Family, Gender and Kinship in Australia: The Social and Cultural Logic of Practice and Subjectivity

Book Review

Family, Gender and Kinship in Australia: The Social and Cultural Logic of Practice and Subjectivity

Allon Uhlmann

ISBN: 978-0-7546-4645-9; 2006; 198 pages; Ashgate, Aldershot, UK;

Jo Grimwade
School of Psychology, Australian Catholic University, Fitzroy VIC

The reader of Allon Uhlmann's Family, Gender and Kinship in Australia will be surprised by the location of the report in economic and historical terms. The author is a US anthropologist and the work is largely ethnographic. Many of the early chapters are concerned with methodological discussion, as the author searches for an approach that is not dominated by quantitative measures of experience. The result is heavy going in the beginning chapters, but the idea emerges that family as a form of practice will vary between cultures, classes and historical periods; and that the practice of 'doing family' will be observably different from that of child or adult, male or female viewpoints.

The text opens up with a report on the family experience of families in Newcastle, Australia, in the 1990s. There is a layering of theoretical concepts on observations about the practice of family through Bourdieu's (1977) tripartite typology of practice, namely that of doxa (a set of practices that are not noticed because they are taken for granted), orthodoxy (the following of doxa by persons), and heterodoxy (the rejection of doxa by enacting other practices, which in turn have the effect of making the taken-for-granted more salient for most). Class, time structure, housingownership, and the presence of a backyard are some of the categories used to explore the ordinary definition of family practice. However, the orthodox family was better understood when contrasted with the heterodox: single, homosexual and childless families.

The chapter on kinship was interesting. Reproduction (having children) mediated kinship in various subsections of the Novocastrian populace, which had been subject to a variety of migrations. Class was contained by kinship. In the next chapter, on internalized gender structures, the domestic and the feminine were closely aligned. The male and the market-place were similarly linked. In turn, the infant is dominated by the adult and the market dominates the domestic. For Uhlmann, these hierarchies are deeply conservative and mediated directly by the acceptance of woman's place in the home.

The final chapters examine issues of methodology and the link between class, gender and kinship. It is interesting that, although the gravity of social processes is toward reproduction of gender and class differences, Uhlmann's group of informants demonstrated a considerable amount of occupational mobility. Class was under question in 1990s Newcastle with the closure of BHP and other heavy industries, but gender and kinship were not moving greatly. Yet, these movements seemed to confirm the reproduction of social difference rather than indicating a collapse of capitalism. The book seems to offer great opportunity to consider issues of work-life balance in contemporary Australia, but the notion of balance did not emerge. Rather, the sociology of experience in families appears to equate with reproduction of a conservative economic order.

This was heavy reading for a clinical psychologist trying to understand how real families experience their social, economic and historical place. The notion of family as a mode of practice was an unfamiliar starting point, but was the key to the argument. Bourdieu's sociological concepts were presented well, but often proved a thick lens through which to view the family. The snapshots of Australian life found in the interview excerpts were directly informative, but were buried in the text. Novocastrians would see themselves, but many other Australians might as well. This is not a text for any but ethnographic sociologists or historians with a sociological interest.

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