Questions: Household Organization and Domestic Space

Question 1

In a society with matrilineal descent and matrilocal postmarital residence, who would most likely share a household with a newly married couple?

• A. The husband's parents and brothers
• B. The wife's mother and her maternal relatives
• C. Both sets of parents in a single large household
• D. Neither set of parents; the couple establishes an independent nuclear household

Answer: (B)

Matrilocal residence means the couple lives with or near the wife's family. Combined with matrilineal descent (tracing kinship and inheritance through the mother's line), this produces households structured around female lineages — a woman, her daughters, their husbands, and their children. The husband is the 'outsider' in this arrangement, potentially maintaining closer ties to his mother's household than to his wife's. This configuration reinforces matrilineal property transmission and keeps female-line kin together for cooperative labor and mutual support.

Question 2

Why do extended family households tend to be more common in agricultural societies than in industrialized ones? Use concepts from your prerequisite topics.

Model answer: In agricultural societies, land is typically the primary productive resource and is often held, worked, and inherited as a family unit. Large households pool labor for planting and harvesting, and co-residence keeps the labor force together. Kinship obligations (from your kinship and descent knowledge) often include caring for elders and supporting dependent kin — obligations most easily fulfilled through co-residence. Industrialization changes the economic calculus: wage labor is individual rather than collective, work is geographically mobile, and elder care is increasingly outsourced to state institutions. The nuclear household emerges as a functional adaptation to conditions where individual mobility and economic independence are more valuable than pooled domestic labor.

This question asks you to apply the principle that household form follows from economic and kinship logic. The key move is explaining not just that extended households are more common in agricultural societies, but *why* — in terms of land tenure, labor requirements, kinship obligations, and the economic incentives these create for co-residence.