Inequality Among Men

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NUNC COCNOSCO EX PARTE

THOMAS J. BATA LI BRARY TRENT UNIVERSITY

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Inequality among Men

Pavilion Series

General Editor F. G. Bailey ALSO IN THIS SERIES

STRATAGEMS AND SPOILS A Social Anthropology of Politics F. G. Bailey

GIFTS AND POISON The Politics of Reputation Edited by F. G. Bailey

DEBATE AND COMPROMISE The Politics of Innovation Edited by F. G. Bailey

FRIENDS OF FRIENDS Networks, Manipulators, and Coalitions Jeremy Boissevain

NEW HEAVEN, NEW EARTH A Study of Millenarian Activities Kenelm Burridge

MIND, BODY AND WEALTH A Study of Belief and Practice in an Indian Village David Pocock

THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL The Bene Israel of Bombay Schifra Strizower

THE MAFIA OF A SICILIAN VILLAGE A Study of Violent Peasant Entrepreneurs Anton Blok

FREEDOM AND LABOUR Mobilization and Political Control on the Zambian Copperbelt Peter Harries-Jones

CONSCIOUSNESS AND CHANGE Symbolic Anthropology in Evolutionary Perspective James L. Peacock

Inequality among Men

Andre Beteille

PAVILION SERIES

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

BASIL BLACKWELL ■ OXFORD

© Basil Blackwell 1977 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Basil Blackwell & Mott Limited British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Beteille, Andre Inequality among Men. - (Pavilion series). Index. ISBN 0-631-17410-9 0-631-17420-6 Pbk. 1. Title 2. Series 301.44 HM146 Equality

Set in Monotype Times and Grotesque Printed and bound in Great Britain by Billing & Sons Limited, Guildford, London and Worcester

Contents

Preface 1 The Two Sources of Inequality

ix

1

2 Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

24

3 Organisation and Structures of Power

48

4 Wealth, Property and Social Class

73

5 Race and Social Stratification

101

6 Continuity and Change

129

7 The Egalitarian Society

153

Index

173

£94624

For Radha

Preface

When I was invited by Professor F. G. Bailey, the editor of this series, to contribute a volume to it, the only conditions placed were that the book should deal with a significant subject and that it should be so written as not to baffle the general reader. I chose to write on inequality because it is one of the central problems of every human society; it is also the kind of problem on which all major lines of social enquiry—in the fields of economics, politics, religion and kinship—tend to converge. Enquiries into what is called social stratification have over the years become highly technical in character. I hope I am not too far wrong in believing that it is still possible to discuss the problem in a significant way without demand¬ ing too much expert knowledge from the reader. In this study I have taken as my point of departure the distinction made by Rousseau between ‘natural’ and ‘social’ inequality. The importance of this distinction has been recognised by students of society and culture for two hundred years; but what we are coming to realise only now is that the distinction, besides being important, is also ambiguous, and perhaps inherently so. Since I have not found it possible to debate this point at length in the body of the book, I ought to say here that I consider it to be of crucial significance. I have adopted a comparative approach, deliberately ignoring the distinction between sociology and social anthropology. The study of social stratification has developed as a specialisation within sociology, in practice concerned largely with the study of advanced industrial societies. But social anthropology, which began with the study of primitive or preliterate societies, has a great deal to con¬ tribute to the understanding of inequality, if only for the reason that no other discipline has shown more forcefully the ambiguous nature

x

Preface

of the distinctions people make between what is social and what is natural. While the treatment of the problem is comparative, no attempt has been made to catalogue every form of inequality in every society. The empirical material has been selected in relation to a particular argument. Some societies have been discussed in more than one chapter, and others not at all. If the argument is valid, then it can be applied to any society, whether or not it has been discussed here. I hope I have covered a sufficiently wide range of cases to persuade the reader that the argument can indeed be applied to others. The ideas presented in this study have grown over the years through discussions with many persons, mainly students. I find it difficult to single out any name from among these for special mention. Mr R. L. Kalra typed the manuscript and Miss Malini Chand prepared the Index; I am grateful to them for their help. Andre Beteille

Delhi School of Economics 14 June 1976

1 The Two Sources of Inequality The spirit of the age is in favour of equality, though practice denies it almost everywhere . . . Nehru The Discovery of India

The great paradox of the modern world is that everywhere men attach themselves to the principle of equality and everywhere, in their own lives as well as in the lives of others, they encounter the presence of inequality. The more strongly they attach themselves to the principle or the ideology of equality the more oppressive the reality becomes. Their attachment even makes it difficult for them to consider dispassionately and objectively whether the inequalities which surround them are increasing or decreasing. Every statement that inequalities are decreasing in some spheres of social life seems to call forward a counter-statement that they are increasing in others. To turn a moral question into a sociological one is the ambition of every student of society, but it is not an ambition which many can reasonably hope to fulfil. The two principal political ideologies of the present age, democ¬ racy and socialism—either singly or in various combinations—are built on the premise of equality for all human beings. These great ideologies and their corresponding institutional structures were born and took shape in recent times in the Western world. Soon after their emergence in the West they spread to other parts of the world so that today they have come to acquire a universal character. The ideologies of equality are simple in their essential features, but the realities they confront differ greatly from one society to another and, within the same society, from one sphere of life to another. In an age where the ideal of equality has so much fascination, any attempt to interpret inequality runs the risk of being condemned as being by implication a justification of it. The risk is all the greater

2

The Two Sources of Inequality

when the attempt is to show that inequalities are rooted in features which are inherent in all human societies. There are many who believe that sociologists, like the moral philosophers of an earlier age, should not only make men more aware of their predicament but also show them a way out of it. People either expect too much from the science of society or are too easily disposed to believe the worst about it. Industrialisation gave a new turn to inequality in Western society. Many of the old forms of inequality disappeared or became attenu¬ ated while some new forms emerged. It is perhaps natural that initi¬ ally and to some extent even now people’s attention should be turned to those forms of inequality which are being eroded. New social forms take time to be recognised, particularly when they are not institutionalised or are contrary to the norms of a society. Further, there can be no doubt that with economic advances and the mitiga¬ tion of the more extreme forms of poverty, inequalities have become less visible if not less harsh in Europe and North America as com¬ pared to their own past and to what prevails in the poorer countries of Asia and Latin America. Thus people in the former countries can be far more optimistic about the future of equality, and inequality can therefore be more easily studied as a technical problem within sociology. The position is very different in many of the countries belonging to what is called the Third World. There traditional forms of inequality, sustained by centuries of economic stagnation, are still very much in evidence. The most gross forms of poverty and the most palpable differences in life chances between classes and between communities are to be encountered there. Inequality is not some¬ thing merely to be measured by technical devices, but is visible to the naked eye. Then there is the question of the inequalities, believed by some to be increasing, between these countries and the advanced countries of the West, which gives an additional piquancy to the perception of the problem as a whole. There is another difference between the advanced and the back¬ ward societies which must be noted here. The advanced countries are ‘advanced’ not only materially but also ideologically. The ideology of equality has taken deep roots there and has permeated every sphere of life. Hierarchy, which Marx described as the ideal form of feudalism, ceased to be the ideal for Western societies a long time ago. There is between the living generations in these

The Two Sources of Inequality

3

societies no gap, or only a small gap, in the definition of what ought to be. The countries of the Third World are not only ‘backward’ economi¬ cally, but many of them are also ‘traditional’ in their culture. Contemporary India provides a good example of this kind of society. It is not as if new ideas and values have made no impact on it. If anything, the ideology of equality is proclaimed more loudly and stridently there than in countries where it has been institutionalised for a century or more. But lurking behind these proclamations are old values and old habits of mind which see the pre-existing inequali¬ ties among men as a part of the natural scheme of things. Hence in these countries a sociological discussion of inequality tends to cut too close to the bone and may easily be represented as a defence of traditional values and institutions. What exactly is involved in turning a moral question into a sociologi¬ cal one ? I shall not attempt to provide an exhaustive answer to this here. The whole book may in fact be viewed as an exercise in sociol¬ ogical reasoning as applied to the understanding of a specific problem. The particular style of this reasoning, its distinctive way of relating facts to ideas can be best revealed through a systematic examination of a problem which has engaged the attention of sociologists for over a century. Here a few preliminary observations will be made to prepare the ground for the more detailed treatment which is to follow. Historically, the first step towards a sociological understanding of the problem was taken when a distinction was made between natural inequalities among men and inequalities in their conditions of existence. In pre-industrial societies, which were generally organ¬ ised on a hierarchical basis, existing inequalities must have appeared at one and the same time both natural and social. Just as men are naturally superior to animals, so also different orders of men born into different castes or estates are naturally endowed with unequal abilities, aptitudes and aspirations. This view of the world was worked out in its most elaborate form in Hindu India, but it was also present in other civilisations, including that of Christian Europe. It is customary to go back to Rousseau to trace the first modern statement of the distinction which forms one basis of the sociological approach to the problem of inequality. Rousseau maintained that natural or physical inequalities among men were small and unim-

