:

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[William] Blake refers to the widow’s tear and the tear of love and forgiveness. There are tears of sadness and tears of joy and doubtless dozens of other kinds. What differentiates these various kinds of tears? It is not the physiology: all tears look alike. The differences lie in the thoughts that provoke them or that, however inadequately, they express. . . . Emotional tears, unlike mechanically induced or reflex tears, are mediated by thought. (Neu 2000, 14)

Paying attention to perceived display rules as well as the display itself has a further advantage. It identifies the emotion work people think they ought to be doing, and allows their effort to be judged against that standard, rather than introducing behaviors the respondents might judge as tangential or even irrelevant (e.g., such items from the emotion work scale as confiding innermost thoughts, praising partner, or verbally identifying family problem areas for discussion) and concluding, mistakenly, that their nonperformance of those specific behaviors means that little emotion work is done.11 It has been established that everyone does emotion work, that both consciously and unconsciously we continually use our “emotional intelligence” skills in displaying our emotions, seeking to evoke emotional responses in others, and dealing with the dissonances and discrepancies between what we feel and what we express. One of the strengths of Hochschild’s emotion work concept is that it sensitizes us to the real or imputed organizational requirements and cultural standards to which our emotional displays are oriented and by which they may be judged. Without reference to the felt emotional state of the actor and the perceived external standard to which a display is directed, we can interpret neither the meaning of an achieved display nor the amount of emotion work required for the performance. These conclusions suggest a reassessment of the consistent finding that wives do more emotion work than their husbands. It has not been demonstrated that men do less emotion work, only that they do not exhibit certain selected caring behaviors as often as women do. Applying Hochschild’s emotion system model means identifying men’s perceptions of the required “appropriate display” and assessing the emotional effort necessary to produce whatever kind of achieved display—congruent, discrepant, or deviant—the men enact. We know from studies of emotion work in the workplace that most interaction involves some degree of regulation or suppression of emotions—the “faking” or “hiding” of feelings—and that within similar work settings men are as apt as women to report such surface acting. It follows that in families the issue may not be the presence or absence of emotion work, but of different emotion work, oriented to different standards and enacted by differentially skilled performers.

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What might the emotion work of husbands and fathers look like, if it were identified by reference to their own specific emotions, the display rules they believed were appropriate, and the dissonance they had to manage to produce an acceptable display? We offer two examples, one in a father’s own words, the other a father’s actions remembered by a daughter. Both because the standard scales have dealt with couple rather than parental emotion work, and because the incidents reported are not exactly congruent with the expressive behaviors respondents are asked to aggregate in responding to the scale items, it is likely that neither of these examples would have been identified as emotion work in quantitative surveys. The self-report is by the father of several children including a severely handicapped son. Asked how his religious beliefs affected his fathering, he responded: When they were little, I’d tell [the kids], “I love you forever and ever, past the end of time” at the end of bedtime stories and stuff, when we’d talk in the evening. That was always the thing they’d know, and often I’d say if we were in the back yard swinging or whatever, I’d say, “Hey, how long will Dad love you?” And [they] know, forever and ever past the end of time. . . . It’s neat because there is that bond. (Marks and Dollahite 2001, 641)

Here is a daughter’s remembrance of a father’s sanction that included the emotion work of minimal display: I was never grounded or scolded, but I knew when I had let them down, and I punished myself by the horrible guilt that I felt. I remember being told I couldn’t go to a concert at USU [the local university]. I was probably 16. I sneaked out and went anyway. Dad came to the concert and found me. I was horrified. He just gently took my hand and took me out to the car. He said nothing and I was never punished, but you can be darn sure I never did it again. (Hill 2006)

It is important in assessing differences in emotionality within families to remember that “every group [including families] is composed of people who feel and express distinct emotions” (Tiedens, Sutton, and Fong 2004, 164). That is, emotional variation is normal. In families we may prize emotional homogeneity, desiring that loved ones share our feelings, and even see such sharing as a sign of caring, togetherness, or family solidarity. But people differ in personality traits and capacities, including tendencies toward positive and negative affectivity, and differ in their interpretations of events and situations. Emotional variance within families—that members of the family expe-

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rience different emotions and express them differently—is not pathological. That marital partners do not feel the same emotions at the same time, or differ in their mode or timing of expression, may simply signal normal emotional diversity. No matter how much we may wish it, “nobody inhabits the same emotional realm” (Lewis, Amini, and Lannon 2000, 120). The suppression or non-expression of emotions is necessary to some degree in managing emotion. It is associated with both negative physiological and positive social consequences. Hochschild defined it as stress-producing, but emotional suppression is also essential to social harmony. Certainly the suppression of negative emotions is associated with positive social consequences. The expression of positive emotions is generally seen as beneficial, but there are situations where in the interest of social harmony even the expression of positive emotions ought to be suppressed. Context and situation are critical. Sometimes the display of a typically positive emotion may offend or wound. “The outcome of any act of emotion expression, or expressive suppression, depends to a large degree on how it interacts with the intentions and goals of the partner. For example, if one person has no interest in affiliating or furthering a relationship, then an intimate sharing of emotions by the other may represent unwanted friendly overtures and actually be experienced as aversive” (Butler and Gross 2004, 112–15). Also, the evidence is mixed on the effects of sharing emotion with others. If others are sympathetic and supportive, it may be helpful to share, but to share one’s emotions in non-supportive settings may increase distress. For children aged twelve to seventeen, family members, especially parents, remain the most likely “sharing partners” of emotional experience. Among adults, the main sharing partners are spouses and companions, although there is evidence that sharing partners are chosen not only for their relationship ties but also for their ability to provide support and empathy (Zech, Rimé, and Nils 2004, 170–74). Emotional expression is a sharing of both needs and vulnerabilities, and within communal relationships—including but not limited to family members—such sharing usually builds solidarity and has other positive effects. In noncommunal or conflictual relationships the potential negative consequences of sharing one’s needs and vulnerabilities may outweigh even the negative personal costs of emotional suppression (Clark and Finkel 2004, 121–22). Emotion and Attentiveness Earlier we said that emotions were an aggregate of “feeling” (consciousness of a state) and intentionality, that they combine cognitive appraisals, one’s

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scheme of projects involving valued persons and goals, and an apprehension of external objectives as relevant to those projects. In this perspective, one’s emotions comprise an “alert” system that maintains ongoing appraisal, attention, and judgments with relevance to the well-being of those persons and things we care about. Oatley (1992, 39) characterizes emotions as a monitoring process that can insert issues into consciousness. Part of that emotional attentiveness is subconscious. Emotions allow us to “track the relevance of such [deeply held] goals to the current context in a manner that goes beyond the capacity of attention or consciousness” (Reddy 2001, 25). Although much of the monitoring process proceeds beyond our awareness, it still requires energy. If it edges into our awareness, in the sort of semi-emotional arousal that characterizes maternal attentiveness, the energy cost is higher. Emotions force or increase attention to persons or things of great personal significance. The motivational force or power of the emotions varies with the significance of the persons involved. Ruddick’s (1989) “maternal thinking” is emotional thinking. The attentive love she describes is both emotional and cognitive. She quotes Iris Murdoch’s description of the “task of attention” in language perfectly fitted to the emotion of maternal love, and the attentiveness that is part of it: “The task of attention goes on all the time and at apparently empty and everyday moments we are ‘looking,’ making those little peering efforts of imagination which have such important cumulative results” (Murdoch 1970, 43). The emotions involved in maternal care are deep and intense because they involve the well-being of another whose welfare is of “highly personal significance” (Ben-Ze’ev 2000, 15), arguably the highest possible significance, to the mother in question. Attentive love occurs in other relationships, but it is probably most common in the mother-child bond. “To love a child is to do whatever is required to keep her safe and help her grow. Maternal attention is prompted by the responsibility to act” (Ruddick 1989, 123), and neither the attention nor the responsibility are wholly rational. It is emotion that ratchets maternal attention to its unusual pitch and constancy, emotion that adds a component beyond intention. To be emotional is to pay special attention, and being emotionally aroused increases our capacity to pay attention (Ben-ze’ev 2000, 14, 54). Emotion work in family settings, then, especially with one’s own children, is apt to be tiring because attentive love does not function on an eight-to-five schedule. Many mothers can attest that the special attention, the continual monitoring that is part of attentive love, continues even while they sleep. New mothers unaccustomed to an emotional attentiveness that allows little respite notice its personal cost. One tells an interviewer, “I don’t walk

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around like a time bomb ready to explode, I don’t want you to think that. It’s just that I’ve got this stuff in the back of my head all the time.” Another explains that “It’s like now you have this person and you’re always responsible for them, the baby. You can have a sitter and go out and have a break, but in the back of your mind, you’re still responsible for that person. You’re always thinking about that person” (Walzer 1996, 221). The emotion work literature tends to focus on feelings and the display of feelings while passing lightly over or ignoring this prior work of attention—of appraisal, evaluation, judgment—which is the basis of emotion both felt and displayed. The definitions of emotion recognize it, but family researchers pay insufficient attention to the challenging preliminary “diagnostic” appraisal that is a necessary precondition of emotion work. This is the effort necessary to identify need, to try to understand the kind of emotional display that will serve another’s need, to assess options and activate appropriate emotional and behavioral response. Much of the literature seems to work from the assumption that one feels what one feels, without considering the preliminary emotion work that produces the feeling. Sometimes one doesn’t know what one feels, and the issue of possible dissonance is less important than knowing what an appropriate—that is, a beneficial—emotional response would be. The sheer responsibility to seek answers, to filter alternatives in an effort to know what one might properly do, can be exhausting in itself, yet it is prior to the effortful emotional expression. Issues such as concern about whether an emotional display will meet the needs of relevant others, and whether it will foster their long-term growth and well-being or merely serve to placate or motivate them temporarily, are “negative spaces,” virtually absent in the literature. Particularly in families, where there are long-term responsibilities and commitments, the kind of superficial “by-the-book” emotion work required of airline stewardesses or purveyors of fast food may be inappropriate. Variables such as duration of commitment, prior emotion work history, and the costs of ascertaining both short-term and long-term need in family members deserve critical attention. A related issue is whether emotion in families is primarily a matter of selfregulation in the interest of prescribed display rules, as it seems to be among airline stewardesses, or whether it is moral work in that its expression reflects commitment to the welfare of its object. If the former, it can be considered moral work only at a very superficial level (i.e., it is mostly impression management, in which one’s behavior conveys more emotional commitment to the client than in fact exists). If it is oriented to the well-being of its object, then intended expressions of emotional commitment “given off” are

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more or less accurate expressions of personal commitment and not merely “bedside manner.” Such moral response entails at least some “self-sacrifice,” that is, it requires taking the focus off self-centered interests in order to see more clearly the need of the other. Hochschild (1983, 195) states that such concern for the other represents one of contemporary society’s forms of the “false self,” “the altruist, the person who is overly concerned with the needs of others.” Alternative perspectives on concern for the other stress the presence in maternal thinking of “attentive love” (Ruddick 1984a, 1989), as well as the positive effects of caring and love on the very capacity for attentive perception and understanding (Little 1995). Key Questions Seeking to summarize the substantial literature on emotion in the workplace, Briner (1999) identified four key questions to which the literature might be addressed. They were: (1) Why do employers want employees to display particular emotions? (2) What determines which emotions employees display? (3) How do employees manage their emotional displays? and (4) What is the relationship between displayed and felt emotion? With only slight rewording, each of these may be applied to emotion work and the emotional life of families. Here, very briefly, we consider some of the needed research to which Briner’s questions direct us. First, why display particular emotions? In the workplace, the answers are to enhance performance, to influence customers in ways that benefit the business, and to help workers identify with and feel pride in their work and their organization. These purposes relate to the well-being and productivity of the work organization. In the family, which emotional displays enhance performance? Which influence family members in ways that benefit them personally, and benefit the family as a whole? How do family members seek direction and clarification on which emotions ought to be displayed? Assuming the family’s goal is the well-being and thriving of family members, what emotional displays best serve the interests of the spouse or the child? Will conscious attention to family “morale” build enthusiasm, pride, and family solidarity? Next, what determines which emotions are displayed? At work, answers include the explicit display rules promoted by management along with implicit cultural behavioral rules. People follow these rules either because they are rewarded, or because of the pressures of social conformity. But just because the rules are there doesn’t mean they will be followed. In the family version of this question, we ask about the display rules governing the marriage and the family, learning which are as firmly established as company

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display rules, and which are flexible or undefined. What emotional display rules are offered to families by their kindred, by institutions such as churches and governments, by the media and by tradition? Is there a couple consensus on “appropriate display”? Do the emotions displayed by family members reflect a negotiated, dynamic “standard,” or does each member “march to a different drummer”? To what extent are family display rules followed because appropriate display is rewarded and inappropriate display punished? Third, how do members manage their emotional displays? At work the answer, following Hochschild, is through both deep and surface acting, but also through identification with one’s work such that “feeling and displaying emotions may be relatively effortless and not require surface or deep acting” because the display is automatic, a genuine reflection of who one feels one is as a person. Another mechanism of display management is the highly scripted, routinized display whereby, again, little conscious acting is required (Briner 1999, 332). Presumably the same techniques apply to the management of emotions in families. Ideally one might expect more authentic display in families, that emotions could be expressed more honestly than at work. However, the deeper commitments to family, the higher stakes with respect to responsibility for another’s welfare, and the greater awareness of complexities in the situation may dictate greater need in families for both surface acting and for efforts to bring one’s emotions into line with a necessary display. Finally, there is the issue of the relationship between felt emotion and displayed emotion. In the workplace, Hochschild and others have emphasized the negative consequences of emotional dissonance. Do the same problems follow emotional dissonance in families? There is evidence that displaying an unfelt emotion (surface acting) may lead one to experience that emotion. Over time, then, it is likely that surface acting yields to deep acting and thus dissonance is reduced because more and more one’s feelings are congruent with one’s actions (Briner 1999, 333). Issues of emotional dissonance and the shading of surface acting into deep acting and authenticity have barely been studied in family contexts, although the theme that offering acts of love builds the emotion of love is frequent in the popular literature. Also relevant to emotion work in families is study of the relationship between emotions, working conditions, and work behaviors. In the employment research, an important distinction is made between emotions experienced because of the nature and conditions of the work and emotions experienced because of interaction with other people, including coworkers and superiors. The counterpart in families, between emotions experienced because of the nature of family conditions, and those arising from interaction with family

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members and others, deserves attention. For example, one analytical approach would be to separate emotional stresses due to family poverty from those deriving from personality differences between family members independent of contextual distress. Here the nature of emotions complicates the research process, because emotions are dynamic, and “because of their rapidly changing nature, emotions can be dependent variables as they are the effect of some event at work and then immediately become independent variables as they are then the cause of some behavior or action by the person who experiences the emotion” (Briner 1999, 327–28). Briner’s recommendation that researchers study the experience of emotion as a transactional process, in the sense that it involves a combination of behavior, cognition, and emotion in a non-linear, feedback-looped process, applies both to the workplace and to families. Finally, it is important to remember that context is critical in the study of emotions. A person’s past, present, and anticipations of the future are implicated in each emotional episode (Briner 1999, 336–38). Emotion Work, Stress, and Satisfaction Emotion work in families is stressful because the stakes are high, perhaps higher than in any other organization. Emotions express “our most profound values and attitudes,” “not merely superficial involvement but deep commitment” (Ben-Ze’ev 2000, 61). It has been suggested that display rules are more negotiable and flexible in families than at work (no one has done the comparative work to demonstrate this), but that does not necessarily make things easier. In families it is often unclear what or whose standards apply, and in problematic situations there may be no unambiguous norms. Therefore, emotion management at home may be more stressful than at work. At work, one merely has to learn and follow the rules. At home one has to make the rules, and in many situations it seems impossible to know whose rules apply, if any rules apply, or to reach consensus amid the competing claims of a myriad of “authorities.” “In times of uncertainty,” said Hochschild (1983, 75), “the expert rises to prominence.” Never have there been so many family experts, and never has choosing among competing expert “voices” been more difficult. And all of this is in addition to the standard problems of managing the elements of an emotion system when norms are well-established and known. Organizational researchers have found that perceptions of control are inversely related to stress and burnout. Also, the greater the personal commitment to or identification with an organization or role, the greater the potential for both reward and cost. A parent’s control is often compromised,

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or perhaps is a matter of ongoing negotiation, thereby raising the potential costs of emotion work. In addition, the personal commitment to and identification with family members are typically higher than for any other organization. Unlike commitments to jobs or companies, commitments to marriage partners and especially children tend to be open-ended, without term. The open-ended, seemingly endless commitment to family members may in itself be a source of strain. For example, it is far easier to negotiate a problematic situation for a set number of hours each day than to face it stretching without end into the future. Physician Rachel Remen (1996, 52) has commented on the potential costs, in terms of emotional health, of the open-ended commitment to family members: It is the caring itself, perhaps stronger in bonds to one’s children that anywhere else, that opens one to emotional exhaustion and numbness. “[P]eople who really don’t care are rarely vulnerable to burnout,” she writes. “Psychopaths don’t burn out. There are no burned-out tyrants or dictators. Only people who do care can get to this place of numbness.” Emotion work in families is also difficult precisely because much of it is invisible and unacknowledged as work. The “mental work” of parenting tends to be unequally divided between husbands and wives, with the “baby worry” seen as natural to mothers. Walzer (1996, 228) found that “women’s disproportionate responsibility for mental baby care plays an important role in generating women’s dissatisfaction,” with some of that dissatisfaction tied to “their loneliness in particular with the thinking they do about their babies.” Perhaps the primary difference between emotion work in families and in the workplace has to do with emotional effort for pay versus emotional effort for love, or the management of emotional display with an eye to the long-term welfare of all family members as opposed to emotion work in the interest of short-term reward for the employee, independent of the long-term interests of other parties to the transaction We cannot separate our emotions from ourselves. Emotions make, and mark, the highs and lows of our lives. Yet reading the literature, especially the qualitative studies, is depressing. There is the loneliness and dissatisfaction of new mothers because their husbands do not match their emotional investment in thinking, planning, and worrying about their babies (Walzer 1996); the deep disappointment of wives who live with “emotional asymmetry” because their husbands are not emotionally expressive (Duncombe and Marsden 1993); the frustration and disillusionment of adoptive parents (Power and Eheart 1995); the patterns of “silencing reality” and “gendered story lines” that emerge in couples experiencing job insecurity (Benjamin

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and Ha’elyon 2004); the “betrayal of self” by a nineteenth-century mother (Blauvelt 2002); the “madness” of parental, largely mothers’ emotion work in trying to get their children admitted to private schools (Chin 2000); the “stress and burden” of family caregivers (MacRae 1998); and the continual struggle and “adjusting to inequity” of caring mothers in “non-standard North American” families as they do institutional advocacy, survival, and identity work for their children (DeVault 1999). To judge from the research, the stresses of family emotion work outweigh the joys. Perhaps, following the problem-oriented emphasis that has been a hallmark of sociology from its beginnings, researchers have chosen stressed or disadvantaged populations for study, and thus, in their problemselection, have neglected coexistent happiness. Or, faced with family narratives describing good times and bad, it may have seemed unprofessional or politically incorrect to accentuate the positive. Perhaps the “disenchantment” of society implicit in the language of modern social science makes suspect even the labels of emotions like wonder, joy, love, awe, and happiness. It is also possible that the pains and stresses we observe are themselves unrecognized components or necessary precursors to the joys of family life, and that the researchers, concentrating mainly, and temporarily, on inputs, miss many of the payoffs. It seems obvious that even positive family outcomes are built upon hard work, stress, unanticipated obstacles, even pain. The odds are high that any observational cross section captures more of the growing pains, more of the ever-present struggles than of the outcomes, whether good or bad. Perhaps, at a minimum, when respondents in situations that appear negative to the researcher, express satisfactions or positive emotions, we should accept those feelings at face value and stifle the temptation to discount them as “false consciousness.”

Notes 1. Ray Bradbury’s (1969) “The Electric Grandmother” poses in fiction the question of whether attentiveness and appropriate response to need is sufficient evidence for the existence of love. A related exercise is Antonio Damasio’s answer to the “naysayers” who compare the sensors in airplane cockpits to the senses of human beings, and ask, “does the plane feel?” or “why does it feel as it does?” Damasio (2003, 126) replies that “any attempt to associate what happens in a complex living organism to what happens in a splendidly engineered machine, say a Boeing 777, is foolhardy.” Still, there are increasingly serious efforts to build emotional intelligence into robots (DeLancey 2002; Minsky 2006; Picard 1997).

