Gender And Prestige Essays - Anthropology, Social Status, Prestige

Gender And Prestige Jason Howard The purpose of this essay is to show embeddedness of prestige system into subsystems of the cultures. We will discuss four cultures which represent four different types of social organizations; !Kung San represents band organization, Mundurucu represents village type, Polynesia - Chiefdom, and Andalusia represents state type of social organization. In all of these cultures prestige system, which is the gender system, is imbedded into other subsystems. Three of these cultures: Mundurucu, Polynesia, and Andalusia, have hierarchical type of ideology, meaning in this culture males have more power then females. !Kung San culture, on the other hand, has egalitarian type of ideology, where there is no significant difference in power between males and females. We first start by defining prestige system, which consists of prestige itself. Prestige is level of respect at which one is regarded by others. Every person in prestige system has status, by which other people value your prestige. Status it determined by following factors: economical, political, personal, and historical. When we talk about the prestige system we have to say that prestige system is supported by ideology, and since cultures have different ideologies, the prestige systems vary from one culture to another. Polynesia, discussed by Sherry Ortner, consists of large numbers of islands in the Pacific Ocean, which include Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, and many more. The islands in their majority have the same prestige system. The prestige systems in Polynesia is the system of hereditary ranking which is embedded in political system, kinship system, and economic system. The type of social organization in Polynesia, as we mentioned above, is chiefdom. Chiefdom is characterized by number of villages, where each village has its own chief, and the whole village system has one chief, higher in rank then other chiefs. This fact is important when we discuss the embeddedness of prestige system in the political system. Every village, that is the part of the chiefdom, has a goal to get on the top of the symbolic pyramid, with main chief and fono, the governing council, on the top. Sometimes, statuses can be brought higher with the right type of marriage, however, most of the villages have endogamy type of marriages, meaning the spouse comes from inside of the village. In case of exogamy marriage, where spouse comes from outside, the groom's family will have to share part of the land with the bride's family. Of course, if the groom's family is higher in rank than the bride's family, that kind of marriage will not happen. Therefore, as a rule, change of the social ranking does not happen, and people die with the same rank they were born with. In Polynesia, people are born with certain statuses, that are passed patrilineally, meaning through the male line. Starting from this point, we can see that females value is lower then of males. However women status is important for men statuses. Thus the status of the chief of chiefs is that high because either daughter in law, or his own daughter is taupo, the ceremonial princess virgin with the highest status for women. In generally, a girl has big value to her descent line because if she marries and the husbands family has a higher rank, she gets the part of his land for her family and brings the rank of her descent group higher. So, actually, sisters unite the descent group, and brothers divide it, because brother's are the ones who share the land with their wives. In general, females are valued for the reproduction of labor, which takes as to the discussion of economic system. The economic system in the Polynesia is based on the redistribution exchange mode. The chief of chiefdom plays role of redistributor, where descent groups provide him with goods and he redistributes them where needed. By this means he getsmore of wealth and prestige. If in the top ranked descent group there is a shortage of labor, chief may adopt newborn babies from the lowest rank descent group So as we could see, the prestige system embedded in economic, political, and kinship systems, where this systems, in their turn, are embedded in each other. The next culture we discuss is Andalusia researched by Stanley Brandes. More, specifically, we look