The [Last Name] Family

Originally written on April 7, 2026

I got reminded of the following after reading this line in the Wikipedia article of the TV series Ozark:

When the Byrdes arrive in Missouri, they become entangled with local criminals, including the Langmore and Snell families, and later the Kansas City mafia.

I notice that the idea of “the [last name] family” was its own culture shock to me. I have never in my life met anyone who touted themselves as such, even if I live in the extended family culture of the Philippines. But looking back using that framework, I could feel just how “the [last name] family” everything was, especially my former main local church, where the members can be considered not to be composed of individuals, but family “gangs” (used instead of “group” to emphasize the mafia-ness of the entire framework itself), with the church itself being itself kind of a gang composed of those “sub-gangs.” I’m not saying they function like political blocs. I’m saying the “the [last name] family” is a useful way to understand just how familized even the largest member (in the sense of individuals) organizations can be.

This framework becomes useful in the case of division and scandal, where the member-individual framing breaks down in favor of narratives by sides. I did use the “two sides” narrative before, but complicating it with the familization or mafia-ization helps clarify how exactly the same event bleeds down, crumbles, lands, or is absorbed. Instead of a straight funnel or many individual holes, the family unit looks at it like a big lump of water falling on a number of sub-funnels, which gets complicated—depictable by these sub-funnels’ different heights and pores and slopes leading to the ones they’re closest to relationally—depending on interpersonal historical ties (relations between each individual) and interfamily relations, all the way up to the larger provisional blocs intersecting a group of families together, with the help of representatives (imagine a single representative tube connecting a group of sub-funnels to another group through capillary action) to tie them to the rest, like the John Family being closest to Ronald Family and Massie Family, but not as much to the rest save through the pastor and the event coordinator who actually functions as the logistical orchestrator behind everything that happens, such that a breakdown in relations between these two can cause not just a ripple but a whole divide that re-settles itself upon a whole new skeleton.