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2. A summary of the terminological difficulties in the field laments that “For a variety of reasons, the study of emotion has not had the series of clarifying steps necessary for advances in understanding. Instead there has been something worse than a Tower of Babel. In that biblical story no one maintained the misconception that they were communicating, for the words they used were different. In the study of emotion there continues to be an illusion that workers are speaking the same language and discussing the same phenomena simply because they use the same words. As a result, instead of construction of emotion theory built on an accepted foundation, various workers each had unique sets of premises, but believed they were dealing with the same matters as everyone else” (Isaacs 1998, 31). 3. Robinson’s book, up to that point, has been an exercise in classification, analysis, and generalization, a modernist summary of modernist research. Having completed that summary, she devalues it by pointing to a higher road to understanding human emotion, namely the experience of the humanities. She advises, “If we really want to understand emotions in all their uniqueness and individuality, . . . if we want to understand how the different elements of the process feed into one another and interact, and how the streams of emotional life blend and flow into one another, then we would do better to stay away from the generalizations of philosophers and psychologists, and turn instead to the detailed studies of emotion that we find in great literature” (Robinson 2005, 99). 4. Some psychologists have even suggested a new term, “cogmotion,” to help correct the tendency to view as separate “the interactive and inseparable nature of cognition and emotion” (Barnet and Ratner 1997, 303). 5. Isaacs (1998) subtitles his book on emotion “Nature’s Vital Gift.” His preface invites us to explore the “wonderful implications” of the use of emotion; Ben-Ze’ev (2000, p. xiii, 14) reminds us that “emotions punctuate almost all the significant events in our lives,” they “force the organism to pay special attention,” and therefore have great survival value. Nussbaum (2001, 31) defines emotion as “eudaimonistic, that is, concerned with the person’s flourishing” or well-being. For Reddy (2001, 22, 24) emotions are “badges of deep goal relevance,” and “evolution’s way of giving meaning to our lives.” They “typically express our most profound values and attitudes,” and they are expressions of deep commitment, “a very important glue that links us to others” (Ben-Ze’ev, 2000, 23, 61). 6. A problematic aspect of Hochschild’s work was her treatment of emotion and feeling as synonymous. At one point she used the terms comparatively—“I would define feeling, like emotion, as a sense”—but mostly the terms were used interchangeably. One defined the other: to manage emotion was to change feeling; emotion memories recalled feelings; the “where” of feeling was the location of emotion; a typology of emotions was an exercise in naming feeling; failures of emotion control equaled failures to shape feeling (Hochschild 1983, 17, 27, 30–31, 41, 49, 223). 7. In this connection, Rafaeli and Worline’s (2001, 110) comparison of organizational attachment to love is of interest: “Attachment of people to organizations is, essentially, like the process of love. Talking about emotions like love in the context

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of organizations such as business corporations may seem odd, but recent biological and physiological research demonstrates the importance of attachment and love for all sorts of human relationships, including connections at work (Lewis et al. 2000). And, as Schneider (1987) noted “processes of attraction between individuals and organizations are what makes organizations, what pulls them together.” 8. The generalizations and examples that follow are based in a substantial cross section of the relevant social scientific literature. We refer specifically to a set of thirty-five journal articles, including fifteen qualitative pieces, fifteen quantitative studies, and five “other” articles. The qualitative/ethnographic pieces are Benjamin and Ha’elyon 2004, Buzzanell and Turner 2003, Chin 2000, Clarke 2006, DeVault 1999, Duncombe and Marsden 1993, Edwards 2004, Eheart and Power 1988, Godwin 2004, Jones 2004, Power and Eheart 1995, Seery and Crowley 2000, Strickland 1992, MacRae 1998, and Walzer 1996. The quantitative pieces are Cappuccini and Cochrane 2000, Erickson 1993, 2005, Helms, Crouter, and McHale 2003, Holm et al. 2001, Kessler et al. 2000, G. Lee 1988, Minnotte et al. 2007, Smit 2002, Stevens, Kiger, and Riley 2001, Strazdins and Broom 2004, Tingey, Kiger, and Riley 1996, Wharton and Erickson 1995, Wilcox 1998, and Zimmerman et al. 2003. The residual category includes Blauvelt 2002, Duncombe and Marsden 1995, Riesz 2004, Shields and Koster 1989, and Wharton and Erickson 1993. 9. Studies using Erickson’s fifteen-item emotion work scale include Erickson 1993, Wharton and Erickson 1995, Cappuccini and Cochrane 2000, and Zimmerman et al. 2003. Adaptations of the scale using fewer items are reported in Tingey, Kiger, and Riley 1996, Kessler et al. 2000, Holm et al. 2001, Minnotte et al. 2007, Stevens, Kiger, and Riley 2001, and Erickson 2005. Different emotion work scales including items on emotion work with children appear in Wilcox 1998 and Strazdins and Broom 2004. 10. The specific items comprising Erickson’s (1993, 900) emotion work scale are listed below. Possible responses for each item ranged from one (never) to seven (always). For husband’s perceived emotion work, the question read “How often would you say your partner engages in each of the following?” For respondents themselves, it read, “How often do you engage in each of the following toward your partner?” 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Confides innermost thoughts and feelings. Initiates talking things over. Tries to bring me out of a feeling of restlessness, boredom, or depression. Lets me know he has faith in me. Senses that I am disturbed about something. Offers me encouragement. Gives me compliments. Sticks by me in times of trouble. Offers me advice when I am faced with a problem. Respects my point of view. Acts affectionately toward me.

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Expresses concern for my well-being. Communicates his feelings about the future of our relationship. Is a good friend. Does favors for me without being asked.

11. A final note on the sex differences in couples’ emotion work is that while the usual finding is that women enact the particular indexed behavior more than men, the differences are surprisingly small. For most studies, the sex difference on these items reflecting “women’s views of emotional support” averages a little over half a point on a seven- or nine-point scale. This translates to the difference between “I somewhat more” and “He somewhat less” or a situation of “I somewhat more than he,” depending on the wording of the scale.

CHAPTER SEVEN



Family Work as Ritual

A few months from now, Ben would stand up in front of nearly everyone he knew and say, in his own words, “Today I am a man.” Yet tonight he wanted nothing more than to hear baby stories: how he’d sneak out of bed and open the door to his room a crack to eavesdrop on The Cosby Show; how we lost and then recovered his beloved stuffed animal Minnie from a muddy Upper West Side intersection. “The past,” Faulkner wrote, “isn’t dead. It isn’t even the past.” Birthdays, death days; first steps, first words, last words, first kisses: if you’ve ever fallen in love or had a baby or watched someone die, you know that these are made-up milestones, convenient fictions. As much as I love the story of Ben’s first steps—how, one morning when he was nine months old and I was on the phone he wobbled into the kitchen—it is more myth than fact, a shorthand for what really happened; how, each morning for the past three months, he’d made microscopic progress toward his goal, successively approximating his upcoming breakthrough, creeping up to it, advancing one scintilla of a frame at a time. Nature itself is gateless. Coiled within the first day of winter lies the nascent kernel of summer; the seasons, with cold snaps in August and January thaws, make mockery of our need to delineate. And time is never a highway, but rather a ceaseless, recursive current with terrifying swirling eddies and peaceful tributaries, and you’re never sure exactly where your fragile canoe will run aground. So you plan parties and rituals, just for the relief of having the earth beneath your feet, if only for a little while. (Israeloff 1998, 198–99)

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 Abraham Joshua Herschel, I’d read, described the Sabbath ritual as “a palace in time.” But to me, ritual felt more like a shack, a modest dwelling you hammer together yourself out of planks you find lying about and bent nails—like the succah, the little booth in which religious Jews eat during the harvest holiday, built each fall and then disassembled only to be reconstructed next year. A place where you can stop resisting those raucous, graceless contradictory feelings we keep at bay so much of the time. A place in which you can open the window a crack and let them in, watch them run riot like dogs too long cooped up, get the better of us, parade before us in all their shameless vanity and urgency, taunting our feeble efforts to tame them. For we can never master paradox. We can only address it the way a frantic mother does her wayward child who shows up hours late: “Do you have any idea how worried I was about you?” because she’s mad and sad and relieved and scared all at once. You can only sit with it, the way you endure your enemy on those occasions when you find yourselves in the same room, breathing the same air, forced to admire, if only grudgingly, each other’s good looks. Ritual, I realize, resuming my work, is all of these: a place and a time, a journey and a stopover, a process through which we absorb paradox, transcend time and place, past and future, male and female, certainty and uncertainty, inclusion and exclusion–all experience that defies explanation. (Israeloff 1998, 223–24)1

 If you sat them together at a table and heard only snatches of their conversation, a sentence now and then, you might think they were talking about atomic energy, or evolution, or love. “The difficulty,” says one, “is how to make visible what is often invisible” (Grimes 1990, 1). Another speaks: “[It] entails . . . the construction of time and eternity; the representation of a paradigm of creation, the generation of the concept of the sacred and the sanctification of conventional order, the generation of theories of the occult . . . the awareness of the divine, the grasp of the holy . . . .” (Rappaport 1999, 27). The third interrupts, “[It] is all of these: a place and a time, a journey and a stopover, a process through which we absorb paradox, transcend time and place, past and future, male and female, certainty and uncertainty, inclusion and exclusion—all experience that defies explanation” (Israeloff 1998, 224). The second voice responds, “[It is] the social act basic to humanity” (Rappaport 1999, 31), then yields to the first, who warns: “We cannot escape . . . [it] without escaping our own bodies and psyches and thus rhythms and structures that arise on their own. They flow with or without our conscious assent. . . . Whether we are involved . . . is not ours to decide. We can only

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choose . . . to be attentive or repressive in the face of actions that compel and surround us” (Grimes 1995, 42). This table talk is not about physics or philosophies of love, but ritual. The speakers are writers on ritual. Their statements, combined in this imaginary exchange, reveal why one of them says that the search for an adequate definition of ritual is like the search for the Holy Grail (Grimes 1990, 12). We might have added voices from the deeper past. Over a half-century ago Bossard and Boll (1950) said rituals were the basic core of family life. Judging from the minuscule output of published work on family ritual that followed their pronouncement, not many believed them: a fifty-year review (Fiese et al. 2002) on family routines and rituals in community-based samples identified only thirty-two relevant studies, leading to the conclusion that the scientific study of family routines and rituals was relatively immature. William Doherty (1997) has reaffirmed the priority of family ritual, warning that in our era of individualism and entropic families, we risk the well-being of our families if we are not actively, intentionally ritualizing. Considerable recent work (Bradley 2003, Eaker and Walters 2002, Grimes 2000, Leon and Jacobvitz 2003, Moriarty and Wagner 2004, Oswald 2002, Pleck 2000) including a special issue of the Journal of Family Psychology devoted to family ritual (Fiese and Parke 2002) suggests an upturn in scholarly interest. Family ritual is the ritual action accompanying the nurturing, maintaining, caring, and socializing activities of family life. We begin with an overview of ritual action generally, including an assessment of the utility of ritual as an organizing, interpretive framework. First, we ask what rituals are, what they do, and how they may be interpreted. Then we consider family ritual as a type of ritual action, with an emphasis on rituals of family work. In the past, formal definitions of ritual sometimes operated to exclude family work. Here, family work fits within a definition of ritual that includes reference to the transcendent. As many family rituals incorporate aspects of the sacred, family work belongs within the traditional purview of ritual theory. We offer an extension of Grimes’s (1995) typology for “mapping ritual,” and in illustrative applications show that family work qualifies as ritual and that framing it as ritual is theoretically instructive. We conclude with a summary of the justifications for interpreting family work as ritual and certain implications of doing so.

Conceptualizing Ritual: Definitions, Characteristics, Types For over a century ritual has been one of the dominant theoretical frameworks in modern anthropology and religious studies. Among social evolutionists and

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historians of religion, the relationship between myth and ritual was essential to understanding early humankind, and to the development of religion and civilization. Later schools of thought, including linguistics, archaeology, psychiatry, and the “myth and ritual” school in classics and anthropology, have continued to find ritual theory useful, and it became a powerful analytical tool in the hands of Western scholars who wielded it in self-affirming comparative studies contrasting their own civilization with that of exotic tribal cultures (Bell 1992; McGrane 1989). In fact, the interpretation of ritual has proven so productive an approach that each succeeding generation of scholars has redefined it, casting the net of ritual more widely. Perhaps its maximum extension may be seen in its application to the classic problem of the origins of society, as in the notion that the social coordination associated with ritual is the original source of group cohesion (Sosis 2000), or that emotional rituals and the “interaction ritual chain” are the essential basis of social solidarity (Collins 2004). In several fields ritual theory frames the study of various “critical juncture[s] wherein some pair of opposing social or cultural forces come together.” Examples include the ritual integration of belief and behavior, tradition and change, order and chaos, the individual and the group, subjectivity and objectivity, nature and culture, the real and the imaginative ideal. Whether it is defined in terms of features of “enthusiasm” (fostering groupism) or “formalism” (fostering the repetition of the traditional), ritual is consistently depicted as a mechanistically discrete and paradigmatic means of sociocultural integration, appropriation, or transformation. (Bell 1992, 16)

Anthropology’s long affair with ritual has been described as an “obsession” (Tambiah 1979, 114), and ritual has become so much a part of the takenfor-granted cultural landscape that at least one author finds it necessary to remind readers that ritual is a constructed concept and not a cosmic reality. Indeed, she says, it is “a rather particular way of looking at and organizing the world,” “not an intrinsic, universal category or feature of human behavior . . . [but rather] a cultural and historical construction that has been heavily used to help differentiate various styles and degrees of religiosity, rationality, and cultural determinism” (Bell 1997, ix). Traditional usage attached the term ritual to repetitive social processes associated with the religious and mystical. More recent practice extends the term beyond that core to cover secular enactments as well. Bossard and Boll, early students of family ritual, said its basic meaning involved normative social patterns that might or might not have a religious element. Ritual was “a social process, with definite forms of interaction and a specific cultural

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content” (1950, 17–18). Beyond that, they tried to clarify their view of ritual by offering examples, a fairly common way around the daunting tangle of formal definitions. A later student of secular ritual cautioned that definitions of ritual necessarily implicating the transcendent were misleading because they seemed to imply that in today’s society ritual was declining in importance, when in fact it might be religion, and not ritual, that was on the wane. If religiously oriented ritual were defined as only one category of a broader field, he predicted, then we were apt to find ritual alive and well in the world (Bocock 1974, 15, 40). Having earlier pointed to the difficulty of arriving at a definitive definition, we hesitate to embark on what may seem like another Grail quest. But we cannot explain why it may be useful to apply aspects of ritual theory to family work without preliminary description of what the term means and an orientation to ritual studies that puts our definitions in context and lays out the frameworks we recommend. The diversity of definitions and the proliferation of applications of ritual is not altogether a bad thing. Several writers (Clothey 1988; McVeigh 1992; J. Smith 1987) have compared ritual theory to a lens that helps us mark things otherwise blurred, or a window that lets us penetrate appearances to a different level of reality. To judge from the literature, it is not a single lens at all, but a veritable optical shop where we can choose among dozens of vision-extenders. We take an eclectic approach to the definition of ritual, a position justified, in part, by the historical confusion about the term. One theorist of ritual wrote that “even among those who have specialized in this field there is the widest possible disagreement as to how the word ritual should be used and how the performance of ritual should be understood” (Leach 1968, 526). A later, nondefinitive list of ways ritual has been conceived ran to twenty-three options: theme, symbol system, gestural grammar, metalanguage, articulation, distancing device, regulating mechanism in a biotic community, type of logic, deep structure, social function, co-variant, restricted code, standardized behavior, primordial human need, developmental stage, neuroreductionistic description, role, mazeway, compulsion, process, form of play, mechanism for understanding reality, and mechanism for experiencing ultimate reality (McLaren 1986, 42–43). One conclusion from the analysis of such listings is that it is futile to seek the essence of ritual in its instances, for the category is too broad. Perhaps the proper approach is to focus on some component, perhaps “ritualized action,” as more “empirically tractable” (Liénard and Boyer 2006, 814). We like Parkin’s (1992, 13) justification for the decision to offer neither a consensus definition of ritual nor to attempt a rational/logical one. He

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pointed to the “amazing” nominalist nature of many definitions (i.e., a ritual is what a writer says it is), and argued that rituals were better defined and understood by examining case studies than by seeking a definitive definition. Anthropologists may have trouble defining ritual, but they seem to know it when they see it. If some of us know ritual when we see it, perhaps we also can identify a good definition when it appears. Here we begin with two quite different attempts. The first is, in our view, the best recent effort at a definitive definition. For Roy Rappaport (1999, 24), ritual is “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers.” Striving for elegance and brevity, Rappaport has the term “formal” do double duty, denoting both “form” in the sense of decorum or adherence to pattern, and “formal” in the sense of being distinguishable from the merely functional or pragmatic. In this second meaning, Rappaport’s “formal” includes one of the essential characteristics of ritual as defined from Emile Durkheim through Victor Turner, namely reference to the transcendent. The second definition is the creation of Ronald Grimes, one of the foremost practicing students of ritual. Grimes dealt with the problem of definition by (1) raising key issues in a critique of one influential definition, and (2) choosing not to work with a single definition, but rather adopting a “soft” definition involving the possibility that some but not all of a standard list of qualities of ritual would appear in any given instance of ritualizing. The appearance of a strategic number of these characteristics is evidence of ritual action (Grimes 1990, 13–14). We shall follow his lead, both in reference to formal definitions as a basis for discussing the nature of ritual and in opting for a “soft,” flexible working definition as we apply the ritual framework to specific instances of family work. Some sense of the variety and commonality of definitions of ritual may be taken from Table 7.1, which presents seventeen formal definitions of ritual or family ritual. We do not say these are the “best” definitions, the most respected or most fruitful in research, only that they serve as a basis for discussion. They are meant to be illustrative, and are not ordered by any underlying metric of virtue, elegance, or utility. Table 7.1. Selected Formal Definitions of Ritual and Family Ritual 1. Ritual is . . . / Rituals are . . . Snoek 2006, 13 “a particular mode of behavior, distinguished from common behavior. Its performers are (at least part of) its own audience. . . . [Most ritual behavior] will be

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traditionally sanctioned as proper ritual actions . . . takes place at specific places and/or at specific times . . . is more formally stylized, structured and standardized than most common behavior . . . is based on a script . . . [and] is to some extent purposeful and symbolically meaningful.” Rappaport 1999, 24 “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers.” Bell 1997, 82, 138–39 “the primacy of the body moving about within a specially constructed space, simultaneously defining (imposing) and experiencing (receiving) the values ordering the environment. . . . Characteristics of ritual-like activities . . . [are] formalism, traditionalism, disciplined invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism, and performance.” Gay 1996, 217 “communal activity . . . that is patterned, meaningful, symbolic, and normative.” Grimes 1995, 60 [Ritualizing, or nascent ritual] “transpires as animated persons enact formative gestures in the face of receptivity during crucial times in founded places.” Baumann 1992, 98 “symbolic performances which unite the members of a category of people in a shared pursuit that speaks of, and to, their basic values or that creates or confirms a world of meanings shared by all of them alike.” Parkin 1992, 18 “formulaic spatiality carried out by groups of people who are conscious of its imperative and compulsory nature and who may or may not further inform this spatiality with spoken words. . . . rituals can only be described . . . as movements between points and places and as positionings.” Goodman 1988, 31 “a social encounter in which each participant has a well-rehearsed role to act out. It takes place within a set time span and in a limited space, and involves a predetermined set of events. Once initiated, it has to run its course to completion.” Tambiah 1979, 119 “a culturally constructed system of symbolic communication. It is constituted of patterned and ordered sequences of words and acts, often expressed in multiple

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media, whose content and arrangement are characterized in varying degree by formality (conventionality), stereotypy (rigidity), condensation (fusion), and redundancy (repetition). Ritual action in its constitutive features is performative in [that]. . . saying something is also doing something as a conventional act; . . . the participants experience the event intensively; and . . . indexical values . . . [are] attached to and inferred by actors during the performance.” Turner and Turner 1978, 243 “formal behavior prescribed for occasions not given over to technological routine that have reference to beliefs in mystical beings or powers.” Goody 1961, 159 “standardized behavior (custom) in which the relationship between the means and the end is not ‘intrinsic,’ i.e., is either irrational or non-rational. Within this general category falls magical action . . . essentially irrational, . . . religious acts [irrational or non-rational] . . . [and] a category of ritual which is neither religious nor magical; it neither assumes the existence of spiritual beings nor is it aimed at some empirical end.” 2. Family ritual is . . . / Family rituals are . . . Pleck 2000, 10 “a highly stylized cultural performance involving several family members that is repeated, has a formal structure, and involves symbolic behavior (gestures; highly scripted or repeated words . . . .) The formal structure usually has a fixed order, with a distinct beginning, middle, and end.” Doherty 1997, 10 “repeated and coordinated activities that have significance for the family.” Cheal 1988, 642 “repetitive stylized acts that are directed toward persons and things that are highly valued.” Wolin and Bennett 1984, 401 “a symbolic form of communication that, owing to the satisfaction that family members experience through its repetition, is acted out in a systematic fashion over time.” Boyce, Jensen, James, and Peacock 1983, 194, 196 [family routines are] “the predictable, repetitive patterning which characterizes day-to-day, week-to-week existence . . . the shared pattern of behavioral rhythmicity that serves as an ordering principle in the ongoing process of a family’s existence. . . . Routines become ritual when they provide a symbolic representa-

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tion of family identity or some other transcendent value in addition to their more pragmatic role as organizational elements in family life style.” Bossard and Boll 1950, 16, 58 “a system of procedure, a form or pattern of social interaction, which has three unvarying characteristics. First, it is definitely prescribed: this is the way a thing is to be done. Ritual means exactness and precision in procedure. Second, there is the element of rigidity. The longer the prescribed procedure continues, the more binding its precision becomes. And finally, there is a sense of rightness which emerges from the past history of the process, i.e., the oftener the repetition of the prescribed procedure occurs, the more it comes to be approved . . . vessels to pass attitudes, behavior patterns, and social tools from one generation to the next . . .[characterized by] deep emotional coloring.”

