Aunting: Cultural Practices That Sustain Family and Community Life

Introduction: Why Aunts?

1 introduction Why Aunts? In writing about aunts, we necessarily explored personal experiences, family networks, social conditions, and cultural relations. A person cannot be an aunt without a recognized connection to others. So a book about aunts is a book about the dense, complex, and necessary relationships that support personal and family life. The answer to “Why aunts?” is that our experiences of family life are not just about the nuclear family but about extended family and community. We think that the aunt is a critical node in our kinship networks and one that, if we are concerned about the well-being of families in this country, deserves closer and more appreciative examination. After all, families are in trouble. We hear it all the time—the family is declining, neighbors do not know each other anymore, no one has time to volunteer in their communities, mobile families move away from their extended family networks as they pursue careers (or paid employment) in an increasingly desperate economy.1 Stresses on the family are almost too numerous to mention: the decline of real income, the lack of affordable child care and health care, the “sandwich generation ” of adults parenting their kids while caring for aging parents. As a nation, we face a crisis of nearly one in every five children living in poverty.2 At the same time, family forms have proliferated, challenging 2 AUNTING our local and national policymakers to support divorced and blended families, chosen families, lesbian/gay families, single-parent families, foster families, and adoptive families. In the face of these very real social problems facing families of all types today, American families remain resilient. We contend that while understanding problems is critical, vigorously examining how families survive and even thrive in challenging times is just as critical to our collective well-being. As we took a closer look at what, how, and why aunts contribute to family life, we became convinced that the aunt relationship should not be overlooked when we study the problems and resilience of families today. Our project explores how the aunt relationship works to support family functioning and individual family members ; how playing an aunt role in the neighborhood can create enduring ties; how mobile families may construct chosen families (often referred to as “fictive kin”) wherever they land; and why people volunteer in official and unofficial “kin-like” capacities to serve others. In talking with people, we often found them referring to their aunt as the person doing the work, making the phone calls, babysitting the kids, and mentoring the next generation. Whether that aunt connection is through biology (a mother’s sister), marriage (a father’s brother’s wife), or choice (a family friend, a neighbor), aunts and their nieces and nephews relate to each other in a variety of ways that matter—tangibly, emotionally, and significantly—in their daily lives. If it takes a village to raise a child,3 many of the villagers are, or can be thought of as, aunts. And the benefits are multidirectional; while the nieces and nephews obviously benefit from aunts’ caregiving, the village “aunties” benefit from their involvement with nieces and nephews, and these relationships strengthen the entire village. We do not exaggerate when we claim that aunts can and are shaping our collective social and cultural lives as they support a wide variety of family forms. In a very real sense, aunts—in the many ways they respond to interpersonal, familial, and communal issues and opportunities—are a relational bulwark against the threats of disintegration and disillusion that undermine our collective experience of contemporary family and social life. In championing the aunt relationship, we want to complicate the idea of “the family.” Despite the tremendous proliferation in family INTRODUCTION: WHY AUNTS? 3 forms, the popular image associated with “the family” is still overwhelmingly that of the heterosexual nuclear family with a husband, wife, and children.4 Many family communication researchers, particularly feminists, are committed to honoring a plurality of family forms and relationships, both for ideological reasons and for pragmatic ones, since families that deviate from the idealized nuclear norm now actually out-number the supposedly normative families.5 Communication researchers have begun to argue that the rich communication practices of alternative and extended families are different but not deficient in relation to the practices of normative and nuclear families.6 One important aspect of many families is extended kinship resources, yet...