A World of Their Own Making

Weddings, birthdays, funerals, reunions, Mother's Day, even Christmas, we think of these ritual events as timeless traditions, our links to the distant past and the future. John Gillis aims to reveal just how modern and how politically constructed these rituals are. Our whole society may be obsessed with family values, but as John Gillis points out in this book, most of our images of home-sweet-home are of very recent vintage. The book questions our idealized notion of "the family", a mind-set in which myth and symbol still hold sway. As the families we live with become more fragile, the symbolic families we live by become more powerful. Yet it is only by accepting the notion that our ritual, myths, and images must be open to perpetual revision that we can satisfy our human needs and changing circumstances. The book uses both recent and historical literature on Western family life from the Middle Ages to the present.