Social stratification
Social stratificationKinship is social relationships that are prototypically derived from the universal human experiences of mating, birth, and nurturance. Mating refers to marriage and birth refers decent, but nurturance can be seen as closely related to mating and birth. In the U.S. it is called adoption, but each society has its own definition.
Kinship is also a social organization, in which each society decides how it will be organized, what aspects of the ‘human experiences’ will be emphasized and which will not. Because each society uses different terms to refer to people they recognize as kin, anthropologists have found six major patterns of kinship terminology. These six patterns are based on how people refer to their cousins. These criteria include generation, sex, affinity, collaterality, bifurcation, relative age, and sex of linking relative.
Generation refers to the kin terms that distinguish relatives according to the generation to which the relatives belong. Sex is used to differentiate kin such as in Spanish, primo refers to a male cousin and prima is a female cousin. Affinity is the distinction mad on the basis of connection through marriage. Collaterality is the distinction made between kin who are believed to be in a direct line and those who are ‘off to one side,’ linked to the Ego through a lineal relative (mother and aunt or father and uncle). Bifurcation is a distinction used to refer to the kin on the mother’s side and kin on the father’s side. Relative age refers to relatives of the same category may be distinguished on the basis of whether they are older or younger. Sex linking relatives is similar to collaterality except that it distinguishes between cross relatives and parallel relatives, both referring to cousins. This provides evidence that social organization varies from society to society.
The difference between kinship and stratification is that kinship involves individuals related through blood or marriage. Stratification involves groups of individuals that are related through similar economic, political or racial/ethnic positions. The roles that individuals play in these organizations are different. Kinship roles are more personal rather than by association.
Kinship and stratification are similar in that there are different types of kinship relationships and stratified societies. There are three kinds of kinship relationships: affinal (by marriage), consanguineal (by birth) and fictive (by adoption, godparenthood, or blood brother rites). It can be further broken down by six major patterns of kinship. The different types of stratified societies are slavery, feudalism, castes, and classes. Slavery was practiced in Africa, and in earlier civilizations of Greece and Rome. Feudalism was a rigid division between the mobility and the peasantry. It was based on their access to control over land. This form of stratification dominated in medieval Europe for centuries, but existed in other parts of the world.
Stratified societies developed from egalitarian societies. These societies have no great differences in wealth, power, or prestige between the members. Each member has equal access to the strategic resources of food and shelter. Each individual may...
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