Set in the context of the colonial era, “Water” highlights the lives of widows in India. Chuiya, an eight-year-old girl, is sent to a widows' ashram after the death of her husband, in accordance with society's norms. Unaware of the fact, Chuiya thinks she will be sent home. The story is about a young Kalyani who is a widow from the ashram but wants to remarry. Chuiya finds her social mother in Shakuntala who takes care of her and in the end succeeds in keeping Chuiya away from the ashram. The other movie I chose is called “A Family Thing”. When Earl Pilcher's mother died, she left him a letter stating that she was not his biological mother. He leaves for Chicago in search of his biological family. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay David Schneider states that every society contains a certain set of “standards.” “The normative system includes rules on the basis of which individuals behave in order to be included in the community. This is evident in "Water", when Kalyani attempts to break the norm by remarrying, but she is not accepted within the community. These are the “rules of how to do it,” as Goodenough (1970) put it. These are the rules that actors must respect without being influenced by the majority. This is why in the movie “Water”, the widows (actors) have to stay away from fried foods; they cannot dress themselves; they must spend their lives isolated in a widows' ashram and, above all, they cannot remarry. These are the normative rules in the Indian context. David Schneider speaks of a “cultural system”. It is a system of symbols and meanings present in the normative system. Culture prepares the ground and the normative system decides the role of the characters. Thus, the white sari, the shaved head, the absence of vermillion are all symbolic representations of the normative rules of widowhood in India according to the film. This supports David Schneider's view that cultural and normative systems overlap in everyday life. These rules may not be the same in all societies. We can see this in “A Family Thing”, where the cultural context is different (American culture) which highlights the racial divide between “black” and “white”. Ray is black and therefore initially refused to accept Earl as his half-brother. David Schneider is of the opinion that each unit of the system, for example mother or father, can be defined on the basis of four categories of components, the first being a pure kinship component. , the second is the age or generation component, the third is the sex component and the fourth is the class component. There may also be other types of components. Schneider coined the term conglomerate system to refer to the system of these components. The pure kinship component has two defining characteristics: a shared biogenetic substance and a code of conduct. The mixture of these two characteristics gives rise to three main categories of kinship: the first is the category of blood relatives which is formed when the two characteristics appear together, the second is when the element of the code of conduct appears alone, which gives rise to parents in law and finally when the biogenetic substance is present alone, the category of parents in nature is formed. Legal parents fall under the broader category called order of law. We can draw examples from “water” where the second category of in-laws can be seen to some extent. The members of the ashram are called Didi (sister) although they have no.