4

V

The Two Sources of Inequality

portant, and he turned his attention to what he called moral or political inequalities such as those of wealth, honour and power. These he believed to be based on convention and to be established, ‘or at least authorised by the consent of men’.1 It is clear that Rousseau believed that conventions could be changed to the greater advantage of men, but it is not clear how far he saw that it is in the nature of all conventions to create and sustain inequalities. Men are no doubt free to discard particular conventions and to institute new ones, although this freedom is perhaps not as great as it was believed to be by Rousseau’s successors. It is altogether a different question whether they can live without any kind of con¬ vention whatsoever. The argument of this book is that society is inconceivable without conventions and rules, and that these consti¬ tute the seedbed of what may be called social as opposed to natural inequality. While the distinction between inequalities based on nature and those based on society is of fundamental importance, it is by no means easy to apply the distinction consistently in practice. Among inequalities established by nature, Rousseau includes differences of ‘age, health, bodily strength, and the qualities of the mind or of the soul’.2 These are attributes of very different kinds, and they are not all given the same importance in every society. Even if we admit that there are differences everywhere in nature, these differences are turned into inequalities only through a process of evaluation, and evaluation is essentially a social or cultural process. Rousseau talks about a difference of ‘the qualities of the mind’ as constituting one kind of natural inequality. To be more specific, we may talk about intelligence, and today it is quite common to measure *■ inequalities of intelligence among people. In order to do this in a scientific way, psychologists are obliged to give a precise and more or less limited meaning to the term intelligence. Now if we are to proceed at all systematically, we must at some stage try to find out how much weight is to be given to differences of intelligence in this sense as against other differences, say of beauty or bodily strength. This takes us back again to standards of evaluation which vary from one society to another. An important feature of the sociological approach is that it is by its nature comparative. Even a cursory glance at existing patterns of inequality shows their extreme variability. No doubt there have been in every civilisation men who have reflected on the nature of

The Two Sources of Inequality

5

their own social hierarchy, its origin and source. But it is only when we compare in a systematic way the inequalities in our own society with those present in others that a sociological appraoch to the prob¬ lem is initiated. It hardly needs to be said that the possibilities of systematic comparison between widely different societies were strictly limited until a little over a hundred years ago. Systematic studies of inequality based on the careful observation and recording of facts began to be made in Western societies from the beginning of the nineteenth century. These studies were at first set almost entirely in a historical context, their objective being to determine whether inequalities were increasing or decreasing. Des¬ criptions of facts were frequently mixed up with judgements of value because the facts were not always easily available and because most writers felt free and even obliged to express their judgement on important moral questions. During the last fifty years a vast body of empirical material has been collected systematically covering almost every important aspect of inequality in Western societies. Some of these studies, particularly some of those conducted in the United States, are very detailed and technical. A number of studies have been published in which com¬ parisons of patterns of stratification and rates of mobility are attemp¬ ted between the different industrial systems of the capitalist type. More recently some scholars have turned their attention to the systematic comparison of inequalities in the two types of industrial society, the capitalist systems of Western Europe and North America, and the socialist systems of Eastern Europe. But if sociology is to be a truly comparative subject, then compari¬ sons must extend beyond the industrial societies of Europe and North America. Sociology as a science developed in the West out of a study of Western society, and even comparative sociology has in practice confined itself largely to the comparison of Western or industrial societies. The study of non-Western societies has been left largely to anthropologists, ethnologists and historians, and the division of labour between students of Western and non-Western societies has in practice tended to be rigid, despite the acceptance in principle of a comparative approach to the study of society. As I have already indicated, the clearest and the most visible forms of inequality are to be found today not in the industrial societies of the West but in some of the predominantly agrarian societies of the Third World. These societies reveal some of the

6

The Two Sources of Inequality

characteristics present in European societies prior to the nineteenth century, but they also present their own distinctive features which derive from a different religious and cultural tradition. In many of them we see today the interplay of divergent and even conflicting rules and standards. A study of inequalities in these societies helps to throw into sharper relief patterns which are also present in Western societies but which are there obscured by other factors. Field studies of tribal societies by anthropologists have thrown much light on the nature of social life in its simplest forms. It is no longer possible to talk as in the past about either primitive com¬ munism’ or ‘primitive anarchy’. A sociological understanding of inequality must take into account the insights gained from the study of tribal and agrarian as well as industrial societies. Comparative sociology helps us to test our ideas about the uni¬ versal features of social life. In the present case it helps us to find out whether or not inequalities are inherent in social life as we know it to be. In Rousseau’s time people sought answers to such questions by arguing from first principles. Today we have access to a vastly superior body of facts, collected and arranged systematically, and these can be used for testing our arguments at every step. The facts gathered by sociologists do not by themselves guarantee a knowledge of the future, but then one must neither claim too much from soci¬ ology nor expect too much of it. Human beings as we know them live everywhere in association with other human beings to whom they are related by a variety of rights and obligations. Some students of human society were struck by the fact that there are parallels elsewhere in the animal kingdom, where some species of insects, for example, have their own forms of associ¬ ation and their own division of labour. Thus, Radcliffe-Brown drew attention to what he called the ‘social phenomena’ that are to be found among bees in a hive in ‘the relations of association of the queen, the workers and the drones’.3 However, this analogy does not carry us very far for there are fundamental differences in the social phenomena observed among human beings and among other members of the animal kingdom. The most obvious difference between animal and human societies is that in the former the patterns of behaviour which express and sustain the relations of association are transmitted through a genetic code, whereas in the latter they are transmitted, in addition, through

The Two Sources of Inequality

7

a cultural code. Now the cultural code has enormously greater plasticity than the genetic code which appears by comparison to be fixed and rigid. It is thus that we see enormous variability in the forms of association from one society to another among humans, whereas these forms tend to be fixed for the species as a whole among other members of the animal kingdom. Thus what each and every human society has and what makes human societies unique is a body of collective representations. The concept of collective representations was formulated and developed by Emile Durkheim and a group of sociologists in France around the turn of the present century. It is now an indispensable tool in the interpretation of social life. The concept is not without its difficulties. It is diffuse and ambiguous and, despite its extensive use by soci¬ ologists for three-quarters of a century, we seem to be no nearer to a more precise definition of it than was proposed by Durkheim. Collective representations are the ideas, beliefs and values held in common by the members of a given society. They have, as it were, a life of their own, and it is by their means that the individual defines his identity in relation to other individuals and to the universe in general. The great significance of collective representations is revealed in the fact that individual modes of thought and perception differ greatly from one society to another, and are largely similar within the same society or the same sector of society. We naturally expect that the ideas, beliefs and values which regu¬ late life in an industrial or even an agrarian civilisation will be rich and complex, but investigations by anthropologists have shown that the collective representations in even the most primitive tribal societies are remarkably elaborate in nature. Man nowhere perceives the world around him directly; everywhere there are elaborate cul¬ tural categories which mediate between him and his universe. These categories act as filters through which objects, events and persons are perceived and evaluated. Let us take first man’s relations to physical things. Even in the most primitive societies physical things are not simply things that exist in their natural form, but are invested with meaning and signific¬ ance. Birds, animals, trees and plants, moving and stationary things are all classified and graded. In an essay on primitive classification published in 1903, Durkheim and Mauss4 argued that man does not leave anything in nature untouched but classifies everything according to the principles of his own social organisation. This is

8

The Two Sources of Inequality

perhaps too extreme a statement, and it may be best to say that similar principles of classification and evaluation are applied to the social and the natural orders. It is true that modern man lives less close to nature than primitive man, and this is why his categorisation of birds, animals, trees and plants is less elaborate and more fragmentary. In industrial societies other things such as buildings, monuments, gardens and parks surround man and constitute his immediate physical environment. In every such society these objects, which are in a more direct way the products of his creation, are in their turn categorised and graded. The French anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, has tried to examine the relationship between nature and culture through a detailed and systematic study of customs relating to food.5 Many are aware of the elaborate and strictly defined modes of food preparation developed in civilisations such as the European, the Chinese and the Indian. Levi-Strauss has revealed the surprising fact that food pre¬ paration is an elaborate affair even among the most primitive of tribal communities. Not everything that is edible is in any society regarded as food. Different food substances have to be differently prepared, and the preparations have to be served in a certain order which is governed by occasion, place and time. The most important consideration from our point of view is that food is in every society made the object of more or less systematic evaluation. In no society are all kinds of food accorded equal value; different varieties of food are associated with different levels of social prestige. Some varieties of food are regarded as particularly appro¬ priate for feasts, banquets and parties; others are regarded as plain or homely fare. Clearly there is some association between the social prestige of food and its scarcity or cost, but the work of Levi-Strauss has provided ample evidence to show that this cannot be the sole explanation of the hierarchy of foodstuffs. Next to food, dress and adornment are objects which engage the attention of individuals in every society. These also are items of culture in the sense that there are collective standards which govern their choice and use, although perhaps here new fashions alter the standards more easily than in the matter of food. The association between social prestige and modes of dress and adornment is too well known to require detailed discussion. One of the interesting features of modern living seems to be that those who set out to repudiate all fashions in dress end at best by setting up a new fashion,

The Two Sources of Inequality

9

giving further testimony to the pervasive role of evaluation in social life. Having found that man applies standards of evaluation to all kinds of material objects—those which surround him and those which he creates—it would be surprising if we were to find that he does not apply them to other human beings. We do find indeed that individuals and groups are subjected to evaluation in every human society. I must make it clear again that I am not talking now about personal assessment which varies from one case to another, but about standards and criteria of evaluation which are socially defined and which form a part of what I earlier described as collective repre¬ sentations. On the question of evaluation, the well-known American soci¬ ologist, Talcott Parsons, maintains, But given the process of evaluation, the probability is that it will serve to differentiate entities in a rank order of some kind. Exactly equal evaluation of two or more entities may of course occur, but it is a special case of evaluative judgement, not a demonstration of its irrelevance.6 We shall take two aspects of the individual members of a society which, according to Parsons, are everywhere subjected to evaluation: their qualities and their performances. In modern industrial societies performance or achievement is generally given pride of place. This is the case whether or not the economic system is organised on the basis of the private ownership of the means of production, although it is true that it is in capitalist societies that we see the full play of the spirit of individual achieve¬ ment through competition. But as Michael Young pointed out some years ago, a meritocratic society is by no means the prototype of an egalitarian society.7 Indeed some may doubt if a society based on a meritocracy is in all ways more desirable than other types of societies of which history provides examples. What Parsons describes as ‘quality’ in contrast to performance is, as he shows convincingly, not wholly irrelevant even in the most highly competitive and achievement-oriented societies. Birth, family status and ethnic identity are taken into account in the ranking of individuals even in modern American society. In other, e.g. pre¬ industrial, societies—which are more static and have a greater

