A related point is the fact that in Euro-American discourse the concept of the family is politically and ideologically ‘loaded’, or imbued with sets of politically and culturally contested ideas about the correct or moral ways in which people should conduct their lives, and the people with whom they should conduct them. In the postmodern intellectual climate of the 1980s and 1990s, the term has been increasingly subjected to re-analysis, deconstruction, and radical redefinition: as is the case with many other cultural and social categories, emphasis has shifted from one meaning to a plurality of meanings. ‘Families’ have increasingly replaced ‘the family’ as an analytic concept, and the family itself, singular or plural, has come to be seen less and less as a ‘natural’ form of human social organization, and more and more as a culturally and historically specific symbolic system, or ideology.