Book contents
6 - Family Work
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2010
Summary
The family work of aunts and uncles takes on a variety of forms but shares some common characteristics as aunts and uncles, as well as nieces and nephews, exchange knowledge about family members, mediate occasional family disputes, or act as partisan supporters or critics. Aunts and uncles talk with nieces and nephews about their parents, siblings, grandparents, and other kinfolk. They tell and retell stories of family members. They share significant events, developmental milestones, and news of current activities. In so doing, they create a family's unique biography and secure the place of each individual within a continuity of generations and relationships. In this chapter, we consider each of the realms of family work as they illustrate how uncles and aunts enact generativity throughout their relationships with family members, particularly nephews and nieces. At the same time, the conduct of family work further illustrates how families are composed of interdependent relationships organized across multiple households. Of course families vary in their permeability, in the knowledge members have of one another, the frequency with which they communicate, and the unique family norms that govern their conversations or the lack of them. Some aunts and uncles have little contact with their siblings or other kin; others have considerable contact. Our task in these pages is to illustrate this diversity and in particular to illustrate how aunts, uncles, parents, and their children often rely on one another in a variety of significant ways.
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- Information
- The Forgotten KinAunts and Uncles, pp. 131 - 158Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009