The household's economic organisation is aimed, next to survival, at providing the means to nurture and train the recruits on whom the continuity of the village depends. Within it, the intensely emotional relationships of the processes of physical and social reproduction are contained and controlled.
Authority and responsibility within the village are also largely a household matter. A man is in charge of his wife and children and their dependants, and responsible to his neighbours for their good conduct. Descent is patrilineal. Sons are expected to remain with their fathers until the father's death. Thus the household ideally contains a man, his wife or wives, his married sons with their wives and children, and his unmarried sons and daughters.
Logically, of course, households need not contain families In fact, almost always and almost everywhere, they do. In these villages all members of a household are always close kin - except, very rarely, for resident servants (cirak). Such domestic groups are often called `families' and distinguished according to their composition into nuclear families, extended families, joint families, compound families and so on. But the word `family' is also needed to refer to the social group of father, mother and children, and sometimes grandchildren, without entailing common residence. It seems to me clearer to use the word family for very close kin, whether or not they reside together and to use the word household for the residential domestic group.
Where others have talked of simple and joint families I shall talk therefore of simple and joint households. Households which contain one married couple I shall call simple, those with more than one married' couple, joint. In this context, I reckon widowers and divorced men whose children are living with them as married couples, partly because such widowers are almost always actively seeking remarriage, and partly because a wifeless man and his children form an autonomous domestic unit in a way that a husbandless woman and her children do