The definitions in Table 7.1 depict ritual as social activity, interactive, shared, and oriented to the collectivity. Almost everyone mentions that ritual is (1) performed, enacted, or dynamic, and there is a fair consensus that it is (2) normative, (3) formal or patterned, and (4) meaningful and/or symbolic. There is less agreement on whether it must be invariant or rigid, traditional, and repetitive. Note also that the definitions of family ritual—the last five entries in the table—are somewhat more open, less fully specified than the generic definitions. Beyond this basic agreement are differences that seem substantial, although partly they may be artifacts of differing terminology. A problem with formal definitions of this sort is that they have an “all or nothing” quality that encourages us to think in dichotomies. Grimes (1995, 60, 74) urges students of ritual to “go easy on exclusive, hard defining” that draws boundaries and sets things out of bounds, and thereby may prevent us from understanding ritual-like behavior in its emergent or decaying phases. In contrast are flexible definitions that highlight the bounding process itself or draw attention to the “spaces” between boundaries. Instead of a formal definition, Grimes offers a set of continua, fifteen clusters of qualities that may or may not characterize ritual. “When these qualities begin to multiply,” he says (1990, 14), “when an activity becomes dense with them, it becomes increasingly proper to speak of it as ritualized, if not a rite as such.” His list specifies what “rituals are” and what “rituals are not” for each quality. Here is a slightly adapted (by capitalizing a word in each set as a cluster label and adding some [italicized] additional descriptors) version of the affirmative side of Grimes’s (1990, 14) list of the qualities of ritual.2 Rituals are (1) performed, embodied, enacted, gestural; (2) formalized, elevated, stylized, differentiated, figured, foregrounded; (3) repetitive, redundant, rhythmic; (4)

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collective, institutionalized, consensual, social; (5) patterned, invariant, standardized, stereotyped, ordered, rehearsed; (6) traditional, archaic, premordial; (7) meaningful, valued highly or ultimately, deeply felt, sentiment-laden, serious; (8) condensed, multilayered, requiring interpretation, opaque; (9) symbolic, referential; (10) idealized, perfected, pure, ideal; (11) dramatic, ludic (playlike); (12) paradigmatic, exemplary, illustrative, archetypical; (13) transcendent, mystical, religious, cosmic, sacred, numinous; (14) adaptive, functional; and (15) conscious, deliberate, intentional, purposeful. Applying this model to real situations, remember that no ritual exhibits the “high” or positive end on all fifteen qualities. These are “family characteristics” of ritual, and “just as no two family members have all the pool of family characteristics, so no ritual action is likely to display all of these” (Grimes 1990, 13). The more of these qualities an activity exhibits, the more likely it is to be ritual. Treating each quality as a continuum rather than a dichotomy encourages investigators to pay attention to the dynamics of the development of ritual, and to the existence of “near ritual.” Each of these fifteen qualities listed above is conceptualized as a continuum, and each generates research questions answerable in ordinal or interval terms. Each raises issues of trends and tendencies rather than of essences; each suggests questions about “how far” or “how much,” opening inquiry rather than ending it in statements of “is” and “is not.” This approach sensitizes us to process and change, rather than the all-or-nothing of stable structure. It is appropriate to the study of family work, where we know there are routines and repetitive behaviors, but whether they qualify as ritual remains to be seen. Rather than making premature decisions about whether an observed activity is ritual, and if so, what genre it represents, we are encouraged “to explore all kinds of composite, boundary-line, or anomalous activity” (Grimes 1990, 15) in an enterprise aimed at revealing process rather than merely naming things. Attention to variation in the qualities of action that comprise ritual leads to the question of whether the qualities of ritual are associated in sets of characteristics, or perhaps of functions. Some students of ritual answer this question by identifying types or genres, and the typologies offered range from simple dichotomies to complex systems of a dozen or more types along a range of dimensions, or themes, e.g., Bell’s (1997, 94) genres of ritual action, Grimes’s (1995, 40-41) modes of ritual sensibility, or Doherty’s (1997, 12–13) classification of family rituals. Table 7.2, containing seven of these typologies, both illustrates a range of possibilities for the study of ritual in families, and contrasts typologies used by students of family ritual with those in ritual studies generally.3

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Table 7.2. Selected Typologies of Ritual and Family Ritual Bell 1997, 94 Genres of ritual action Rites of passage Calendrical and commemorative rites Rites of exchange and communion Rites of affliction Rites of feasting, fasting, and festivals Political rituals Doherty 1997, 12–13 Family rituals Connection rituals Family meals Rising and retiring, coming and going Going out and going away Love rituals Couple rituals Special person rituals Community and religious rituals Rites of passage: weddings and funerals Grimes 1995, 40–41 Modes of ritual sensibility Ritualization (bodily, ecological) Decorum (interpersonal, formal) Ceremony (intergroup, political) Magic (technological, causal, means-end oriented) Liturgy (religious, sacral) Celebration (playful, dramatic, aesthetic) Fiese 1992, 154–55 Family ritual: Settings and definitions Dinner time (shared family meal) Weekends (leisure and/or planned activities that occur on non-working days) Vacations (events or activities surrounding a family vacation) Annual celebration (birthdays, anniversaries, first day of school) Special celebration (celebrations that occur regardless of religion or culture: weddings, graduations, family reunions) Religious holidays (religious celebrations): Christmas, Chanukah, Easter, Passover Cultural and ethnic traditions (celebrations tied to culture and ethnic groups: naming ceremonies, wakes, funerals, baking particular ethnic food)

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Grimes 1985, 2 Ritual types Rites of passage Sacrifice Marriage rites Worship Funerary rites Magic Festivals Healing rites Pilgrimage Interaction rites Purification Mediation rites Civil ceremony Rites of inversion Rituals of exchange Ritual drama Wallace 1966, 104–66 Transformations of state (“What do the performers of religious ritual say they are trying to do?”) Ritual as technology Ritual as therapy and anti-therapy Ritual as social control Ritual as salvation Ritual as revitalization Bahr and Bahr Functions: What ritual does Creates meaning Communicates (socializes) Embodies Orders (organizes, structures) Transforms Connects (builds solidarity)

Our own attempt to summarize the performative or active functions of ritual is based in a review of the literature including essays on definition and discussions of ritual process. We aimed at a comprehensive list, generalizable to the entire ritual literature, yet inclusive enough that almost every specific function of ritual might be subsumed under one or more of its categories. We wanted a manageable list, short enough to apply easily as we tried to describe

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and interpret family work. We finally settled on six verbs or verb phrases that seem to capture the active processes ritual sets into motion (see panel seven of Table 7.2). What does the performance of ritual do? It creates meaning, communicates, embodies, orders (organizes or structures), transforms, and connects. We will apply this list of ritual functions to specific instances of family work

Ritual and Prosaics: Ritual Analysis in Ordinary Life Catherine Bell (1997) begins her book Ritual with a statement that dates from the third century BC. Her epigraph, attributed to the Chinese philosopher Xunzi, points to the importance of rituals of “common customs” and to the difficulties of interpreting ritual. It warns that the meanings of ritual are not accessible to pragmatic interpretation, nor to the “uncouth and inane” efforts of the learned “system-makers,” nor to the arrogant despisers of “common customs” who think themselves superior to common people (Watson 1963, 94–95). Xunzi’s “common customs” are the “little” rituals of daily familiarity that have become second nature, the family work associated with our own bodies, our own present, and our own ordinariness. Life is mostly ordinary, customary, and normal. The successful enactment of the customary makes it possible to survive long enough to experience the special. Christmas may come but once a year, but it doesn’t come at all unless someone has successfully negotiated the preceding 364 days. If “sacred” or “special” denotes the set apart, then that very setting apart defines the existence of the “other,” the secular, ordinary field against which the special is defined and foregrounded. Within that field, ordering the customary, are the rituals of everyday life. Early definitions of ritual emphasized its sacrality as opposed to profane life, its occurrence in sacred space, its boundedness and separateness from the mundane, and its special character. Some writers continue to distinguish ritual from the common customs, stressing “ritual’s formality, its dramatic quality, and its sensuality,” in contrast to ordinary behavior (Lawson and McCauley 1990, 45), or its formal style, its distinctiveness in place and time, its “non-common” nature (Snoek 2006, 13). Here ritual’s attraction is precisely its “otherness.” This emphasis on the extraordinary nature of ritual has meant that many of the everyday rituals of household and family have been defined away. There has been a tendency to conceptualize activity as either ritualistic or ordinary, and the focus on “either-or” makes it difficult even to recognize situations where ritual permeates daily, practical living (Bradley 2003). Grimes (1995,

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41) says that “Usually, we begin to speak of ritual in far too lofty a way by referring to ultimacy, sacredness, awe, sacrifice, or eternality, or in too specific and normative a way by confessing faith in specific personages or religious traditions. As a result, we sometimes unwittingly disincarnate ourselves from our own bodies, our own present, and our own ordinariness.” A more inclusive approach does not stress ritual’s extraordinary nature, but instead creates definitions that cover rituals both little and dramatic. For instance, Wolin and Bennett’s (1984, 401) definition of family ritual—“a symbolic form of communication that, owing to the satisfaction that family members experience through its repetition, is acted out in a systematic fashion over time”—leaves plenty of room for the prosaic. So does Driver’s (1991, 12–13) appeal that we stop neglecting the small, familiar rituals: [O]ur thinking about rituals, as far as it goes, is directed toward the “big” ones: church services, funeral processions, state ceremonies, weddings, pilgrimages, festivals, and the like. These we tend to separate from the “little” ones: acts of greeting and leave-taking, table manners, making beds, issuing invitations, going to Grandma’s house, making a date, and so on. Ignoring these because of their daily familiarity, we do not notice how greatly our lives are affected by ritualizing activities that have become, as they are supposed to do, our “second nature.”

Several writers have pointed to a “work–ritual” connection, in that ritual is defined as a special kind of work. Driver (1991, 15, 98) asks that “whenever I use the words ‘ritualization,’ ‘ritualize,’ or ‘ritualizing,’ I hope the reader will think of work—often playful work, but nonetheless work.” The key question then becomes, if ritual is work, does work breed ritual? Under what circumstances does ordinary work begin to exhibit the character of ritual? Driver’s answer: Wherever the spirit of play enters it, work starts to become ritualized. It develops routines that are multipurpose, serving to communicate, to entertain, and to invoke something or someone not otherwise present in the labor itself. . . . As work done playfully, ritual remains in touch with what is “other.” Ritual is not about itself but about relation to not-self. Secular or religious, ritual is always concerned with powers that are understood to have their being outside the ritualizers. (Driver 1991, 98–99)

Formal definitions of ritual usually have operated to exclude family work. Among the reasons for this were (1) the definitional requirement that ritual involve activity oriented somehow to transcendent powers; (2) the related

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requirement that ritual activity not be practically efficacious, that the work of ritual not be the same as the pragmatic, means-end oriented work of the world; (3) a tendency of ethnographers to overlook “minor” ceremonies; and (4) a related tendency to pay more attention to the works and viewpoints of male informants than of females. As a result, the main work of at least half of the world’s adults—the “women’s work” of housework, family care, nurturance, and child socialization—has generally not received much serious analysis. Beginning about 1950 an occasional voice called for studies of family ritual, and there was increasing emphasis on secular ritual, accompanied by definitions that removed the criterion of transcendence and allowed rituals to have a component of practical action. It thus became theoretically possible for family work to fall within the purview of ritual studies. Yet it was not until an increasingly powerful feminist theory mandated the study of the outlooks and activities of ordinary women (D. Smith 1987) that there appeared the beginnings of a literature on the ritual life of women in families. Even then, because researchers tended to rank so many aspects of women’s family experience above housework and child care, other family rituals—of connection, celebration and recreation, rites of passage, holy days and holidays, of joining and parting—overshadowed rituals of nurturing, caring, and cleaning. Sometimes women’s role in bringing off holiday and life-cycle rituals is noted (Pleck 2000), but the focus generally is on the holiday celebration or family feast, not the work producing it. The case that we ought to attend to rituals of family work, and a justification for including them as essential to the ritual organization of daily life, can be made on at least two grounds. The simplest one is that all aspects of human life are ritualized to some extent, and that family work is important enough, in terms of its frequency and essential nature, to merit serious attention. With the now-current broadened definitions of ritual allowing pragmatic activity not oriented to the sacred to be seen as ritual, housework qualifies along with other secular activities. In taking this approach, one grants, at least implicitly, that family work is secular activity to be included in the current expansion of ritual scholarship. The alternative is to argue that family work qualifies as ritual under the earlier definitions that required some linkage to the transcendent, and that to overlook its sacred and near-sacred aspects is to misrepresent its nature. In this perspective, it appears that the “little” rituals of family life have been neglected not because they did not meet the criterion of transcendence, but because they seemed ordinary and small-scale, and they were primarily the domain of women.

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We prefer the latter alternative. A definition of family ritual that allows for the sacred—that expects it, actually—sensitizes us to the possible presence of transcendental aspects of life that might easily be overlooked under less restrictive definitions. If family life in general implicates the transcendent, then so does family work, for it is the very ground in which family life grows. Indeed, women and domestic ritual play a vital role in preserving culture, including its religious and transcendent aspects, as shown in Kandiyoti and Azimova’s (2004) analysis of women’s role in perpetuating life-cycle and religious rituals in Uzbekistan under the Soviet regime, Rodriguez’s (2004) exploration of Mestiza spirituality and the power of women to maintain and transmit religious consciousness in the home, or Paulson’s (2006) exploration of the role of ritual meals in connecting body, place, and identity among indigenous Bolivians. Ritual, Kinship, and Transcendence We have noted that an increase of ritual studies in anthropology, religion, and other disciplines has redefined and extended the concept. Early work on ritual built upon the assumption that social acts could be unambiguously classified as sacred or secular, as “nonrational, mystical, nonutilitarian, and sacred or [as] . . . rational, common-sense, utilitarian and profane.” As the ethnographic evidence accumulated, students of ritual discovered that such distinctions were illusory, for in fact the sacred and the profane often shaded into each other, or even reversed polarities (Leach 1968, 522). Under some conditions, sacred things become profane, and profane things, sacred. Evidence of the ephemerality and instability of such basic theoretical dichotomies as the sacred and the profane has serious implications for the definition of ritual. If, as early definitions had it, the term denotes activity oriented to the sacred, and yet at the same time the designation of something as sacred or profane can be shown to be dynamic and situational rather than stable, then (1) the entire analytical enterprise is complicated greatly, for sanctity is contingent and not inherent and (2) ritual necessarily applies to a much wider field of activity than the strictly “religious” or the “aesthetic.” Strict boundaries disappear in the transactional, transitional nature of the concept. It follows that at least some of the time, even those activities most people consider prosaic or profane, such as housework, may qualify as ritual. There is a long tradition identifying families and homes as sacred. In many cultures, the home is considered a holy place, in some ways comparable to a temple. It is instructive to compare Jonathan Smith’s (1987, 104) depiction of the “focusing power” of the temple to the potential focusing power of the family home as a sacred place:

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When one enters a temple, one enters marked-off space . . . in which, at least in principle, nothing is accidental; everything, at least potentially, demands attention. The temple serves as a focusing lens, establishing the possibility of significance by directing attention, by requiring the perception of difference. Within the temple, the ordinary (which to any outside eye or ear remains wholly ordinary) becomes significant, becomes “sacred” simply by being there. A ritual object or action becomes sacred by having attention focused on it in a highly marked way. From such a point of view, there is nothing that is inherently sacred or profane. These are not substantive categories, but rather situational ones. Sacrality is, above all, a category of emplacement. . . . Ritual is not an expression of or a response to “the Sacred”; rather, something or someone is made sacred by ritual.

The same kinds of argument apply to the dichotomy of aesthetic versus instrumental. Ritual was said to encompass behaviors that were not strictly utilitarian or rational, in which “the relationship between the means and the end was not ‘intrinsic’” (Leach 1968, 521, 525; Goody 1961, 159). Here, too, the dichotomy has proved less defensible than hoped. The instrumental and the aesthetic merge into one another, or may be combined in a single activity. Many family rituals seem more secular than sacred. In fact, they are a combination of both. Most real activities, as opposed to ideal concepts or mental images, are complex combinations of sacred and secular, ideal and pragmatic, aesthetic and instrumental. The world is more complex than our conceptualizations of it, and we should expect to find that combinations of sacred/profane and aesthetic/instrumental are common in family ritual. To summarize, it seems on several grounds that many family rituals incorporate aspects of the sacred. First, much family behavior is sacred by the definition of family members themselves, and sanctity is usually a matter of one’s attitude toward something rather than of the thing itself. Second, the mundane but essential tasks of family work have much in them that touches the sacred, in the sense that they maintain life and represent humanity’s links to past and future, and to the ecosystem. Third, the link between society and the sacred as understood by Durkheim and functionalist theorists who followed him, typically did not link individuals directly to “society,” but had an important role for mediating groups and institutions. Durkheim himself said that families and kinship groups helped to create and maintain that which society defined as sacred. The societies Durkheim described in Elementary Forms of Religious Life were clans, perhaps more appropriately viewed as extended families. When he (2001, 166) wrote that “religious force is but the collective and anonymous force of the clan,” he

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might as well have said that the religious force derives from the family. He previously had made this linkage explicit, saying that “totemism involves both religion and the family, since the clan is a family” (89). Durkheim chose to treat issues in terms of religion rather than family, perhaps because he assumed religion influenced families more than families influenced religion. He said, “In lower societies, the problems [family and religion] are closely connected. But both are so complex that they must be treated separately. Furthermore, primitive familial organization cannot be understood without a familiarity with primitive religious ideas, since these ideas govern as principles for family organization” (2001, 89). In Elementary Forms Durkheim treated religion as a mediating institution that defined and enacted patterns of relating to the sacred. However, he did not ascribe that function only to religion, but rather allowed that other institutions might also play a sanctifying and mediating role. Morality consisted of appropriate patterns of relating to the sacred, and it grew out of rituals of sacrifice and consecration, many of them family rituals. “[N]ow, as in the past,” he wrote, “we observe society constantly creating new sacred things.” This awareness of the existence of transcendent powers or beings— Durkheim’s “religious force”—emerged from family life. It was the clan, the family, that “can awaken in its members the idea that there are forces outside them that both dominate and sustain them—in short, religious forces” (Durkheim 2001, 160–61). Durkheim saw the modern family continuing to play a central role in the transmission of moral principles. It was “an important centre of morality, a basis for moral education, a centre of moral security and a source of attachment and regulation for the individual” (Lukes 1972, 185). Durkheim emphasized the importance of the family in the moral education of its members and as a refuge and source of altruistic love. Some family functions were seen as partaking of or sustaining the sacred, and he explicitly referred to family work as a source of moral responsibility: [Family] is . . . the moral environment where his inclinations are disciplined and where his aspirations towards the ideal are born, begin to expand and continue to be maintained. In presenting him with domestic duties and affections . . . which . . . are obligatory like moral imperatives; in showing him the continuous operation of . . . an altruism dictated as much by necessity as by instinct; in offering husband and wife the most propitious opportunity for the most intimate physical and moral union which is also the most permanent; . . . in providing a place of refreshment where effort may be relaxed and the will reinvigorated; in giving this will and effort . . . an end going beyond egoistic

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and momentary enjoyments; in forming, finally, a refuge where the wounds of life may find their consolation and errors their pardon, the family is a source of morality, energy and kindness, a school of duty, love and work—in a word, a school of life which cannot lose its role. (Lukes 1972, 185–86, citing Davy 1925)

Note especially Durkheim’s reference here to the importance of domestic duties and work and their relation to love, altruism, and morality.4 Ritual and Family Work “To ritualize,” says Driver (1991), “is to make (or utilize) a pathway through what would otherwise be uncharted territory,” and as acts of ritualization become more familiar, “it comes to seem less like a pathway and more like a shelter.” Many ritualizations are not perceived as ritual, for while “they both guide and shelter the passing of generations,” some are “so much a part of everyday life that they pass largely unnoticed, thought of simply as normal behavior” (1991, 16–17). Driver’s statement can be generalized to the activities of family work, the acts of everyday, normal behavior that guide, enclose, protect, ease, and shelter us, that bind us across generations, and yet “pass largely unnoticed.” There is much to be learned about the nature and importance of family work by asking whether, and how, it qualifies as ritual, and if the critical societal functions of domestic ritual will continue to be served as much of traditional family work is displaced or eliminated. Ritualization, Bell (1992, 90) explains, is usefully understood as a process whereby some actions are differentiated from the day-to-day context of ordinary acts, and highlighted or distinguished from that context. Since ritualization is the process that differentiates, it follows that it is the process that “creates” the sacred and the profane. The nature of the process varies by context and culture. Thus we must look to the specific family processes, the embodied performances, to understand the variations of sacred, profane, and their intermixture, and to mark those activities set apart by ritualizing. In looking for meaning in family work, we may anchor our continuum of transcendence (Grimes’s quality number thirteen) at one end in repetitious acts that have little meaning apart from their objectives in entropic work. At the other end of the continuum are family tasks that carry significance far beyond their apparent utilitarian objectives. These are processes valued in themselves, beyond whatever “product” or outcome is ostensibly their purpose. These tasks of maintenance and caring are oriented to a “beyond” and invested with metaphysical significance.

