FAMILY IN THE CARIBBEAN

Barrow, Christine. Reddock, Rhoda. Caribbean Sociology: Introductory Readings.

Ian Randle Publishers Ltd. Jamaica (2001)
 FACTORS SHAPING THE CARIBBEAN FAMILY
1. Culture Herskovits (1964) and Frazier (1939) argued that the
Africans brought with them cultural practices that they retained while
enslaved on the plantation system. Polygamy is attributed to the
family forms that exist in the Caribbean as well as for the male
marginalization in the household.
2. Economics and Poverty Lewis (1966) states that poverty impacts
the poor on three levels: the individual , the family, and the
community. He goes on to add that males tend to abandon their
families when they fail to fulfil their expected male function of
providing financial support.
3. Social Status Clarke (1957) proposed that it was considered
improper for a man to propose marriage unless he owned a house and
was financially stable. Also that men enjoyed talking about sexual
prowess and that it was a status factor to have fathered children with
different women.
 THE AFRO-CARIBBEAN FAMILY

Colonial social welfare workers were brought from

England to deal with what were perceived to be
problems of family life in the Caribbean. This social
pathology was at the request of Colonial Office.
They judged Caribbean families by their own middle class,
Christian, nuclear family standards and found them to be
dysfunctional and disorganized.
 FINDINGS OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGISTS

1. Family life was seem as loose and unstable, and

relationships appeared to be casual.
2. Conjugal ties were seen as promiscuous and transitory.
3. Children were illegitimate, effectively fatherless,
unschooled and subject to erratic but severe physical
punishments at the hands of their parents.
4. As a result, the social pathologists attributed a range of
social ills (juvenile delinquency in particular) to the weak
and malformed Caribbean family life.
 RECOMMENDATIONS & SOLUTIONS?

The social pathologists mandated that the Caribbean

family be reconstructed to conform to the nuclear ideal,
with marriage and legitimate children.
Policies were implemented to attempt to alter the
structure of lower-class African families. It was felt that
this would improve and develop the moral and social
well-being of Caribbean societies.
Case study: The island-wide marriage campaign in
Jamaica.
 RECEPTION OF THE REPORT

Social pathology was largely seen as ethnocentric the

Caribbean family was seen as a failure since it did not
meet Western, Christian standards.
Data collection provided the basis for an assumed
understanding of family forms in the Caribbean and
misrepresented as extended family types were virtually
ignored and only co-residential conjugal unions were
acknowledged.
 MATRIFOCALITY
R.T. Smith (1973) used the term matrifocality to define the
Afro-Caribbean family structure. He states that it characterizes
a situation in which it is women in their role as mothers who
come to be the focus of relationships.
Matrifocality increases as the mother moves from childbearing
and rearing, to becoming dependent (especially economically)
on her partner and the father(s) of her children. Later, as the
children grow into adults and contribute money to her for
household expenses, she becomes the centre of an economic
and decision-making coalition with her children.
 CRITICISMS OF MATRIFOCALITY

Smith was quick to point out that matrifocality refers to

mother-centeredness, not to female dominance or headship.
Caribbean feminists, however, point out that these
stereotypes and standard portrayals of women are distorted
and misconceived. They present a pattern of submissiveness,
a preoccupation with home, motherhood and domesticity
and an economic security derived from dependence on a
man which is highly unlikely in the circumstances of poverty,
unemployment and economic uncertainty in which many
Caribbean women live. (Barrow 1988)
 MY MOTHER NEVER
FATHERED ME
RETHINKING KINSHIP AND THE GOVERNING OF FAMILIES
MINDIE LAZARUS-BLACK

Barrow, Christine. Reddock, Rhoda. Caribbean Sociology: Introductory

Readings. Ian Randle Publishers Ltd. Jamaica (2001)
 Background

In the article, it was found that Antiguan slave marriages did not
bestow a mans name to his wife or children or protect inheritances.
Rather, slaves engaged in a pattern on non-legal, serial partnerships.
As a consequence, family took a variety of forms.
Depending on the context, the time, and the conditions of labour,
slave families and household composition might include stable units
of men, women, and children, mother-child households with visiting
partners and fathers, three-generational or sibling groups, and more
rarely, families in which men participated as lovers and fathers in
more than one household.
It was noted that by the end of the 18th century, both legal and
outside families were part of life in each of the three ranks of
Antiguan society (upper, middle and lower classes).
 The Argument

Antiguas talk about families and illegitimate children in

Parliament was framed as a social welfare problem.
Male irresponsibility was critical in law makers talk about
kinship and what to do about it.
Lawmakers stressed that nuclear marriage was ideal and
that other family forms are deviant and have less value.
One senator argued that child maintenance should be
raised because the reality of Antiguan life is that women
father children.
 The Counter-Argument

Mothering is about washing, cooking, cleaning, marketing, sewing,

ironing, working your day job, braiding hair, and minding the children
or making sure that they are minded by someone else.
Men may do some or even all of these everyday activities, however,
most of the time, they father.
Fathering is commonly associated with certain specific behaviours,
such as paying for maintenance, school fees, and special items that
are expensive like new shoes, a boys first suit, or a piece of
jewellery to commemorate a girls confirmation.
Moreover, proper fathering is the ability of men to bestow support
at their own prerogative.
 Mothering vs. Fathering

1. Women evaluate differently and accord higher status to

what men bestow to households.
2. Gifts by men are highly valued and they elevate the
status of he who gives.
 Conclusion

