Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents

While traditional understanding dictates that these relationships toe rigid lines, their porous nature seeps through in folk songs like these. In social practice, daughters do marry their young uncles (typically mother’s youngest brother) and brothers marry the widow of their deceased brothers – but these barely ever make it to mainstream stories.

Why do you think Yasmin is still living at home? She goes to the hospital, makes her salary, brings it home, and puts it in her father’s hands. That’s how it works in Pakistan.”

Throughout most of human history, people grew up enmeshed in dense family networks that knitted together distant cousins and in-laws. In these regulated-relational worlds, people’s survival, identity, security, marriages, and success depended on the health and prosperity of kin-based networks, which often formed discrete institutions known as clans

The family is bound together then, not in perfect harmony or by the ability to always divide up resources and responsibilities efficiently, but by a very incomplete, very coarse, and often very loose “contract” that defines the responsibilities of each member toward the other members.