The notion of family as the form of people’s relationships took its root in the ancient time. Family has become the part of our life since then, but the importance of its study is still essential. Such a form of social relations keeps much attention among scholars. The aim of this paper is to contribute to general social perspective on the family and introduce a brief analysis of family’s origin, its history and structure.

I start my paper with the very definition of the family. Thus, family is form of social behaviour, then more than one people live together in a residence usually, but not necessarily such relations are legalized. The family can be organized because of marriage of two persons or then people of the same bloodline live together.

I. Historical background

The history of the family started in ancient times, when people lived in tribes. A tribe is a predecessor of a contemporary family. People under the circumstances urging them to hunt in order to find some food and protect themselves from wild animals started to unite in a certain groups. Within this certain group the household was elected during the common gatherings, usually it was a very old and wise man. Hence, the tribes had a certain structure. There was a clear division of those, who hunt and those who protect the settlement, and those who were responsible for the organization and general order. Thus, the study of primitive history gives us a general understanding of the society organization and reveals its conditions of living. The common principle of living was the polygamy. There was not a clear bloodline, and children were therefore considered common to all members of the tribe.

It is worth noticed that the polygamy also lied in the fact that sexual relations were primitive. The belonging to the same bloodline relations did not form a family. When nowadays the family system is based mainly on blood relations or marriage and exclusiveness, the so-called families in ancient times with free sexual intercourse or polygamy, came into being almost spontaneously. The family ties in this structure could be loosened and the individual could become free again. However, this rarely happened on the person’s own will and is considered expulsion. Thus, more or less organized societies among barbarians can be found, however, precisely because the individual is not merged in the family.

Therefore, unrestricted sexual freedom prevailed within the tribe. It is generally considered that every woman belonged equally to every man and every man to every woman, though it is difficult to trace the ancient relationships. However, it should be noticed that sexual polygamy does not mean what is understood by prostitution in the modern society. More likely under the sexual intercourse namely group marriage was understood.

Nevertheless, other scholars deny the primitive social stage of such promiscuity. Indeed, it is such a remote epoch that we can hardly prove the existence of polygamy directly by discovering its social fossils among backward savages. The assertions of the monogamous habits are cited by Westermarck. But for sure there is plenty of promiscuity evidence in the later stages of human existence.

The unrestricted sexual relations dominated when the institute of family was rooted in the society. However, it did not resemble the tribe structure, certain sexual freedom in relations. To give but few examples, many historical and fiction literature evidences the sexual freedom existed during the 16th and 17th centuries. Since the eighteenth century such primitive relations were not the common and prevailed only in some phases of human developments.

When people entered a qualitatively new stage of development new form of relations began to exist. The people of the same settlement started to live in small groups living within a community. With the spread of new developments and harmonization of social structure certain rules of human behaviour were put in rules and procedure. It should be noticed that religion had a tremendous influence upon our ancestors and the religious beliefs were mainly the main supporters of family as an agent of social behaviour. The family underwent changes with religious and society conditions and only after a long series of changes they finally ended in monogamy, which makes up an essential part of the social constitution of the people. Starting with the decisive part played by consanguinity in the social structure of all barbarians and to some extent within medieval peoples, the importance of a system did widespread.

Thus, it is the time to view the family structure. Referring to the previous paragraphs, the family represents an active principle, which is influenced by the developments in the society. Since the society is never stationary, certain advances have been introduced from a lower to a higher form of a society. Despite the family system is not passive, it is worth noticing that the progress which took place by the family were made at long intervals of time and was not radically changed. The analysis of family structure, that has been formed during the ages are introduced further.

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