ANTHR 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 31: Sociocultural Evolution, Hereditary Title, Perfectly Clear
Anthr 102
Cultural Anthropology
Summer 2018
● Inequality
○ Social Stratification refers to a system by which a society ranks categories of
people in a hierarchy. In the united states, it’s is perfectly clear that some groups
have greater status, power, and wealth than other groups.
○ Class is a person’s position in society defined in economic terms.
○ Class, for Marx, is defined as a social relationship rather than a position or rank in
society. In Marx’s analysis, the capitalist class could not exist without the
proletariat (working class), or vice-versa.
○ Caste are each of the hereditary classes of Hindu society, distinguished by relative
degrees of ritual purity or pollution and of social status. Starts from
■ Untouchables
■ Labourer or servant
■ Commoner (merchants or farmers)
■ Nobility (ruler or warrior)
■ Priests
○ Is class and caste achieved? or ascribed?
■ Archived status is a position that is earned or chosen
■ Ascribed status is the social status a person is assigned at birth or assumed
involuntarily later in life.
○ Race is an ideology that claims differences among people are natural, genetic or
biologically caused.
○ Race is a way of giving meaning to our bodies and other peoples bodies. These
meanings have been used to categorize and rank people and justify the inequality.
E.g. Slavery
○ Scientific racism is the use of scientific methods to classify and rank variation in
human populations based largely on physical traits. E.g. evolutionism
○ Unilineal cultural evolutionism categorized human cultures into: savages,
barbarians and civilized.
○ Racism is the belief in the existence of biological different races. It is also the
systematic oppression of one or more socially defined races by another socially
defined race.
○ In the Caste painting, whites were at the top, different categories of mestizos in
the middle, followed by Indians and Africans at the bottom. These categories
were not fixed, but they were defined by occupation, clothes, language or
urban/rural.
○ Race and class interact to define people’s place in society.
○ Ethnicity is a shared sense of historical group identity
■ Shared cultural features, language, religion…
■ “ethnicity is created by historical processes that incorporate distinct social
groups into a single political structure under conditions of inequality”
■ Ethnicity is fluid, easily influenced
■ dominant ethnic groups stress superiority over subordinate groups
Document Summary
Social stratification refers to a system by which a society ranks categories of people in a hierarchy. In the united states, it"s is perfectly clear that some groups have greater status, power, and wealth than other groups. Class is a person"s position in society defined in economic terms. Class, for marx, is defined as a social relationship rather than a position or rank in society. In marx"s analysis, the capitalist class could not exist without the proletariat (working class), or vice-versa. Caste are each of the hereditary classes of hindu society, distinguished by relative degrees of ritual purity or pollution and of social status. Archived status is a position that is earned or chosen. Ascribed status is the social status a person is assigned at birth or assumed involuntarily later in life. Race is an ideology that claims differences among people are natural, genetic or. Race is a way of giving meaning to our bodies and other peoples bodies.
