Humans are preoccupied with vitality; that is, a concern with the generation, transmission, continuation and protection of life itself. The obvious social tie formed around this preoccupation is the family. However, numerous individual families of a nation understand themselves to be just that; thus, the continuation of the nation into the future is regarded as entailing the continuation of the families into the future. Anthropological studies reveal that humans have always formed not only families, but also larger groups of which families are a part. Parents transmit to their own offspring not only their flesh and blood – genetic properties in a broader term – but also their cultural inheritance; the language, traditions, customs and so forth – of the larger group, of the nation. This cultural inheritance is usually viewed by the parents as being quite precious to their existence. This intergenerational transmission of one’s culture may be part of the reason for the tendency to view the nation as a form of kinship, because what is being transmitted is a part of one’s self to one’s descendants.