10

The Two Sources of Inequality

historical depth—a large number of such qualities are recognised and serve as criteria for differentiating and ranking individuals. Gradation in terms of quality has been a conspicuous feature of the pre-industrial civilisations of India, China and Europe. No doubt some carried it further than others, but they all differed in this matter from modern industrial civilisation. The qualities of men are viewed as being inherent in their nature and they are believed to be generally though not invariably acquired by birth. Every civilisation has of course its own theories of human nature, and even our modern scientific civilisation has not succeeded in discarding altogether the view that human nature is to some extent unalterable. If we now return to Rousseau we will be able to understand a little better why the distinction proposed by him between ‘natural’ inequality and ‘moral’ inequality is so difficult to apply in practice. Natural inequality is based on differences in quality, and qualities are not just there, so to say, in nature; they are as human beings have defined them, in different societies, in different historical epochs. What modern anthropology teaches us is that human beings create not only their own ‘morality’ but in a way also their own ‘nature’ by investing everything around them with meaning and value. The most obvious example in the modern world of the way in which natural or physical differences are invested with moral or cultural significance is to be found in our attitudes to race. What is race, and how should we view differences of race? Are differences of race wholly an aspect of nature or are they also an aspect of culture? As physical anthropologists discovered soon after they began to make systematic studies of race, it is extremely difficult, some would say even impossible, to break up the human species into a number of natural kinds. All kinds of differences in physical features are of course present. But if we take differences in skin colour, for example, we get a totally different distribution of the human population from the distribution we get when dividing it according to blood groups. The geneticists say that blood-groups which correspond to genotype are more significant than skin colour which corresponds to phenotype. But then what should we do about skin colour? Should we regard it as being totally extraneous to human nature? Whichever way the geneticist disposes of the problem, it will continue to be there for students of society and culture so long as physical appearance as a quality is subjected to evaluation.

The Two Sources of Inequality

11

I have argued so far that human beings everywhere discriminate among things and among persons, and that some kind of evaluation is applied to both. Systems of evaluation differ greatly from each other in their complexity and coherence, although there is always the danger that other systems of classification and evaluation appear simple and naive in our eyes. It is only by applying the comparative approach that we recognise the specificity of our own system of evaluation and the universality of evaluation as a social phenomenon. It is perhaps fruitless to ask whether we first categorise things and then apply the scheme to society or whether our experience of society provides us with certain categories in terms of which we classify everything else. The evaluation of things and of persons is something we can observe directly in all societies. What is important for our argument is that discrimination and evaluation are inherent features of culture and perhaps of the human mind itself, and these processes are applied in similar ways to the world of things and the world of persons. I have argued in the preceding section that each society has a culture or a set of collective representations of which evaluation is an inherent feature, and that this provides a universal source of inequality. I shall now argue that every society, as a set of interacting individuals, is characterised by some degree of organisation which involves force, power and domination, and that this constitutes a second universal source of inequality. The role of force, power and domination in the relations among men has of course been a subject of continual discussion among political philosophers since the days of Machiavelli, Bodin and Hobbes. But there are several differences between the philosophical approach to the problem and the sociological approach presented here. For one thing, philosophers like Hobbes argued about man and the commonwealth from first principles on the basis of certain assumptions about human nature; the sociologist, on the other hand, takes for granted the variability of human nature and bases his argu¬ ments on systematic comparisons among societies of different kinds. Secondly, political philosophers, while talking about the distribution of power, have almost always had the powers of the state in mind; the sociologist considers in addition the distribution of power in associations other than the state as well as in stateless societies.

12

The Two Sources of Inequality

Hobbes believed, not unlike Rousseau, that natural inequalities among men, whether of the body or of the mind, are small and inconsiderable, and the systematic subordination of some men to others is a consequence or, better, an aspect of living in society. For it is in their civil as opposed to their natural condition that men are organised in terms of justice, law and power. In talking about power or the ‘common Power’ here, Hobbes had of course the state in mind,8 but we shall see that it is possible to talk meaningfully about power in a variety of other social contexts as well. If one views the state as the sole source and locus of power, one can adopt either of two attitudes to the problem of power in social life. One may argue that the state is essential to civilised living, to both order and progress, and that it should therefore be maintained if not strengthened. Alternatively, one may argue that the state is a historically specific institution, that it arises in particular times at particular places, that it can be negated, and that with its negation inequalities of power will cease to exist. The sociological argument on the other hand is that superordination and subordination based on inequalities of power are inherent in all organisations of which the state is one but not the only example. Here also, as in the case of culture, the really decisive evidence comes from the anthropological study of tribal communities. The study of the simpler societies by the methods of intensive fieldwork is barely fifty years old, and the systematic study of their political life is of even more recent origin. Yet these studies have led us to revise some of our basic ideas regarding the organisation of human activities through which social life maintains its nature, form and identity. In the past people commonly held either of two diametrically opposed views about the nature of life in what were called savage societies. One view was that there was no law in the proper sense among savages: what prevailed was the law of the jungle where might was right and the weak were entirely at the mercy of the strong. The other view was that in savage societies custom was king, that the savage was such a slave to superstition that his life was auto¬ matically regulated by a blind adherence to custom, leaving no room for force, power and domination in this regulation. The results of Malinowski’s fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands revealed for the first time the complex nature of the sanctions by which social life is regulated among primitive peoples.

The Two Sources of Inequality

13

Malinowski brought out the complex pattern of rights and obli¬ gations which bind individuals to each other in tribal societies, and in the process showed that social life there is not self-regulating in quite the same mechanical way in which it is in the societies of ants and bees.9 In understanding social life among human beings even in its simplest forms we have to take into account their codes of con¬ duct, the frequent departures from these codes in practice, and the mechanisms for dealing with these departures. All men, whether in primitive or in advanced societies, have rights and obligations, but they are not by that reason all equal; some have superior rights in defining the obligations of others. Put in very simple terms, my argument is that it is in the nature of a system of social relations that the rights and obligations of people towards each other should be defined to some extent, and that it is in the nature of a system of action that this definition should remain to some extent ambiguous. It is thus that power and domination lodge themselves as significant features of social life everywhere. In a society where rights and obligations are defined and perceived unambiguously, and accepted unequivocally, power as we know it may cease to be significant but one may doubt if such a society would continue to be a human society. My argument may be best illustrated by examining the organisa¬ tion of social activities within a given territorial framework. It is a truism that human beings everywhere have to live in a territory. Living together in a particular village or district and having to inter¬ act with each other continually over a period of time require some limitation and adjustment of interests among people. While this requirement is present in all associations, we see its force most clearly in the territorial group which is, moreover, a universal form of association. Every local community, however small or simple, has its own division of labour. Men and women, old and young, have to perform various tasks for themselves and for each other if the community is to maintain itself. Under such conditions, when an individual violates his obligations to another individual, this becomes to some extent a matter of concern for the group as a whole. But the violation of an obligation and the remedy for the violation are neither of them simple matters. It has to be determined whether an obligation existed, to what extent it has been violated, who was ultimately responsible for the violation, what reparation should be made, to whom, by

14

The Two Sources of Inequality

whom, and in what manner. I would like to repeat that this is not just deductive reasoning: anthropological fieldwork all over the world has shown that these are questions which occur repeatedly in all communities, everywhere. Issues in dispute or doubt have to be settled and decisions must be taken which will be binding on all the members of the community. Now it is of course possible in theory for the entire collectivity to arrive through consensus at decisions which will be considered by each to be binding on all. But this is not how things work in practice in the case of even small and compact groups with a simple division of labour, and such a practice would clearly be impossible in the case of large and dispersed groups with a complex division of labour. In both cases there are persons who by virtue of their character and position play a more decisive part than others in taking collective decisions. It is in this sense that we speak of these positions as ones of power and authority, since it is by virtue of them that some can take decisions which are considered to be binding by all. I have avoided giving formal definitions of power and authority, but the discussion above will make it clear what kinds of considera¬ tion should enter into their definition; I would like only to add here that some element of physical compulsion, potential or actual, everywhere lies behind decisions that are regarded as authoritative. Now, societies differ greatly in the extent to which positions of power and authority are elaborated and related to each other. But such positions are present in all societies even when they are not clearly separated from other positions defined in terms of other attributes and functions. In a detailed and meticulous survey of politics and government in tribal Africa, Professor Schapera showed that the simplest and the most complex tribal societies share certain basic features in com¬ mon.10 All have territorial groups which may be small or large, loosely or tightly co-ordinated. In the case of the most primitive tribes, the local group is small and the co-ordination between local groups is limited; there is nevertheless some apparatus, often merely an aspect of the kinship system, through which activities are organ¬ ised, order maintained and conflict resolved. Where the local group is only an extended kin-group, those in authority are generally persons occupying senior positions in the kin-group. In other cases, and at higher levels of territorial organisation there are chiefs of various kinds. The point to bear in mind is that the differences

The Two Sources of Inequality

15

between village headmen, titular chiefs and paramount chiefs are differences of degree and not of kind. It is perhaps necessary at this point to say a few words about the distinction, made famous by British anthropologists, between seg¬ mentary and centralised political systems. It has been argued that there are some political systems, called segmentary or acephalous, where there are no kings, chiefs or headmen, and no concentration or inequality of power, but where order is maintained through a balanced opposition of segments which are equal and opposed at every level. Some comments are required on this. If we take the classic case of the Nuer tribes described by Evans-Pritchard, we find firstly that no clear description is presented of how order is maintained within the village or camp, which are in many ways the most significant local groups. Secondly, at every territorial level we have one lineage which is described as the dominant lineage; if the concept of dominance is to have any meaning, it must relate to inequalities of power. Taking all things together, it would appear that the most satisfactory statement of the position is that of Professor Gluckman, who says: To some extent, the answer to this problem maybe that the govern¬ mental organisation which we find in states at these levels of economic development has an inherent instability which contin¬ ually leads to its breakdown, so that the difference between tribes organised under chiefs, and those which lack chiefs is not as great as it appears to be.11 Where the organization of a number of local groups in a larger system is weak, the apparatus through which this organization is maintained and in which inequalities of power are rooted, is likely to be weak or non-existent. Students of human society make a distinction between the sphere of kinship and the sphere of politics, and this distinction is particu¬ larly clear in the case of industrial societies. In tribal and also agrarian societies the sphere of kinship is quite large, and some anthropologists have sought to distinguish within it the domestic domain from the politico-jural domain. Even if we argue that there is no separate political domain among some of the simplest tribes we must recognise that there are inequalities of power in the kinship group through which social life in the community is organised.

