STRUCTURE AND ETHOS IN FAMILY LIFE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE TRADITIONAL CHINESE AND MODERN AMERICAN FAMILY

Contemporary U.S. white urban Protestant upper middle class families are contrasted with traditional non-gentry Chinese families as examples of two extremes of human action and thought patterns. It is the thesis of this dissertation that there exist specific continua in the realms of social structure and social consciousness that can be characterized by two extremes. By elaborating these extremes as polar ideal types, one can objectively map what has been deemed thus far as hopelessly subjective. The traditional Chinese and the contemporary U.S. families have been selected to illustrate historical settings that approach the poles of the specific dimensions which have been selected for elaboration. These dimensions are a general structural variable which focuses on superordination and subordination as well as three dimensions of subjective consciousness, namely solidarity, ideology, and morality. Roughly speaking, solidarity denotes a sense of identification with the group and is characterized by an individual's commitment and loyalty to the group. Ideology refers to a choice between what appears good or bad, that is, what appears meaningful and meaningless, and morality is described as the distinction between what appears to be right or wrong and denotes the sense of justice. The opposites of the structural dimension are found to be either hierarchical or coalescent; whereas solidarity is either communal or associational, ideology is either organic or voluntaristic, and morality is either authoritarian or libertarian. Through an examination of the literature concerning these two family types as well as the use of participant observation of overseas Chinese in Malaysia and of contemporary U.S. family life, the traditional Chinese family is found to be hierarchical, communal, organic, and authoritarian, while the contemporary U.S. family is depicted as coalescent, associational, voluntaristic, and libertarian. Atypical types are found among Chinese gentry and working class U.S. families which verifies the assumption that no society is ever void of continua variations.