Family, marriage, partnership, and parenthood in the coordinates of postmodernity

Abstract

The theoretical part of the article deals with the analysis of different approaches to understanding of the concepts by which researchers explain the changes taking place in today’s postnonclassical world. In particular, their attention is extended to the description of social and psychological practices existing in this reality as means of personal life construction related to personal interpretation of sociality and search for personal identities as legitimized by postmodernity. Therefore, reasons actualizing the analysis of the concepts of family, marriage, partnership, and parenthood are considered. It is noted that an important role in understanding of practices belongs to habitus (habit) as a system of schemes of perception, evaluation, and actions acquired by an individual, which structure practices, generate them in the conditions of social reality, and thus appear as the reconstruction/construction of the family, marriage and parenthood habitus (habit). It is proved that habitus transforms turning into a constitutive principle of the practices that do not fit the discourse of the traditional family, marriage, and parenthood. The multidiscourse space performing the semantic field function for the practice design and the updated identity constitution becomes a signal of habitus (habit) changes. Content analysis of the empirical part shows that the respondent representations of family and marriage contain mostly the reconstructions put forward by the modernity, whereas partnership is constructed on the basis of other social reality criteria. Thus, representations of family, marriage, and parenthood in the everyday discourse are based on the traditional value paradigm characterized by the following criteria for the choice of practices: love – formal relations – trust – mutual understanding – support – children – happy family. Partnership practices are constructed according to different criteria: equity – intimacy –sex – sympathy, fondness – freedom, i. e. their organization principles are different from the traditional structural and functional organization of marriage and family.

Key words: practice, postmodernity, habitus, family, marriage, parenthood, partnership, identity, transformation.