The smallest durable social units.
8 topics · 9 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation
Office of the U.S. Surgeon General · 2023
Argues that loneliness carries mortality risk comparable to smoking or obesity, and calls for rebuilding social connection through deliberate changes…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
Friedrich Engels · 1884
Argues that the monogamous family emerged alongside private property in order to secure inheritance, making kinship an economic institution; its…
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family
Lewis Henry Morgan · 1871
Compares kinship terminologies across more than a hundred societies and argues that the different systems for naming relatives track underlying…
+2 more at this level
9 works
Office of the U.S. Surgeon General
Argues that loneliness carries mortality risk comparable to smoking or obesity, and calls for rebuilding social connection through deliberate changes to institutions, workplaces and public space rather than leaving it to individuals.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Friedrich Engels
Argues that the monogamous family emerged alongside private property in order to secure inheritance, making kinship an economic institution; its ethnographic basis in Morgan has since been largely discredited.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Edward Westermarck
Surveys marriage customs across societies and argues that pair-bonding is rooted in evolved instinct rather than being a late cultural invention, against the then-dominant theory of an original promiscuous horde.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Pew Research Center
Finds that a growing share of middle-aged adults is simultaneously supporting an ageing parent and a child, and argues this squeeze falls hardest on those with the fewest financial resources to absorb it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026UN Women
Argues that no single family form is universal or in decline, and that women's and children's wellbeing depends less on family structure itself than on the laws, services and money households can draw on.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jennifer E. Lansford
Reviews parenting research across cultures and argues that some practices, such as warmth toward children, are near-universal while others, such as physical discipline, vary in their effects depending on how normative they are within a given culture.
Lewis Henry Morgan
Compares kinship terminologies across more than a hundred societies and argues that the different systems for naming relatives track underlying stages of family and marriage organisation rather than being arbitrary.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ferdinand Tönnies
Distinguishes Gemeinschaft, community bound by kinship and shared life, from Gesellschaft, society bound by contract and self-interest, and argues that modernisation is a shift from the first toward the second.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Warren Shapiro (ed.)
Collects essays testing whether kinship terminologies worldwide are organised around a small set of focal, extendable relationships, arguing for and against Scheffler's formal account of how kin categories are built.
link checked 17 Sept 2026