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There are more such sacred family activities than might be expected, partly because investigators have tended to label many of the sacred ceremonies linking families to the wider religious institutions as religious rather than family events. Some of these are life-cycle rituals, ceremonies where representatives of religious institutions participate with family members, ceremonies both familial and religious. Thus christenings, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, extreme unction and other blessings on the sick, marriages, and funerals are “passages” in which family members are guided, accepted, or served by agents of organized religion, but these rituals are also family activities. They serve as markers in group life, points of orientation anticipated and remembered that identify beginnings, endings, achievements, and losses. Families and extended kindred gather for these ceremonies and the sociality that accompanies them, thereby providing both family meaning and family context to the “religious” rite. Many family rituals situate home and family in relation to ultimate meanings and the wider cosmos. From his review of the history of world religions, Mircea Eliade (1959, 177, 179, 183) concluded that the “cosmos” one inhabits, be it physical body, house, tribal territory, or the world, “communicates above with a different plane that is transcendent to it.” The house, symbolizing both the human body and mankind’s earthly home, is an important element in ritual, and “ordinary life and the ‘little world’ that it implies—the house with its utensils, the daily routine with its acts and gestures, and so on—can be valorized on the religious and metaphysical plane. It is his familiar everyday life that is transfigured in the experience of religious man; he finds a cipher everywhere. Even the most habitual gesture can signify a spiritual act.” An ethnography of the Ila, one of the African Bantu tribes, provides an example: [T]he rituals surrounding the Ila home, marriage, and intitiation restore people to themselves, by locating them in the ultimate enduring realities. . . . This remains true when we turn from the Ila home to the village and regional levels of Ila experience. Symbolisms of the home are in fact repeated on a wider scale, making the land itself a larger home for the Ila. The resonances echo throughout Ila life. (Zuesse 1979, 86)

Ritual performance is communicative, conveying tacit learning along with cognitive knowledge. It is wordless practice as well as verbal instruction, holistic and at the same time specific. Rituals contain values and mentalities as well as actions, and convey more than is apparent to the participants.

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Investigators may recognize ritualized practice in statements by informants that a sequence of actions is “our way”of doing things, or “the way” a thing is done.5 Any activity may be invested with value and embodied in ritual. Activities directly linked to maintaining life—obtaining food, clothing, warmth, and shelter—are especially apt to be infused with sacred power. Similarly, activities associated with birth and death, and with the capacity to live normally and well, or to cope with conflict, illness, handicaps, or natural forces, tend to acquire transcendent significance. Historically, much of family skill, lore, and meaning was transmitted or underscored in family ritual. Through family and domestic ritual were handed down the embodied practices that conveyed the knowledge about life, skills and associated cultural meanings, and the priorities accumulated in preceding generations. Ritual conveyed culture, much of it embedded in rituals of family work. To judge from the literature, family rituals have fallen on hard times. In many families they are few and weak, hence the perceived clinical need to create new ones (Brin 2004; Doherty 1997; Imber-Black, 2002; Imber-Black, Roberts, and Whiting 1988). Among the factors that have attenuated rituals of family work are technological innovations that effectively end certain practices, or that render obsolete traditional ways of doing things. It seems that the arsenal of rituals available to families has shrunk, partly because many of them have been outmoded by changed lifestyles, or made irrelevant by a widespread dislocation or defunctionalization of family whereby activities formerly located within the family are now the province of outside institutions. Wendell Berry’s essay, “Men and Women in Search of Common Ground,” points to the hollowness of families in which no one serves anyone else, and everyone devotes as little time as possible to family work. In this contemporary ideal, home is a place where “the married couple practice as few as possible of the disciplines of household or homestead.” Their domestic labor consists principally of buying things, putting things away, and throwing things away, but it is understood that it is “best” to have even those jobs done by an “inferior” person, and the ultimate industrial ideal is a “home” in which everything would be done by pushing buttons. In such a “home,” a married couple are mates, sexually, legally, and socially, but they are not helpmates; they do nothing useful either together or for each other. According to the ideal, work should be done away from home. When such spouses say to each other, “I will love you forever,” the meaning of their words

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is seriously impaired by their circumstances; they are speaking in the presence of so little that they have done and made. (Berry 1987, 119)

Berry’s solution to the empty family described above, a family recognizable as a version of Doherty’s (1997) “entropic family,” is the performance of rites of family work. Only then, he argues, can the word “love” have meaning, “only in such ways can love become flesh and do its worldly work.” He reminds us that [O]ur marriages, kinships, friendships, neighborhoods, and all our forms and acts of homemaking are the rites by which we solemnize and enact our union with the universe. . . . We know that, when they need us, we must go and offer ourselves, body and mind, as we are. . . . It is only in these trying circumstances that human love is given its chance to have meaning, for it is only in these circumstances that it can be borne out in deeds through time.” (Berry 1987, 118, 122)

Jeanette Batz (1996, 19) makes the connection between family work and religious ritual direct and explicit: I think chores can be a form of prayer. I also think, after reading the heaviest tomes in the divinity library, that elaborate sets of chores—spring cleaning, for example—can be a form of ritual. We’re used to thinking of ritual as a stiffly ceremonial event at which one sits, stands and kneels with docility, hoping to please the supernatural. But the strongest rituals reveal the sacredness of the ordinary, using particular actions in particular ways to extract its deeper meanings.

Among the most cited treatments of family work as ritual is Kathryn Rabuzzi’s (1982) chapter “Housework as Ritual Enactment.” Rabuzzi contends that much of women’s work, denigrated and neglected in modern society, deserves to be elevated to the status of cultic ritual. The ritual enactment of housework, she suggests, makes the woman an artist whose performance reinforces her bond to her home and even adds an element of sanctity. There is an aesthetic component to housework that deepens and intensifies her tasks, whereby she “may actually be enacting her own psychic environment” and externalizing “her inner needs for order.” Beyond this individual benefit—one that some definitions of ritual would exclude because it is individual rather than social—is the connecting of the one who performs the task to the one who taught her how to do it: “To do a task precisely as you observed or were taught by your mother or grandmother is to experience a portion of what they each once did. Two kinds of knowledge

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are thus imparted: knowledge of what it is to be a housewife and knowledge of what it was to have been Grandma X in her homemaking aspect” (102). The performance also links the woman to the people served by her task, but Rabuzzi does not explore this connection. In this reference to generational aspects of the rituals of housework, Rabuzzi highlights two of the six functions of ritual, communication (socialization, or cultural education through performance) and connection (the linking of generations). But these are not the only aspects of family work illuminated by ritual theory. We will proceed in the direction Rabuzzi has pointed, asking what else the rich conceptual frameworks of ritual studies may reveal as they are focused on work in the home.

Processes of Ritual Analysis Our application of ritual theory to family work is distinctive in its emphasis on the homely, day-to-day activities of housework, family maintenance, child socialization, and child care, in contrast to the usual focus on family rituals associated with holidays and festivals, formal gatherings, leisure, and recreation. The inclusion of child care is especially important because that, more than housework, has been the work that binds women to the home. One way to illustrate how the framework of ritualism can be fruitfully applied to family settings is to point to family-relevant elements that appear in definitions of ritual and descriptions of what it does. Table 7.3 presents a set of such statements. The “family-familiar” aspects of these statements, elements that have a direct and obvious relation to family work as well as to other types of family behavior, are readily recognized. Without undue repetition of material in the table, note the emphasis on the “carefully rehearsed motions through which we regularly go” that shape our lives, and that multipurpose routines, some of which we make up as we go along, communicate, entertain us, and at the same time invoke the beyond. Note that ritual “brings into being . . . [what] otherwise would not be” and is the way “a living impulse works itself out.” Ritual communicates between generations; it teaches us our limits and engages our senses, our family and neighbors, our homes and our tools. At the same time it helps to create our deepest underlying realities. It is “a mode of paying attention” that begins in the family network and spirals outward. It is “formative of the ways we bide our time,” “includes processes that fall below the threshold of social recognition as rites,” yet it shapes our everyday interaction. Finally, it “has to do with the lives, sufferings, and deaths of particular, usually well-loved individuals.”

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Table 7.3. Phrases Familiar and Resonant: Descriptions of Ritual Applicable to Family Work (Family Nurturance and Maintenance, Child Care, and Socialization) Grimes 1995, 71 “Ritual is formative of the ways we bide our time. In ritualizing, we concentrate, and thereby consecrate, time. . . . We must not forget . . . that ritually crucial times involve both: once-in-a-life times and here-we-go-again times.” Northup 1995, 113 (summarizing K. Brown 1991) “There, in the middle to Brooklyn, she fosters rituals rooted in ancient practice. She is a builder of altars and hostess to other worshippers. Her ritual tasks as a priestess are also those of women’s domesticity: cooking, healing, singing, nurturing, ‘helping.’ The rites she conducts, while open to people of both sexes, are grounded in a network of ritualizing women that begins with the mother-daughter relationship and spirals outward to include other women relatives and friends.” Parkin 1992, 13–14 (discussing Gerholm 1988) “[R]itual is anything but an edifice . . . it is an arena of contradictory and contestable perspectives—participants having their own reasons, viewpoints, and motives and in fact is made up as it goes along. . . . Such jumbled-up ritual is a common feature of the modern world . . . . Rituals, however they are defined, are not just expressive of abstract ideals but do things, have effects on the world, and are work that is carried out.” Sered 1992, 32 “[T]he domestic religious realm [can be seen] . . . as the arena in which the ultimate concerns of life, suffering, and death are personalized–domestic religion has to do with the lives, sufferings, and deaths of particular, usually well-loved, individuals. This conception of domestic religion is useful in that it allows for the possibility that the same symbol or ritual may, on different occasions, or on one occasion but for different people, be both domestic and nondomestic. . . . Domesticity, then, is not an inherent characteristic of any particular ritual, place, or event—it is a human interpretation of that ritual, place, or event.” Driver 1991, 79 (quoting Delattre 1978, 282) “[L]ook at ritual as a kind of performance . . . human lives are shaped not only, not even principally, by the ideas we have in our minds, but even more by the actions we perform with our bodies . . . ‘the carefully rehearsed motions through which we regularly go.’” Driver 1991, 98–99 “[R]itual . . . [is] work done playfully. Wherever the spirit of play enters it, work starts to become ritualized. It develops routines that are multipurpose, serving to

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communicate, to entertain, and to invoke something or someone not otherwise present in the labor itself.” Grimes 1990, 10 “[I]magining a process whereby a rite is formed out of processes less formed or formal helps us see the connections between ordinary life and ritual life. . . . Ritualization includes processes that fall below the threshold of social recognition as rites. Like social drama, ritualization is deeply embedded in ordinary human interaction. Erving Goffman refers to the stylized routines of everyday life as ‘interaction ritual.’” J. Smith 1987, 103 “Ritual is, first and foremost, a mode of paying attention. It is a process for marking interest.” McLaren 1986, 263 (discussing Delattre 1979, 38) “[R]itual rhythms (or motions through which individuals commonly engage the world) are paradigmatic of how human beings construct reality and develop their moral attributes. . . . a ritual brings into being something which otherwise would not be. . . . A ritual does not express; rather, a ritual articulates . . . bringing about forms and joints and building up an organized product, with interconnected members, where beforehand there was only the potentiality for it. Articulation is the process by which a living impulse works itself out.” Zuesse 1979, 239–40 “Ritual immerses us in process and Becoming, forces us back into the concrete, and makes us recognize our body. . . . [It] is not only that it announces our limits and humbles us by showing us our bodies, but also that it indicates that our limits and bodies are sanctified participants in a larger marvelous whole, a divine order. Just because ritual does this to us on the bodily level, it can be nothing else than concrete and specific, engaging our particular sensory world, our family and neighbors, our house and plowing instruments. . . . Ritual makes use of activities that are deeply familiar and intimate, which when engaged in involve the body very strongly and emotionally, or which have perhaps been done so often that they have taken on a habitual and automatic nature. These actions have thus become part of the deepest and most certain underlying reality of the experiential world. They are deeply ‘known.’” El Guindi 1977, 21 “Ritual seems to say the same thing over and over, repeat the same message in many ways and through different channels. . . . [It] contains information directly related to the social life of a people. . . . Ritual is one way in which members of a culture encode and communicate relevant, cultural information through generations.”

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Grimes (1995, 24–39) devotes a provocative chapter to “mapping ritual,” in which he illustrates the kinds of questions a consideration of action as ritual can generate. His six categories for mapping ritual are time, space, objects, sound and language, identity, and action. We have extended his list and organized it differently, producing the eleven-category outline below. Its logic is as follows: Rituals are performances, enactments located or positioned somehow. They occur in space and time, involving both actors and materials whose existence and characteristics are apprehended by the senses. Ritual action is performance or movement involving people, position, materials, and perception. To construct a systematic map of ritual action one must apprehend and describe each of these categories. Our version looks like this: A Model for Mapping Ritual Action I. People: The animated life involved in the work of ritual 1. Actors—agents, performers, observers, audience II. Positions: The location of the action, its context and coordinates 2. Space—location of the action in physical or other spatial contexts 3. Time—location of the audience in real or symbolic time III. Materials: The physical and social structures associated with locations in space and time 4. Objects—elements, surfaces, artifacts, and constructions that support, frame, facilitate, or constitute the action IV. Perceptions: The sensory impressions and messages that convey the existence and selected characteristics of ritual action 5. Sights, images, appearances—what the action looks like 6. Sounds and language—what the action sounds like 7. Textures, tactile impressions—what the action feels like, touch, tangibility 8. Smells, olfactory impressions—what the action smells like, odors, aromas, scents 9. Tastes, gustatory impressions—what the action tastes like, flavors 10. Kinesthetic impressions—sensations of position, movement, tension, and balance 11. Intuitions, feelings—“sixth-sense” impressions of transcendent being or movement The extension of Grimes’s six categories into the above eleven is mainly due to the specification of types of perception. No description is ever com-

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plete, but the reminder to pay attention to touches, tastes, smells, and intuitions in addition to what is seen, heard, and experienced kinesthetically will help capture some of the more memorable aspects of family ritual. Indeed, many of the perceptions associated with family work are so powerful as to be clichés, such as the smell of baked bread, the touch of mother’s hand, the feel of clean sheets, or the taste and texture of newly picked fruit. We have considered definitions of ritual, presented some typologies, and listed procedural alternatives for mapping ritual and interpreting results. These efforts to summarize portions of the literature yield several “paradigms of discovery,” including definitions that help us identify what we are looking for, procedural alternatives that stimulate fruitful research questions, possible organizing frameworks, and issues of interpretation. We turn now to illustrative applications of these paradigms in cases drawn from biography and ethnography.

Rituals of Family Work: Applications Food and Cooking We begin with a sharp criticism of Anglo culture by John (Fire) Lame Deer, a Sioux medicine man. Lame Deer contrasts the Sioux appreciation of the sanctity of food, and the need for associated ritual, with a growing tendency in the wider culture to minimize ritual and settle for the quickest, most efficient mode of nourishment: Old Uncle . . . used to tell me, “There’s more to food than just passing through your body. There are spirits in the food, watching over it. If you are stingy, that spirit will go away thinking ‘that bastard is so tight, I’ll leave.’ But if you share your food with others, this good spirit will always stay around.” I was brought up to regard food as something sacred. I can foresee a day when all you have to give us are capsules with some chemicals and vitamins instead of food, with the missionaries telling us to fold our hands over a few tablets on our plates, saying, “Heavenly Father, bless our daily pill.” I’m glad I won’t be around to see it. (Lame Deer and Erdoes 1972, 36)

The aspect of family work best represented in the literature on family ritual is the family meal (DeVault 1991; Beoku-Betts 1995; Larson, Branscomb, and Wiley 2006).6 The focus of attention is usually the communication and association that accompany eating together, and not the preparation, serving, or cleaning up after the meal. There is some recognition that special days may require special effort. Thus Doherty (1997) advises guests to help

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the host with cleanup after Thanksgiving dinner, and Fiese (1992) includes “baking particular ethnic food” associated with a cultural tradition as a possible family ritual. Doherty (1997, 27) says that the regular family meal is “the best place to begin the process of becoming more intentional as a family,” and sets down fourteen questions about mealtimes aimed at helping families assess and improve their family rituals. Only two of the questions bear on the task performance necessary for the meal to occur. They are, “Who does the meal planning?” and “Who prepares the meal and sets the table?” A final question has to do with an end-of-meal ritual, but refers to how the meal as a social event is brought to a close rather than the processes of cleaning up. His remaining questions have to do with the environment of the meal as conducive to connection and conversation, when the meal is served, how family members are called to the table, who is present and how they are seated, the kinds of food served, possible distractions and interruptions, conversation topics and participation in conversation, table manners and food preferences (28–31). Conceptualizing mealtimes as rituals of family work changes the focus to include more attention to preparation and follow-up, as may be seen in the following accounts, one from the introduction to the second edition of a vegetarian cookbook that in its first edition sold almost a million copies, and the other from a fictionalized autobiography of a black writer who grew up in Philadelphia in the 1960s. Neither of these accounts is “thick” description, yet both have something to teach us about the complexity of family ritual. They reveal it as multi-layered, juxtaposing multiple activities within a narrow time frame; it is social as opposed to solitary and therefore involves multiple perspectives and perceptions; and it joins a meaning system to bodily activity such that spiritual, intellectual, and physical reality are merged in the experience. Carol Flinders’s (1986) introduction to The New Laurel’s Kitchen: A Handbook for Vegetarian Cookery & Nutrition combines childhood memories with responses to the first edition of her book from readers “valiantly struggling against junk food and junk living.” She remembers the rituals of life at her grandparents’ farm, “a place of unceasing activity: of planting and plucking, of pickling and freezing, of jam boiling down on the stove while a cheesecloth bag full of curds hung from the kitchen faucet to drain. . . . Over all of this my father’s mother presided, Keeper of the Keys without parallel.” Flinders describes the patterned ritual of Sunday dinner, when “the dining room table was leafed out to its full length and all the sons and daughters and grandchildren who could make it were fitted around, and every square inch of lace tablecloth was covered: platters high-piled with Parker house

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rolls, bowls of coleslaw and green beans, cut-glass dishes of jelly and jam and more. . . . She aimed to please.” Now, Flinders writes, she understands “what went into building that whole small universe . . . I see, for instance, the real function of those ritual Sunday suppers: the effect of ‘facing off’ again and again, recognizing ourselves to be part of a clan, and feeling some pride in that; knowing that the bonds that held you together one-to-one were also part of that larger structure, so you didn’t take them lightly” (32–33). What to her was the function of those Sunday rituals, and of the other rituals of work associated with family life on that farm? Flinders identifies it as “that feeling of stepping into a charmed circle, where so many small things whispered that you were deeply and unqualifiedly valued: that we did take for granted until much later, when life had taught us how rare such a situation really is.” She acknowledges the hard work required to carry on such rituals, but remembers that everyone worked hard then, not only her grandmother. Flinders says she might be able to dismiss it, or vaguely attribute it to “love,” but she knows that that explanation is insufficient. Love is only part of the answer. “We all ‘love,’ after all. I think there was something more, and naming it comes as something of a shock in our supposedly liberated world: my grandmother knew her worth. She knew the value of everything she did there in the house and around it—knew that it was endlessly significant” (1986, 33–35). Flinders’s essay is useful beyond her account of identity and family mealtimes because she looks into the meanings of food preparation (1) as experienced by her grandmother, whose effort was “endlessly significant”; (2) for herself and others in the charmed circle where participation in these rituals convinced them they were “deeply and unqualifiedly valued”; and (3) for newcomers to such rituals who experienced awe and amazement at the power and personal significance in rituals of food preparation. She quotes a friend’s account of her discovery that preparing food can be a transcendent experience. The friend said: “‘You know, partly I think it’s the food itself. If you watch, so much beauty passes through your hands—of form, and color, and texture. And energy too.’ Abruptly her hands flew up into the air as if an electric current were passing between them. ‘Each grain of rice, each leaf of kale, charged with life and the power to nourish. It’s heady, feeling yourself a kind of conduit for the life force!’” (30). For Flinders, food preparation should occur in “set apart” time and space. The necessary consecration of time for food preparation sometimes follows a conscious decision “to live a different kind of life. . . . something stops you and turns your attention inward—puts you in touch with your deepest beliefs and desires, so that for a time, the contrary and conventional messages from

