Between Generations

Family Models, Myths and Memories

Paul Thompson, Daniel Bertaux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351314060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Between Generations concerns powerful memories that continue to shape the present, but in this case in almost all families throughout the world. What is it that parents pass down to their children? How can we understand the mixture of conscious and unconscious models, myths, and material inheritance that are intertwined in both family and individual life stories? These questions turn out to be unexpectedly complicated, and answering them has suggested how a life-story approach can provide a new key to research on the dynamics of the family and on social change.

Because culture is the essence of what makes individual humans into a group, the core of human social identity, its continuity is vital. Cultures are always changing, but the stability of languages, religions, and cultural habits can be astonishing. In contrast to the claims of culture to represent tradition over centuries, stands the sheer brevity of individual human life. Hence, the universal necessity for transmission between generations exists.

This edition in the Memory and Narrative series, brings together, contributions from the Americas and Asia as well as from Western and Eastern Europe. They combine the techniques of life story research with the insights of family therapy. Interdisciplinary and intellectually stimulating, the volume will appeal to students in many areas, including history, sociology, literature, psychology, and anthropology.

1

Introduction

DANIEL BERTAUX and PAUL THOMPSON

Transmission between generations is as old as humanity itself. It arises from the fundamental human condition. Our lives are a fusion of nature and culture; but nature and culture are in contradiction. Because culture is the essence of what makes individual humans into a group, the core of human social identity, its continuity is vital. Certainly cultures are always changing; but only in part. And the ability of languages, religions, and cultural habits such as those concerning food to survive in the most adverse conditions can be astonishing. But in contrast to the claims of culture to represent tradition over centuries, even eternal truths, stands the sheer brevity of individual human life. Hence the universal necessity for transmission between generations.

The role of family in this intergenerational transmission goes back equally far. On the other hand, it has never held a monopoly of it. A second basic channel, with quite different rhythms, has been the peer group, which has had a particularly crucial role in the transmission of models of femininity and masculinity, sexual and social relationships, fighting and parenting. There have also been, throughout known history, more specific social institutions for transmission: apprenticeship to work skills, shamans or medical schools, apostolic successions of sacred knowledge.

It is, however, the role of the family in transmission on which this book is focused. And it is important to emphasize at the start that it is a very broad role. We may not bring up our children today to worship the shrines of family ancestors as was the practice in many European and Asian societies in the distant past. Nevertheless the family remains the main channel for the transmission of language, names, land and housing, local social standing, and religion; and beyond that also of social values and aspirations, fears, world views, domestic skills, taken-for-granted ways of behaving, attitudes to the body, models of parenting and marriage—resulting in the condensation of experiences characterizing particular class groups, which Tocqueville called ‘les habitudes du cœur’, the habits of the heart, and Bourdieu chose to characterize with the old word ‘habitus’.¹

Families are not, however, neat collective units. Even the word itself has many different meanings. The sense in which we refer to ‘family’ here is as a network of individuals related by kinship and including two or more generations. In terms of transmission, the wider family is likely to be as important as the simple family household in which most children are reared in contemporary western Europe. But while a household normally has clear boundaries, a family in our sense is less easy to pin down. This is because it is a collectivity constituted from an individual standpoint. Every person has a unique position in a family, and as a result defines relationships differently—so that my niece may be your mother-in-law; and for the same reasons, includes or excludes different members in defining the network. ‘Family’ is a cultural image constructed out of real individuals, and also, sometimes, mythical ancestry.

This same double-faceted character applies to transmission. Culture is social, but it is carried and realized by individuals. Most parents seek to transmit only the aspects of their family culture which they approve. Quite often, indeed, they deliberately attempt to hand down a different model, even a mirror image, in certain crucial respects. Thus the ‘family strategies’ of which historians and social scientists write are not so much collective strategies as selections from the culture which the family offers. Equally, one of the fundamental dynamics behind transmission is the search for individual self-perpetuation. Physically, a child is of one’s own flesh: and often evidently so, witnessed through the same eyelashes, the same smile, or less luckily, the same big feet. In the same way, parents hope to see many of their own social characteristics continued through their children. More than that, they may be handing down through their ambitions for their children their own unrealized projects: to become a famous artist, or a scholar, to be comfortable, to have a loving marriage, or to be an independent woman. But again, individuality shapes not only what the family offers, but also what is taken up. Thus parents may offer their own unrealized dreams to their children, but the children on their side must either turn them down or make them their own. Transmission is at the same time individual and collective; and it takes place through a two-way relationship.

