Revision summary
Morgan defined family as practices that display relatedness, not only as a co-resident group. The view fits diverse households, migration, and rites across houses. It makes gendered care visible as work done. It underplays law, property, and caste as closures on who may practise. Use it with Shah, Karve, and feminist political economy, not as a solo theory.
Model answer
Introduction
- David Morgan shifted the sociology of family from a fixed institution to family practices: the activities through which people display relatedness. The view is powerful for contemporary diversity. It is weaker if it dissolves structure, law, and gender into a set of optional habits.
Body
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.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD M[Morgan] --> D[Family as doing] D --> A[Care visit name feed] S[Law caste property gender] --> W[Who may practise] A --> F[Displayed relatedness] W --> F
Conclusion
Morgan’s family practices correctly treat relatedness as activity and fit diverse households. A critical analysis keeps law, property, caste, and gendered labour as structures that decide whose practices count as family. The view is a necessary shift, not a complete theory of kinship.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Does women's education help to eradicate patriarchal discriminations? Reflect with illustrations
Next question in the 2023 paper (Q5). View answer →
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Does Morgan say the family has ended?
No. He says the family as a single fixed group is a poor starting point. Practices continue.
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Can friends be family on this view?
They can if care and display are done. Law and inheritance may still exclude them.
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