The Dynamics of Stasis: Historical Inertia in The Evolution of the Australian Family.

This paper highlights the significant role the anthropological perspective with its broad comparative outlook, and its focused ethnographic observations, can play in understanding historical processes in general, and the under-theorised processes of stasis and historical inertia in particular. It does so by engaging with the history of the white Australian family. It argues that the sense of radical shifts in the family is misplaced. Conceived of as a life trajectory, the nuclear family remains overwhelmingly dominant cognitively, culturally and normatively. The recent limited changes that have emerged largely in response to the increased cost of social reproduction, do not amount to an overwhelming shift, nor do they reflect major cultural or normative transformations. The continuities in the Australian family are consistent with the broad continuity in family practice in comparable metropolitan and settler European societies for well over a millennium. These continuities demand a historical explanation. The paper shows the inevitable conservative entailments of heterodox alternatives, and the conservative effects of the powerful cultural preconditioning of social agents' cognition. It also links the symbolic politics of family practice to the social politics of cultural and ideological production. More generally, the paper argues that stasis is no less historical, no less dynamic, and no less worthy of analysis and explanation, than are change and transformation; and, that stasis and transformation are not different processes, but rather intertwined facets of the always multi-faceted historical process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]