Family transmission between generations is thus an intrinsically complex process which also, because of the existence of other channels, lacks a monopoly of what may be handed down. It has in fact been frequently argued that the long-term development of more complex societies, and particularly of industrialized or ‘modernized’ societies, has resulted in a diminution of the role of the family in cultural transmission and the socialization of children. The trend in this direction was particularly dramatic under the totalitarian regimes of the mid-twentieth century, when specialized organizations such as the Hitler Youth or the Red Guards were used to remould young people’s values away from the orbit of their families. But the idea goes back further:

if one values the existence of society … education must make sure that its citizens hold a sufficient community of ideas and feelings without which no society is possible; and for such an outcome, education cannot be abandoned to the arbitrariness of individuals. Since education is an essentially social function, the state cannot turn its back on it. On the contrary, everything that pertains to education must somehow be submitted to its determination. … The role of educator can only be fulfilled by those who possess specific qualifications, of which only the state can judge.²

This strong statement does not come, as one might guess, from the worlds of Stalin or of Mao, but from Emile Durkheim, founding father of sociology and a profound influence in the shaping of the French educational system. It would be difficult to put more strongly the ‘modern’ tendency to undervalue, and even delegitimize, family as a channel of transmission.

There are also plenty of indisputable instances of encroachments on family territories besides the impact of the growth of formal education. Economists have shown, for example, how an increasing proportion of the transfers of financial resources between generations takes place outside the family, through taxation, welfare, and pensions. Even the direction of these currents has been changing—although partly also for demographic reasons—so that it is no longer predominantly from older to younger, but from the middle adult generation to both the young and the elderly. Many social-mobility studies also suggest an evolution from ‘ascription’, in which the crucial determination of occupation was your father’s, to a ‘meritocratic’ competition for jobs in an open labour market, with education as the crucial factor in reaching a high social standing. Although the narrow basis of these studies makes such inferences doubtful, they echo the wider climate of opinion of the welfare-state era.

It seems possible that a similar, less noticed process has also been happening in the sphere of cultural memory. On the one hand the last hundred years have seen a proliferation of public monuments, such as war memorials in western Europe, or giant statues of Mao and Lenin in communist countries, which create ‘lieux de mémoire’ for collective remembering.³ But in the cities at least, and in England more generally, cemeteries are no longer the regularly visited shrines of family memory that they once were: how else could the City of Westminster have sold off all its cemeteries to private enterprise for a pittance? The Protestant families of southern France who take their children to the mountain refuges where their ancestors fought the armies of Louis XIV and held secret religious open-air assemblies in the woods two hundred years ago are not at all typical: they are an instance of a minority, struggling against the odds to maintain its identity.⁴ With the increasingly comfortable majorities the accepted occasions on which family history and memories could be transmitted have been shrinking. Funerals and mourning in particular were radically reduced, almost as if the final pain of death would disappear if mention of it was silenced. And at the same time specialists on ageing argued that ‘reminiscing’ by the elderly was in itself a sign of mental and social deterioration, of an inability to adapt to the present.⁵ One can indeed see how the development of oral history itself, the popularity of family genealogical research, or the media success of Roots,⁶ have offered many people more legitimate ways of seeking the transmission of their family memory. We would also suggest that the scant attention paid by researchers to the forms of transmission which certainly continue through the family is again a reflection of its conventional devaluation.