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outside can’t penetrate.” She quotes co-author Laurel Robertson: “We all have important other things we want to work on. When you come into the kitchen, the thing to remember is that you’re going to be there for a certain time. Drop everything else and concentrate on doing the very best you can” (1986, 26–27). Flinders sees a transforming power in kitchen ritual, such that it may create sacred space: Long before institutionalized religions came along—and temples, and churches—there was an unquestioned recognition that what goes on in the kitchen is holy. Cooking involves an enormously rich coming-together of the fruits of the earth with the inventive genius of the human being. So many mysterious transformations are involved—small miracles like the churning of butter from cream, or the fermentation of bread dough. In times past there was no question but that higher powers were at work in such goings-on, and a feeling of reverence sprang up in response. . . . [T]he real point is not so much to find the holy places as to make them. Do we not hallow places by our very commitment to them? When we turn our home into a place that nourishes and heals and contents, we are meeting directly all the hungers that a consumer society exacerbates but never satisfies. (30)

Compare the characteristics of ritual with this description. Here is true ritual: repetitive, patterned activity, the patterns not entirely encoded by the actors but derived from those who have gone before, activity only partially oriented to the pragmatic outcome but also implicating symbolic and transcendent meanings. Here also we have sacred space and time, mind, body, and senses combined in enactments aimed at nourishment and healing. Assessing the fit of Grimes’s soft definition of ritual we can identify at least eleven of the fifteen qualities in the descriptions above (performed, repetitive, collective, patterned, traditional, meaningful, condensed, symbolic, transcendent, adaptive, and conscious). Also present in Flinders’s account are all of our six main functions of ritual (Table 7.2): the creation of meaning, communication, embodiment, organization, transformation, and connection. Consider a second illustration in which the transcendent aspects of preparing and serving food are less explicit. Here is Andrea Lee’s (1991) description of her mother’s kitchen and the remarkable rituals of transformation that happened there. At home Mama was a housekeeper in the grand old style that disdains convenience, worships thrift, and condones extravagance only in the form of massive Sunday dinners, which, like acts of God, leave family members stunned and reeling. Her kitchen, a long, dark, inconvenient room joined to a crooked

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pantry, was entirely unlike the cheerful kitchens I saw on television. . . . This kitchen had more the feeling of a workshop, a laboratory in which the imperfect riches of nature were investigated and finally transformed into something near sublimity. The sink and stove were cluttered with works in progress: hot plum jelly dripping in to a bowl through cheesecloth; chocolate syrup bubbling in a saucepan; string beans and ham bones hissing in the pressure cooker; cooling rice puddings flavored with almond and vanilla; cooked apples waiting to be forced through a sieve to make applesauce; in a vat, a brownish, aromatic mix for root beer. The instruments my mother used were a motley assemblage of blackened cast-iron pots, rusty-handled beaters, graters, strainers, and an array of mixing bowls that included the cheapest plastic variety as well as tall, archaic-looking stoneware tubs inherited from my grandmother, who had herself been a legendary cook. Mama guarded these ugly tools with jealous solicitude, suspicious of any new introductions, and she moved in her kitchen with the modest agility of a master craftsman. Like any genuine passion, her love of food embraced every aspect of the subject. She read cookbooks like novels . . . I learned from her a sort of culinary history of her side of the family. . . . Mama took most pleasure in the raw materials that became meals. She enjoyed the symmetry, the unalterable rules, and also the freaks and vagaries that nature brought to her kitchen. She showed me with equal pleasure the handsome shape of a fish backbone; the little green gallbladder in the middle of a chicken liver; and the double-yolked eggs, the triple cherries, the peculiar worm in a cob of corn. As she enjoyed most the follies, the bizarre twists of human nature and experience, so also she had a particular fondness for the odd organs and connective tissues that others disdained. (103–4)

Her mother’s kitchen is itself transformed, the ordinary space tinged with transcendence from meaningful, passionate process as the master alchemist changes the “imperfect riches of nature” into inviting, nourishing sublimity. Here too are “artifacts,” the implements of the transformation, some of them links to a previous generation. Mythic elements expressed in ritual are also explicit here, in the “symmetry, the unalterable rules,” and her mother’s deep suspicion of innovation. The transforming power of ritual is manifest in its contrast to the darkness and inconvenience of the space where the magic occurs, the ugliness of the tools, and even the “freaks and vagaries that nature brought to her kitchen,” vagaries transformed to delectability by mother’s artistry. Powerful sense perceptions permeate these rituals: The colorful images of dripping jelly, cooling pudding, bubbling chocolate syrup, hissing pressure cooker, and aromatic root beer—all call forth remembered sounds and smells and tastes.

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Cleaning, Maintenance, Child Care The rituals of family work do not divide neatly into categories, for activities are multi-functional and time is multi-tasked. Children are cared for and socialized while the housework is being done. A single, complex family activity may strengthen connection, communicate, order, embody, transform, and create meaning. The “paradigms of discovery” should sensitize us to function and processes of ritual we might otherwise overlook. Keeping them in mind, we examine two accounts of family ritual relevant to housework and family maintenance. One is a brief paragraph in which a Native American woman compares doing the laundry at a large boarding school to the greater functional complexity but lower efficiency of the family laundry. The other is a description, from the daughter’s point of view, of mother and daughter cleaning a trunk together. Ramona Bennett, a Puyallup Indian woman, comments on the costs to Indian children of growing up in a boarding school rather than in a family: In an institution you learn to wash sheets for three hundred people, but you don’t get a chance to know human beings, to see them laugh as well as cry. In a family unit, you see your parents tending babies and old ones, you see them sitting down and talking about making out a budget and solving family problems. It’s important to children of any age to see that their people can be productive. (Bennett 1995, 153)

Bennett’s statement highlights the difference between work rituals oriented to mass production, focused on maximizing productivity, and those of the home, which involve intimate knowledge of other human beings and the modeling of parents and grandparents. For Bennett, doing the washing in a family setting has the side benefit of association with family members who may laugh or cry during the activity, and whose access to the clean sheets is by right of family belonging rather than institutional enrollment. Note that it is the multi-functional nature of family work that is missed in the more efficient, large-scale operation. Jamaica Kincaid (1985) grew up on the island of Antigua during the 1950s. Here is her recollection of the ritual of cleaning the trunk, from her autobiographical novel Annie John. From time to time, my mother would fix on a certain place in our house and give it a good cleaning. If I was at home when she happened to do this, I was at her side, as usual. When she did this with the trunk, it was a tremendous pleasure, for after she had removed all the things from the trunk, and aired them out, and changed the camphor balls, and then refolded the things and

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put them back in their places in the trunk, as she held each thing in her hand she would tell me a story about myself. Sometimes I knew the story first hand, for I could remember the incident quite well, sometimes what she told me had happened when I was too young to know anything, and sometimes it happened before I was even born. Whichever way, I knew exactly what she would say, for I had heard it so many times before, but I never got tired of it. For instance, the flowers on the chemise, the first garment I wore after being born, were not put on correctly, and that is because when my mother was embroidering them I kicked so much that her hand was unsteady. My mother said that usually when I kicked around in her stomach and she told me to stop I would, but on that day I paid no attention at all. When she told me this story, she would smile at me and say, “You see, even then you were hard to manage.” It pleased me to think that, before she could see my face, my mother spoke to me in the same way she did now. On and on my mother would go. No small part of my life was so unimportant that she hadn’t made a note of it, and now she would tell it to me over and over again. I would sit next to her and she would show me the very dress I wore on the day I bit another child my age with whom I was playing. “Your biting phase,” she called it. Or the day she warned me not to play around the coal pot, because I liked to sing to myself and dance around the fire. Two seconds later, I fell into the hot coals, burning my elbows. My mother cried when she saw that it wasn’t serious, and now, as she told me about it, she would kiss the little black patches of scars on my elbows. As she told me the stories, I sometimes sat at her side, leaning against her, or I would crouch on my knees behind her back and lean over her shoulder. As I did this, I would occasionally sniff at her neck, or behind her ears, or at her hair. She smelled sometimes of lemons, sometimes of sage, sometimes of bay leaf. At times I would no longer hear what it was she was saying, I just liked to look at her mouth as it opened and closed over words, or as she laughed. How terrible it must be for all the people who had no one to love them so and no one whom they loved so, I thought. (21–23)

All six key functions of ritual appear in Kincaid’s recollections. There is the creation of meaning in the narrator’s sense of connection to her mother and the conviction that her mother loves her. There is also connection to the past, to herself at an earlier age but also to relatives and others who figure in the stories linked to the relics in the trunk, stories about events that stretch even to the period before she was born. To the narrator, the ritual of the trunk is more about reaffirming her connection to her mother than about sorting and cleaning. Still, socialization is going on, in the skills of trunk-cleaning and proper storage, and in the art of mothering. There is communication in the activities of sorting, expressing value for each relic, and in the storytelling, communication that conveys sentiment along with family history. There

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is transformation, a trunk to be cleaned and rearranged, and a daughter to be assured of mother love and reminded of a shared past. There is embodiment, motion, and meaning in the handling, seeing, and smelling of each item, and the hearing of the stories. Finally, there is the ordering, the formality of the process, the same stories in the same form such that the narrator knows exactly what her mother will say, the repetition of remembered events as triggered by the orderly process of removing and replacing each piece. Here we can illustrate only a fraction of the ways that ritual theory is applicable to family ritual and family work. Parkin’s (1992) conception of all ritual as movement—essentially, all rituals as rites of passage of some kind—strikes us as an idea worth exploring in its application to family work, and so does Turner’s description of ritual as “antistructure” that makes it possible for one to “stand aside,” “not only from one’s own social position but from all social positions and of formulating a potentially unlimited series of alternative social arrangements” (Turner 1969, 13–14). Sered’s (1992) conception of women as ritual experts and their sacralization of the profane through domestic ritual also seems rich with potential. One of the most essential arenas for further work has to do with the salience of family work, in the sense that it is critical to the maintenance of life. Joint participation in work that matters binds people together, and the more the work matters, the more meaningful participation is likely to be. If the spinoff of family functions to outside institutions ultimately removes virtually all the essential processes from the family, there may be no tasks left that matter enough to convey the ritualized skills and coded cultural information that formerly expressed a viable way of life. In the metaphor of “depth” of culture, it seems probable that low rates of joint participation in the meaningful performance of essential family work will produce shallow family culture. Having introduced some conceptual frames for interpreting family work as ritual, we return to the assertion that family ritual is the core of family life, and that the well-being of families is linked to the power of their rituals. Granted the validity of these statements for family ritual in general, our present burden is to justify singling out one category of family activity—family work—as a priority topic for future ritual studies. Studying family work from the perspective of ritual theory can be justified on a general or holistic level, and at a more specific, analytic level. We will treat these separately. Holistic Justifications There are at least four arguments for treating family work as ritual. First, interpreting family work as ritual legitimates the study of activities often overlooked as unimportant or unworthy of serious study. The analysis of ritual

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has a respected place in the scholarship of several disciplines. If family work merits designation as ritual, then it must be important enough to deserve study right along with other important rituals. The more typical position for family work is to serve as residual activity or background context against which “special” activities are highlighted. Treating it as ritual elevates it to the status of meaningful human activity deserving attention. We may label this first argument the “Cinderella justification.” Second, to pay attention to family work by making it the focus of ritual analysis responds to the priorities of the people who do the work. That is, to study family work is to accede to the “emic” or grounded priorities of the people. The people in this case are mostly women, and they “vote” priorities with their feet and hands, their minds and muscles. The world over, whatever else they may do, they maintain households, cook and clean, nurture and socialize children, and care for family members. To dignify their family work as ritual is to dignify their grassroots priorities and the meanings that motivate many of them to give their lives an hour or a day at a time, in the service of family and kindred. This second argument may be called “the justification of grounded theory.” Third, the interpretation of family work in ritual perspective seems a promising way to actualize several strains of philosophical and family theory having to do with the salience of the “small” and the “ordinary,” and with family as opposed to the other institutions of society. The theorists here range from Heidegger (Dreyfus 1981) through Schumacher (1973) and Morson (1988), all of whom postulate the overriding importance of the “small” and the prosaic. Efforts to describe and interpret family work as ritual should make possible some critical tests of “small is beautiful” propositions. We label this argument “the justification of prosaics.” Finally, family work is perhaps the most critical “place” or set of activities where technological change impacts families. From dishwashers and vacuums through wrinkle-free fabrics and microwave meals, families are under continual pressure to adopt new products and ways of doing things and to discard the old. The family’s position as the “battleground” where the capitalist consumer culture of a new millennium meets the traditional lifeways is nowhere more apparent than in family work. We are cautioned by social critics like Neil Postman (1993) of the dangers that follow the unplanned and unthinking adoption of new technologies. He urges that we evaluate carefully the personal and social consequences likely to follow the acceptance and use of any technological “advance.” Otherwise we may simply be carried along, ultimately arriving at places or conditions we never would have chosen, and having lost aspects of culture that made life meaningful, practices for which

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there are no substitutes. Casting family work as ritual and applying what is known about ritual change to change in family settings is a productive way to study technological and social change. This argument for viewing family work through the lens of ritual may be designated the “family work as contested arena” justification, or the “technology as Pied Piper” rationale. Analytical Justifications We offer two analytical justifications for applying ritual theory to family work. The first is the justification of efficiency: existing conceptual frameworks in ritual theory provide ready-made options that may be as applicable to the study of family work as to other kinds of ritual. The literature is full of typologies and frameworks, models of successful analytical practice and theorizing, options for reclassifying almost anything in terms already applied to exotic subcultures and almost begging to be applied creatively in crosscultural comparison.7 This is the “paradigms of discovery” justification. Interpreting family work as ritual also offers possible explanations for some of the puzzling findings about conflict and stress in families. We lack a label for this argument, but phrases like “suspicions disconfirmed”or the “justification of serendipity” might fit. Consider one example, the issue of feminine “gatekeeping,” whereby in apparent violation of rational and efficient practice, women seem to have difficulty delegating certain household tasks to men or even to children. Some women are reported to be so committed to having family tasks done “their way” that they, against logic, refuse to settle for lighter work loads for themselves by allowing others to perform these tasks according to standards of performance that are judged by the homemaker to be inferior to her own (Allen and Hawkins 1999). If the tasks are defined as ritual, and not simply as pragmatic problems to be solved, then a woman’s seemingly irrational attachment to certain process and performance standards becomes understandable. At issue is not simply task performance, but ritualizing, the doing of work that is laden with meaning, both explicit and tacit. Changing modes of performance and outcome changes the meaning of the activity, perhaps threatening embedded meanings or devaluing the ritual as a whole. Violations of ritual are more serious than violations of random or simply technical procedure. Reactions initially interpreted as a need to control or an unwillingness to compromise may turn out to be commitment to ritual at both the cognitive and the emotional level.

 The analysis of ritual in family work is also relevant to the frameworks of colonization and subordination, since the very tasks we are concerned with

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have been systematically denigrated, stigmatized, and, often, eliminated from homelife. To the degree that many of them continue, it represents a continuity of a former traditional order. Rabuzzi (1982) again is relevant here. She observes: Homemakers in general are the largest group in the post-industrial world still to connect back in this particular fashion to their forebears. . . . [E]xcept for those who are farmers or those who apprentice in skilled trades, even individuals who do pursue a parental career are apt to be trained outside the family in professional or trade schools. . . . [H]omemakers and peasants, like tribespeople, appear to be beneficiaries of a mode of knowledge now essentially lost to most people in our post-industrial age. (102–3)

The trajectory of change represents the ongoing dialectic between rituals of hearth and home and those of industry and the media. Ironically, the dominant culture’s treatment of housewives and mothers parallels that of some of the tribal “others” who were the objects of much of the ethnography of the past century. The rituals of family work represent a cultural line of defense, an often subtle conservative force encoded by the parents of the past, and especially the mothers and grandmothers, which preserves, often beyond the dignity and awareness of the “colonial” powers, the essentials of local “native” society. Many of these rituals are resistant to change because they are based in tacit understanding and are communicated dynamically rather than merely verbally. Ritual is a mode of communication, and also a way of encoding knowledge. If the traditional ways are to survive, then ritual may represent a force of resistance or rebellion. Perhaps more importantly, it represents communication with the future, as children enact family rituals in the course of daily life. It seems likely that the conflict between the new rituals and the old will determine the nature of future society. It is the rituals of family work, in contrast to the pragmatic technological asepsis that would replace them, that encode family tradition, communicate family solidarity, and serve as vessels of cultural persistence and survival.

Notes 1. Reprinted with the permission of Simon and Schuster, Inc. from Kindling the Flame: Reflections on Ritual, Faith, and Family by Roberta Israeloff. Copyright © 1998 by Roberta Israeloff. 2. For another list of characteristics in the manner of Grimes’s “rituals are” set, see Snoek’s (2006, 10–12) description “How to create a definition of ‘rituals.’” His twenty-four characteristics, including many that appear on Grimes’s list, are divided

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into categories that fit the discrete Aristotelian definition as opposed to those that are “fuzzy sets,” either polythetic, fuzzy, or both. In a note Snoek cites twenty-four sources for definitions of ritual and six for lists of ritual characteristics. 3. A relevant typology, representing a methodological rather than a substantive approach to ritual, is Fred Clothey’s (1988, 156–69) set of “axes of concern.” These are issues to be treated in any comprehensive interpretation of ritual. The essential concerns are (1) issues of meaning, or the appropriate placement of the ritual in both (a) contemporary, and (b) historical context; (2) morphological considerations (i.e., the relationship of the ritual to the “universe of religion and human being,” including the “categories of coherence” of both the community and the observers); and (3) the relation between the interpreter and the interpreted, including issues of objectivity, subjectivity, and the limitations of interpretation. 4. Only recently have Durkheim’s contributions to the sociology of the family become available in English translation. See Mary Ann Lamanna’s (2002) Emile Durkheim on the Family. 5. This view of ritual performance as containing more than is apparent to the participants, and of the importance of embodied action in cultural enactment and transmission, is congruent with a recent interdisciplinary emphasis or “performative turn” in social theory. See, for example, Alexander (2004) and Burke (2005). 6. The Spring 2006 issue of New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development was devoted to articles on family mealtimes, including an overview of their forms and functions (Larson et al. 2006), a history of American family mealtime practices (Cinotto 2006), an assessment of the family meal as a site for childhood socialization (Ochs and Shohet 2006), mealtime talk as support for literacy development among children (Snow and Beals 2006), routine and ritual elements in mealtimes as context for children’s well-being and identity (Fiese, Foley, and Spagnola 2006), and the effects of family mealtimes on adolescent nutrition (Neumark-Sztainer 2006). 7. A useful resource for these comparisons is Kreinath, Snoek, and Stausberg’s (2007) annotated bibliography.

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Suffering is a troubling fact, but the first fact to notice is that suffering is the shadow side of sentience, felt experience, consciousness, pleasure, intention, all the excitement of subjectivity waking up inexplicably from mere objectivity. Rocks do not suffer, but the stuff of rocks has organized itself into animals who do experience pains and pleasures. We may wonder why we suffer, but it also is quite a wonder that we are able to suffer. Something stirs in the cold, mathematical beauty of physics, in the heated energies supplied by matter, and there is first an assembling of living objects and later of suffering subjects. Energy turns into pain. The world begins with mere causes; it rises to generate concern and care. . . . Sentience brings the capacity to move about deliberately in the world, and also to get hurt by it. But sentience has not evolved to permit mere observation of the world but rather to awaken some concern for protection of the kinesthetic core of an experiential life that can suffer. A neural animal can love something in its world and is free to seek it. . . . The appearance of sentience is the appearance of caring when the organism is united with or torn from its loves. The story is not merely of goings on but of going concerns, that is, of values that matter. The evolution of caring—and, inseparably from this, of suffering—is the evolution of the capacity to respect life—first one’s own life, and in due course the lives of others. (Rolston 2004, 290–91)

 We began this book talking of positive and negative space, on the way to wondering about the seeming neglect by family scholars of essential processes that loom large in the priorities of families themselves. Some of these

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processes—caring, love, respect, suffering—are named above in Rolston’s statement on the evolution of caring. It is striking how distant such concerns seem from much of the family literature, how many reports there are based in what Rolston calls “mere observation” for each piece reporting shared experience and the empathetic knowing associated with personally “being there.” It is not obvious what the ideal distribution by types of method should be, but somehow the study of families in the aggregate—the distanced analysis of survey data collected by someone else—has come to dominate family social science. Many family professionals, too many, we believe, now devote their careers to the analysis of prepackaged data, data from people and contexts they don’t know personally.1 Much of our published work has the cold objectivity of a family science seemingly as close to physics as we can make it, in contrast to the warmth inherent in knowing, participating with, and caring about the subjects of our inquiries. Even in family therapy distance between specialist and subject is often seen as the appropriate relation.