The Antiguan mother does not father her child because

kinship and gender ideology and practice describes and
values differently what fathering entails, how it is
accomplished, and to whom it is assigned.
While mothers are responsible for the everyday things and
rearing practices that people take for granted, many
Antiguan children have the experience of going to their
father to get important necessities that their mothers
cannot provide books, school fees or new shoes.
 CHANGES OVER TIME &
SPACE IN THE EAST INDIAN
FAMILY IN RURAL TRINIDAD
JOSEPH NEVADOMSKY

Barrow, Christine. Reddock, Rhoda. Caribbean Sociology: Introductory

Readings. Ian Randle Publishers Ltd. Jamaica (2001
 Background
The last great influx of immigrants began in 1845 with the
importation of mainly Hindu indentured labourers from India. By
1917, approximately 140,000 Indians had been transported to
Trinidad, where most of them remained.
Scholars who have carried out research among the East Indians in
Trinidad have variously addressed the problem of acculturation in
terms of agricultural settlements and farming practices, religious
organization, ecological adaptation, community structure, regional
cultural patterns, education, aspirations of youth, personality
structure and values, politics, history, and drinking patterns, among
other things. (Niehoff et al. 1969)
Niehoff calls the two most important social institutions brought from
India, namely, the extended family and the caste system.
 The Case for Cultural Restraint

Niehoff showed that the caste system had been virtually wiped out in
the indenture period, suggests that the institutions of the Hindu
family seem to have survived much better than that of caste. The
Indians seem to view marriage as the focal point in the affairs of the
family and have retained much tradition in it.
Klass (1961), in his study of a predominantly Hindu village, pointed
out that traits and values deriving from India take precedence over
those deriving from the non-Indian environment. He singles out the
family to illustrate the strength of cultural restraint.
Smith (1963), studied a Muslim West Indian community and concluded
that the social organization of the Indian family is extremely resistive
to the acculturative pressures.
 The Case for Cultural Restraint (ctd.)

East Indians have successfully transplanted this

institution of Indian social life in its basic form
from which they brought their homeland. The East
Indian family in Trinidad is still characterized by
their inferior or unequal status of women,
parental selection of mates, rarity of divorce,
sharing of property, and inter-relationships within
the caste system. (Malik, 1971)
 Cultural Persistence and Social Change
It is suggested that the Indian family has not been able to maintain its
integration as a traditional system in the face of social change.
Some have stressed the importance of rural isolation and ethnic
identity as the major mechanisms for preserving East-Indian culture
to some extent. Others have stressed the sheer tenacity of Indian
institutions and values and their functional unity in the face of
pressures for change.
Certain cultural traits were believed to constitute a set of critical
core features the cultural focus that is, they formed a layer of
values, a sort of quintessence of the culture. Such values were
through to derive from the pre-contact situation, reinforced from
time to time by the influx of new migrants from the same pre-contact
areas.
Cultural Persistence & Social Change (ctd.)

Because these values were at the heart of the culture, providing it

with stability, validity and tone, they were thought to be especially
resistant to acculturation.
Thus in spite of the massive deculturation effects of slavery, New
World Negroes were presumed to have held on to such deeply
internalized features of their Old World cultures such as religious
beliefs, magic, folklore, myths and kinship patterns, while economic
patterns, technology and various incidental values were thought most
likely to disappear under external pressure.
Features of this theory are similar to the concept of culture as an
onion, in which the outer (superficial) layers must be peeled away
before the core of the onion (culture) can be reached and
transformed.
 Toco versus Amity A Comparison
Both studies took into the consideration the survival of the antecedent
culture with an unfortunate neglect of the Caribbean with its own
tradition of slavery and indenture.
Both Herskovitses (1947) and Klass (1961) view culture as the total
body of the transmitted heritage, one of its essential features being
continuity through socialization.
Klass contends that Indian culture in Amity is a remembered system
having been perpetuated by individual carriers of culture and capable
of transmission through the generations.
Immigrants do not arrive tabula rasa ready for the total indoctrination
into the host social system. But, through a sequence of generations,
there will eventually be some erosion of many traditional conventions.
 Toco versus Amity: Conclusions

Cultural transmission is not, then, a mere repetitive process forming

each generation into automatons stamped with the image of the past.
In Smiths view (1965), the core of culture is in its institutional system
and cultural pluralism occurs when each cultural category adheres to
its own unique system of compulsory institutions: family and kinship,
religion, education, modes of agriculture and settlement, and so on.
Trinidads rural East Indians were described as a cultural enclave or
a parallel socio-cultural system rather than a subcultural category
of the population.
As a result, the East Indian are argued to have resisted creolization.
 The Indian Family in Guyana

Tend to be frugal.
Place a high value on land acquisition.
Structure their leisure activities around religious rituals.
Perceive education as a threat to cultural identity.
Feel threatened by a school system dominated by Negro
teachers.
Object to a curriculum that provides role models
unrelated to the traditional Indian patterns.
 Indian Family in Trinidad

They regard education as a tool to undermine the solidarity of

the traditional family because it taught children to be ashamed
of their social origins.
They viewed their access to quality education as restricted as
education was not a means for their social advancement.
They stuck closely to farming, a familiar occupation, and the
security of land.
Seen as being a retreatist adaptation because they felt
unable to achieve their goals through methods normally
prescribed by society.
 Contemporary Family Patterns

Social mobility has led to the creation of new relations, values and
aspirations.
The ideal household is the nuclear one.
The majority of marriages toady are based entirely on free personal
choice.
There is greater individualism resulting from independent incomes
and educational mobility.
The undisputed hierarchy of the traditional Indian family has been
replaced by ambiguity and rebellion.
The trend in husband-wife roles is toward greater equality in
decision-making.