Durkheim was not the only social scientist who assumed the shrinking of the family sphere to be one of the hallmarks of historical progress. The same assumptions underlie the thinking of Talcott Parsons in post-war America and his ‘functional’ division of social life between the masculine ‘instrumental’ world of work and the feminine ‘affective’ sphere of the home. The return of married women to paid work has ended that male dream-world. Nor is he the only grand theorist of family and socialization dwarfed by subsequent history. Margaret Mead in her widely read book on the youth movements of the 1960s,⁷ drew on a full life’s work in anthropology to set out a three-stage development of human societies in terms of intergenerational relationships. In the earliest, pre-literate societies, which she calls ‘post-figurative’, grandparents are the dominant holders both of social knowledge and of moral authority, and they therefore are the socializers of the children. In the second stage, as the pace of change quickens, the practical experience and skills of the grandparents become obsolete, and parents become the transmitters in this sphere; but the older generation still tell the young what is right and wrong. In the third stage, with change still faster, and also with the increase in long-distance migration, the parents too find their life experiences and skills and even their moral views redundant. The children are left on their own to pick up and teach each other—and often their parents too—new skills, new values, new ways of living. Only the young are nimble enough to look forward, to anticipate the future course of their societies; hence Mead called them ‘prefigurative’. She saw the rebellion of young Americans as heralding the advent of this new stage.

The 1970s showed that she was mistaken. The older generation remained in economic power and political control, while the young sought jobs rather than to change the system. Mead’s misunderstanding came from her failure to distinguish the coexistence of many different channels of transmission. The challenges to parental authority in the 1960s were certainly important and reflected fundamental changes, particularly in the separation of sexuality from family-building; and the resulting tremors also temporarily shook the educational systems. But in Western countries transmission in political and economic spheres was little affected. Significantly, it was only in China, where the youth rebellion was deliberately instigated by the ageing Mao for his own political purposes, that it penetrated the whole social system. And equally significantly, the outcome was not the revolutionary progress for which he had hoped, but a collapse of civic society and politics into anarchical violence and bitter individualistic cruelty.⁸

The early 1990s offer us, however, another viewpoint as a result of the collapse of the Communist societies which Stalin and Mao had built. A century earlier, Durkheim’s optimistic faith in progress and rationalization had been wholly in tune with the thinking of his time; as also Max Weber’s analyses of historical development through bureaucratization. But by a curious twist of history, their Utopian visions were realized in nightmares, of which the most sustained was the reign of Stalin. His centralized system aimed to have all under its gaze, responsive to its iron will. It is notable that two of the centres of resistance which the totalitarian system repeatedly sought to destroy were the family and memory. Family properties were seized and family enterprises suppressed. Not only having been a capitalist, or a political opponent, but even being descended from one became a pretext for social exclusion or imprisonment. Public statues were replaced, streets and towns renamed. Whole peoples were uprooted from where they lived and forcibly resettled; and some of them too were renamed. Children were forced to denounce their parents. More fortunate families kept their past a secret and, if need be, changed to safer names before being exposed.

The collapse of these totalitarian societies has had a double consequence. The first is that a vital part of their struggle to transform themselves into democratic societies has been to recover the histories of family and everyday life that had been suppressed for two or in the Russian case three or four generations. Living testimonies constitute a crucial part of this huge effort. They were already the inspiration of its anticipation in Solzhenitzyn’s Gulag Archipelago.⁹ This is why in the major Russian cities the Memorial associations documenting the victims of Stalin have not only attracted thousands of members, but can be seen with their banners among the leading democratic pressure groups in political dem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• List of Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Family Myth, Models, and Denials in the Shaping of Individual Life Paths
• 3. The Pull of Family Ties: Intergenerational Relationships and Life Paths
• 4. Religion, Family, and Industry in the Transmission of Values: The Case of Women Textile Workers in Antioquia, Colombia
• 5. Social Change, Family Histories, and Attitudes to Money in a Rural Community in Epirus
• 6. Attitudes towards Marriage and Divorce among Women in Modern China
• 7. A Hitler Youth from a Respectable Family: The Narrative Composition and Deconstruction of a Life Story
• 8. Transgenerational Transmission in the Families of Holocaust Survivors in England
• 9. Grandmothers, Mothers, and Daughters: Intergenerational Transmission in Displaced Families in Three Jewish Communities
• 10. Memory of Slavery in Black Families of São Paulo, Brazil
• 11. Spoken and Unspoken Words in the Life of a Cypriot Woman: A Life Story by her Granddaughter
• 12. Kichuk Paris: A Bulgarian Family Story