Extent of Sharing within the Family Versus Extent of Total Group Sharing

Table 5C and 5D shows that the level of cultural sharing within the family is more distinctive of the Swahili than the level of cultural sharing within the community at large. That is, the differences between the Swahili and the other two groups are larger with respect to internal family sharing than with respect to total group sharing. Further, if these two sets of differences are compared to the differences between internal family and total group sharing in table 5B, it can be seen that the level of sharing for the Swahili community is more similar to the levels of sharing in the two other societies than Swahili communitywide sharing is to Swahili family sharing.

This finding may be counterintuitive in that interaction, both within families and in the wider community, seemingly would act to increase levels of sharing. Yet the data here show that groups with no interaction among their members (i.e., groups in three widely separated parts of the globe) are more similar in levels of sharing than either coresident families or whole communities whose members interact. A hypothesis that might explain this is that the range of sharing associated with working societies (i.e., those still in existence and whose members are not all leaving in the immediate future) is narrower than the range associated with working families.

Some families, this hypothesis suggests, get along with quite limited sharing while others have substantially more, and this wide range is present in all the societies included in this study. Direct experience with Swahili families

suggests that some families get along quite well (carry out household activities, distribute money and goods, have members who seem reasonably satisfied with one another, etc.) on the basis of rather limited—both in scope and intensity—interaction. The members of these families talk to one another less, stay around one another less, and restrict interaction when it occurs. Other Swahili families are less restrained: they interact more and do so more unrestrictedly. But the latter families "work" quite as well as the former do in keeping together and accomplishing their members' ends.

At the community level, however, there is a narrower variation brought about by the relatively low limit on the level of sharing that can be attained in so large and diverse a group and the relatively high "floor" on what must be present if a group is to continue operating. The minimum needed for social continuation is, I suspect, largely made up of "tokens," which will be discussed in chapter 6, and status identifiers, which will discussed in chapter 7.

Members of different families have little need, or for that matter, opportunity, to deal with one another in nuclear family statuses. There is some pressure to be seen in conversations and to use relationship terms to praise or condemn (see chap. 7) people belonging to different families, and this may represent the basis for some part of the rather consistent, and low, level of sharing of family culture found among people from different Swahili families (and the comparison groups as well). Another part of societywide sharing is found in the agreement about who is what in the family, that is, what categories of people are found in households and who fits in them.