The concept of stratification is borrowed from the natural sciences. In the study of the history of Earth, geologists have found the concept of stratification quite useful. Going into the deeper recesses of the earth, geologists discovered that the present surface of the earth represents the latest layer and that as we go deeper, we find several such layers, each layer having a unique configuration. The earth’s crust consists of a number of parallel layers that lie one upon the other. They may extend over hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of the Earth’s surface. Each such layer is termed a stratum, and the manner in which each stratum is linked with the others shows a definite pattern. This pattern is named stratification. The pattern in which various strata are arranged suggests a chronological rank order. Different parts of the earth are differently stratified. Each system of stratification represents a distinct area of the earth.
Physical anthropologists and students of prehistory use geological strata to determine the age of fossils or the cultural artefacts they discover during their excavations. Found in a particular bed—a stratum—the discoveries formed part of the ‘assemblage’ of that stratum and gave credence to theories relative to their age. For more recent discoveries, palaeontologists and prehistoric archaeologists used the technique of C-14 dating or dendrochronology. By measuring the percentage of C-14 to C-12 in a dead body (it is found that in an object, C-12 remains constant while C-14 continues to decay), the age of the artefact or the bone is determined. The percentage of the C-14 in an item represents a stratum. Using this technique, the age of an artefact up to 60,000 years can be satisfactorily determined. Similarly, dendrochronology is used to measure the age of a tree through its rings, which are formed with the growth of the tree and the amount of rainfall. The tree rings helps one to identify the age of the discovered item. The rings in this case constitute a stratum of the tree.
However, the concept of strata in these researches is associated with chronology—that is, history. Each stratum represents a period of history, and the layers can be placed one upon the other in terms of its age. Stratification of the human population in terms of age groups corresponds to this simile. There are other forms of stratification that are not based upon their ‘age’, but are based on their alleged or assigned superiority or inferiority. Sociologists, for example, conceived of human societies as consisting of different systems of stratification. All societies are stratified, but the way they are stratified differs from society to society.
When used in the analysis of existing social structures, stratification does not refer to the age of the units in the system; it connotes only their placement in terms of hierarchy (vertical relationships) as well as horizontal ordering. Age groups are vertically ordered, but not always the genders—male and female can be divided horizontally; of course, some societies may assign a superior status to one sex—male in patriarchal and female in matriarchal societies. Classes or castes may be vertically arranged, but the rank order does not indicate their age—one cannot say that the lower classes are older than the upper. Thus, stratification, as employed in sociology and social anthropology, is used to identify different strata and their actual placement. Implicit in this analysis is also the assumption that all societies are characterized by ‘inequalities’. These may be graded vertically, or be differentiated in terms of its characteristics. Social reformers talk of inequalities in terms of higher and lower, or superior and inferior, and argue for their abolition.
Box 14.1 Dendrochronology
Simply put, dendrochronology is the dating of past events (climatic changes) through the study of tree ring growth. Botanists, foresters and archaeologists began using this technique during the early part of the twentieth century. It was discovered by A. E. Douglass from the University of Arizona, who noted that the wide rings of certain species of trees were produced during wet years and, inversely, narrow rings during dry seasons. Each year a tree adds a layer of wood to its trunk and branches, thus creating the annual rings we see when viewing a cross-section. New wood grows from the cambium layer between the old wood and the bark. In the spring, when moisture is plentiful, the tree devotes its energy to producing new growth cells. These first new cells are large, but as the summer progresses, their size decreases until, in the fall, growth stops and cells die, with no new growth appearing until the next spring. The contrast between these smaller old cells and next year’s larger new cells is enough to establish a ring, thus making counting possible.
Some scholars have gone to the extent of classifying human societies as hierarchical and egalitarian: the best example is that of Louis Dumont, who characterized Indian society as Homo Hierarchicus as against the societies of Europe, which he designated as Homo Equalis (Dumont, 1981). Dumont studied the Hindu caste system and labelled the entire Indian society as hierarchical, implying that the societies of the West have no inequalities, no hierarchy—a disputable contention, and certainly an over-exaggeration.
It is important to mention that there is a difference between a person’s position and the position of a group in the system. A person’s position is determined by his status-set; of course, public esteem is generally governed by the key status, which is generally ‘economic’—the source of income and the amount of earning. This alerts us to the fact that even in the same family, different persons may have different economic standings. In societies which are individualistic, and where the family norm is that of the nuclear family, a person’s status is naturally generalized as the status of the family. But where families are extended, such translation of status is not that easy; more difficult is the situation where the two statuses—economic and social—do not correspond.
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