/lit/ - Literature

>>16613750
"Yes."

>>16588113
>>16588119
>>16588124
>>16588132
Wow this looks fucking RAD.

>>16577250
>Dictionary
>2020

>>16537891
>>16537878
Let me clarify:

Europeans have, since pre-historical times, been fluctuating between two models of familial organization: "Big Families" and "Small Families".

Big Families have a patriarch, with the biggest having patriarchs, and a matriarch, with the biggest having matriarchs. Child-rearing is distributed amongst many people, such that a kid will actually have multiple "father-figures". You can read about men in the Classical period who were born, never meet their father, and are instead raised by like, four other dudes in the village, but live with their mother: that's this. This system allows for enormous families because you just have a massive blob, acting as its own small ethnostate along self-organizing principles, taking care of basically everything. These usually crop up in agricultural communities, or in other "spiritually-agricultural" communities, such as mining towns, where the limiting factor on economic activity is manpower.

Small Families have a single father, a single mother, and while they're part of a larger web, the father is the head of a small state. A VERY small state, but a state none the less. So, an individual navigates relationships among many of these tiny states. They still have many kinfolk around them, but they're "raised by", "belong to", and will "inherit the title(s) of" their mother and father as individuals. A son WILL become a patriarch under this model, whereas in the previous one, he only will if he wants to. These crop up in urban areas, or in aristocracies, where economic activity isn't actually aided by pure numbers of men available (think craftsmen), and instead it is beneficial to maximize the benefit going to a small clique of children.

The Nuclear Family is NOT the Small Family. They're fundamentally different. How? See >>16537896. The Small Family exists to benefit you, your kids, and your kin. The Nuclear Family exists to benefit banks.