FAMILIES - the constant is change
16 May – 14 September 2008
The special exhibition “FAMILIES - the constant is change” has its own website. Click here: familien.landesmuseum.ch
The topic of the family is something that touches everyone. Each of us is shaped, both positively and negatively, by our family background. Sometimes, the family is a nostalgic reminder of the “good old days”; sometimes it comes down pure economic interests associated with an inheritance; sometimes it is the object onto which visions of social utopia are projected. Anthropological constants and cultural manifestations run through the family more than any other area of life. This exhibition sets out to investigate these issues and phenomena.
What we currently think of as the family is not a universal concept, unchanged since time immemorial. The family – consisting of people related by blood or marriage – was for many years the centre of the “household community”, to which maids, servants and hands also belonged.
It was not until the 18th century that the term “family” was used to apply solely to those persons in the house who were actually related to each other – the small social group of parents and their children.
The exhibition covers the development of the family in Switzerland from the perspective of social and cultural history and from 1750 to the present. The prologue offers a fascinating insight into the period before 1750. A chronological series of sections focuses on real families. Alongside them are other families from different regions, classes and milieus.
The exhibition concludes with a look at the situation today. The bourgeois ideal of the family is increasingly being called into question, and the welfare state that has grown up over the last 100 years is having to adapt to these changes. Examples include divorce law, the education system, inheritance law and retirement provision.
The exhibition aims to illuminate some aspects of change and continuity in the forms families take and the ways in which they live. To this end, historical and present-day families are juxtaposed with the factors in each time segment that influence the changing nature of family structures. Those factors are economic, legal, religious, cultural and scientific.
The exhibition also presents research results that were obtained as part of the national research programme on “Childhood, Youth and Intergenerational Relationships in a Changing Society” (NFP 52) and will be published this summer, for example in the generation report.
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