Political structures and traditional family structures

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I just now watched a very interesting video which claims that political ideologies are determined, in part, by the type of family structure that traditionally prevails in a given region:



How Family Structure Drives Ideology

This video is based largely on a book, The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems by Emmanuel Todd, written back in 1985.

According to Todd, the world map of Communism at that time corresponded mostly to countries with a specific traditional family structure: "exogamous communitarian," in which (1) married men and their wives continue to live in the homes of the men's parents, and (2) it is taboo to marry cousins.

Todd also noted that most of the Muslim world has a tradition of "endogamous communitarian" families, in which (1) married men and their wives continue to live in the homes of the men's parents, and (2) it is considered okay to marry cousins from within this extended family.

One thing surprised me: the claim that nuclear families (only one married couple per household) are a millennia-old tradition in much of Western Europe, including England. I was previously under the impression that extended families, of one kind or another, were commonplace throughout Western Europe until a few centuries ago. Perhaps that's not the case after all?

Curious as to how reputable Todd's book might be, I dug up the following via Google:

- Testing Todd: family types and development by Jerg Gutmann and Stefan Voigt, Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2021.
- Book review: The Explanation of Ideology by PeterMcCluskey, Less Wrong, 19th Jul 2021.
- The Church's crusade against cousin-marriage did not create the Western nuclear family: Emmanuel Todd gets his vengeance, Policy Tensor, May 7, 2021.

As far as I can tell so far, it would appear that Todd's book is academically respectable, although not everyone agrees with it.

Interesting. A lot to digest. Could be on to something. About all that I can say for now.

My first thought is, it's surely an oversimplification.
I'm not into videos and this one is particularily uncomfortable for me to watch, flashing maps and photos without going deeper into any information. However, I get some of the ideas from reading this:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LvRL844 ... f-ideology

By "nuclear family", I believe the author considers a norm of starting a new household upon marriage, as opposed to new members entering an existing household with marriage. Close ties within extended families are still maintained and other family members might live with the couple but the center of the household remains the married couple. That's how it looks here.

The author correctly attributed Poland to

Based on how shocked I was reading American novels full of cousin marriage - and, on the other side, how shocking it was for me to learn about interracial marriage bans - I believe we're way more exogamous than Anglo-Saxons.

But the author painted whole USSR with one broad brush, which is entirely, completely wrong. European parts of USSR had Baltic cultures closer to Nordic tradition and West Ukraine with society very similar to Polish, while Central Asian parts of USSR are traditionally Muslim and they have family structures more similar to e.g. Afghanistan. I'm also not convinced that "Exogamous Community" was the tradition even in Russia itself. My partial Russian heritage stories would not confirm it, though of course mixed marriages are always some kind of exceptions.
Anyway, I'm sure USSR was way more diverse and I suspect Russia itself was also much more diverse than it's painted here.

Except for divorce rate, I can't find particularily deep differences in approach to family between Poland and Russia - yet we have deeply different political cultures. So I think the author overstretches his ideas quite a lot and does not sufficiently test them against hard data.

Cousin marriage isn't common here in the U.S.A.

There's a popular stereotype, here in the U.S.A., of cousin marriage being common among "hillbillies" in small isolated rural communities in the Appalachian mountains, specifically. To whatever extent this stereotype is true, it should be noted that many people in Appalachia are of Scotch-Irish background, not Anglo-Saxon.

@Magz

He does NOT include former Soviet Central Asia as part of "Russia". If you look at his map he lumps Kazakhstan, and the rest of "Stans" with Iran, the Middle East, and North Africa ( in "endogomous clan"). And not with Russia in the exogamous clan region.

So at least in this aspect, the author does acknowledge cultural diversity within Soviet Union.
Still, he completely overlooks such diversity in the European part od SU - and I still have difficulty finding any evidence that traditional Russian family structure was substantially different from traditional Polish family structure and more similar to Chinese family structure. I just don't see this - neither IRL nor in articles I can find. In modern times, the only substantial difference is divorce rate, the rest of the structure seems largely the same.

Slavic cultures would seem to bear much similarities to each other, since each comes from a common source.

But we historically developed and still maintain a serious diversity of political cultures - tolerant proto-democracy of Poland-Lithuania, peaceful merchant Novgorod Republic, warlike Kozak communities, brutal dictatorship of Moscow... within similar languages, cuisine and family structures, political entities of very different nature formed and evolved.

Sorta agree. I get the impression that Poles, and Russians, were similar to Germans, in family structure. Nuclear family, but dad rules (all Europeans were rather patriarchal actually but some more so than others). Making both Russia, and Poland, 'authoritarian nuclear' in his scheme. Certainly not a clan structure like China.

I definitely grew up in a multi-generational matriarchy, men went to work and had little to say at home.
Some say this matriarchy was an adaptation to men being often absent because of wars.

It differs between families, probably between regions - yet in my home, first the grandmother ruled, then, when my parents built their own home, my mother took her role. My brother lives in a very similar setting with his wife, too. Women are the managers in this family, it turns that way even if we don't want to.

Was this your grandmother on your mother's side, or your father's side?

Mother's side.

According to this page about Russian culture:

Three generations in one household was how I grew up, too. And many of my classmates.
Adult children living with their parents for lack of available new homes.
Big role of grandparents in raising children.
Taking an old widowed parent to live with you.
It's all here as well. Then why put the two into different categories?

I can't see much information on how things looked back in the 16th century when Moscow became the kind of dictatorship it can't stop being since then. But I think it wasn't about family structure, it was about Mongol influence and invention of political police.

I just now watched the video again. It claims that Russia's alleged traditional Chinese-like (or Mongol-like?) clan-based family structure got broken down under Communism. So they wouldn't have actually had that family structure anymore within the lifetime of very many people living today.

So the question is: Did Russia, in fact, have that clan-based family structure before Communism?

Realistic Russian novels from 19th century don't seem to paint such a picture... unless someone more knowledgeable in the topic proves me wrong, families depicted in novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky didn't substantially differ in structure from families in other parts of Europe at that time.
That's very different from classical Chinese stories like Dream of the Red Chamber, which depicts families as, indeed, clans sharing great households with strong, formal leadership and rich inner dynamics.