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CHAPTER 8 - FERTILITY, MATING AND ILLEGITIMACY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2016

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Summary

DIVERSITY OF FAMILY FORMS

Most advances in the technique of fertility analysis have stressed the importance of treating mating habits of the population. Among European populations, where mating and marriage are largely synonymous terms, the study of mating is relatively straightforward. Here such unions as have not been initiated by formal marriage, as well as the children born to them, are so insignificant in number that they can be safely ignored. Under these conditions the study of fertility wholly in terms of marriage and legitimate births is justified.

But the situation in the West Indies, largely the legacy of slavery, is entirely different. Here fertility must be analysed against a background of diverse family patterns. It is an over-simplification to consider this situation as merely one of extremely high illegitimacy, as in fact exhibiting a widespread departure from the norm of the family traditionally associated with European populations, which has as one of its chief characteristics initiation by a rite or procedure endowing it with legal sanction. The previous discussion of the West Indian family through the different stages of reproduction suggests that we are dealing with types sui generis. The diversity of family forms, and the extent to which some of these differ from the types traditionally associated with European communities, do not mean that a wholly chaotic family situation prevails. Such an assessment, almost universally expressed in the past, is occasionally still echoed today. But, as Herskovits rightly points out, diversity of type does not indicate ‘a state of demoralization’. On the other hand, it is equally inaccurate to deny altogether that instability is characteristic of many West Indian family forms. And Herskovits, in his further argument on this matter, seems to read into the existing situation a greater degree of stability than actually exists, ‘Here the range of permitted behaviour in organizing as in instituting the family is simply wider than in other societies. For in the final analysis the family … quite successfully performs the task allotted to it—the propagation and rearing of the young.’

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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