16

The Two Sources of Inequality

This point needs to be made, for to the contemporary Western mind the sphere of kinship is the sphere of equality; this is by no means the case universally. I have considered so far the problems of organisation only in territorial groups. But these problems exist in all forms of association: territorial groups such as the village or the state provide only a kind of model through which we can understand and explain them. The problems of organisation, and of the inequalities of power inherent in them have been studied in diverse forms of association ranging from religious sects (often based on egalitarian values) to social clubs (designed generally for companionship among equals). When we move from simple, small-scale tribal communities to complex, large-scale industrial societies, positions of power and authority multiply, and become more clearly defined and more elaborately structured. Organisation is a pervasive feature of indust¬ rial societies, whether we take democratic or totalitarian regimes. In these societies organisation is aided by technical devices of a kind which was not dreamt of even in the most despotic of tribal societies. Given the elaborate nature of the apparatus of power and authority in industrial societies, it is difficult to see how control over it could be made equally accessible to all. It is far from my intention to argue that wherever there is a con¬ centration of power there must also be an abuse of power. That is a separate question which has led some to the conclusion, which I find to be of doubtful value, that the solution to our modern prob¬ lems lies in a return to a life based on simple, small-scale communities. As I have said, even the simplest communities are not free from inequalities of power, and if these generally appear small or neg¬ ligible, this may partly be because we assess them according to standards which are not always appropriate to them. I have tried to interpret the prevalence of inequality among men in terms of two principal phenomena, evaluation and organisation. These in their turn are rooted in culture on the one hand and power on the other, without either of which human society as we know it is inconceivable. Different scholars have given different degrees of emphasis to these factors, some attaching more importance to com¬ mon values and others to power. But the interesting point is that these are also the factors which, in the opinion of most, hold a society together and ensure its continuity as a living whole. In other

The Two Sources of Inequality

17

words, the very things which give order and coherence to society are also responsible for maintaining inequality among its members. Sociology began as a discipline by asking what holds a society together, what gives it coherence and design, what makes it some¬ thing more than a mere aggregate of individuals. Today we no longer put the question in the form in which it was put by moral philosophers in the eighteenth century and earlier who wanted to discover how and under what conditions individual human beings living in a state of nature came together and created a society. Perhaps we realise today that this question cannot be properly answered by the methods available to us. Moreover human beings always and everywhere live in society. The problem therefore is to find out not how society origi¬ nated but how it is maintained. Among the first sociologists to raise this question and to attempt a rigorous answer to it were Emile Durkheim and his associates in France at the turn of the century. Durkheim drew on an earlier tradi¬ tion of French social thought, notably that of Montesquieu and also of Rousseau, but gave his own distinctive answer to the question. Collective representations, shared ideas and values, or culture are, according to Durkheim, the fundamental factors that give unity, coherence and design to social life. Durkheim has been reproached by his critics for ignoring the place of force, power and domination in society. It is true also that he did hot show systematically how common values are linked to social inequality, although this has been done by his most important modern interpreter, Talcott Parsons. Other sociologists, notably Pareto, Mosca and Michels who were all contemporaries of Durkheim, have emphasised the part played by force, power and domination in holding society together. Their work also can be related to an earlier tradition, going back in this case to the fifteenth-century Italian political philosopher, Niccolo Machiavelli. The work of Michels in particular presents a lucid analysis of the relationship between organisation and the inequality of power, a relationship which has been summed up in the ‘Iron law of oligarchy’.12 We do not have a sociological theory which synthesises in a satis¬ factory way the two approaches presented above. Most attempts at synthesis miss what in my view is the essential point that it may not be possible to reduce the problem of either order or inequality to one single, unifying principle. So far at least, attempts to reduce the problem of power to that of ‘legitimate’ power and to explain it in

18

The Two Sources of Inequality

terms of culture have proved to be no more fruitful than attempts to explain common values or systems of evaluation by a theory of power or of material interests. In other words, the theoretical approach of which I am mistrustful is the one for which the bad name is ‘reductionist’ and the good name is ‘unified’; the approach which I propose to follow is described as ‘pluralist’ by its advocates and ‘eclectic’ by its critics. Corresponding to the two principal sources of inequality are the major dimensions of inequality, or its two major scales of gradation. These are commonly described as the scale or dimension of status on the one hand and of power on the other. Status relates to the esteem and respect that are accorded to qualities and positions which are valued in themselves; it is of the essence that esteem and respect are here freely accorded. Power refers to the obedience and compliance that some more than others are able to command by virtue of the positions they hold in society; here it is of the essence that some are able to impose their will on others despite their resistance. It must be made clear that power and status are analytically separable concepts, that the scale of status is different from that of power. It is of course true that the same person may enjoy both status and power, although not to the same extent in every society. Some societies even take pains to keep the two separate in principle. Thus, it has been said that in traditional Hindu society a separation was made in principle between the Brahmin and the king, the former being accorded the highest status, the latter enjoying the most power. It is also easy to see that whatever the formal principle might be, in practice status and power can to some extent be converted into each other in every society. Those to whom people show esteem and respect of their own accord can and often do use their position to command obedience from the same people and from others; but there is a limit beyond which this becomes a hazardous venture, for respect and esteem which are freely given can also be freely with¬ drawn. Likewise, those who command obedience also enjoy some respect, if not from everyone at least from their subordinates; but here again people in power seem to enjoy the most respect when they are furthest removed from the ultimate source of power which is physical compulsion. In modern Western societies status and power are often confused because under capitalism both are to a considerable extent associated

The Two Sources of Inequality

19

with wealth. Wealth is esteemed as a thing in itself and it also enables a person to have command over others. But this is by no means the case in all societies, and even under the most extreme form of capitalism there are other avenues than wealth to both status and power. One can in fact take examples from modern Western societies to show that although status and power are often combined, the de¬ mands of the two are in many ways incompatible. Status groups are as it were by their nature exclusive; the symbols of status are exclusive and, if they are to maintain their superiority of status, people must pursue exclusive styles of life. On the other hand, demo¬ cratic politics, which is one of the important avenues of power in modern societies, requires aspirants to power to define their identity in inclusive rather than exclusive terms. It is thus that in countries like Britain—or India—leaders of the people often pursue one style of life in private (for themselves and their family) and a different style of life in public (for themselves and their constituents). Thus it is clear that while status and power are to some extent mutually convertible, one cannot be wholly reduced to the other. Status and power are based on different principles which appear beyond a certain point to be incompatible. Schemes of analysis which seek to explain all forms of inequality by a single principle often end with either tautology or platitudes. No general study of inequality can be regarded as truly sociological unless it places due emphasis on the almost endless variety of the actual forms of inequality. Given the fact that all societies apply schemes of evaluation, one can think of many such schemes since the criteria of evaluation are many. It would be useless to attempt an inventory of all the criteria that have been devised and used by men throughout the world for placing each other on a hierarchy of status. Even if the number of such criteria is not unlimited, it must be quite large. One may perhaps think of each culture as selecting from the total stock a limited number of criteria and using them in the discrimination and ranking of groups and individuals. Clearly there are attempts within each culture to bring about some consistency between the different criteria of evaluation, and one obvious way of doing this is by placing the criteria themselves in some kind of a hierarchy. Here again, one may say that a single, unified hierarchy of all the criteria of evaluation recognised in a

20

The Two Sources of Inequality

society is more an ideal-than a reality. One may go further and say that it is more an ideal of the ideologues than of the ordinary people who in all societies apply more than one scheme of status gradation without being acutely troubled by the need to be logically consistent. The problems of organisations likewise vary greatly according to the size, location and distribution of the population, the history of the people, their social and cultural diversity, the material resources available to them, and the technological apparatus at their command. Just as human beings have in different places and times created a variety of schemes of evaluation, they have in the same way devised a variety of forms of organisation. As a consequence, the distribution of power, like the gradation of status, varies from one society to another. Since we have argued that the gradation of status and the distri¬ bution of power vary to some extent independently of each other, we must examine each of these separately and in their mutual rela¬ tionships in order to form a proper understanding of the systems of social inequality. In its detail the system of inequality in each society is a unique combination of a number of different factors. This does not mean that societies cannot be grouped together for purposes of comparative study. However, we must remember that the number and complexity of the factors involved make all classi¬ fications to some extent arbitrary. There is no danger when we use a classification as a rough guide in the systematic study of reality; the danger arises only when we begin to regard it as a fixed and unalterable scheme. I shall now give a brief outline of the plan of the book. As I have already indicated, I do not pretend to have a unified general theory which will at once explain all forms of social inequality, and I do not believe that such a theory exists or is likely to come into existence in the forseeable future. At the same time, I do not propose to des¬ cribe a series of cases of social inequality, choosing from among the many that are available a few on some basis of representativeness. What I propose is to discuss some of the main or, better, more interesting forms of inequality prevalent in contemporary societies in terms of certain basic principles whose mutual relations, as I have already indicated, are to some extent indeterminate. I have briefly indicated above the nature of evaluation and its significance for the gradation of status. In the next chapter I shall

