Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Humans are highly social animals. Normally we live in groups all of our lives.
It is extremely unusual for us to be in total isolation from other people for
long. You may personally enjoy being alone. However, your voluntary
isolation probably does not last more than a few hours or days at most. Our
strong emotional need for social contact makes it possible to use solitary
confinement as an effective punishment in prisons. The threat of social
ostracism can also be an effective way of curbing potentially deviant
behavior. Those who act "badly" run the risk of being rejected by other
members of their social group or community.
The need for human social contact and the rewards that it can bring lead most
people to become members of numerous social groups. In fact, we are
members of many groups at the same time. We may be family members,
employees of companies, citizens of towns, states, nations, and members of
ethnic groups. In addition, we often are members of clubs, vocational
associations, political parties, and religious groups.
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sexual joke with a good friend of your own age and gender, but you probably
would not do it with your grandparents or teachers. Likewise, when
interacting with your children you most likely will act in a responsible, nurturing
leadership role that would be inappropriate when you are talking with your
parents or your boss, since you are likely to have an inferior social status
relative to them.
Our individual identities are greatly defined by the groups to which we belong
and by our positions within them. Think about the last time that you met a
stranger at a party or at some other social gathering. You probably asked a
question to determine what group they belong to and what they do within it. In
North America, the typical question in this situation is "what do you do." In
other words, are you a student, a doctor, a lawyer, etc. If the stranger
answers "I am a student," the common follow-up questions are "what school
do you go to" and "what classes are you taking" or "what is your major."
In small-scale societies that are primarily organized around kinship, the
common equivalent first question for a stranger would be something like "who
is your father." In other words, what is your family or clan identity.
People around the world create social groups based on two broad criteria:
kinship identity and non-kinship factors. Which of these is most important
depends greatly on the scale of the society. As societies grow in size to
hundreds of thousands of people, the non-kinship factors usually become
increasingly important and the kinship ones less crucial. However, even in the
largest industrialized nations today, we still use kinship for creating some
kinds of social groupings, but kinship has become much less important as a
foundation for membership in educational, business, and government
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organizations. Kinship will be explored in the next tutorial of this series, while
non-kinship factors are considered in this one.
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Status and Role
In all of the many social groups that we as individuals
belong to, we have a status and a role to fulfill. Status is
our relative social position within a group, while a role is
the part our society expects us to play in a given status.
For example, a man may have the status of father in his
family. Because of this status, he is expected to fulfill a
role for his children that in most societies requires him to
nurture, educate, guide, and protect them. Of course,
mothers usually have complementary roles.
Commonly expected
role of a father around
Social group membership gives us a set of statuses and the world is as a
role tags that allow people to know what to expect from protector and provider
each other--they make us more predictable. However, it is
common for people to have multiple overlapping statuses and roles. This
potentially makes social encounters more complex. A woman who is a
mother for some children may be an aunt or grandmother for others. At the
same time, she may be a wife for one or more men, and she very likely is a
daughter and granddaughter of several other people. For each of these
various kinship statuses, she is expected to play a somewhat different role
and to be able to switch between them instantaneously. For instance, if she is
having a conversation with her mother and young daughter, she is likely to
politely defer to the former but will be knowledgeable and "in-control" with the
other. These role related behaviors change as rapidly as she turns her head
to face one or the other. However, her unique personal relationships might
lead her to think and act differently than what would be culturally expected. In
other words, social group membership gives us a set of role tags that allow
people to know what to expect from each other, but they are not always
straight jackets for behavior.
Three generations of
women in a family,
each playing several
different roles in their
casual interaction.
Acquiring Statuses
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The way in which people get our statuses can vary significantly in detail from
culture to culture. In all societies, however, they are either achieved or
ascribed. Achieved statuses are ones that are acquired by doing
something. For instance, someone becomes a criminal by committing a
crime. A soldier earns the status of a good warrior by achievements in battle
and by being brave. A woman becomes a mother by having a baby. She also
can acquire the status of widow by the death of her husband. In
contrast, ascribed statuses are the result of being born into a particular
family or being born male or female. Being a prince by birth or being the first
of four children in a family are ascribed statuses. We do not make a decision
to choose them--they are not voluntary statuses. We do not pick the family
we are born into nor do we usually select our own
gender.
