March 11th 2008

Social Organization
Kinship, Descent, Age, Gender, Associations, and Stratification



Descent Systems
Patrilineal
Matrilineal
Ambilineal

Common Correlations:

Subsistence	Characteristics	Family	Residence	Kinship	Descent
Indus./Foraging	Mobility	Nuclear	Neolocal	Eskimo	Bilateral
Agriculture	Men Work	Extended	Patrilocal	Iroquois	Patrilineal
Horticulture	Women Work	Extended	Matrilocal	Crow	Matrilineal
	Internal War	Extended	Patrilocal	Iroquois	Patrilineal
	Scarcity	Nuc/Ext	Ambilocal	Hawaiian	Ambilineal
Pastoral	Men Work	Extended	Patrilocal	Iroquois	Patrilineal

Clan: the exact relationship is unknown but the siblings believe that they share a paternal ancestor sometime in the distant past
Totemism: is tracing liniage back to animal or some other object.
also see Bilateral Kinship (as used in the USA) in the text.

Sacdliwusk : KSU Wildcats and our mascot willie is an example how totemism remains in our culture this is an association.

Moving on to associations as a part of social organization ... showed a clip from "Mean Girls" showing the cliques in a high school lunch room to illustrate social organization by association.

Stratified Society: people are divided into social tiers (classes or castes) and do not share equally in wealth, influence, and prestige. Even in the basic needs for survival are not shared equally.

Egalitarian Society: everyone has about equal access to wealth, influence, and prestige. Often mechanisms to equalize wealth.


Caste in India

Caste: a closed social class determined by birth and fixed for life 2,000 castes in 4 Varnas
Brahmans: Priests and Lawgivers
Kshatriyas: Fighers and Rulers
Vaisyas: Merchants and Traders
Shudras: Artisans and Laborers
Dalits (Harijan): Cheap Labor, Unclean work (e.g. Leather)
Video Clip from CNN showing a caste-related killing Caste among Sikhs.

Sikhs of the Punjab region of India tried to eliminate the caste system. They established their religion 500 years ago.
Their beliefs are nicely stated in this quote from one of their sacred texts:
"Let no man be proud because of his caste/race (Jaat).
For the man who has God in his heart, he alone is the true Brahmin.
O stupid fool, be not proud of your caste/race (Jaat), by this pride many sins arise.
Everyone says there are four castes/races (Jaat), but they are all created from the Lords seed (essence).
All men are moulded from the same clay, but the potter has fashioned it into vessels of numerous forms.
By joining the five elements, the form of the body is made, no one can say that the element is less in one and more in another"

video made by 2 school boys from England who are Sikhs, showing that Sikhs still wrestle with the caste system and that it still exists despite their efforts to eliminate it.




We then turned to an analysis of American stratification, beginning with American ideals such as
* "All men are created equal"
* We are almost all "middle class"
* Equal opportunity for all

However, these are not just ideals.
They also form part of an ideology that blinds us to the inequalities that really DO exist.
An ideology consists of ideas and ideals that legitimize the current order as "the natural order of things" and blind us to certain realities.

For example, Thomas Jefferson who wrote "All men are created equal" also wrote about the inferiority of Blacks.

We then looked at social inequality in America.

Here are some statistics:



from: Haves and Have-Nots: Income Inequality in Americaby Uri Berliner on NPR


Resources that support life are not distributed equally.
47 million do not have health care, and those who do cannot be sure that major operations will be covered.

video interview with a woman who used to run a managed care program in which she was encouraged to deny healthcare to clients, even if it meant killing them.

As the gap between rich and poor grows, there is increasingly less contact between the classes and less sense of moral responsibility among the most wealthy CEOs, as illustrated by the Enron case (video from CBS)
Smartest guy in the room video.

concluded with Bill Moyers talking about "Class War". We started by asking whether or not classes even exist in America. We ended by finding that not only do they exist, some are saying that they are at war with one another.