Family Rituals: Mapping The Postmodern Family Through Time, Space and Emotion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Beyond metaphors of fragility, fluidity and liquidity, this paper intends to address the question of “what makes the contemporary family?” Inspired by the work of David Morgan, the postmodern family is mapped looking at family practices, specifically the ones which fit into a larger category: family rituals within divorced families with small children. Methodologically, the analysis relies on the accounts on birthday anniversaries, family vacations and Christmas celebrations, provided through episodic interviews, applied to Portuguese middle-class both men and women, in the context of a broader qualitative study. While some sociological recent theorization emphasizes the image of a family of inaccurate contours; through rituals it can be experienced by the actors themselves and, at the same time, observed and perceived by outsiders. In divorced families, children play a major role in the adults’ meanings of family rituals, forcing its reinvention. The experiences of “the last” or “the first” birthday, vacations or Christmas “prior to” or “after” the divorce, “with” and “without” the children, are iconic of how rituals somehow suspend families’ daily life in the view of a “special time and space.” This ephemeral condition is fundamental to understand not only “the families we live with,” but also “the families we live by” (Gillis, 1996), in this early 21st century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".