Family ties are shaped by marriage, adoption, choice and law as well as biology, Cornell anthropologist Meredith Small argues in a new book examining a universal but flexible human institution.
“Family: How the Human Need for Connection Forms and Shapes Our Lives,” published in October by Pegasus Books, considers how people build the relationships that organize their lives.
Small, a professor emerita of anthropology in Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences, discussed the book in an interview with the Cornell Chronicle. Her work draws together human history, cross-cultural comparisons and research on other primates to examine why family matters and how its forms vary.
The connections extend far into the past. Small points to the group of Australopithecus fossils found in Ethiopia known as the “First Family,” dating to about 3.3 million years ago, as one example discussed in the book.
She also explores Neolithic households from roughly 6,000 years ago. The historical sweep puts contemporary arguments about family structure alongside evidence that households and kinship arrangements have long taken different forms.
Changes over the past 70 years have widened people's choices, Small s...