The Two Sources of Inequality

21

deal in greater detail with evaluation and hierarchies of status, taking a number of familiar examples. After considering some of the major premises on which systems of hierarchical values have been built, I shall examine in detail social gradation in the Indian caste system, which has gone further than perhaps any other system in the elaborateness and rigour with which it has developed an ideology of hierarchy. I shall then consider briefly gradations of status and ideas of hierarchy in some other societies. In chapter 3 I shall devote myself to the problems of organisation and the distribution of power. Here I shall examine in some detail the place of rules and sanctions in social life. After considering their place in simple organisations, I shall show how rules and sanctions are co-ordinated in organisations on a large scale. I shall discuss in some detail the part played by the centralised state in modern industrial societies in creating and maintaining inequalities of power and, through them, other types of social inequality. I shall try to show that the distribution of power sustains inequalities in demo¬ cratic as well as totalitarian regimes. Inequalities of status and of power are universal features of human societies. It is true that hierarchical values have been developed much more elaborately in some societies than in others just as central¬ ised states have been organised much more efficiently in some countries than in others, but the logic of hierarchy and of dominance is in its fundamentals everywhere the same. There are two major manifestations of inequality in contemporary societies which I shall treat separately in the two succeeding chapters. Chapter 4 is devoted to property and social class, and chapter 5 to race and social strati¬ fication. Class is the term most widely used in the modern world to des¬ cribe the inequalities among groups or categories of persons. It is so widely used, not only by scholars but by people in every walk of life, that it may appear futile to try to fix a single, specific meaning to it. Underlying the variety of meanings given to the term, there is the view, often explicit and almost always implicit, that class is based on economic factors. As is well known, Marx linked the concept of class to the institution of property or private ownership of the means of production. This in my view is the most fruitful way of looking at class: but if we look at it in this way, we see it as being historically specific, manifest in some societies but not in all, unlike status and power which are universal features of social life.

22

The Two Sources of Inequality

In studying property and class, we examine as it were the interplay of status and power in a given institutional field. Property, wealth and income give access to things that are valued; income is valued in itself and, under capitalism, it has a tendency to become the measure of all values. Property, or the private ownership of the means of production, also gives one control over persons. It is in this dual role that property becomes the most important marker of inequality in many societies. Differences of race do not relate to social inequality in quite the same way as those of property. For one thing, they are not manifest in all societies or even in all complex societies. For another, even when they are present they do not necessarily become significant bases of social inequality. Two major historical deveopments, colonialism and slavery, have mainly been responsible for structuring inequalities of both status and power along the lines of race or inherited physical difference. A consideration of these raises questions about inequalities in the international system over and above those present within national societies to which sociologists have mainly confined their attention. Chapter 6 deals with continuity and change. It examines first the mechanisms through which inequalities are maintained in a society. They are maintained through common values as well as the monopoly of power. Competition for status through emulation, and competition for office through participation do not necessarily remove inequali¬ ties; in fact they often serve to maintain them and to give them legitimacy. Societies differ on the whole according to the degree of disharmony between their existential and normative orders. When the normative order is built on the premise of equality, inequalities in the existential order are bound to be a source of tension, conflict and change. The last chapter deals with the egalitarian society. It re-examines the concept of primitive communism in the light of evidence pro¬ vided by anthropological research. It also examines the part played by the market on the one hand and the state on the other in dealing with the problem of inequality. Although these have been viewed since the beginning of the modern age as the principal institutions through which inequalities might be removed, they have themselves created new, less visible but no less real, inequalities while mitigating some of the old.

The Two Sources of Inequality

23

Notes and References 1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality’ in J.-J. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1938, p. 174. 2. Ibid. 3. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society, Cohen and West Ltd., 1952, p. 189. 4. Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification, University of Chicago Press, 1963. 5. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, Jonathan Cape, 1970. This is the first in a series of four volumes called Mythologiques. 6. Talcott Parsons, ‘A Revised Analytical Approach to the Theory of Social Stratification’ in Reinhard Bendix and Seymour Martin Lipset (eds.). Class, Status and Power, A Reader in Social Stratification, The Free Press, 1953, p. 93. 7. Michael Young, The Rise of Meritocracy, Penguin Books, 1961. 8. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Dent, 1973. 9. See in particular Bronislaw Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society, Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1926. 10. Isaac Schapera, Government and Politics in Tribal Societies, Watts, 1956. 11. Max Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society, Basil Blackwell, 1965, p. 85. , , , 12. Robert Michels, Political Parties, A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, Dover Publications, Inc., 1959.

2 Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre Observe degree, priority and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office, and custom, in all line of order . . . Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida When we think of classification and evaluation we must think also of schemes of classification and standards of evaluation. It is a part of everyday experience that we evaluate objects, actions and persons all the time. We do much of this without even being fully aware that we are making evaluations, not to speak of the conscious application of logically consistent standards. All this raises problems for the sociologist: the fact of evaluation as a pervasive feature of experi¬ ence, and the seemingly arbitrary application of standards of which people themselves are not always aware. Perhaps we become a little more self-conscious about standards of evaluation in moving from one social setting to another. Thus a person from a working-class home in England or America might learn on moving into an established college or university that dry sherry is superior to sweet sherry, or that a rare steak is superior to a well-done steak. In this kind of process what one generally learns is that there are different values and standards, and that some are superior to others; or, in the extreme case, that only the ‘superior’ values and standards deserve to be described as such, and not the others. The position is a little different when we move from one society to another, because then we observe that values and standards may differ not only in their details but also in their fundamental features. Protestants and Catholics, churchgoers and non-churchgoers, lawyers and scientists, city dwellers and suburban dwellers might all be rated differently in relation to each other in one society as com-

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

25

pared to another. From a popular American textbook we learn that in the United States today, other things being equal, the young are ranked higher socially than the old;1 the position is quite different in India and was probably different also in the United States a few generations ago. How are we to reduce this seemingly endless vari¬ ation to some meaningful order? In every society there are some who take a particular interest in exploring the logic behind the prevalent ideas, beliefs and values, and in formulating them in a coherent and systematic way. Naturally, there is much variation in the extent to which systems of ideas and values are invested with unity, coherence and elaborateness by those who propound them. Much depends on the presence or absence of specialists to perform such tasks; even when they are present, specialists might play very different roles in different societies. Again, the development of writing makes it possible to codify and standardise ideas and values in a way which is not possible in pre¬ literate societies. Among the various systems of ideas and values, the ones elabo¬ rated in pre-industrial civilisations such as those of India, Europe and China are of special interest. These civilisations preserved a certain continuity over time, and it may be argued that, despite the many political upheavals they all underwent, the basic structure of ideas and values remained in each case remarkably stable. Further, there is in each case a large and fairly reliable body of literature, both original and interpretative, on the basis of which general and comparative statements may be made with some confidence. The first feature that strikes us is that the major civilisations of the past were all hierarchical by design, although the logic of the hierarchy was not everywhere the same. The design was most elaborately and consistently worked out in the case of traditional India, although it was very much in evidence in medieval Europe and also in China from the time of Confucius onwards. A hier¬ archical design or conception does not, to be sure, exclude altogether the idea that human beings might be equal in some ultimate sense, or in the final analysis. But it does for the most part accept that individuals and groups are and should be ranked as high and low according to generally acknowledged principles. It has been said that the principle of purity provides the key to the understanding of evaluation and hierarchy in Indian society.2 Objects, beings, events, places, conditions, actions, individuals and

26

Evalutaion and Hierarchies of Status

groups are all invested with varying degrees of purity—or impurity— and are all in this way automatically arranged in hierarchical orders. When we look a little more closely at the Hindu system of ideas we see that much more is involved in the process of evaluation than a simple opposition of purity and pollution; but this opposition does certainly provide us with a useful point of departure for a systematic understanding of the extremely complicated patterns of social rank¬ ing among Hindus. The ideas of purity and pollution, though not altogether absent from European civilisation, clearly did not occupy as important a place as in the Indian civilisation. What then was the basis of hier¬ archy there? Talking about aristocratic societies, Montesquieu said that the principle of such societies was honour. Clearly, the con¬ ception of honour had an important place in medieval European society, as it seems to have even today in the Mediterranean countries. But other conceptions, such as those of piety—or what Montesquieu might call ‘virtue’—also have their place in the standards of evalu¬ ation used in these societies. Perhaps here, as in the case of most societies, it becomes impossible to speak of a single unifying principle or, indeed, of a single unified hierarchy. What kind of hierarchy is there in modern industrial societies ? What are the principles on which it is constituted? Most sociologists would maintain that modern societies are not hierarchical by design; that they differ fundamentally in their design from ‘traditional’ or ‘medieval’ or ‘feudal’ societies, no matter how great the similarities might be between the two types of society in their practice. Not that there is an absence of inequalities or even of inequalities of status in modern societies, but the principles which ensure their maintenance are not explicit or on the surface, or do not appear as principles of inequality as in the case of traditional India or medieval Europe. As is well known, modern societies place a very high value on achievement, in particular achievement on the basis of competition. Inequalities which are the result of ‘open’ or ‘fair’ competition are generally viewed as being in some sense legitimate, although opinions differ on the form and extent of the proper rewards of success and the proper penalties of failure. The closer we come to our own times the more persistently do we encounter the contradictions, equivoca¬ tions and ambiguities that are no doubt a part of all systems of ideas. Given these ambiguities, we can never expect to get a fully rounded picture of the social life of a people by studying only the structure,

