Family Secrets the Economy Is Unaware Of

Abstract

This article discusses the limits of the concept of the family on the basis of observations from two case studies involving rural families in the Brazilian Northeast. It attempts, in the first place, to show the limitations of research on the home that assumes the family to be a nuclear one: a married couple and their unmarried children. It goes on to develop a critique of the economistic approach that treats the family as exclusively a unit of production and consumption. It concludes with observations about the family in the communities of Gericó and Valente, which are located in two quite different microregions of the state of Bahia. Families in these rural communities have proved to be more extensive and more complex than that of the model originally adopted, both with regard to who belongs to the family and with regard to these families' organization and objectives, which go well beyond the limits of mere units of production. © 2004 Latin American Perspectives.