Distinguishing Family-Based Generations from Social Historical Generations
Discussion
CARLOS A. MALLMANN and GUILLERMO A. LEMARCHAND:
“We agree with Mannheim’s assertion that one has to avoid the confusion with the traditional demographic concept of generation. This notion is based on the obvious differentiation between the two generations which coexist in a family, which we call Family Biological Generations (FBG).
Marchetti, among many others, has shown that the time difference between them is of the order of 25 11 years. This statement means that 50% of the children generated in a cohort of women are delivered between their ages of 14 and 36 years.
On the other hand, these recently born children still have—as we show later—to be nurtured up to their adulthood which means another 16.8 1 years. In this way, the children of this cohort group are inserted in social life when their mothers are 30 to 54 years old. We define this period of time as Family Social Generation (FSG). The FBG and the FSG have very clear conceptualizations within families. This is not the case with respect to the society in which they live, because in it a continuous set of cohorts of women coexist, which means, as we said previously, that the flow of new adults is continuous, not discontinuous as in families.
When we study the case of societies we need to introduce a different concept of generation, namely: the Societal Historical Generation (SHG).
We believe that this lapse is equal to the average life-lapse in which, according to human being’s psycho-somatic epigenetic development ground plan, their motivational priority is social and habital, namely between 16 and 56 years of age. In the next section we provide a brief description of the research results on which this affirmation is based. Sorokin and Lorenz, among others, made a similar, but not identical, statement when they said that its duration is equal to the time-span in which persons are active as members of asociety, from themomentof their socialemergence to thatof retirement or death [5, 9]. Mentre’s conception was very close to ours. He coined the term ‘‘Social Generations’’ in a book by that name in 1920, for him a generation is ‘‘a state of collective mind in a human group that endures for a certain time’’.
The discontinuity needed in order to distinguish SHG from the continuum of them existing in societies is provided initially as a consequence of the self-organizing process, which manifestation is a social entelechy that is a function of time.
From the analysis of historical processes we concluded that the sequence of Societal Historical Generations of a society is conformed by strings of billows which are in phase among them, each followed by another string which has a different phase.
The phase changes from one string to the next is determined by societal-transcendental historical events as, in one way or another, Mannheim, Ortega y Gasset, Ayala, and Marıas, among others posited.
History shows that these recurrences propagate within the society maintaining their timing, even in the periods of internal transcendental events such as socio-political revolutions.”