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Humans are characterized by a distinctive set of traits, including: (1) large brains, (2) long periods of juvenile dependence, (3) extensive biparental care including large transfers of information, (4) multi-generational bi-lateral kin networks, (5) habitual bipedal locomotion, (6) use of the upper limbs for tool use including projectile weapons, (7) concealed or “cryptic” ovulation, (8) menopause, (9) culture including language, and (10) lethal competition among kin-based coalitions. The evolution and co-evolution of this suite of traits presents several evolutionary questions or puzzles that are central to understanding the human family. This chapter describes these puzzles, and suggests a resolution based on the importance of social competition during human evolution. It also considers the developmental issue of how the family social environment may affect the timing of reproductive maturation and how this timing is essential to an understanding of the family.

Trailer parks serve African American families primarily as places to live. Social lives take place among large, close-knit kin networks, or in churches also attended by relatives. Kin importantly provide access to employment or income supports in times of need. In contrast to the integrated contexts of their trailer park, where they attend school, or work, park families experience a segregated world, amongst their church and kin networks. Park parents have large sibling sets, a source of rich supports and resources. Lacking such support a family struggles, but alternatively form fictive kinship ties with people from church or friendship networks.

Muslims and Muslim polities have been present for hundreds of years on the coast of East Africa. Some 80 percent of the population in Southeast Tanzania is estimated to be Muslim. How and why this came to be the case, and how this process has shaped both the ritual practice of these Muslims and the way they understand their place within their country, is the subject of this book. It concentrates on the role of proselytizers rather than the motives of converts, emphasizing the former's personal commitment and piety. The conversion to Islam among non-Muslims in the countryside, and the spread of Sufi orders in the towns where many people already were Muslim, are addressed. The religious practice and everyday life, and the role of the state, travel, and local society in the production of oral records are described. Moreover, the chapter discusses the historicity of local views of history and religion, kin networks, villages and religious affiliations, and the polyvalence of religious change, struggle, and negotiation.

This chapter looks at how family members care for each other and the impact of employment, particularly women's employment, on their ability to do so. It examines how people care for children, older people, and those who are unable to care for themselves, whether temporarily, due to illness, or on a more permanent basis. It also discusses how the connectedness of kin networks varies and how this relates to class and patterns of women's and men's employment.

Chapter four considers expulsion and enslavement from the perspective of free people of color themselves. Drawing upon “feelings”, emotions and the importance of familial and community ties, it illustrates how free blacks who submitted enslavement petitions were often enmeshed in spousal or other affective relationships which crossed the boundary between slavery and freedom. These people placed their families before their legal status when requesting bondage. A sense of place in which one belonged underscored the petitioners' desire for enslavement, and while their rhetoric often focused on economic benefits of slavery to whites, free people of color themselves were prioritizing their own personal relationships. Love and affection for family members with whom the petitioners wished to live was cited as the primary motivational factor in many enslavement cases, and the often poignant testimony of the petitioners reveals the extent of romantic attachment to spouses, as well as love for wider kin networks within affective communities.

Chapter 3 details why so many women wished to remain with their abusers and how it was they started moving toward the law despite their best efforts. Using interview and observation data, the author describes how women initially wished to avoid the law. They tried to “run a family” (sansar calano): work things out, make the violence stop, have a peaceful family life with people who had abused them. This chapter asks what it means to “run a family” and examines the social and institutional factors that shape women’s desires. It then goes on to show how, despite their commitments, in the process of seeking help women became enmeshed in kin networks that pushed them toward legal engagements.

This paper examines transnational movements at the northern border in 1838, a pivotal year in United States, British, and indigenous relations. In that year, the Upper and Lower Canada Rebellions were launched from Maine to Detroit as an attempt by local people on both sides of the border to over throw a small cadre of British elites who dominated a conservative political machine. That same year, Potawatomi of the southern Great Lakes who had traditionally freely crossed the border due to treaty arrangements negotiated at the end of the eighteenth century, utilized these transnational options to flee forced removal by the U.S. government. Similarly, indigenized French, individuals who were the products of over a century of integration into Native communities, were migrating away from these communities as British Indian agents attempted to protect indigenous homelands. At Detroit, a key location for migrating Potawatomi and other Anishinaabe, the movements of these three groups came together, dislocating and relocating families, and at times breaking out into armed conflict that threatened a British/American neutrality agreement. Detroit’s location at the apex of the indigenous buffer zone made the performance of indigeneity a crucial means to negotiate and sometimes thwart the agendas of the two Euro-American nations. Of the three groups, Potawatomi were most successful in maintaining their communities.