Family and Kinship

Abstract

All the world over, people live in families, and development planning accepts this as a basic fact. When the land of large estates is redistributed, the holdings are supposedly calculated to be sufficient to support a family, sometimes with a surplus beyond bare essentials. When populations have to be resettled — because their homes have been flooded when a dam was built, or destroyed by an earthquake, or perhaps because they are refugees — the authorities aim to produce family housing. Wages may be set in relation to the supposed needs of a family — though, indeed, it has often been thought that there need be only enough to keep a single man, on the assumption that the family he had left at home could look after itself.