Family is what you, as an individual, make it.

Family as we perceive it today is a relatively recent development and the perception itself is relative to the individual.
From best friends, to friends, as well as the blood ties that we all have, our relationships are what define us and our contribution to that circle of relationships helps to define the group and groups that we belong to.

What's that saying? "Friends are just the family you choose to be with."

Defining family in a modern industrialised world is pretty all consuming. Why not ask for an analysis of family from a historical anthropologist, they would probably take a year just to write an index on what subjects to be limited to and whether or not taking pre-historic behavioural analysis would be worsen their case or not, in their argument that family really is relative to the times you live in.

In a nutshell, extended family in pre-historic times would have been the basis for a whole tribe. A group of tribes within a 10 mile radius would be closely related, but would they describe themselves as family?

Moving on to more civilised surroundings, both in ancient Greece and, later, in the Roman empire, family would have included family alliances as well as the slaves they bought and sold. "Family alliances" being the basis of power and its manipulation over a much larger area.

Later, in the middle ages, family would have extended to such Royal alliances as many were made simply to avoid war or to obtain a political foothold.

As we draw closer to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the family, is perceived as a much closer knit group, but the servants in many households, especially long standing ones, would have been included as "family".

In the twentieth century, general perceptions became narrowed until the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, when so-called "moral" ground was lost with the advent of higher divorce rates, less formal couplings and more children out of wedlock. The rise of the single family and singleton in the twenty first century has brought us out of the post modern perception that the family with 2.3 atomic children is the norm.

Lets hope it stays that way.

Learn more about this author, Richard George.
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