The Changing Arab Kinship Structure: The Effect of Modernization in an Urban Community

A central issue in the analysis of social and economic changes associated with modernization is the impact of these changes on family structures and on the changing centrality of kinship groups. In the long run, the centrality of marriage and childbearing and their significance for the continuity of kinship, ethnic, and other descent groups is expected to decrease. "Family-oriented, traditional values have been forced to compete with different Western hierarchies of values, which stress career and occupation as main goals, objective rather than particularistic criteria, and individualism as against familiasm."' This conclusion assumes that modernization is an overall process; that breakthrough modernization is achieved by the breakdown of the antecedent traditional structures; and that these are replaced by modern structures in an advanced modernization process.2 At the communal rather than societal level some questions might be raised: What are the expected normative and behavioral family patterns in a community that has limited or no access to the economic and political center but has achieved an advanced stage of individual modernization? What is the expected effect of modernizing forces when they compete with conservation factors that tend to lead to nonmodern consequences? How do kinship and other descent groups adjust to these contradictory factors and reorganize in an effective way in the new modern settings?3 In order to address these questions I will focus on the kinship structure, the Hamula, in Shefar 'Am, an Arab urban community in Israel. Mainly I will focus on the social role of the Hamula as reflected by patrilineal endogamy (marriage within the Hamula) because it is the most prominent role. The political role, as reflected in the local elections, and the economic role, as reflected in the Hamula function as a source of economic aid, will also be addressed.