A conceptual shift from “household” to “entourage”: redefining the scope of the family

To grasp the meaning of the domestic and family group, two concepts are available to us: the family and the household. In the post-war period, the notion of family-household identity took on its strongest meaning through the emergence of a single family model, the nuclear family, which has become synonymous with the household statistical unit. However, these two concepts are unsuitable for the dynamic analysis of the domestic group to which an individual belongs throughout his or her life. In fact, these concepts cannot really define what takes place in terms of networks, that is, the strategies of mutual aid, mobility or social reproduction at work within kinship groups, nor can they explain social morphology or its evolution. In this chapter, we propose and justify the use of a new notion: that of the entourage which includes successive households to which the individual has belonged, as well as the key persons in the family network