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

27

the abstract form of their ideas. We must study at least three different things that are mutually related, although not in a simple or direct way. These are: (a) the ideas of people, their collective representa¬ tions, which have a more or less consistent structure; (b) the arrange¬ ment of people into a variety of groups, classes and strata which also have some kind of design; and (c) the actions of individuals in various situations which in their turn reveal certain patterns. The design according to which the existing groups and strata are arranged is explicitly formulated in the normative texts in the case of some societies but not in the case of others. Thus, the legal and religious texts of the Hindus tell us that their society is divided into four varnas and into numerous jatis, and they also tell us how they are arranged in relation to each other; similarly, the division of medieval European society into estates is more or less clearly recog¬ nised and described in the normative texts of the period. If, on the other hand, we examine the normative texts of America today we will not find in them any clear picture of the number of classes in American society or of their mutual relations. The normative texts of even the Hindus, which are so explicit and elaborate, do not give us a complete picture of all the actually exist¬ ing groups in Hindu society and their mutual relations. For one thing, these have their own life, as it were, and their own rhythm of change which is different from the rhythm by which ideas change. To pursue the present example, the normative texts of the Hindus have remained frozen over a long period of time during which the morphology of groups has undergone much change. Today this mor¬ phology is available in its actual form for investigation but the ideas and values by which it was animated have lost much of their meaning. When these ideas and values had their full meaning, the actual arrangement of groups was not accessible to investigation by the methods we have today. The identification of the enduring groups and categories in a society and of their mutual relations is a task to which social anthropologists have devoted much attention; indeed some of them mean precisely this when they talk about social structure (or social morphology) which many have made the principal subject of their study. Experi¬ ence has shown that investigating social morphology in this sense by direct observation is most convenient when the social field being investigated is relatively small and has fairly clear boundaries. Community studies, whether rural or urban, are from this point of

28

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

view an indispensable aid in the mapping of the different social strata, their mutual positions and their inter-relations. Finally, we come to patterns of social action which from the view¬ point of some are the most interesting things to understand. What are the ways in which people show and acknowledge deference, esteem, respect in different situations ? By what signs do we recognise them in different societies? Individual action is nowhere rigidly determined by either the prevalent system of ideas or the existing arrangement of groups. Given the presence of a certain framework within which individuals act, we still require to know how they define and construct the situations in which they find themselves. Here again intensive studies of small sets of individuals have thrown a flood of light on what status actually means to people in their everyday life. I shall now discuss at some length hierarchies of status in Indian society with special reference to the caste system. There are certain obvious advantages in doing this, for the Indian case has been viewed by many as a model of a hierarchical society. Here is a society in which not only can one see sharp inequalities in the conditions of life, but one whose whole design, as it were, was hierarchical. There is a vast body of indigenous literature—in the classical Sanskrit as well as in various regional languages—in which the logic of this hierarchy is expounded at great length and with much subtlety. There are also many recent studies by anthropologists from which we can form a fairly good idea of the actual arrangement of groups and strata in Indian society. Before we plunge into a detailed discussion of status hierarchies in Indian society, I would like to introduce a few words of caution. We must, first of all, guard ourselves against the notion that social life in India, whether now or in the past, revolves solely around considerations of hierarchy and status. There are many, particularly in the West, who have been beguiled by the logic and symmetry of the Indian model of hierarchy into believing that power and domin¬ ance were subsidiary, or even residual, phenomena in Indian life. This is a mistaken and misleading notion, and we must keep in mind the universal presence of power and dominance even when our dis¬ cussion is about something else as in the present case. The second point to remember is that Indian society is very large and it has a very long history. No single person’s observations can

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

29

cover equally well all the regions in the country. Even the many detailed studies made by anthropologists in recent years cover the different parts of India very unevenly. In my own discussion I shall speak mainly of West Bengal and Tamilnadu, two regions which I know from my own experience and observation, but other regions have other features. All that I can say here is that at the level at which I shall be arguing the different regions show merely variations of what may properly be regarded as the same fundamental pattern. Somewhat more worrying than the problem of variation in space is that of change over time. Sociological expositions of traditional values in India sometimes evoke the extreme reaction from educated Indians that sociologists make a habit of discussing things that have ceased to exist in the real world. How far is it valid to talk about ideas and values in terms of structures that take no account of time in the historical sense ? There is no doubt that social and cultural life has changed a great deal in course of the development of Indian civilisation. Indeed at every point the traditional texts begin by describing the changes that have been taking place, and set out to identify the reasons for these changes and to suggest remedies for current evils. But what strikes the contemporary reader at least as much as the changes in events and personalities is the remarkable sameness in the idiom of discourse, the categories of reasoning and the standards of reference. No doubt these also alter in their details as we move from one region to another and from one phase to the next; but the extent of continuity enables us to speak with some confidence abqut a common framework of ideas and values until at least the middle of the last century. This common framework of ideas and values has had to accom¬ modate an increasing number of new elements from the middle of the last century onwards. Some would argue that these have shaken the old framework to its foundations; but no great effort is required on our part to recognise it even today. Many observers of contempo¬ rary India, from both within and without, have commented on the tremendous obsession with status among people in all walks of life. Perhaps it is too much to relate the whole of this to the traditional preoccupation with purity and pollution as the basis of social grada¬ tion. The Western influence has certainly eroded the ideas of purity and pollution, but one may doubt that social gradations as such have been reduced by it to any substantial extent. New patterns of gradation have in fact been taken over readily from the British. One

30

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

might say indeed that the Indians absorbed most easily from their new masters what they could fit best into the mould of their tradi¬ tional culture, namely the British preoccupation with status. The point of departure for most discussions of traditional Indian society is the varna scheme, or the fourfold hierarchy of Brahman (‘priest’), Kshatriya (‘warrior’), Vaishya (‘husbandman’) and Shudra (‘servitor’). The first point that needs to be made is that the term varna signifies much more than a category of persons, or what in con¬ temporary sociology is signified by a class or a stratum in the restricted sense. Its connotation is as broad at least as that of the word ‘order’, commonly used in medieval times to signify, among other things, the various orders of society. Since one of the most common contemporary meanings of varna is colour, it was assumed by Western scholars in the last century that the fourfold hierarchy reflected differences of skin colour among people, and that the association of the two was evidence of the racial origin of social divisions among the Hindus. Today we find it more reasonable to see the association between particular categories of persons and particular colours (Brahman, white; Kshatriya, red; Vaishya, yellow; Shudra, black) as symbolic rather than material. The :nteresting problem then is to see how colours, together with a hundred other things, are among the Hindus classified and graded in a more or less systematic way. The origin of the varnas is first recounted in a famous hymn in the Rig Veda, believed to be the oldest collection of hymns among the Hindus and going back about three thousand years in time. The same account is repeated again and again in hundreds of texts in both Sanskrit and the regional languages. In some places it is very terse, in others quite elaborate; in some versions only human beings are classified into varnas, in others many more items are classified; in some texts the ranks of the varnas are described and explained, in others this is left implicit. Despite all these variations, the texts seem to present the same basic structure. The Taittiriyasamhita, belonging to a somewhat later period, gives a fairly detailed account of what may be called the origin of categories among the Hindus. The different categories of things, beings and gods are shown as emerging from the mouth, the arms, the thighs and the feet of the primeval being. Further, those which emerge from his mouth—among men the Brahman, among animals the ram and among gods Agni—are ranked highest, and those which

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

31

emerge from his feet—among men the Shudra and among animals the horse—are ranked lowest. Thus the four varnas, Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra, represent not only the four orders of men but also the four orders of the universe. In common usage, however, they have for a long time referred primarily to persons. But as N. K. Bose pointed out, it is not uncommon even now for temples—or lands—to be categorised as Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya or Shudra.3 While social anthropologists have in their studies of Indian society given much importance to the scheme of varnas, they have on the whole ignored another scheme of classification, that of the gunas or qualities. The same texts which describe the fourfold varna scheme often also describe a threefold scheme of gunas, the three qualities or gunas being sattva or ‘purity’, rajas or ‘valour’ and tamas or ‘darkness’. The two schemes refer to different phenomena, although in both principle and practice they are closely related to each other. I believe that any discussion of status and hierarchy in traditional India must give an important place to the classification and ranking of gunas. The scheme of gunas, unlike that of varnas, does not lend itself easily to analysis in terms of simple binary oppositions, a practice much in vogue among those anthropologists who are today de¬ scribed as structuralists. One may work out very elaborate and symmetrical schemes by taking the simple opposition of purity and pollution, and applying it throughout the range of the varna hierarchy. It appears much more difficult to do this when one has to deal with a set of three items (like the three gunas) than with a set of either two (purity/impurity) or four (the four varnas). The demands of symmetry should not however lead us to ignore cate¬ gories which are of fundamental significance in the culture itself. It would be surprising if no attempt were made to establish a relationship between the qualities of men (or of beings) and the order in society (or the universe) to which they are assigned. The texts are quite explicit about the relationship between the fourfold scheme of varnas and the threefold scheme of gunas. The Brahmans are endowed with the quality of sattva, the Kshatriyas with rajas and the Shudras with tamas', the Vaishyas are endowed with a mixture of the qualities of rajas and tamas. The three qualities, like the four orders, have also their respective colour symbols, white for sattva, red for rajas and black for tamas. What should we understand by each of the three qualities of sattva,

