Aspects of kinship, family and gender in a deindustrialising Australian town

This thesis explores aspects of kinship, family and gender behaviour as a unified field of practice. It is based on fieldwork among working-class Australians, mostly White, and on published sociological and historical material. The theoretical apparatus that is deployed is grounded in Bourdieu's theory of practice and in cognitive science. A close and systematic investigation reveals that the nuclear family remains the prototypical family, and is both conceptually and experientially dominant. While the nuclear family-conceptualised as a life trajectory-remains dominant, the distribution of individuals in the different stages of this trajectory has changed. Moreover, the actual trajectory is undergoing some change, too. A clearer distinction between a childbearing and a child-rearing phase is emerging, as is a distinction between social maturity and economic independence. I describe the kinship system, the ideology of relatedness and the world view which inheres in the system. I focus on the gender order, and use both articulated and unarticulated practices to tease out the internalised structures of masculine domination. Following this I describe how practice in the field of kinship, family and gender interacts with practice in other fields to produce the broader social order, particularly the prevailing class structure and the political economy. After systematically consolidating the theory of practice which informs the analysis in this thesis, I situate my work within the relevant anthropological literature, and in relation to the sociological analysis of the Australian family. In light of the work reported here, I offer a critique of the conceptualisation of practice in much of the social scientific study of the family