Abstract
The relatively hereditary character of diverse cultural phenomena has already drawn attention to the role that the family can play in this trans mission. It appears in particular that political orientations and the chances of access to different types and levels of education can frequently be explained by a specific family membership. Two types of argument are put forward here in order to explain how the family can appear as a privileged place of cultural apprenticeship: on the one hand psychological arguments linked with the primary and universal character of family education and the type of relations that this develops; on the other hand a more sociological explanation based on the repercussion that the more or less great complexity of learned language entails with regard to diverse exterior participations, and on the comparison between the impact of the family and those of other socializing agents on the successive choices which they will impose. To these explanatory elements of the existing link between cultural memberships and the family environment is added, for religion as much as for the family, the transition from the public to the private sphere. This parallel evolution will tend to increase the autonomy of religion on the plane of secondary elaborations for which it will borrow its mode of re-interpretation from the exigencies of daily life, particularly from the family.