32

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

rajas and tamas 1 Needless to say, there are no simple English equivalents for any of these terms. Each is a broad category made up of several elements, and it is not easy to reduce these to a single principle, or to place the three together in any simple, linear scheme. Further, given the presence of hundreds of different elements, there can always be a difference of opinion about which of the three broad classes of gunas each element represents. The term sattva which represents the first or highest quality is commonly translated as ‘purity’, but this is not its only meaning. Sattva also signifies truth, wisdom and learning. It will be seen at once how this introduces ambiguities in the actual process of ranking. For although in principle purity, sanctity and holiness should go together with truth, wisdom and learning, in practice there is always some divergence between them. Thus, some Brahmans might claim the highest rank because of the purity of their ritual practice while others might do the same, apparently with equal justice, on the strength of their learning. The second of the three qualities, rajas, signifies valour, energy and the spirit of activism. It underlies the Hindu conception of what might be described as the kingly virtues. The third quality, tamas, literally signifies darkness in the sense of ignorance, but also of impurity. Tamas is clearly associated with what is considered base and inferior in the Hindu scale of evaluation, and, appropriately, it is attributed predominantly to the Shudras, the last of the four orders of Hindu society. It will perhaps be suspected that the three qualities do not rank themselves easily in a natural order. In the normative texts sattva is clearly given pride of place, but presumably those who wrote these texts were Brahmans, or believed themselves to be Brahmans or at least to be endowed with that particular quality. It is not easy to say categorically how people in different walks of life evaluated sattva and rajas relatively to each other in the actual give and take of ordinary living. One thing, however, is clear, that tamas ranked unambiguously below the two other primal qualities. The different gunas inform not only human beings but, in principle, all living beings and substances. We have already discussed the general significance of food in all cultures, and the classification of food is particularly important among the Hindus with their numerous and well-known dietary restrictions. There is sattvik food which is pure and austere; rajasik food which is lavish and elaborate; and

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

33

tamasik food which is coarse and impure. The different types of food are appropriate not only to the different orders of society but also to different occasions. What I have been discussing so far are two major schemes of classification and evaluation which provide a measure of coherence to the collective representations of the Hindus. It would be a mistake to think that every Indian appeals at once to either of these schemes whenever he is in doubt or difficulty about the rank to be assigned to a particular person or object. The actual process of ranking, it hardly needs to be repeated, is both complex and ambiguous. For one thing, there are only four varnas and three gunas whereas the actually existing social divisions are numerous and the qualities recognised among men are legion. In Hindu society, as in other societies, action or kriya is not only the most immediate object of evaluation, but in some sense also its ultimate test. The schemes so far considered would be of little interest to us if they had no bearing at all on human action. Indeed, the study of normative texts itself becomes misleading when we confine our¬ selves to their formal aspects, ignoring their historical context. For in almost every case the immediate occasion for the composition of these texts is some specific problem which is located in history: men’s actions have deviated from their proper course; how are we to understand and rectify this deviation ? If we are to follow N. K. Bose, from the Mahabharata to the Institutes of Manu the problem is always the same.4 In the confusion of the times people’s origins and their qualities get obscured. New tribes, new hordes enter the fold of Hindu society with their alien and unorthodox ways. How are they to be given their proper place in this society? The answer is always the same. Men reveal their qualities in their actions, and it is on the basis of their qualities and their actions that they are to be assigned to a particular order in society. As I have already said, the most striking feature of the caste system from the viewpoint of status and hierarchy is its elaborateness and care for detail. We can never get an adequate idea of these by considering only the general characteristics of the system in the country as a whole. I would like at this point to take up briefly a particular historical case, that of the Brahmans of Bengal; and, through an examination of some of the debates and discussions— partly historical, partly legendary—regarding their status, to try to

34

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

give some idea of the issues involved in the actual ranking of groups in Indian society. Bengal is an important cultural region of South Asia: until 1947 a part of India, divided between India and Pakistan from 1947 and 1971, and now divided between India and Bangladesh. Its present population is well over a hundred million people. Bangladesh is predominantly Muslim, and West Bengal, which is contiguous with it and is a part of India, is predominantly Hindu. Since the discussion relates to culture and goes back beyond modern times, I shall for the most part ignore the present political boundaries. The Hindu population of Bengal, as of any other region of India, is divided into hundreds of castes, subcastes and sub-subcastes, commonly described as jati or jat in the local language. When we try to fit these innumerable jatis into the fourfold varna scheme we see at once the contrast between the neatness and symmetry of the scheme, and the confusion and ambiguity of real life. The Kshatriya and Vaishya varnas, comprising the second and the third orders, are virtually missing, and there is a large assortment of groups at the bottom, known collectively as Chandala or Asprishya (literally, untouchable), and now as Harijans, which are technically exterior to the fourfold scheme. In recent times as well as in the past several groups have claimed Kshatriya and Vaishya status, but these claims have generally been regarded as of doubtful value. Traditionally Bengal has five categories of Brahmans: Saptasati, Madhyadeshi, Rarhi, Barendra and Baidik.5 Of these only the last three have a recognisable and significant identity in the present population. Together they constitute four to five per cent of the popu¬ lation, and have during the last several centuries occupied a pre¬ eminent position in the social hierarchy of Bengal. They were the guardians of learning (Sanskrit, Bengali, and later, English) and of ritual orthodoxy; they were substantial landowners; and right until present times they have continued to be leaders of opinion, at least among the Hindus. They contributed substantially to a voluminous body of literature in Sanskrit, Bengali and English in which the nature, form and basis of their society are discussed in detail. The Rarhi and Barendra Brahmans both claim affiliation with the Kanyakubjas, one of the major divisions of the Brahmans of North India whose original home is outside Bengal, to its west, in what is now the state of Uttar Pradesh. According to their genea¬ logies and records, they came to Bengal during the reign of King

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

35

Adisur who, according to various legends, ruled sometime between the ninth and the tenth centuries, before the advent of Muslim rule. Even though there is much uncertainty about the date and the manner of their coming to Bengal, the reasons for it is in every version the same. The Saptasati Brahmans, who till then were the only Brahmans in the land, had fallen from the ways of learning and purity, and King Adisur had for this reason had five learned and pure Brahmans brought from Kanyakubja in order to protect his land from evil. It will be seen at once how the legend establishes a hierarchy between the two kinds of Brahmans, immigrant and indigenous, in terms of culturally defined qualities. Although they both claim the same origin, Rarhi and Barendra Brahmans are and have been for centuries distinct and separate groups, members of each marrying only within its own group. It is difficult to say exactly how the division came about, but it clearly has a territorial basis, the Barendra Brahmans having their home in Barendrabhum which is the eastern and northern part of Bengal, and the Rarhi Brahmans having theirs in Rarhdesh which is the western and southern part of Bengal. To show that hierarchy is not literally all-pervasive, these two major sections of the Brahmans of Bengal cannot be easily ranked in relation to each other. Rarhi and Barendra Brahmans have each their own internal sub¬ divisions. The internal structure is in the two cases broadly the same, hence I shall confine myself to subdivisions only among the former. The Rarhi Brahmans have a three-tiered traditional structure with the Kulin at the top, and the Srotriya and Bamsaj below them; the Srotriya are themselves internally subdivided, but there is some ambiguity about the mutual ranks of these as well as of the Srotriya and the Bamsaj. For the present discussion we shall consider only the Kulin who are clearly at the top vis-a-vis the rest. Once again, in order to understand the social pre-eminence of the Kulin (which was universally acknowledged by the orthodox until the last century) we have to go back to history or, as some might say, legend. The Kulin system is believed by one and all to have been instituted by King Balial Sen of Bengal in the second half of the twelfth century. Historically Balial Sen is a less shadowy figure than his predecessor Adisur, and we get rather more detailed accounts of the manner and circumstances under which the new system was instituted. The reason for instituting the system was once again the same. Many of the Brahmans, whose ancestors had been brought

36

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

from Kanyakubja, had become degenerate, and the king therefore found it necessary to sort out the best from among them and to give them a special position of pre-eminence. The word kulin, which occurs repeatedly in discussions on and by Brahmans from medieval times onwards, is derived from kul which literally means family or lineage, and signifies a family or lineage of quality. By instituting the Kulin system the king sought to ensure that qualities appropriate to the status of Brahmans should be cultivated, nourished and preserved instead of being dissipated. It is true that the assumption was that this could be best accomplished by applying the hereditary principle; but we are told that those Brahmans who were socially elevated were themselves chosen on the basis of kul, signifying birth and lineage; sheel, signifying character and conduct; and bidya, signifying learning and intellect.6 The caste system (or any system of ‘fixed’ estates) is viewed as being based essentially on the hereditary principle. But this principle can never be applied mechanically in any living society, and this becomes evident as soon as we take a historical or developmental view of the problem. For instance, among a group of Brahmans who begin from a position of equal pre-eminence, rival claims to superior status inevitably emerge in the course of time. One obvious way in which this happens is for some Brahmans to claim that they alone have maintained the purity of their line; inevitably there are rival claims of this nature. Then comes the question of testing these claims. The test is not only in terms of unbroken genealogical descent —which many can demonstrate with more or less success—but also in terms of the preservation of qualities that are valued in the culture. In the case of the Brahmans of Bengal these qualities are purity of ritual practice and cultivation of scriptural learning. The rules of descent and marriage are in a hierarchical society designed to preserve the highest qualities at the top, and they are also a proof of their preservation. According to the orthodox Hindu scheme of values women should never marry downwards, although they might occasionally marry upwards. Thus the Kulin system allowed Kulin Brahmans to take daughters in marriage from Brah¬ mans of the two other categories, Srotriya and Bamsaj. These two were often willing, for reasons of status, to marry their daughters to Kulin Brahmans, and, when they did so without receiving daughters in return, they confirmed the hierarchical division of Brahmans. It was in this way that the Kulins began to practice polygamy on