On Distance Among the achievements of modernist social organization, says Zygmunt Bauman (1991) is the social production of distance, and distance reduces personal involvement and moral responsibility. The “objectivity” and “value free” nature of mainstream social science are aspects of such distance. So is its bureaucratic organization, and the apparent tendency to minimize personal involvement with the subjects of one’s research. Modernity is characterized by “substituting rational criteria of action for all other,” or a “progress in ‘remote control,’ that is in extending the distance at which human action is able to bring effects” (Bauman 1991, 193). We family researchers have become masters at “remote control,” summarizing in equations and statistical tables characteristics of families that neither we nor anyone else in the chain of data collection and analysis have known well. It is true that there are economies of scale and efficiencies of analysis and presentation possible when one analyzes, say, data from thousands of respondents in a wave of the National Study of Families and Households. There are also costs. These respondents are known to us only by “remote control.” They are families whose dynamics none of the researchers understand, because no one has invested the weeks or months necessary to know them in the particular. They are “remote, barely visible targets of action” (Bauman 1991, 193) and perhaps their being “barely visible” (by design) contributes to our difficulties in explaining what is going on in these families. It may explain why our theo-

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retical predictions often receive so little support. And there are few stories from such data sets that we can share with our neighbors. To illustrate just how distanced we have become, some comparisons with ethnography, the signature method of anthropology, may be instructive. If we rank research methods along a continuum according to extent of participation with, or proximity to, the subjects of research, ethnography anchors the high proximity pole. Ethnography is the living “concrete encounter” between a researcher and members of another culture (Fabian 1983, 88), an encounter involving “communicative interaction with an Other” (McGrane 1989, 123). It is understood that effective communication and “translation” between culturally different persons is time and effort intensive. It involves “fieldwork.” Fieldwork usually means living with and living like those who are studied. In its broadest, most conventional sense, fieldwork demands the full-time involvement of a researcher over a lengthy period of time . . . and consists mostly of ongoing interaction with the human targets of study on their home ground. . . . Fieldwork asks the researcher, as far as possible, to share firsthand the environment, problems, background, language, rituals, and social relations of a more-or-less bounded and specified group of people. (Van Maanen 1988, 2–3)

Ethnographers use a variety of research techniques, but the necessary core is “engagement in the lives of those being studied over an extended period of time” (Davies 1999, 4–5). Doing ethnography “requires researchers to use their social selves as their primary research tool” (Hume and Mulcock 2004, xvii), and the practice of “reflexivity” allows explicit treatment of the researcher’s feelings as part of the resulting ethnographic narrative. Now consider two concepts relevant to intercultural contact borrowed from Mary Louise Pratt’s (1992) Imperial Eyes, a study of how writing by European travelers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (research reports by experts) shaped the public image of the “domestic subjects” of Euroimperialism. The motivations for writing European travel books were not unlike those justifying contemporary research. There was a “need to know” that included elements of scientific curiosity but also the priorities of ruling economic and political interests, an “obsessive need” by what Pratt calls “the metropolis,” “to present and re-present its peripheries and its others continually to itself” (4, 6). Pratt applies the term “contact zone” to “the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical

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disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect.” The term “contact” is intended to highlight “the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters.” The “contact” perspective stresses the dynamic, mutual interrelation of the European and the other, that it is a joint, constructed encounter. It “emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other. It treats the relations among colonizers and colonized, or travelers and ‘travelees,’ not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power” (7). Relevant to family research is the linguistic aspect of the contact zone. There speakers of different languages interact, and while they manage to communicate via more or less workable “pidgin” or “creole” languages, linguistically such “contact languages” are “chaotic, barbarous, lacking in structure” (6), and there is much miscommunication. A second concept is Pratt’s (1992, 7) “seeing man,” “an admittedly unfriendly label for the European male subject of European landscape discourse—he whose imperial eyes passively look out and possess,” and who at the same time represents the mentality of “anti-conquest,” a way for European observers “to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony.” The “seeing man” is both exploiter and innocent; he facilitates empire while denying complicity. He shares the fruit of exploitation while claiming no responsibility for it. The seeing man is an observer, not a participant. He possesses through observation and assertion, backed by the power of others. The tradition of fieldwork includes the notion that the all-important interpersonal encounters occur in a place, a “field,” that is apart from, other than, the researcher’s “home.” However, the interaction, not the place, is the main focus of interest, and “the anthropological tendency to argue and think through spatial metaphors has concealed the degree to which fieldwork has never been dependent on fixed places as such” (Coleman and Collins 2006, 11). In a sense, the ethnographic field is not “out there” but is emergent, constructed at the intersection of the “fields” of both researcher and subject. From the standpoint of the ethnographer, the shifting field is “the professional universe . . . constituted by her social origins, affiliations, dispositions, gender, and above all her position within a microcosm of fellow anthropologists” (Coleman and Collins 2006, 5; Bourdieu 2003). The contact zone is the intersection of that field with the field of the respondent, whatever its physical location. To summarize: The “close” end of the continuum of methodological distance between observer and respondent is occupied by ethnography, whose

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practitioners are possessed of “an empiricism extreme even for the social sciences.” They are committed to both subjectivity and objectivity as attitudes of research, to both the knowledge of observation and that of emotional involvement, to that which can be charted and counted, but also to the possible “legitimacy of ‘empathy,’ ‘insight,’ and the like as forms of cognition” (Geertz 1988, 9). The concrete encounter occurs in a contact zone identifiable more as the intersection of the “fields” of researcher and other than as locality. The encounter is characterized by reciprocal observation and influence, location at one or more “sites,” extended engagement, and to some degree, emotional involvement, empathy, personal responsibility and vulnerability, or “the messiness of relationship” (Hume and Mulcock 2004, xx). Distance reduces awareness, and so proximity and empathy are encouraged, not simply as ways to build rapport but as avenues to understanding. Sometimes truly “being there” means paying attention because one cares (Little 1995). It is now understood that objectivity and value-free approaches are not necessarily the best ways to observe and understand. Personal knowing depends on participation, on investment of self, on visceral and intuitive understanding. It includes truths we feel that we cannot fully trace to discrete observations, things tacitly known or holistically understood. If verstehen as a method means anything, it means holistic apprehension of input, seeing and feeling more than we know or record. Anthropologists have devoted a great deal of thought to the problem of professional distance versus “going native,” of knowing how much “being there” is too much. Sociologists have solved the problem by methods that minimize the duration of contact, often limiting it to a brief interview or telephone call. Contrast the close particularity of the ethnographer-subject relationship with the distance built into survey research. In survey research, the contact zone is abbreviated in duration and extent of presence. Typically the researcher is not “present” at all, being represented by the “hired hand,” an altogether different presence, or by an artifact (questionnaire). The researcher, in delegating the personal encounter, avoids the responsibility and vulnerability inherent in facing the other, but loses the opportunity for mutual empathy or intuitive understanding. The inevitable language disparities of the contact zone tend to be recognized only in the maximal misunderstanding situation of interviewer and subject having no common language. In telephone interviews the “contact” is even more limited, for the contact zone exists more briefly and contact is limited to hearing and speaking. The encounter is largely defined and controlled by the researcher, in his or her interest, to minimize the “messiness of relationship.” That is, it is as

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little like a “relationship” as the researcher can make it. Throughout, it is an exercise in power differentials, whether the respondent participates because paid (researcher as employer), because of the prestige of the sponsoring institution, or the successful “salesmanship” of the researcher (distanced, rarely in person) or the researcher’s hired help. In practice, the interpersonal skills and nuanced “knowing” of the investigator rarely matter much, because she is rarely present in the contact zone. Rather than the contact experience being an episode of open, effortful, complex communication, it has become something that the researcher hires out, a job for lower-status, partially trained, non- or semi-professionals. Provided that a basic rapport can be maintained, the brief interval within which the all-important data are constructed is treated as largely unproblematic. A few hours of instruction, and almost anyone can do it. A half-century ago, C. Wright Mills lamented the distance between researcher and respondent represented in the “fact-cluttered” interview surveys. “For is it not obvious that interviewers at best semi-skilled cannot obtain—in fact, no one regardless of skill can obtain—in a twenty-minute or even a day-long interview the kinds of depth materials which we know, from the most skilled and prolonged interviews, are there to be gotten?” And if the interviewers were not getting it, no one was, for “these fact-cluttered studies . . . contain very little or no direct observation by those who are in charge of them. The ‘empirical facts’ are facts collected by a bureaucratically guided set of usually semi-skilled individuals. It has been forgotten that social observation requires high skill and acute sensibility; that discovery often occurs precisely when an imaginative mind sets itself down in the middle of social realities” (Mills 1959, 70). The problem here is distance. The analyst looks for meaning in the numbers themselves, or in descriptive accounts by others. She rarely has the advantage of remembered experience with respondents “in the middle of social realities.” Thus in the distanced encounter, the researcher is reduced to “seeing man,” owning the data of observation, yet minimally responsible or vulnerable. Her “imperial eyes,” well-insulated from “the messiness of relationship,” view the data and possess the patterns found there. In some ways, such efforts by a subculture of trained specialists to know and control2 the families of a wider population, or families of subcultures other than their own, are comparable to the portrayals of ethnic others attending colonial conquest. How apt the comparison, how closely it parallels the organization and purposes of the explorations we call “family research,” each researcher may judge. But there is irony here. At least in our own personal experience, most family professionals did not choose the field because

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they wanted to become distanced data processors who “possessed” by oversight, but not by participation and feeling. Despite a growing reflexivity in the practice of anthropology and wide recognition that all data are constructed and reflect human aspects of the encounter (factors less likely to be noted in brief, well-distanced encounters), family researchers seem increasingly committed to very partial data in which the particularities of co-presence in the contact zone tend to be ignored. Most writing in the major family journals is objective, technical, and “cold.” The language is scientific, the analytical methods statistical, the reports seemingly addressed to a circle of peers who have mastered the jargon and prevailing modes of presentation. Except in clinical fields where some degree of “closeness” to clients is absolutely essential to professional practice, it seems to us that the reward systems in family scholarship are heavily skewed toward “objectivity,” reflecting the modernist virtues of non-involvement and distanced subject matter. It appears that we rarely leave our computers and “get involved” with real families in ways that show up in our publications. Or perhaps our editors are unwilling to risk the scientific status of their journals by publishing work that reveals warmth and closeness as opposed to detachment and styles of presentation largely unintelligible to non-specialists.

Context and Particularity In The Vulnerable Observer (1996, 5), Ruth Behar describes anthropology as a “form of witnessing,” “a mode of knowing that depends on the particular relationship formed by a particular anthropologist with a particular set of people in a particular time and place.” Because it involves particularity and relationships, often long-term ones, anthropologists are often “vulnerable.” To be vulnerable is to accept the human dimensions of the encounter, with the responsibility to the other inherent in the simple fact of proximity. “Being with others,” writes Bauman (1991, 182), “that most primary and irremovable attribute of human existence, means first and foremost responsibility.” In the name of science our disciplines create bureaucratic and procedural ways to reduce feelings of responsibility and objectify observation, but the recognition of responsibility that accompanies proximate, shared humanity, sometimes breaks through the professional facade. As when a photographer recording a natural disaster, surrounded by other journalists and observers, throws aside his camera and administers comfort, putting his arms around a dying woman (Behar 1996, 1).3 Families reflect their contexts. Each must be considered in its particularity, with respect to time, place, and subculture. Families are shaped by their

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connections to outside groups, networks and institutions, both past and present. The effort to understand another’s experience is an attempt to simulate, for purposes of understanding, that person’s social ties. “What participantobservation-grounded-knowledge (ethnology) necessarily strives for as its absolute goal and limit is simulated membership in the alien culture it is seeking to comprehend. It seeks to acquire full knowledge of membership without commitment to membership” (McGrane 1989, 125). With affiliation comes responsibility. To the degree that one’s methods simulate membership, yet allow or encourage the avoidance of responsibility, the observer is a “free rider,” accessing cultural benefits while minimizing personal costs associated with commitment. Behar (1996, 25–26) writes that “vulnerability isn’t for everyone. Nor should it be. Anthropology is wide-ranging enough to include many different ways of witnessing.” In the family sciences generally, it seems that close and particular research involving both cognition and emotion is for almost no one. As we have reviewed the various family literatures, we have been impressed at the substantial distance—a chasm, actually—between statistical “explanation” and “understanding” in the commonly understood sense of that term. Part of that difference is captured in the term “context.” Psychiatrist Robert Coles (1990, 342) describes his research with children as “contextual,” which means that it aims to learn from children as they go about their lives: in the home, the playground, the classroom, the Hebrew school or Sunday school. It is important, and revealing, for children to be asked questions, presented with morally suggestive (or ambiguous) scenarios, asked to respond in a range of ways to inquiries aimed at elucidating the structure of their thinking, its values and assumptions. It may also be helpful for some of us to spend months or even years with children, watch them and listen to them as they struggle with their ongoing lives, and learn from them as they casually chat with each other and as they answer questions they themselves put to one another.

There is need in the family sciences for more of the kind of understanding that is achieved by spending “months or even years” with the families we study, observing and participating “as they go about their lives.” This happens, to a degree, in some of the clinical research, and in anthropology. It is rare in the literature of the other family fields. Pressures for academic productivity, young scholars’ need for rapid publication, and the growing thicket of bureaucratic regulation surrounding new data collection mean that the analysis of existing data sets is a more efficient way to achieve status and

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tenure than is time-intensive participation in the ongoing lives of families other than one’s own. In some sciences, there is great respect for the context from which data are extracted. Archaeology, geology, and criminal science come to mind as examples. Investigators interpret the meaning of artifacts, samples, or evidence by close attention to the materials found nearby. Meaning exists in proximity, in imputed relationships, in stories constructed from the imaginative analysis of the particular in context. By contrast, much of the data from which the generalizations of family science derive are deliberately bereft of context. In the interest of statistical generalization, an individual respondent here, another there, are selected as units in a sample designed in the aggregate to represent some collectivity—a city, region, or nation—but which represents the living contexts of its elements superficially, if at all. That is, on the way to achieving a representative sample of individuals, we lose the micro-contexts—families, friendship groups, neighborhoods—which structure and give meaning to the individual lives. In the processes of sampling and data reduction, living complexity is minimized, abbreviated, and reduced to quantitative simplicity. Respondents are decontextualized, removed from their surrounding strata and systems, whose particularity may be collapsed into an indicator or two. They may be defined as “representing” their block, neighborhood, or kinship group, but in fact we know little about how representative they are, or about how their “representation” differs from that of others in their groups, because in the process of assembling the representative sample, we have removed them from the particularities of family, neighborhood, and kinship group. There is also the problem of language. Families are language communities, and ideally the researcher encounters each family in its own language. To interpret a culture or subculture different from one’s own involves reducing interpersonal distance, and common language is critical. This principle applies not only to national languages, but to the ethnic and intra-ethnic differences of education, occupation, social class, and even gender. Respondents from diverse backgrounds may understand standard survey questions differently from the experts who prepared the questions, and the extent of that potential misunderstanding is unknown and usually unmeasured. Here, again, there is no substitute for immersion in the particular. Long-term association with family members makes it possible to know their linguistic idiosyncracies, their ethnic and socioeconomic dialects, even their body language. Lacking such familiarity, the linguistic gap between researchers and their subjects is often sizable. The extent to which our data and findings

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are flawed because words and images did not mean the same thing to some respondents as others, is not known. We do know that linguistic distance is reduced as researchers and respondents associate over time. How does language misrepresent the understanding we seek? First, much is lost in the translation of the particular, with its components of the unsaid and unperceived, into the necessarily abstract, categorical response categories offered. Further, this “translation” may be especially problematic if an interviewer is busy entering responses to queries, shaping words into numbers, more oriented to categories in the coding process than to unmeasured dimensions of surrounding context accessible to the senses. There follows the “translation” from what the numbers may be thought to indicate into text, this time not in the family’s language, but in that of analysts and potential readers. Each stage—the language of the family, the transmuting of that language into numbers, and the translation of numbers into findings presented in the rarefied languages of science—involves losses and distortions of meaning. What the scientific report finally contains is much removed from what was said and felt in the family context. Berry (2000, 45) warns that, despite the supposed “objectivity” of scientific prose, “There is no reason whatever to assume that the languages of science are less limited than other languages. Perhaps we should wish that after the processes of reduction, scientists would return, not to the processes of synthesis and integration, but to the world of our creatureliness and affection, our joy and grief, that precedes and (so far) survives all of our processes.” Especially for researchers whose procedures did not include personal presence among the population and contexts from which their numerical data derive, a “return” to holistic and qualitative experience in those contexts, taking seriously Berry’s wishful suggestion, would help humanize our findings and offer opportunities for intuitive knowing to supplement statistical knowing.

Simplification and Reduction In pursuit of understanding, we reduce the number of things we must pay attention to. We simplify. Primo Levi, survivor of Auschwitz, answers our desire to “understand” his own and others’ experience with the comment that “What we commonly mean by ‘understand’ coincides with ‘simplify.’” Things are more complex than we can master, and without simplification “the world around us would be an infinite, undefined tangle that would defy our ability to orient ourselves and decide upon our actions” (Levi 1988, 36). We simplify by conforming experience to language. We reduce things to

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conceptual models, frequently resorting to interpretations involving the opposition between “we” and “they,” not recognizing the many “half tints and complexities” we have merged or overlooked. Simplification may be justified, Levi continues, “as long as it is recognized as such and not mistaken for reality” (37). The danger is that we forget how far removed our indicators and manageable models are from the actualities they presumably “indicate.” We forget that in seeking essences we have stripped away the particular. Our data are constructed, not merely observed. The models may be necessary, but they remain models. Brunner (1990) critiques what he calls the “cognitive revolution” in psychology. His concerns apply also to other social sciences. What happened, he says, is that the thrust of the cognitive revolution became “fractionated and technicalized.” Very early on . . . emphasis began shifting from “meaning” to “information,” from the construction of meaning to the processing of information. These are profoundly different matters. The key factor in the shift was the introduction of computation as the ruling metaphor and computability as a necessary criterion of a good theoretical model. (4, original emphasis)

What limits information processing is that it requires precise coding, “welldefined and arbitrary entries that can enter into specific relationships that are strictly governed by a program of elementary operations. Such a system cannot cope with vagueness, with polysemy, with metaphoric or connotative connections.” The processes that create and maintain meaning in ordinary life are “surprisingly remote from what is conventionally called ‘information processing’” (Brunner 1990, 5). Other social sciences, even those once largely nonquantitative such as social work and history,4 have reshaped themselves, or at least their published product, in accordance with the computational metaphor, thereby increasing the distance between researchers and the subjects they study. Numbers feed the system. What cannot be expressed numerically is by definition unimportant. Bruner (1990, 4) comments that the reduction of reality to numerical terms requires precoded information, and that “the system that does all of these things is blind with respect to whether what is stored is words from Shakespeare’s sonnets or numbers from a random number table.” In a similar vein, Peter Berger (2002) identifies one of the “severe deformations” that has befallen sociology as “methodological fetishism,” or “the dominance of methods over content.” Echoing Brunner’s concern about the “technicalization” of social science, Berger (2002, 28) agrees that statistical

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analysis is often useful, but that does not mean only that which can be quantified is worth studying. Moreover, the “worship of quantitative methods” limits the kinds of data people collect and their access to the complexities of life as lived. In order for data to be analyzed statistically, they must be produced by means of a standardized questionnaire. This means, inevitably, that people are asked to reply to a limited number of typically simple questions. Sometimes this works; sometimes it does not. Take the example of the sociology of religion. . . . Even such a seemingly simple question as “Do you believe in God?” will be interpreted by respondents in so many different ways that their replies are hard to analyze, let alone capable of helping a researcher construct something like, say, an index of orthodoxy. This does not mean that the intentions behind these replies could not be clarified; it only means that survey research is not a good way of doing so.

In The Culture We Deserve, Jacques Barzun contrasts the mentality of analysis, deriving from the success of reductionism in natural science, with the contrasting mentality of holistic knowing. In popular understanding, Barzun (1989, 11) writes, everybody’s mind is now shaped from the cradle to desire and to trust analysis exclusively. The best minds are analytic engines, ready to work on any material. . . . Specialization and analysis go together; they are the same process at different levels of any subject—you break up the whole domain, then you break down the smaller portions ad infinitum. The purpose of analysis is to show what little things big things are made of and how the little bits fit together to produce the whole.

This analytical way of knowing Pascal called the “geometrical bent.” But there is another road to knowledge, Pascal’s esprit de finesse, or in Barzun’s terms, “intuitive understanding.” It does not analyze, does not break things down into parts, but seizes upon the character of the whole altogether, by inspection. Since in this kind of survey there are no definable parts, there is nothing to count and there are no fixed principles to apply. The understanding derived from the experience is direct, and because it lacks definitions, principles, and numbers, this understanding is not readily conveyed to somebody else; it can only be suggested in words that offer analogies—by imagery. (Barzun 1989, 11–12)

Much about families resists the breaking into parts necessary for analysis. We can artificially separate characteristics, but if their operation in the family is

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relational and interdependent, they will be understood only in combination, as wholes, and in process. Families are dynamic and particular, and so are the vantage points, worldviews, accumulated experience, and interpretive systems observers bring to the contact zone. The data-collection encounters are themselves fluid, particular, partial, approximate, and constructed. To the degree that these encounters are translated into numbers, they acquire an almost mystical aura of certainty and accuracy of measurement. Numerical measurement is useful. It is also undeniably approximate, and often misleading in ways that one can know only if one has actually been there, attentive and sensitive, during the encounter.

Toward Family-Centered Science We have said that modernist inquiry tends to separate researchers from their “subjects,” differentiating and typically “elevating” the scientific outlook over that of the subjects. Postmodernist approaches, with their emphasis on connection, the relativity of grand narratives, and the legitimacy of diversity, tend to reduce distance between professionals and those they serve or study. Celebrations of this coming together, and of the occasional substitution of everyday language for the cold language of theory and expertise, show up across the various family specialties. Nurse-therapist Nancy Moules (2000, 236) praises the thrust toward connection in postmodernism, for when we moved from the top positioning of which modernity convinced us, we shifted to more humble levels of community, contribution, and connectedness. . . . As people, postmodern or not, we come to the therapy room . . . with our rich legacies of experiences and beliefs about the world. Postmodernism does not (and could not) ask us to relinquish these, but to acknowledge that the people we work with come with their own legacies, which are as rich, valid, and legitimate as our own.

