familiarity

Last week, another group was doing a class presentation on friendship.  This week, my group had to do our presentation on family.  The presentation itself was awkward, but I got through it.  People construct families in all these different ways, place emphasis in different ways, on the roles, responsibilities, and relevance of those in the group, and even the group over all.

Collectivists, we learn, value the group itself, while individualists predominantly value the group only in so far as what it does for them.  Individualists value independence, while treating familial connections as more temporary, circumstantial, disposable.  Collectivists can go to the other extreme, of treating an individual as disposable, should their disposal benefit the group.

We ask why people go through all this; what is the purpose of family?  These are complex fluid in-group / out-group dynamics.  On one level, the practicality of it seems to be fundamental across cultures.  People figure out ways of banding together, establishing these protocols to facilitate it.

On another level, we need to create all these distinctions between us and them, because it's how human biology works.  We bond over the notion that we're us, and they're terrible.

"oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism"

Family is a vital part of being human, regardless of how we define it.  What it does for people is important.  We're not evolved to go through life alone.