Household and Household Size
For most economic, organizational, moral, and ritual purposes, the smallest social unit of the that is the household. It is an important economic unit, coordinated usually by the male head of the household, who decides, within the limits imposed by the macrostructure, what activities will be undertaken, and who collects and distributes the family income. The household is the setting for intimacy, for the education of the young, for preliminary (and usually effective) attempts at controlling deviant behavior, and for much family religion. Like the that itself, the family has a clearly bounded corporate and spatial (chap. 7) inside and outside, and tries to protect the inside through privacy and secrecy. There is no specific name for the household in Newari, but its members sometimes refer to each other with the Nepali (and Hindi) term jahan , in this sense "household family," which is distinguished from other, larger family units. Sometimes the group is referred to by terms that refer to the sharing of boiled food, particularly rice, such as chaga jasi , "one rice pot." If a household separates into separate units, it is conventionally phrased as "having stopped sharing a kitchen area," or "having stopped eating boiled rice together." The main metaphor for the household, as is generally true of household units in other parts of the world, is that its members share a common cooking and eating place.
When families separate, usually at a time when there are two or more sons with their own wives and children, they may, if the house is large enough, divide up the space in the house in which they were living, or add to it so that uncles, brothers, cousins, and so on, live in more or less
close contact, but have separate cooking areas or cooking times, separate household heads, and separate household shrines. According to a survey by the Nepal Rastra[*] Bank (1974a ), a majority of all Bhaktapur households shared larger housing structures with (at least) one other household.[1]
This same survey showed for Bhaktapur an average figure of six persons per household, the same figure as that given in the National Census of 1973. The survey also has figures on the distribution of size of households for the entire city population: 5.2 percent of the households included only one person; 33.2 percent, two to four persons; 37.2 percent, five to seven persons; 13.4 percent, eight to ten persons; and 10.9 percent, eleven or more persons.[2] The available surveys do not consider the distribution of household size in relation to the variables of macro-status and thar . Tables on average monthly expenditure in relation to household size, however, show that the larger households are not only correlated, as one would expect, with larger total monthly expenditures but also in a direct and regular correlation with increasingly higher per capita monthly expenditures. For example, households averaging 4.2 members spend fifty-three rupees (Rs. 53) per member per month, households with 7.7 members spend Rs. 67 per member per month, while the largest households averaging 17.5 members spend Rs. 84 per member per month. These larger households are the wealthier households, the houses at the upper levels of the status system. These are also the people with the largest houses, which are more likely to contain two or more closely related households. People living in the upper, say, 25 percent of the Bhaktapur macrostatus and economic system, from well-to-do farmers and up, may sometimes live in large family units of twenty or more people in a house, because of the larger households and the multiple households in a house.
The Nepal Rastra[*] Bank Survey also gives a rough overall idea of the average number of component "families" or "subfamilies" in a household. They define additional family units as those consisting of a married couple (with or without children) other than the identified head of the household and his spouse, or of a widowed man or woman with children. They found that 30 percent of households had a least one such additional unit, almost 30 percent of the multiunit households having two additional units, and 9 percent having three or four. The sample survey suggests that there are about 2,920 such subfamily units, living in the 6,494 households of Bhaktapur, dependent on or subordinate in
some way to the household head. In accordance with the distribution of numbers of people in households, we may also assume that the larger and more prosperous and generally the higher the household is in the macrostatus system, the more likely it is to have a membership made up of such separate nuclei.
Thus from the upper strata of farmers and above, people are more liable to live in larger houses, in larger households, with more complexly nucleated household structures, and in close contact with closely related households. Most middle farming families and the levels below them tend to separate quickly into smaller and physically separated units as brothers marry. It would seem this has various consequences for other aspects of social organization, and for the differential developmental and family experience of people of both high and low status.