She applauds (237) this “direct challenge to expert practice,” recognizing that expertise exists both within the family and the therapist, and that expertise is always relative. Also in social work there is movement in a humanizing direction, in contrast to the distancing practice implicit in the “dominant Western paradigms” whereby “social work has been an agent of colonization, especially in transferring inappropriate mainstream theory and practice models to work with indigenous groups” (Coates, Gray, and Hetherington 2006, 381). Postmodern thought in social work has raised the status of marginal

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and indigenous worldviews, but the essential relativism of postmodernism has not provided a sound political grounding for non-dominant views other than tolerance. An alternative “eco-spiritual perspective” emphasizes “interdependence, emergence, diversity and the feminist ethics of care with its relational concerns about the maintenance of interpersonal connections as well as the protection of human rights” (391). This alternative perspective upholds the legitimacy of the local view, and the healthy growth that may come from managing the tensions among different local views. It stresses the importance of “local contexts, indigenous knowledge, and traditional helping and healing practices” in place of the “colonial” models of mainstream Western social work. We stress that this is a matter of balance, for there is need for both “cold” and “warm” science, and all the gradations between. It seems appropriate to ask, what might a family-centered science look like? Some time ago we asked that question with reference to the field of home economics, now officially labeled “family and consumer sciences.” An analysis of statements by leading professionals in the Journal of Family and Consumer Sciences (Bahr and Bahr 1995) suggests that the direction of choice for that specialty is not toward family-centeredness in the sense of proximity or “warmth,” but toward increasing the “remote control” that is the hallmark of modernist science. Pronouncements in the journal emphasize the continuing role of empirical research as the authority base for family and consumer science experts. Ideally, it is said, FCS professionals “work to create a ripple effect across communities, across generations, through public policy, and ultimately via breakthroughs in knowledge and science that can be applied widely around the world” (Andrews 2003, 8). An endorsement of the methods of “critical theory” as part of the FCS outlook was interpreted to mean that now FCS professionals not only had the responsibility to teach technical knowledge, but also to take the lead in creating the moral standards of the future. No longer limited simply to individuals, families, and communities, the FCS professional using the “critical science” perspective could now focus on “developing a rationally and ethically justifiable ideal state (what ought to be)” (Vincenti and Smith 2004, 67; Jax 2000). While it may be affirmed that families have always been the essential and elementary first focus of family and consumer sciences, the nature of that focus—in the spirit of the metaphor, having achieved focus, what FCS would then do to, or with, the family under focus—was never a matter of consensus. The dominant official position has been that home economics, having achieved focus, would change the family. The implications of this modernist orientation were rarely admitted, nor was much attention given to the many

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other ways that expert “viewers” and more or less pliable “objects of focus” might interact and still protect the visions and values of both parties. The appropriate disciplinary adjustment, in our view, is an interactive, holistic approach that acknowledges the integrity of the “object” families, validating their “emic,” grounded view as no less legitimate than the professional visions and modernist traditions of the experts in contact. Telling of how he came to respect the children he wished to learn from, Robert Coles (1990) describes the preconceptions he, the trained clinician, brought to the encounter, and how those attitudes impeded understanding rather than helping him know the children. “So often our notions of what a child is able to understand are based on the capacity the child has displayed in a structured situation. If the child fails to respond to a researcher’s predetermined line of questioning, the researcher is likely to comment on a ‘developmental’ inadequacy” (23). The key terms here are “preconceptions,” “predetermined,” and “structured.” All favor the researcher, whose conceptions, determinations, and structure frame the respondent in line with his expectations and needs. Coles goes on to tell how “inadequate” respondents—Hopi children— eventually allowed him access to their worldviews and understandings, but not until he had known and worked with them for months, gained their trust, and had allowed the children to become his teachers. Early on it was necessary for him to abandon the condescending “noblesse oblige, if not outright self-delusion” of the expert scientist studying the humble “subject,” “waiting for those . . . poor children to ‘catch on,’ to begin to accommodate themselves to my interests” (24). What Coles says about his relationships to his young informants applies as well to adults and families as subjects of research: “Each child becomes an authority, and all the meetings become occasions for a teacher—the child—to offer, gradually, a lesson” (27). Coles’s relationships with the children he learns from are based on “prolonged encounters,” many visits over months and years. He explains that to know a child, even superficially, requires prolonged encounters. Of course, it is possible to get data quickly, through structured situations and predetermined questions. One can thereby create an illusion of knowing a child well, an illusion buttressed by the easily generated numerical indicators. But such data are only remotely connected to the child’s world. Their apparent precision is artificial and deceptive. Knowing a child in this way is very much like the way some anthropologists have known “alien cultures.” “Being there,” while essential, is not enough. The contact must be characterized by mutual knowing, by dialogue rather than monologue. Here McGrane (1989, 127) faults his own discipline, for being too attached to its own theories and

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worldviews, and rarely according sufficient status to those of their informants. “Anthropology never listened to the voices of ‘alien cultures,’ it never learned from them, rather it studied them; in fact studying them, making sense out of them, making a ‘science’ about them, has been the modern method of not listening, of avoiding listening, to them.” If we would truly understand, and avoid deceiving ourselves with our own monologic data construction, there is no substitute for the holistic knowing that comes from investing time, a great deal of it, in particular respondents and families. At the same time, a willingness to accept the validity of a contrasting, grounded point of view is critical. McGrane’s assessment of the trained incapacity of many anthropologists to honestly accept the viewpoint of the other as a legitimate view of reality applies to family scientists as well as anthropologists: The Other’s presence as the field and subject matter of anthropological discourse is grounded upon his theoretical absence as interlocutor, as dialogic colleague, as audience. . . . In order for modern anthropology to sustain itself, its monologue about alien cultures, those cultures must be kept in analytic silence. The moment that an alien culture is allowed to speak its language, the moment the anthropologist seriously plays with the possibility of the truth and authority of that alien culture, the monologue-based language of anthropology bursts. (127–28)

Families are marvelously complex, and they may be known, in part, by carefully collected numerical data derived from predetermined questions administered in structured situations. These data, however, are tainted by the researchers’ framing and conceptualizations. They are constructed by the professionals, according to their priorities and understanding. Along with these constructions of the scientists we need the constructions of the families, reflecting their worlds, subcultures, and outlooks. These are only available via long experience in the families’ worlds, just as professional outlooks reflect the researchers’ long experience in the subcultures of professional social science. Holistic reality is a matter of multiple perspectives and merging constructions. One side, even that of highly trained data constructors, is not enough. For some problems, easily obtained, superficial data may be sufficient. Brief encounters may suffice to enumerate a population and establish some of its basic demographic characteristics within acceptable margins of error. But even for such “obvious” characteristics, their role in family process is particular. Does a mother’s age in family A mean the same as it means in family B? How much can we generalize about each family from knowing that they both

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have two minor children? Or that both families, according to the mother, are Roman Catholic? The apparent “sameness” is likely superficial. Writing of doing fieldwork at “home,” Hume and Mulcock (2004, xxii) point out that the “certain degree of ‘sameness’” that may characterize a “home” situation often masks important differences. “Merely speaking the same language, having similar histories, and coming from the same socioeconomic group does not necessarily equate with sameness.” The sameness masks differences that will not be captured in the distanced, minimized survey encounter. We need both quantitative and qualitative studies, explorations of both the particular and the statistical interplay of the categorical. A proper balance, we think, would require many more studies grounded in the intensive, intuitive, personal involvement of the researchers, books like Margaret Trawick’s (1990) Notes on Love in a Tamil Family, Lillian Rubin’s (1996) The Transcendent Child, Gina Bria’s (1998) The Art of Family, or Robert Coles’s (1997) The Moral Intelligence of Children. Perhaps we are asking for more anthropological writing on families. A better solution would be more attention to ethnographic methods by family scientists generally. We family professionals, some clinicians excepted, tend not to be wellprepared for qualitative, ethnographic work. We are more comfortable “analyzing data,” distant physically and psychologically from our subjects, than living and observing “in the field.” For many of us, respondents exist simply as numbers. Being there, or having been there, no longer is an important part of our academic credentials. Others may see things differently, but from our niche it seems that the family sciences, in their effort to be scientific, have lost touch with their subjects. Our writings have become bloodless statistical exercises that reflect little involvement with the families whose characteristics are distilled into lines in our charts and columns in our tables. These are not families we know, families we have laughed and played and eaten and cried with. They are less than virtual families, because we do not know them in the particular. They are not families we love. Even in the clinical fields, much of theory and instruction in how scientific work is supposed to be done has encouraged distance and coldness. British psychotherapist David Bott (2001b, 112) contrasts the way family therapy was taught at the beginning of his career with the way it was practiced by leading clinicians he later observed at work. As things were taught, he writes, “much was made of ‘epistemology’ and trainees were enjoined to work within a radical ‘paradigm’ . . . which gave primacy to the system over the thoughts and feelings of individual family members.” In contrast, working with “leading exponents of the field,” he was impressed by “the warmth

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with which they approached families in distress, their concern for individual family members and, above all, the optimism they conveyed about the possibility of positive change.” But there was no proper place for that “warmth” in the scientistic outlook of the day. What appeared as warmth was only justified if it was instrumental, “a strategic method to overcome resistance,” a way to build rapport (112). Bott opposes the tendencies in therapy to bid for higher status by increasing the distance between professionals and clients. He sees such distancing as an effort to claim “the glamour of science” by discourse in “high sounding theory while covering up the confusion of complicated human interactions by recourse to a technical approach” (113). Increasing the distance—making the theories, methods, and explanations of family therapy more “remote”—parallels modernist organization generally. In Bott’s opinion, “family systems theory, as it was articulated at the time, was not only philosophically cold and obscure but also had the potential to dehumanize those it set out to help” (113). He applauds the postmodern influences in family therapy, largely related to social constructionism, that have “encouraged therapists to be more modest about their abilities and more respectful of their clients’ integrity.” At the same time, he worries that family therapy continues to neglect the “humanistic contribution.” A properly family-centered therapy, he says, pays attention to the place of empathy and sympathy in family intervention, with empathy not a facade or a technique for gaining access and legitimating intervention, but part of the intervention. Family-centered therapy, he writes, “describes a process where the therapist approaches the family with respect, understanding and affection and encourages family members to respond to one another in a similar manner. . . . The point is that when it comes to families, alongside understanding and respect for individual difference, love is exactly what it is all about” (Bott 2001b, 114, 116–17; original emphasis). Bott’s recommendations to therapists and counselors might be generalized beneficially to other family fields. In contrast to “modernist certainty” with its privileged methods, knowledge, and power, he would have us recognize “a socially constructed world . . . in which there can no longer be therapeutic experts in the traditional sense of holding a privileged story. If there is expertise then it is to be found in the ability to “‘co-construct’ reality with clients” (114). Yet in most of the family disciplines, the experts continue their work within a “privileged story.” The techniques of remote knowing continue to be emphasized, and there is little co-construction. What does it mean to be more family centered? It means that we work to change our scientific monologue about families to a systematic dialogue with

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families; that we work to make writing which is accessible to non-specialists more acceptable in our professional publications; and that we reward intensive knowledge of the particular as much as extensive knowledge of the general. It means that we recognize that distance blurs our view of surfaces, and impedes understanding of what may lie beneath the surface, for error is associated with distance, and understanding with the merging of constructions. Finally, it means that life as lived is never simply objective or cognitive, and to force it into objective and numerical language is to lose much of the reality we would understand. Lord Byron said that happiness was born a twin. Just so, understanding depends on the merging of outlooks, on dialogue and acceptance, not monologue and oversight.

Notes 1. For example, of eighty-nine articles published in the Journal of Marriage and Family in 2007, one was a theoretical piece, and eight were critiques and commentaries. Of the remaining eighty articles, only six evidenced much participation by the authors in the lives of respondents, and usually this amounted to personally conducted in-depth interviews.Two of the six reported activities that qualified as ethnographic research. Most of the seventy-four articles (93 percent) based in quantitative survey research, sometimes in combination with other methods, were analyses of large-scale data sets collected by others. Of these, the most frequently represented were the National Survey of Families and Households (seven articles), the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (six), the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (six), and the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (six). Large international and regional data sets were also well-represented. In all, at least forty-nine (61 percent) of the research-based articles analyzed data from large-scale national, multinational, or regional data sets, with most of the remainder being smaller metropolitan or local studies, such as the Oregon Youth Study, The Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study, or the USC Longitudinal Study of Generations. Most “local” studies also hired students or non-professionals as interviewers. Direct and intensive participation with respondents by the authors of these articles rarely happens. 2. In bureaucratically sponsored and bureaucratically administered science the attempt to control is never far beneath the surface, whether we are talking the “policy implications” of research findings or, as clinicians, working to “normalize” troubled individuals or families. 3. See also George A. Tobin’s (1992) provocative statement of the problem of accepting responsibility for others versus observing them in his “The Camera and the Sandwich.” He contrasts Phil Donahue at the “camera” end of the continuum with Mother Teresa at the “sandwich” end. Tobin argues contemporary society is tending toward the “camera” mentality. We get “terrific footage of people in trouble,” but

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seem constrained from involving ourselves in the particular problems of particular people. 4. It is fair to note that the dominance of the computational metaphor has generated countermovements. Brunner (2002, 114) points to an explicit emphasis on “narrative in history” at the 2002 meetings of the American Historical Association as evidence of narrative’s continuing importance to historians. It might also be seen as a reaction to decades of dominance by the more quantitative “new history.”



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Index

abuse, xxvii, 90–91, 104 Acts of Meaning, xii affection, 47, 78–80, 83–84, 120, 203, 243–44 African-Caribbeans, 100 agape, 79, 81–87 Agger, Ben, 185 AIDS, 108 Albanese, Patrizia, 190, 191, 204 Alexander, Jeffrey C., 296 Allen, Sarah M., 294 altruism, 5, 8–11, 19, 27–31, 36, 46, 67–124; motivations of, 116 Amazonian Yanomami, 101 American Indians, 33–34, 54, 55, 165– 67, 285; and science, 127–30; and spirituality, 165–67; and the value of work, 202, 209, 285; views on family, 33–34, 50, 150; views on nature, 55; views on women, 52, 54 Amini, Fari, 74, 80–81, 105–7 Anna Karenina, 154–55 Annie John, 290–91 anthropology, 300, 303–4, 311–13; and ritual, 261–62, 264, 274

Ariès, Philippe, 90 Aristotle, 52–53 The Art of Family, 148, 151–52, 313 The Art of Loving, 72 attachment theory, 104 attentiveness, 113–18, 122, 150–54, 206, 212–14, 227, 243–50 Augustine, 115–16 Azimova, Nadira, 274 Barboncito, 166 Barzun, Jacques, 308 Batz, Jeanette, 280 Bauman, Zygmunt, 134–35, 303 Baumann, Gerd, 265 Beall, Anne E., 77 Beals, Diane E., 296 Becker, Gary, 104, 184 Behar, Ruth, 303–4 Bell, Catherine, 262, 265, 268, 269, 271, 277 Bellah, Robert N., 6, 25, 110, 119, 198, 208 benevolence, 9, 53–54, 70, 104, 207 Bennett, Linda A., 266, 272

363

364



Index

Bennett, Ramona, 290 Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron, 220, 238 Beoku-Betts, Josephine A., 285 bereavement, 91, 143, 147, 153 Berger, Peter, 307 Bergin, Allen E., 138, 140–41, 156 Berheide, Catherine W., 196, 203 Berry, Wendell, 205, 206, 207, 279–80, 206 Berscheid, Ellen, 74 Beutler, Ivan F., 35–43, 45–46 biases in research, xi, xv, 6, 59, 221; created by language, xviii, 120–21, 168, 242 Bighorse, Gus, 165–67 birth, 36, 133, 135 Blackgoat, Danny, 55 Blau, Peter, 201 Blood, Robert, 183 Bocock, Robert, 263 Bolitho, William, 244 Boll, Eleanor S., 261, 262–63, 267 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 70 Borgmann, Albert, xvi Bossard, James H. S., 261, 262–63, 267 Bott, David, 313–14 Boulding, Kenneth, 9, 14, 102–4, 119, 216 Bourdieu, Pierre, 47 Bowen, Murray, 42–43 Boyce, W. Thomas, 266 Boydston, Jeanne, 185 Boyer, Pascal, 263 Bradley, Robert, 261, 271 breast-feeding, 68, 91, 92, 142–43, 164–65, 174, 229 Bria, Gina, 148, 151–52, 313 Brin, Deborah J., 279 Briner, Rob B., 250, 252 Brinkerhoff, David B., 200, 203 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 204 Brown, Donald, 38–39, 88, 101 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 161

Brümmer, Vincent, 80, 84 Brunner, Jerome, xii, 307 Buddhism, 72, 145, 149, 169 bureaucracy, xxi, 6, 17, 19, 38, 41, 302–4 Burg, Mary Ann, 195 Burhoe, Ralph, 130 Burke, Peter, 296 Burris, Christopher T., 81 Buss, David, 73 Callen, Barry, 140 Cancian, Francesca, 80 caregiving, 17–19, 23, 146–47 caring, 6, 12–16, 178; acts of, 14–15; for self, 16. See also love; sacrifice Carson, Kit, 165 charity, 4, 13, 72 Cheal, David, 266 Chidester, David, 50 child care, 178, 188 childhood, 90, 93, 106, 158, 194, 234, 286 children: burden of, 19–20; development, 106; and happiness, 75; responsibility to care for, 30; who don’t know how to give, 30 Chopra, Deepak, 72 Christianity, xvii, 6–7, 53, 72, 131, 134, 136, 138, 139, 146 Cinotto, Simone, 296 Clark, Margaret S., 195 Clothey, Fred, 263, 296 Coles, Robert, 304, 311, 313 Collins, Randall, 262 Coltrane, Scott, 187, 193, 200, 203 comfort, 155–60 commitment, 24, 45, 54, 71, 304; of discipleship, 53; in families, 34–35, 43, 49–50; and love, 8–9, 22, 80–84, 113–14, 119–22, 203–5, 249–55 communication, 9, 63, 90, 110–11, 194; in families, 122; between mother and child, 114–15

Index

Comte, August, 87, 99 concentration camps. See the Holocaust conflict, 91, 193, 279; avoidance of, 26, 144; in families, 42, 75, 94, 144, 227, 294; in relationships, 146, 193, 247; resolution, 190 Confucianism, 52, 53–54, 70 contact zone, 299–301, 303, 309 Cornwall, Marie, 141 Corrywright, Dominic, 136 Coser, Lewis A., 20–21 Coser, Rose Laub, 20–21 Cours de Philosophie Positive, 87 Cousins, Ewert, 138–39 Crawford, Jennifer, 140 Crease, Robert, 60 cult of domesticity, 179–80, 199 The Culture We Deserve, 308 Daly, Kerry, xiii, xv Daniels, Alene, 217–18, 226 death, 50–53, 133, 157–68 de Beauvoir, Simone, 194, 195 Delphy, Christine, 194 Denton, Melinda Lundquist, 134 de Rougemont, Denis, 72–73 DeVault, Marjorie L., 185, 285 deviance, 39–40, 42 Diamond, Irene, 185 Diefendorf, James M., 237 Dillon, Martin, 81 distance, 299, 300–303, 307, 309, 314 division of labor, 179–97, 199–209 divorce, 97, 135 Doherty, William J., 261, 265, 268, 269, 279, 280, 285–86 Dollahite, David C., 146 domestic help, 193 The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, 107 Doucet, Andrea, 200 Douglas, Mary, 41 Dreyfus, Hubert L., 293



365

Driver, Tom F., 272, 277, 282–83 Durkheim, Emile, 40, 145, 215, 264, 275–77, 296 duty, 7, 8, 13, 55, 100, 111–13, 198. See also responsibility Dyson, Freeman, 44 Dyson, Jane, 140 Eaker, Dawn Goettler, 261 Eaton, Gai, xxv, 60 Economy of Love and Fear, 9 economy of time and motion, 181 ego, 79, 87, 103, 236, 276 Eichler, Margrit, 190, 191, 204 Eisenberg, Nancy, 235–36 elder care. See caregiving Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 275 El Guindi, Fadwa, 283 Eliade, Mircea, 278 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 202, 208 Emile Durkheim on the Family, 296 emotion: display of, 222–25; global vs. discrete, 229–30; management of, 223, 225–26, 234, 237, 251; measurement of, 225; and performance, 222–23; suppression of, 247; theories of, 215, 218–21, 236 emotional salience, 235 emotion system, model of, 215 emotion work, 211–54 empathy, 301 empiricism, xii, xiv, xx, xxii, xxiv, xxiv, 47, 49, 74, 301–2, 310 epistemology, xvi, 29, 58–59; of empiricism, xxii–xxiv, 44; of transcendence, 47, 49, 59 Erdoes, Richard, 33, 285 Erickson, Rebecca J., 226–27, 242 eros, 82–87, 108, 109 ethnography, 300, 304, 313. See also anthropology Evangelical churches, 136 Evertsson, Marie, 195

