The Limits in the Amount of Family Culture Shared by Family Members and Community Members from Different Families

Despite the difficulties in this approach to studying cultural sharing, it produces findings that can provide a starting point for further investigation in a largely neglected area of empirical research. It is not that the results of this study are beyond doubt but, rather, that they give indications of having some validity.

Some of the findings are what would be expected: members of the same family share more of the understandings concerned with family life and relations than those belonging to different families (table 4A below). Rather less expected is the size of the difference between sharing among same family

members and sharing in the community generally. Table 4 shows that within the family about five-eighths of the items (0.454 would be 5/8, 0.600 would be 3/4) are shared, while among members of different families in this long-enduring, well-integrated, and traditional community, less than half of all the items (0.333 would be 1/2) are shared.

The fact that cultural sharing is a good deal less than complete among members of the same families and also among community members is probably in accord with the assumption, now widely held, that "all by all" sharing does not occur. It may be, however, that its absence in so small and highly integrated a group as the nuclear family may carry this a bit farther than is generally envisaged.

The nuclear family was chosen as the venue for studying the role of cultural sharing in Swahili social life because it is a crucial element in this society and an undoubtedly effective group as concerns retaining its members and meeting an acceptable (to members) proportion of their social, emotional, and material needs. Given the stability and endurance of the families studied and the broad array and significance for members of the tasks taken care of within it, it is clearly warranted to view the culture of this group (i.e., the beliefs, values, and procedural understandings concerned with its tasks and relation-

ships) as effective. If the effectiveness of culture is taken to depend on the extent to which its constituent elements are shared, there would be every reason to expect a level of sharing here about as high as would be found among the members of any group whose activities cover a broad scope of life.

It is striking, therefore, that three-eighths of the cultural elements directly concerned with family life and relationships (as represented by our questionnaire) are nevertheless unshared among members of functioning, continuing families. This limited sharing may be less than surprising, but the fact that the sample includes only members of active, continuing families, all of whom are concerned with family life and relationships on a daily basis, makes it somewhat more interesting.

The idea that there is a Swahili family culture is not supported by the findings in table 4, if what is meant by "family culture" is a single set of generally shared cultural elements concerned with family life and relations. The ability to explain culture's effectiveness as the basis for Swahili family life (and the results from the other four societies are quite similar in this; see Swartz 1982a ) as a consequence of "shared beliefs and values" is put into question by these findings and made more doubtful yet by findings reported elsewhere here, especially in chapter 9.