Analyze critically David Morgan's views on family practices

What Morgan argued

• In Family Connections and later Family Practices, Morgan treated family as something people do: phoning, feeding, visiting, naming, and caring.
• Practices are historically situated, have an audience, and can be more or less intense.
• The approach fits later marriage, divorce, step-ties, friendship care, and households that do not match Parsons’s isolated nuclear type.
• It also fits Indian urban life where brothers do not co-reside but still perform joint rites and remittances.

Critical gains

• It avoids treating the census household as the whole of kinship, a warning A. M. Shah also gave in another vocabulary.
• It makes gender visible as who actually does the practice, not as a role label on a chart.
• It allows chosen kin without forcing them into a fake biological box.

Critical limits

• Property, law, and caste endogamy still organise who is allowed to practise family with whom. Practice theory can underplay that closure.
• Talcott Parsons and older functionalism over-fixed the group. Morgan should not over-unfix it into pure process.
• Feminist work on unpaid labour needs the practice idea, but also needs Marx on surplus and patriarchy as structure, not only as a habit.
• Cross-cultural use must not treat British late modernity as the world pattern. Karve’s regional systems still constrain practice in India.

Judgement

• Use Morgan to see doing. Keep descent, alliance, and law to see who may do.