366



Index

exchange, 9–10, 103–4, 116 exchange theory, 3 Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, 12–16 fairness, 186 Familiar Exploitation, 194 family: activities of, 153–55; affected by the market, 5–6; behavior in, 39; core of, 38; dysfunctional, 86; in crisis, 41–42; emotional dissonance in, 251; endurance of, 118; identity, 177; love of, 53, 116–23; and religion, 55–56, 135–39, 141–47; responsibilities, 8, 174; rituals, xxvii, xxxi-xxxii, 55, 150, 153, 200, 208, 259–95; sanctification of, 153; single-parent, 135; and spirituality, 55–56, 127–68; stories, 150–51; stresses and burdens on, 18, 22–23; terminology, 38, 54–55; universal characteristics of, 35–43; uniqueness of, 35, 41–43, 45, 47, 148; work, 173-210 family realm, 35–42 family theory, xv, xix, xxii, 35, 42, 56–58, 201, 213, 293; problems with, xxix, 3, 6–8, 14, 41, 120–122, 178, 214 fathers, 4-5, 240–47 Father Sergius, 154–55 Fehr, Beverley, 86 feminism, 16, 273 Fernández-Armesto, Filipe, xvii–xviii fieldwork, 299–300 Fiese, Barbara H., 261, 269, 286, 296 Fine, Reuben, 89, 91–94, 123 Finke, Roger, 145 Firth, Raymond, 198–99 Flinders, Carol, 286–88 Foley, Kimberly P., 296 forgiveness, 70, 76, 144, 153 Fortes, Meyer, 100, 119

Foucault, Michel, 197 Freud, Sigmund, 93–94, 97, 105, 122 friendship: compared to kinship, 54; within families, 208, 221; and love, 83, 84, 86, 98 Fromm, Erich, 72, 79, 102, 119 Fuchs, Nancy, 147–49, 154 Gallagher, Maggie, 96–98 Gallup, George, Jr., 160 Garland, Diana, 147–54 Gaunt, Ruth, 188 Gay, Volney P., 265 Geertz, Clifford, 59 gender equality, 178, 183, 189, 196 gender roles, 17, 90, 179, 183–89, 192 Gerkin, Charles, 111 Gerson, Kathleen 19–20, 30 gift-giving, 9–10 Gilligan, Carol, 16–17 God, 112, 138–40; assistance from, 146; belief in, 131–34; experiences of, 151, 155; manifestations of, 144 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 204 Goode, William, 35, 87–88 Goodman, Felicitas D., 265 Goodman, Michael A., 146 Goodnow, Jacqueline J., 202, 203 Goody, Jack, 266, 275 Gosse, Edmund, 52, 161 government, 16–17, 30 Grant, Jedediah, 162–63 grants, 9–10, 102–4, 116, 119 Greedy Institutions, 20–21 Greer, Germaine, 92, 123 Grimes, Ronald, 260, 261, 264, 265, 267–68, 269, 270, 271–72, 277, 282, 283, 284–85, 288, 295 Grote, Nancy K., 195 Gupta, Sanjiv, 189 Habits of the Heart, 6, 110 happiness, 53, 74–76, 146, 254

Index

Hard Choices, 19–20 Harris, C. C., 200 Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism, 88–89 hate cultures, 89–93, 123 Hauerwas, Stanley, 178 Hawkins, Alan J., 207, 294 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 204 health care, xxi, 143, 147 Heelas, Paul, 132, 140 Heisenberg principle, 18 Helminiak, Daniel, 139–40 heritage, 7, 45, 203; cultural, xii, 110, 130; religious, xvii, 7, 132, 135 hermeneutics, 56, 59, 92 Hess, Jon A., 237 Hill, Peter C., 140 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, xiv Hinduism, 72, 144 Hochschild, Arlie, 215–16, 224, 226–27, 231–32, 235, 241, 243–45, 250–52 Hoffman, Edward, 57, 158–59 holistic approaches, 312, 292–94 the Holocaust, 11, 12–16, 24–25 home economics, 310–11 homemaking, 180, 195, 196, 207 Homer, 204 housewife, 181, 186, 194 housework, 121, 173–208; as ritual, 285–92; spiritual dimension of, 204 Housework as Ritual Enactment, 280–81 humanity, 12, 14, 23 Human Universals, 38–39 Hume, Lynne, 313 husbands, role of, 112 The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People, 21–22 Imber-Black, Evan, 279 Imperial Eyes, 299 In a Different Voice, 16–17 Inchausti, Robert, xxi, 21–22, 70–71, 77, 198



367

Indians. See American Indians individualism, 3, 4, 8, 11, 27, 97, 98, 110–13 infancy, 67–69, 74, 105–6 institutional reform, 17–19 interfaith marriage, 135 intimacy: contractual, 6, 205; dissatisfactions over, 240; and family, 122; in family literature, xi, 111; and love, 48, 79, 83–84, 85, 107; and spirituality, 150 intuition, xv, xvii, xix, xxv, 24, 44, 49, 284 Islam, 131, 146 Israeloff, Roberta, 259, 260 Jackson, Timothy, 78, 81 Jacobvitz, Deborah B., 261 James, Sherman A., 266 James, William, 72, 232 Jaspers, Karl, 132 Jensen, Eric W., 266 Joan of Arc, 22–23 Johnson, Lesley, 186 Johnson, Miriam, 184 Johnson, Robert, 77–78 Jones, Doug, 101 Judaism, 131, 146, 158, 163 Kandiyoti, Deniz, 274 Karlsson, Jan, 218 Kermode, Frank, 132 Kimball, Heber C., 162–63 Kincaid, Jamaica, 290–91 The King of the Castle, xxv King, Martin Luther, Jr., 204 King, Ursula, 132 kin selectivity, 53, 99 Kinsey, Alfred, 70 kinship: fictive, xxvii, 47, 54; and solidarity, 38; terms of, 38, 54–55; ties of, 36–37, 160 Kluckhohn, Florence, 121

368



Index

Kosík, Karel, 218 Kramer, Michael W., 237 Kreinath, Jens, 296 Kress, Ralph, 157 Kübler-Ross, Elizabeth, 160–61 Lake Placid Conferences, 180 Lamanna, Mary Ann, 296 Lambert, Nathaniel M., 146 Lame Deer, John (Fire), 33, 285 language, xvii, xix-xx, 219, 305–6, 309, 312; effects on views of reality, xviii, 7, 120–21, 168, 242; of sacrifice, 3; shrinking of, 7–8 Lannon, Richard, 74, 80–81, 105–7 Larson, Thomas, 285, 296 Lau, D. C., 53–54, 70 Lawson, E. Thomas, 271 Leach, Edmund, 263, 274, 275 Lee, Andrea 288–89 Lee, Dorothy, 117, 198, 202 Lee, John, 77–78, 85 Leon, Kim, 261 Leonard, Diana D., 194 Levi, Primo, 306 Levinas, Emmanuel, xxix, 19, 25, 29, 79 Levine, Michael, 93 Levine, Stephen B., 94 Lewis, Thomas, 74, 80–81, 105–7 Liénard, Pierre, 263 Life After Life, 161 Life Before Life, 161 Linares, Juan Luis, 81, 91, 94–95 Little, Margaret Olivia, 115 Lloyd, Justine, 186 The Long Walk, 165–67 Lopata, Helena, 184 loss, 155, 159, 164–65 love, 314; and the brain, 105–6; brotherly, 72, 79, 82, 83; burdens of, 25; companionate, 96; complexity of, 78, 94; definitions of, 5, 76–87; economics of, 9–11, 101–4; of family,

xii, 53, 70, 75, 86–87; importance of, 72; in family literature, 6, 70, 75, 87, 206; and infants, 74; marital, 86, 94–98, 115, 247; obligations of, 112; parental, 27, 50–56, 68–70, 86, 91, 106–7; Paz’s conditions for, 85; preservative, 113-16; romantic, 70–79, 84–98, 108; and spirituality, 149, 152; unconditional, xi, 112; universality of, 71–76 love cultures, 89–94 Love in the Western World, 72–73 Lukes, Steven, 276 MacRae, Hazel M., 227 Mahoney, Annette, 143–46, 153 Mainardi, Pat, 194 The Making of the Modern Family, 90–92 The Managed Heart, 215 Mann, Patricia, 185 mapping ritual, 261, 284–85 Marcel, Gabriel, 51 Marcuse, Herbert, 218 marital satisfaction, 90, 240 market models of human relationships, 3, 38, 46, 68, 103, 110, 181–86, 192, 205, 208 Marks, Loren, 153 Marks, Stephen R., 193, 197 marriage: 70, 83, 84, 88, 90, 142, 176, 242, 250, 270; decreased use of the word, 97; as a means for personal growth, 93, 98; modern views of, 96, 97, 98, 113; and religion, 110, 112, 133, 135, 143–47; and spirituality, 150 Martin, Mike, 80 Marx, Karl, 102 materialism, xxiii–xxiv, 43–44, 94, 97, 116, 122–23 May, Rollo, 79, 82 McCauley, Robert N., 271 McGrane, Bernard, 311–12, 262

Index

McLaren, Peter, 263, 283 McLeod, Deborah L., 140 McVeigh, Brian, 263 meaning, xii, 307 The Meaning of Love in Human Experience, 89 Mencius, 52–54 Milkie, Melissa A., 196 Mills, C. Wright, 302 models, xiv, 7, 40, 41, 123 modernism, xi–xxxii, 298, 309–10, 314; and love, 70, 97, 122–23; and objectivity, 44; and self-sacrifice, 29; and spirituality, 130, 133, 139; and transcendence, 58–61 Modernity and the Holocaust, 134 modern Western mind-set, xxii–xxvi, xxviii, 123 Monroe, Kristen Renwick, 10–11, 27–28 Moore, Thomas, 148–50 moral imagination, xiv The Moral Intelligence of Children, 313 moralistic therapeutic deism, 134 morality, 5–6, 12, 15–17, 19–20, 25, 29, 192–93, 198–209 The Moral Sense, 21 moral values, 12, 28, 178, 310 moral work, 249–50 Morgan, Lila, 157 Moriarty, Patricia Hale, 261 Mormons, 162 Morse, Melvin, 156–67 Morson, Gary Saul, 154–55, 293 mothering, 4–5, 16, 21, 22, 27–28, 15354, 248-49; feelings associated with, 45–46; intensive, 4, 27-28; quality of, 90–91 mothers: employment outside the home, 135–36; love for child, 74, 113–16, 119; in social science research, 21–22; stay-at-home, 153–54 Mother Teresa, 19, 77



369

Moules, Nancy, 309 Mulcock, Jane, 313 Murdoch, Iris, 206 Muslims, 131, 146 Myers, Merlin, 5–6, 14 mysticism, xxi, 43, 59, 90, 138, 262, 266, 268, 274 Native Americans. See American Indians naturalism, xxii, xxiv, xxvi, 44, 47 Naylor, Kristen E., 195 near-death experiences, 76, 156–67 Nermo, Magnus, 195 Neumark-Sztainer, Dianne, 296 new age, 131–41, 136, 138, 139 New Axial Period, 139 The New Laurel’s Kitchen: A Handbook for Vegetarian Cookery and Nutrition, 286–88 Next to Godliness: Finding the Sacred in Housekeeping, 204 “Nocturne of San Ildefonso,” xxii normative behavior, 39–40, 42 Northup, Lesley A., 282 Notes on Love in a Tamil Family, 313 nursing, 68, 91, 92, 142–43, 164–65, 174, 229. See also breast-feeding nurturing, 28, 42, 178, 261, 273; attentive, 214; benefits of, 176, 211; of children, 6, 36–37, 146, 174; governance, 36, 46; and love, 80, 81; role of women in, 214, 217, 282 Nussbaum, Martha, 220, 238 Oakley, Ann, 184 Oates, Joyce Carol, 51–52 Oatley, Keith, 248 objectivity, 298, 301, 303 Ochs, Elinor, 296 Oehlschlaeger, Fritz, 81 one-way transfer. See grants Orleck, Annelise, 185

370



Index

Oswald, Ramona Faith, 261 Our Share of Night, Our Share of Morning: Parenting As a Spiritual Journey, 147–48

proximity, 299–301, 304–5, 311 psychoanalysis, 93–94 The Psychology of Love, 90 psychotherapy, xx, xxi, 62, 93, 106, 142

Palmer, Parker, 44–45 paradigms, xvi, xviii parenting, 153–54. See also fathers; mothering; mothers Pargament, Kenneth I., 140 Parke, Ross D., 261 Parkin, David, 263, 265, 282, 292 Parsons, Talcott, 145, 183–84, 191 particularity, 306 Parting Visions, 156–67 Pascal, Blaise, 308 pathologies, 3, 6, 10, 16, 20, 40 Paulson, Susan, 274 Paz, Octavio, xxii, xxvi, 73–74, 80, 84–85, 87, 107–10 Peacock, James L., 266 Peck, Alice, 204 Peck, Scott, 78, 80 Penha-Lopes, Vânia, 194 Percy, Walker, 107 Perin, Constance, 47–48 personal fulfillment, 195, 196 personal worth, 208 phenomenology, 57–59 philia, 86 Pirsig, Robert, 127–30 Pleck, Elizabeth H., 261, 266, 273 Plotinus, 116 pornography, 88, 108 positivism, xx, 49, 58, 87, 198 Postman, Neil, 293 postmodernism, xii, xvii-xxi, 8, 21–22, 29, 56, 134, 309–10, 314 Pratt, Mary Louise, 299–300 prayer, 135 pre-Axial period, 138 Proctor, Williams, 160 prostitution, 108

qualitative research, xx, 307, 313 quantitative research, 305, 308, 313 Quinby, Lee, 185 Rabuzzi, Kathryn, 280–81, 295 Rappaport, Roy A., 260, 264, 265 rational choice theory, 3 Reddy, William M., 219 reduction, 306–9 relationships, 36; broken, 152; marital, 95, 144, 176; parent-child, 49–50, 75, 99, 144, 177; premarital and extramarital, 96; sibling, 75 relativism, xviii–xix, 60, 77, 182 religion, 131–47, 214 resource theory, 183 Remen, Rachel, 154, 163–65 Rempel, John K., 81 responsibility, 8, 17, 19, 22, 24, 29, 79, 118. See also duty Rexroat, Cynthia A., 195 Reynolds, Pam, 162 Richard, Erin M., 237 Richards, P. Scott, 138, 140–41, 156 Ring, Kenneth, 160 Ritual, 271 rituals. See family, rituals Roberts, Janine, 279 Robertson, Laurel, 288 Robinson, Jenefer, 219, 238 Robinson, John P., 196 Rodriguez, Jeanette, 274 Roman Catholics, 144 Roof, Wade Clark, 133–36 Rubin, Lillian, 313 Rubin, Zick, 90 Ruddick, Sara, 43, 113, 116, 206, 248 rule of amity, 99–100

Index

Russell, Bertrand, 70, 79 Russell, James A., 86 Sabom, Michael, 160–62 Sacred Stories of Ordinary Families, 147–54 sacrifice: attitude towards, 112; benefits to the giver, 30; displacement of, 3, 6–9; as an extension of self, 4; in family literature, 6; as a family responsibility, 17, 19; by fathers, 4–5; for the good of the whole, 177; for a greater need, 4; by mothers, 4–5, 26; motivations of, 24, 25, 111; as a personal defect, 4, 16, 21, 26; power of, 9, 103; risk of, 17; salience of, 3–5, 23; sanctifying nature of, 13; self-sacrifice, 250; in the social sciences, 1–31; as a symbol of love, 5; transcendence of, 13, 19. See also the Holocaust sanctification, 143–47, 153–55 Saul, John Ralston, xv, xxii Scanzoni, John, 97, 120 Schmookler, Andrew Bard, 60 Schreurs, Agneta, 140 Schumacher, E. F., 293 Scott, W. Richard, 201 The Second Sex, 194 self-interest, 11 selfishness, 8, 22, 77 self-sacrifice. See sacrifice Selznick, Philip, 206 Sered, Susan S., 282, 292 service, 119, 160 sex, 79, 87–88, 90, 94–98, 107–8 sex roles. See gender roles The Sexual Bond, 97 sexuality, 108, 136 Shehan, Constance L., 195 Shelton, Beth Anne, 185 Sherman, General William T., 166 Shohet, Merav, 296 Shorter, Edward, 90–92



371

simplification, 305–9 Smith, Christian, 134 Smith, Cynthia L., 235 Smith, Dorothy E., 273 Smith, Huston, xxii–xxvi, 43–44, 57, 141, Smith, Jonathan Z., 263, 274–75, 283 Snoek, Jan A. M., 264, 271, 295, 296 Snow, Catherine E., 296 social imaginary, xii–xiii Solomon, Robert, 132 Sorokin, Pitirim, 28, 77–79, 82, 87, 88–89, 122–23 Sosis, Richard, 262 soul, 108–10, 116 Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship, 148–50 Spangler, David, 138 Spinrad, Tracy L., 235 spirituality: definitions of, 139–41; of dwelling, 132–33; of families, 147–68; growth, 80; and health care, 142–43; and love, 149, 152; in marriage, 112; and religion, 135–39; resurgence of, 131–35; of seeking, 132–33; spiritual experiences, 155–60; and therapy, 143; and transcendence, 57 Spirituality for the Skeptic, 132 Spirituality and Society in the New Millennium, 132 Spirituality, Suffering, and Illness, 148–49 The Spiritual Revolution, 132 Stark, Rodney, 145 Stausberg, Michael, 296 Sternberg, Robert J., 77, 84, 85 Stoicism, 72, 93, 220 Strike, Kenneth, 206 Tambiah, Stanley J., 262, 265 Taylor, Charles, xii, xvi theory. See family theory therapy, 270; ethics in, 142–43; family, 143; literature in, 92, 111, 120,

372



Index

313–14; marital, 42, 94–96. See also psychotherapy Thomas, Darwin, 141 Thompson, Linda, 185 Tice, Diane M., 236 time-use studies, 181 Tjeltveit, Alan, 95 Todorov, Tzvetan, 12-16 Tolich, Martin B., 229, 233 Tolstoy, Leo, 154–55 Tracey, David, 134, 137, 140 tradition, xviii–xix, xxiv, 310 tragedy, 155 transcendence, xxiii–xxiv; and contemporary family theory, 56–58; as context for experiencing the sacred, 55–56; epistemology of, 47, 49; of family, 34–35, 42–61, 157, 160–68; generational, 49–53; and love, 94; of sacrifice, 13, 19; as social mediation, 53–55 The Transcendent Child, 313 traps, 9–10 trauma, 42, 114, 147 Trawick, Maragaret, 313 truth, xvii, xix, xxiv–xxv Turner, Edith L. B., 266 Turner, Victor W., 264, 266, 292 universality: of families, 35, 37–39, 53, 62–63; of love, xxx, 71–76, 90 value-free research, 301 Van Ness, Peter, 140 virtue, 6, 7–8, 16, 21, 30; of sacrifice, 4, 5; Todorov’s ordinary virtues, 12–15. See also morality visions, 157–68 The Vulnerable Observer, 303

Wagner, Linda D., 261 Wain, Martin, 94 Waldel, Cato, 216, 218 Waldron, Vincent R., 232 Walker, Alexis, 185 Wallace, Anthony F. C., 270 Walters, Lynda Henley, 261 Warton, Pamela M., 202, 203 Watson, Burton, 271 Weber, Max, 41 Weizenbaum, Joseph, 134–35 West, Jessamyn, 204 Wharton, Amy S., 227 White, Lynn K., 200, 203 Whiting, Richard A., 279 Wilson, Edward O., xx, 73 Wilson, James Q., 21, 28–29, 99–100 Wilson, John, 76–77 wives, role of, 112 Wolfe, Donald, 183 Wolin, Steven J., 266, 272 women’s oppression, 182, 185, 186, 194 Woods, Richard, 141 Wordsworth, William, 161 work, 121–22, 176, 179, 198, 202, 203; theories of, 216–18; enjoyment of, 196; unskilled, 183 worldviews, xvi–xviii, xxiv, xxviii, 310–12 Wright, Curtis, xxvi Wright, James D., 195 Wright, Lorraine M., 140, 148–49 Wuthnow, Robert, 132–35 Young, Iris Marion, 195 Youngs, Bettie B., 203 Zuesse, Evan M., 278, 283



About the Authors

Howard M. Bahr is Professor of Sociology at Brigham Young University. He received the B.A. from Brigham Young University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas, Austin. His previous family-related work includes coauthoring Middletown Families: Fifty Years of Change and Continuity (1982). His most recent book is The Navajo as Seen by the Franciscans, 1898-1921: A Sourcebook (2004). Kathleen S. Bahr is Associate Professor Emeritus in the Department of Marriage, Family, and Human Development in Brigham Young University’s School of Family Life. She received B.S. and M.S. degrees from Utah State University and a Ph.D. in family and child ecology from Michigan State University. She is coauthor of Family Science (1992), and has published and lectured widely on family work as context for family relationships and human development.

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