What goes on within the households is then a major part of village social life. An account of it involves both an account of the specific paired relationships that occur within it, and an account of the overall pattern these normally make. Such an account is not easy to give in a brief general form.
In my year's field work, the births, deaths, and marriages which involved changes and adjustments in my census, somehow impressed me at the time as exceptions in a stable pattern. Perhaps this attitude is allied to the surprise most people feel at the size of other people's children when they have not seen them for a long time. But this tendency to see the social world as something fixed is entirely misleading. Every household and every relationship within it is changing all the time. As people grow older they move from one socially defined group to another, and the circumstances in which they have to play their roles change constantly.