Pahl and Liz Spencer Personal Communities : Not Simply Families of ‘ Fate ’ or ‘ Choice ’

B judgemental about the nature and quality of people’s private and personal intimate relationships has a history as long as most of the world’s religions. Similarly, the huge empirical variations in the relations between kin, on the limits and restrictions on marriage partners, on rules about the transference of property, and many other features have been documented by social anthropologists in very great detail over the last 150 years. Those being judgemental and those being ethnographical have traditionally spoken with different vocabularies to different audiences. However, in recent years, there has been a growing convergence between judgemental and empirical perspectives. Thus Robert Bellah and his colleagues in their widely received book Habits of the Heart (Bellah et al., 1985) invoked the support of a sociological investigation of the personal lives of middle Americans in order to find answers to their problem of ‘how to preserve or create a morally coherent life’. They concluded that the problems facing America are not just political: ‘They are moral and have to do with the meaning of life’ (Bellah et al., 1985: 295) Bellah and his colleagues point to the growth of ontological individualism – the idea that the individual is the only form of reality – as undermining the essential forms of social obligation that are necessary for the development of a ‘morally coherent life’. This notion has become somewhat uncritically accepted as part of the contemporary conventional sociological wisdom (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001). One consequence of this individualism, Bellah et al. claimed, is that: