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Nineteen anthropologists and historians met October 9-15, 1981, under the auspices of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research at the Seven Springs Conference left, Mt. Kisco, N.Y., to discuss the changing form and function of households. The overall aim of the conference was to move scholarly debate beyond the classification and analysis of household systems in terms of genealogical or coresidential types to the processual themes of what households do, what functions they perform, and how and why they alter through time.

The participants were social historians and anthropologists with common research interests in the household. They were invited to present newly analyzed evidence of documented change in household size or composition in a single society or of significant differences emerging from a controlled comparison of households in contrasting communities. The universalitv of the household, its utility as a unit of analysis, its adaptive potential, its interaction with more inclusive social and cultural systems, and relationships between household tasks (produc- tion, distribution, transmission, reproduction, and coresidence [Wilk and Netting]) and household organization were among the planned topics of discussion. Formal sessions were also organized to examine issues raised in previously circulated papers. The first two days of discussions were devoted to definitional and methodological questions: what definitions of household have been employed by the participants in their own recent work, how useful they have been in analysis, what techniques of data collection have been employed, and what are the distinctive problems of ethnographic and historical investigations. On the third dav, substantive material was presented on the relationships between production and house- hold organization and between transgenerational transmission of property and coresidence. One day of discussions was devoted to intrahousehold distribution of goods and services, pooling of income, and consumption. There was also consider- ation of the relationships between the household and more inclusive social units such as the estate, the local community, the nation, and the world economic system. On the fifth and final day of the meeting, conferees delved into the symbolic aspects of the household as seen in both Euro-American and East Asian traditions.

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