SOCIAL STATUS

also called Status, the relative rank that an individual holds, with attendant rights, duties, and lifestyle, in a social hierarchy based upon honour or prestige. Status may be ascribedthat is, assigned to individuals at birth without reference to any innate abilitiesor achieved, requiring special qualities and filled through competition and individual effort. Status is often ascribed on the basis of sex, age, family relationships, and birth, placing one into a particular social group. Achieved statuses may be based on education, occupation, marital status, and other factors. The word status implies social stratification on a vertical scale. The spatial analogy covers several meanings. A person may be said to occupy a high position when he is able to control, by order or by influence, other people's conduct; when he derives prestige from holding important office; or when his conduct has earned the esteem of his fellows. Relative status is a major factor determining the behaviour of people toward one another; and competition for status seems to be a prime pursuit. One's status tends to vary with social context. For example, the position of a man in his kin group helps determine his position in the community. Among the Hopi Indians the lineage, although unnamed, contains the mechanism for transmitting rights to land, houses, and ceremonial knowledge and is thus vital for personal status. Among the Tallensi a mere lad who (having lost his father) is head of a household counts as an elder; a middle-aged man still under his father's roof is formally a child. Status may be governed by occupational considerations; thus in parts of sub-Saharan Africa blacksmiths commonly form a separate group of low status. In the Hindu caste system, sweepers are at the bottom of the scale because they handle human excrement. Status is closely correlated with etiquette and morality and in many societies rises with the liberal use of wealth (see gift exchange; potlatch). Manipulation of the wealth-status system in such cases often demands great individual effort, aggression, and chicanery, as well as an excellent memory. In most Western urban-industrial societies, such attributes as a respected occupation, the possession and consumption of material goods, physical appearance and dress, and etiquette and manners have become more important than lineage in determining one's social status. Status groups are aggregates of persons arranged in a hierarchical social system. Such groups differ from social classes in being based on considerations of honour and prestige, rather than on purely economic status. Social stratification by status is common in premodern societies. The members of a status group interact mainly within their own group and to a lesser degree with those of higher or lower status. In some societies, clans or lineages may be ranked generally as aristocrats and commoners or graded from a royal clan down to clans that are stigmatized for lowly occupation or slave origin. Perhaps the most striking manifestation of status groups is found in the caste system of India. In Hindu villages there are usually members of a number of small endogamous groups (subcastes) based on traditional occupations, arranged from Brahmans to Untouchables. Contact with a person of lower caste (such as eating or drinking from his hands, bodily contact) pollutes one of a higher caste and necessitates ritual purification. ( See caste.) The age-grade system (see age set) of many traditional East African societies may also resemble a status group.