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Introduction

Introduction

Key Concepts: Families explores how family scholars have approached the study of 'family' as a social institution. Convention dictates that a book such as this begins with a definition of the topic at hand. For many readers in Euro-American societies, the word 'family' probably conjures up the image of one or two parents and their biological child(ren). Some might include grandparents in this picture. While at first glance, defining family might seem a fairly straightforward task, by the end of this book I hope the reader will have gained insight into how complex family lives are and how difficult it is to try to pin down this dynamic and multidimensional social phenomenon. Attempts to define 'family' in terms of composition are beset with problems because definitions of which constellation of relationships constitutes 'family' vary across cultures and over time. I am therefore interested in exploring how 'family' has been defined by 'lay' people as well as by academics and policymakers, and with which consequences. As such, the aim of this book is to advance critical scholarship within family studies.

My discussions span families across the globe and engage with scholarly work from the Global North and the Global South. A brief note on terminology is necessary at the outset: I use 'Western' when I am talking about culture; I refer to Global North and Global South when talking broadly about geographical regions; and I use the term 'Euro-American family studies' to signal the fact that family studies is a field dominated by perspectives originating from Europe and North America.

Sociology of attention

This book appears in a series called Key Concepts. I approach the task of providing an overview of the key concepts in family studies by focusing on the act of conceptualizing 'family'. This means trying to understand how family scholars have conceptualized 'family', why they have done so and which dimensions of family life they have noticed, as well as what the consequences of such decisions are for the kind of knowledge that is produced about family life. I do this with the help of Zerubavel's (2015) sociology of attention that asks just such questions. Zerubavel (2015: 2) defines attention as the 'mental act of focusing' and 'narrowing of our conscious awareness'. Paying attention to something means selectively focusing on specific features while filtering out other details that are not considered pertinent. In other words, some features come to the fore of our consciousness and others fall to the background. As a result, we come to view the world as made up of 'seemingly discrete, freestanding entities that are somehow separable from their surroundings' (p. 8). But Zerubavel reminds us that the contours and boundaries that we perceive to exist are the result of how we look at social phenomena, and that changing our conceptual lenses leads to a shift in what we see. In this book, I am interested in exploring what family scholars do and do not see and notice when they study families, and what could be seen, or seen differently, if we used different attentional foci.

What we do and do not notice is not merely down to individual choice. This is because, when making sense of the world around us, we make use of an 'often-shared and therefore ultimately collective sense of relevance and concern', meaning that we 'notice and ignore things not only as individuals but also jointly, as parts of collectives' (Zerubavel, 2015: 9). Members of 'attentional communities' share 'attentional traditions' and 'attentional habits', which in turn help shape what they 'regard as relevant and to which [they] therefore attend' (p. 52). These attentional traditions and habits are ones that we pick up through a process of 'attentional socialization' (p. 63) during which we learn what to focus on and what not to attend to.

Explaining the relationship between individual minds and sociocultural context is the bread and butter of the social sciences. There exist many theoretical approaches devoted to explaining how people's thoughts and actions come to be shaped by their relational, social and cultural context, but also how people's actions contribute to changing conventional ways of thinking and doing (May, 2013). A person will come into contact with a number of attentional communities through their lifetime, including the (sub-)cultures they are born into and the attentional communities they join that cohere around, for example, a particular occupation or interest. Each scientific discipline also has its own attentional conventions. Sociologists, for example, are trained to 'envision social movements, labor markets, power structures, influence networks, and kinship ties' (Zerubavel, 2015: 68). Members of an attentional community experience a sense of 'attentional "togetherness"' that derives from their 'collective focus of attention' that in turn 'presupposes a shared sense of relevance' (p. 69). That which falls inside this frame of attention is deemed 'remarkable (and thus noteworthy)', while that which falls outside the frame is classified as 'unnoteworthy' (p. 22) and is 'thereby tacitly ignored' (p. 27).

Members of an attentional community in other words have a shared, usually tacit, understanding of what is worthy of attention and what 'ought to remain in the background' (Zerubavel, 2015: 59). As a result, they are 'perceptually readied' to notice those features of social reality that 'reflect [their] collective expectations' (p. 53). Family scholars for example are trained to notice and foreground specific features of family life, such as relationships between parents and children or family practices in the home. Other features, such as relationships with extended kin and what happens when family members step outside the home, are relegated to the background. According to Zerubavel, features of social life that are foregrounded gain a 'thing-like quality' (p. 12) while backgrounded features are seen as 'shapeless' and 'lacking a well-delineated contour' (p. 14).

In addition to shedding light on attentional conventions in family studies, this book is written as an extended exercise in 'looking obliquely' that aims to transcend conventional ways of seeing 'family'. This entails looking at family through substantive and conceptual lenses that are not usually used in the family studies literature. I wish to enliven family studies by encouraging family scholars to consciously notice the attentional boundaries they adopt and to pay more attention to dimensions of life that are perhaps less obviously about 'family', but that nevertheless fundamentally shape how people (family scholars included) think about and 'do' families. This exercise in looking obliquely is inspired by Brekhus's (1998) work on reverse marking by which he means a process of consciously foregrounding features of social life that have hitherto been relegated to the background. Reverse marking is made possible through a 'nomadic perspective' which 'entails shifting to several different analytic vantage points from which to view something' (p. 47).

Mason's (2011b) facet methodology helps explicate what reverse marking means in terms of how we as social scientists produce knowledge about the social world. Mason argues that because of the dynamic and multifaceted nature of social phenomena, they can never be grasped in their totality. Mason compares the social phenomena that social scientists study, such as family life, to a gemstone. Social scientific analysis sheds light on particular facets of the gemstone with the help of concepts and methods of investigation. In this scenario, concepts and methods act like lenses; different lenses will refract a different kind of light on the phenomenon that is being studied; and how this light is refracted back to the observer depends on which facet of the phenomenon is being looked at. In other words, as noted above, how we look affects what we see. Mason encourages researchers to adopt a sense of openness and playfulness that opens up the possibility that we are surprised by the social worlds we study, as opposed to finding more or less what we expect. The approach taken in this book is open in two ways: open to questioning the conventional boundaries that are placed around what 'family' is and open to exploring how different disciplinary approaches and theories can shed new light on families.

Looking obliquely is partly about reverse marking, in that it is about looking at family life through different analytical vantage points in order to bring into relief that which conventional attentional foci have not attended to. But looking obliquely is also something more, namely making new connections between dimensions of life that are usually not seen as connected. This is what Sousanis (2015: 37) calls 'stereoscopic vision' that results when we interweave 'multiple strands of thought' so as to create a 'richly dimensional tapestry'. In the resultant tapestry: 'Distinct viewpoints still remain, now no longer...