In India, ascribed, rather than achieved, social status has been strongly
reinforced for more than 3,000 years and permeates most areas of life even
today. As a result, social mobility has been very difficult to achieve until
recent generations. Even now, it is limited for those at the bottom of society.
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At the heart of the Indian ascription system are castes (or varnas ).
These are carefully ranked, rigidly hereditary social divisions of society.
Underlying and constantly reinforcing the Indian caste system is the Hindu
religion and its concept of ritual pollution. People in the higher castes must
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take great care not to be polluted by contact with members of the lower castes
and especially the "untouchables." Being polluted puts one out of one's caste
and requires ritual cleansing. As a result, Indian restaurants usually have
chefs who are from the Brahman caste. Since they are at the top of this
ascribed status system, they cannot pollute any customers, regardless of their
caste. Likewise, a Brahman doctor would be more acceptable to all.
Castes are not limited to India. They may be found in one form or another in
most nations today. In Europe, the royal families traditionally were a separate
caste from the peasant farmers, tradesmen, and other classes. Only rarely
were "commoners" allowed to become members of the royalty. In North
America, one's race or ethnicity is often a caste identity. Most black, white, or
other Americans do not have the option of waking up tomorrow and deciding
that they will be a different race. Society generally will not allow them to do it.
While race is greatly a socially and culturally constructed reality rather than a
biological one, it is still a reality just the same in North America and in much of
the rest of the world as well.
Age sets are especially common in sub-Saharan Africa. Among the 1/4
million Masai cattle herding people of southern Kenya and northern
Tanzania, for instance, male age-sets have been traditionally very important.
The Masai strongly differentiate three major age-based male groups--boys,
warriors, and elders. The latter two groups are also informally divided
into junior and senior warriors and junior and senior elders.
From the age of 6-8, Masai boys spend much of their time on their own, away
from the community, sharing the work of herding cattle owned by their
parents. At this time they develop the close male relationships that will last
throughout their lives. When they are 12-14, boys are circumcised together in
a ritual that marks their transition to a new status--they become morans , or
warriors. In Masai culture, only morans are allowed to have long hair. They
also dress differently and spend much of their time away from the community
in a hidden training camp. They no longer herd cattle but now are responsible
for their defense against predators such as lions and people who might steal
them. While boys are not allowed to carry spears, morans do. They must
remain unmarried during the 7 years that they are morans, but some of them
secretly have girlfriends. In their twenties, the moran once again go through a
rite of passage together. It marks their transition to the elder status and role
within society. They reinforce their camaraderie at this time by drinking the
blood of a freshly killed cow that has been specially sacrificed for the purpose,
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and their long hair is shaved off by their mothers to signify their new status.
They are no longer warriors but are becoming respected decision makers and
spokesmen for their families and communities. As elders, they are now
allowed to get married when they can acquire sufficient numbers of cattle to
pay a bride price. In Masai society girls usually marry in their teens and men
in their thirties and later. Middle aged and older men typically have several
wives.
NOTE: There is not universal agreement as to how the word "Masai" should
be spelled. Some prefer "Maasai."
Age sets also exist in other parts of the world but are generally not as
important as they are in sub-Saharan Africa. For example, students who
attend prestigious private universities such as Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and
Cambridge usually identify with the members of their graduation class and
keep in contact with them throughout their lives. They get together for
reunions and help each other get jobs or arrange business deals. They
generally see themselves as a closed group of people who have shared a
common experience and continue to have common interests.
Gender-based Groups
In addition to age, gender is also a universal basis for organizing social
groups. While both men's and women's groups occur, men's associations are
more common around the world. When gender-based groups exist in small-
scale societies, every adult of the same gender is usually a member. In large-
scale societies, gender-based groups become more institutionalized and
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membership is usually not mandatory. Typical gender-based groups in North
America include the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, fraternities, sororities, and
lodges (e.g., Elks, Masons, etc.).
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gangs of relatively poor, disenfranchised youths. Cross-cutting these largely
ascribed class-based groups may be others based on ethnic or racial identity.
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