Comparing Family Systems in Europe and Asia: Are There Different Sets of Rules?
Author(s)
Goody, Jack
Abstract
Seeing Europe as the forerunner both in the development of industrial capitalism and of lower fertility, demographic historians have looked at predisposing factors in the web of family variables that may have led to these conditions. We are not directly concerned here with matters to do with individualism, the propensity to save, conjugal love, care of children, or the nuclear family, but all of these have been isolated by one author or another as characteristic of Europe, Northwest Europe, or England. As with the European marriage pattern identified, characterized by late age at marriage and living-in servants, these features are then contrasted with the rest of the world that never made it. Since this exercise first began, Japan clearly has “made it,” enabling us to set aside certain aspects of the Weberian thesis, for example. Historians and other social scientists, however, have had a field day in pointing out the similarities in family structure between Japan and England/Europe, contrasting this with the case of China. But now we find Taiwan, not to speak of other little dragons, joining the capitalist camp, so quite rightly these family systems are being reexamined from the standpoint of development of various kinds. Confucianism is found to be just as important as Protestantism. This article questions some of the demographic and economic presuppositions on which these and other discussions are based and argues that they are overly dependent upon the works of European scholars, largely in this case historians and demographers.
