‘Each to their own’: Ethnographic notes on the economic organisation of poor households in urban Nicaragua
通过尼加拉瓜城市贫困家庭的民族志观察，发现家庭内部存在非合作特征，挑战了传统上认为家庭天然合作且内部统一的观点，强调应从内部制度动态理解家庭。
Abstract This article presents some ethnographic notes on the economic organisation of poor households in urban Nicaragua. These highlight a number of atypical features that raise several important theoretical questions. In particular, they highlight the possible emergence of non-cooperative households, and point to a problematic association in the literature between doubly ‘naturalised’ notions of kinship and households. The article concludes that not only are neither households nor families inherently cooperative, but moreover they are not internally unified institutions. They are rather multifaceted in nature. In order to properly understand them they need to be conceived in terms of their internal institutional dynamics.