Rethinking the Politics of Family Studies

Anthropologists interested in the history of the social sciences, the family, and international development will no doubt appreciate Arland Thornton’s clever phrasing “reading history sideways” for capturing the “approach to history that, instead of following a particular society or population across time, compares various societies at the same time” (p. 4). His impressive study promises to reorient population research in important new directions. Thornton examines the centuries-old practice of drawing conclusions about family life around the world on the basis of a developmental paradigm steeped in social evolutionary assumptions. Part 1 details how reading history sideways has been applied to the study of family changes from the 1700s through the mid-1900s. Part 2 demonstrates how the understandings emerging from this approach have themselves catalyzed substantial transformations in family life throughout the world. An introductory section describes the kinds of data that were available to family scholars, from classical sources such as the Bible and ancient Greek and Roman texts to observations from the time of the Crusades and the Age of Exploration and the cross-cultural comparative material published in the 1500s—texts that were sometimes considered problematic by those who used them but nonetheless seemed to provide usable material for scientific analysis. Thornton shows that cross-cultural data played a central role in the work of political theorists such as John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Robert Malthus, among others, thinkers who further normalized the classification of family behaviors on a comparative scale of civilization. Reading history sideways from the 1700s though the mid1900s resulted in a grand historical modernization narrative of family life and its transformations over time. This narrative posited that family life in Northwest Europe altered dramatically beginning in the 1700s: from extended families the smaller, nuclear household emerged; people entered marriage at later ages than they had previously, and some never married at all; the power and authority of older generations over younger family members waned, and arranged marriages ceased; younger people began choosing their own spouses on the basis of affection and love. One of the most significant changes that followers of the grand narrative of family change described was the increasing status of women. Yet these changes were not merely described; they were depicted as representing the most modern and civilized forms of family life. By the mid-twentieth century, evidence had accumulated to demonstrate that this distinctive configuration of family life had characterized societies in Northwest Europe long before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Thornton reviews evidence published from the 1960s on that challenged entrenched preconceptions by revealing that the nuclear (or a weak stem) family had been common in Northwest Europe since at least the 1300s, individualism and the autonomy of younger generations can be traced back to the thirteenth century in England, and late marriage and widespread celibacy had been practiced since 1000. The debunking of the myth, however, did not lead to the demise of reading history sideways or the evaluation of family life around the world on a comparative scale of civilization. This is because the myth of family transformation was integrally linked to what Thornton calls developmental idealism: a vision that presumes that modernized family forms represent not merely change but moral progress. He summarizes the four key components of developmental idealism as follows: “(1) modern society is good and attainable; (2) the modern family is good and attainable; (3) the modern family is a cause as well as an effect of a modern society; and (4) individuals have the right to be free and equal, with social relationships being based on consent” (p. 8). Thornton argues that developmental idealism has been a major force catalyzing changes in family life throughout the world for the past 100 years because it has been integrally linked to agendas and desires for socioeconomic development. While recognizing that there has been resistance among some local communities, he claims that it is the belief in developmental idealism more than economic forces, technological inputs, or structural changes that has led people to alter when they create unions, how they relate to their spouses, children, and parents, and when they become parents themselves. For anthropologists interested in kinship, reproduction, and development, these arguments will not be surprising. The value of the text for this audience lies in the vast amount of material Thornton has assembled and carefully synthesized on the ways in which what anthropologists would call social evolutionism has dominated Western thought and development work on issues related to the family. The text is also interesting for anthropologists who study population science itself as an increasingly contested epistemological field: I found it fascinating to trace the lines of critique the author took and the assumptions he left undisturbed in targeting the grand historical narrative of family modernization. Thus, while Thornton is adamant about his rejection of the developmental paradigm as both intellectually and ethically bankrupt for contemporary social science, he remains sanguine about the viability of developmental idealism: “The values and beliefs of developmental idealism can be accepted without a belief in the developmental paradigm, reading history sideways, and the conclusions of generations of developmental scholars. More explicitly, such values as equality, consent, free-