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

37

a large scale. The accumulation of wives became a symbol and a proof of their social pre-eminence. But in course of time this itself became a subject of social criticism because, for one thing, the accumulation of wives could be tolerated only up to a point within the old scheme of values, and, for another, the West brought in new social values or, rather, new ways of looking at old values. We see the Kulin system in the full light of day in the nineteenth century when the practices associated with it were marked out for social opprobrium by some Brahmans themselves. The Kulins, they main¬ tained, had deviated from the path of right conduct, and they chast¬ ised them for their greed, their covetousness—and their indifference to learning. My argument is that this attack itself appealed to values which were an essential part of the traditional culture. To return to the Kulin system in its heyday. I have given only a bare sketch of its internal structure. In its full-blown form it was an extremely elaborate system, and virtually every aspect of it was informed by a hierarchical design. Not only were the Kulins ranked above the others, but they themselves were graded as ‘greater’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘lesser’, although it is hard to say how meticu¬ lously the details of these gradations were observed in real life. The Kulin system held such a powerful sway in Bengal that, although designed originally for the Brahmans, it was soon adopted by the Kayasthas (the highest caste among the Shudras) as well as other castes. The next round of differentiation is associated with the Mel system which is believed to have been instituted among the Kulin Brahmans by a Brahman pundit named Debibar towards the end of the fifteenth century. This was in some ways a unique institution, for it sought to establish a hierarchy on the basis not of ‘qualities’ but of ‘faults’.7 Since the institution of the Kulin system various faults had crept in among the Brahmans. The Mel system was an attempt to contain each kind of fault within a particular confraternity or mel, instead of letting all faults spread to all members of the sub¬ caste. Thus, those who were tainted with the fault of addiction to alcohol were to constitute one mel and to marry only among them¬ selves ; those tainted by a particular form of sexual irregularity were likewise to form their own mel. In this way thirty-six divisions are believed to have been created, and they were broadly graded in inverse relations to the gravity of their faults. I have discussed the Brahmans of Bengal at so much length not

38

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

with a view to giving a complete picture of the social history of Bengal or its contemporary social structure, but in order to show what status and hierarchy signify in a particular social context. Many things have been left unsaid. I have only implied that what applies at the top, also applies elsewhere although, to be sure, not in exactly the same way. I have also merely suggested that what pre¬ vailed in the past may be glimpsed even today although, again, its relevance has greatly altered. My main aim has been to show what for want of a better term I can only describe as a kind of inevitable tendency among individuals and groups in a society to arrange themselves on a hierarchy of status. No discussion of status among the Hindus can pass without comment on those who are at the very bottom of the hierarchy, the exterior castes or Untouchables, or Harijans as they are called today. The traditional literature discusses them in far less detail than the Brahmans; in fact, given the traditional scheme of values, it is only natural that the Brahmans, who were the principal creators of this literature, wrote so much about themselves and so little about those who were furthest removed from them on the social scale. Indeed, if we are to say anything in detail about the actual lives of these people we must rely mainly on contemporary observers. Is untouchability an inherent feature of the caste system ? This is not an easy question to answer. Modern anthropologists generally contend that the Brahman and the Untouchable are the two poles of the system, that even as the former exemplifies the quality of purity, the latter exemplifies that of impurity, and that the one can be defined only in relation to the other. We have seen that the Untouchables were in the strict sense outside the fourfold varna order, although there is mention of them in the texts from very early times. Gandhi maintained that there was no basis for untouchability in orthodox Hinduism, that it was a later historical development, an excrescence, and that strictly speaking, the so-called Untouchables were a part of the Shudra varna. Without entering into the question of origins, we may safely say that the Untouchables have for a long time been a part of the actual arrangement of Hindu society, and that their place in it can be easily interpreted according to the Hindu scheme of values. Virtually every¬ thing with which the Untouchables are associated—occupation, diet, their entire style of life—is regarded as base and impure, and it is on this account that they are assigned the lowest station in society. The

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

39

power of association is so great that even after they abandon beef¬ eating, which is regarded with the most extreme social opprobrium, they continue to bear the stigma of pollution. Harijans, who make up roughly fifteen per cent of the Indian population, are found throughout the length and breadth of the country, in fact wherever Hindus are found. There are various accounts—scriptural as well as folk, legendary as well as historical— which seek to explain their degraded status in society. But in their case, instead of moving from the past to the present, it is more con¬ venient to move from the present backwards. The results should from our point of view be broadly the same, whichever procedure one adopts. By common consent the Harijans occupy today, as they did in the past, the most severely degraded position in South Indian society, particularly in the states of Kerala and Tamilnadu. Here they were believed to contaminate not only by their touch but also by their presence, or, in the extreme case, by merely being seen. In fact in Malabar the different castes were graded on a hierarchy in terms of the physical distance each had to maintain from the highest Brah¬ mans. These and related practices were legally abolished soon after India became independent. We do not know whether such peculiar customs were ever strictly observed in practice, but they clearly symbolised the distances that were to be maintained among men. Distances among men are still maintained in the villages of South India as they are in all parts of the world, but in a more visible, more palpable form than in most places. The ‘clean’ castes live in the village proper; the Harijans live on its fringes, and often away from it in their own hamlets, each a cluster of mud-and-thatch hovels, packed closely together in the middle of the paddy fields. Even now the Brahmans and the upper castes resent it when they make free use of their streets, not to speak of using their temples or wells. The Harijans keep their distance—despite the law. In the village in Tanjore district in South India where I did field¬ work in 1961-62 the entire population is divided and subdivided into a large number of castes and subcastes which are hierarchically arranged. The ranking is ambiguous in the middle—as it well might have been in the past—but the distance between the Brahmans at the top and the Harijans at the bottom is clear and palpable. They differ from each other in diet, dress, speech, occupation and in almost every major aspect of their style of life. The Brahman style of life is rated

40

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

highest, perhaps not as unequivocally as in the past, and the Harijan style of life is rated lowest, clearly and unequivocally. There is some emulation of superior styles of life by those who are not too low in the hierarchy. This is not always successful for it requires to be backed by some real improvement in material condi¬ tions, and it generally takes much time before claims to superior status are acknowledged and accepted by others. These processes, again, we have reasons to believe were not unknown or even uncom¬ mon in the past, although they acted more slowly and were circum¬ scribed by a variety of constraints. In any case, the gradual adoption by inferiors of the symbols of their superiors does not undermine the hierarchy but only confirms it. When I describe the village in terms of the vertical arrangement of groups and categories, I am not presenting the morphology as I observed it, in the strict sense of the term, but as I constructed it. One does not see the arrangement of groups and categories in a society in the way in which one sees the arrangement of bones and tissues in an organism. What one sees are individuals interacting with each other in a variety of situations. In a sense the most interest¬ ing feature of status and hierarchy in a South Indian village is what one observes in everyday life. No one can be a successful fieldworker in such a village—or perhaps in any community—without learning to accord deference to some and to receive it from others. How gracefully one can do these is perhaps as good a measure as any of one’s success as a fieldworker. Living in the village one can see how deference serves to maintain distances among people (and of course also to bind them together) in private and public places. Those who are furthest apart do not visit each others’ houses. Even today the Brahmans do not enter the streets where the Harijans live; when a particularly heterodox Brahman does enter it, it becomes an event for all the residents of the street. When a Harijan has some work in a Brahman home, he enters it through the backdoor and does not pass beyond the backyard. A ‘clean’ Shudra may enter a Brahman house through the front door, but he is expected to remain standing, or to sit on the floor at a distance; if he is an educated and well-to-do person from a town or city he may be offered a chair, but there is generally something awkward about such an occasion. When a Brahman landowner visits his nonBrahman tenant’s home, which he does only on special occasions, he is received with honour.

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

41

When inferiors pass their superiors on the road, they step aside and make way. Inferiority and superiority are not simply matters of caste, but of both caste and landownership, so that a rich ‘clean’ Shudra landlord does not necessarily see himself as the inferior of a poor Brahman cook, although in this area Harijans generally accord deference to Brahmans. Since differences in dress, deportment and bearing are so conspicuous, a Harijan usually makes way for a Brahman even when the two are not personally acquainted. I have seen non-Brahmans lower their umbrellas on hot summer afternoons at the approach of a Brahman, not personally acquainted with them. This is not very common now, although I was told that it was so in the past. During my stay in the village I often accompanied one of the Brahman landlords on his evening walks to a neighbouring market. This person had a practice of buying a bundle of green fodder for his domestic cow every evening. However, he neither bought nor carried the bundle himself, but had this done by some Harijan who happened to be passing by and who was not necessarily his tenant or farm servant. When he gave the coins for the purchase to the Harijan, he never put the money into his hands, but threw it into a piece of cloth which the Harijan held up for the purpose. When I teased the Brahman, who understood English, on this ritual, he asked me to try myself and see if I could do it differently. When I tried the next evening to put the coins into the Harijan’s hand, he took two steps back and asked the Brahman in Tamil to tell me not to put him to shame. I often twitted the Brahmans about the unnatural way in which they kept others at a distance by building walls around themselves. Some agreed with my sentiment, others argued that they were utopian. The one point to which many of them returned again and again was this: how could their actions be considered unnatural when the Harijans whom they kept at a distance were in their turn divided and practised segregation among themselves? And indeed in this village the Harijans were divided into two main castes, Palla and Paraiya (from which we have the English word ‘pariah’), and the Pallas regarded themselves as superior, and did not take water from the wells of the Paraiyas whom they denied access to their own wells. It might appear from my somewhat detailed discussion of status and hierarchy in the preceding section that the Hindus are a rather

42

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

peculiar people. My objective, however, is not to show that Indian society, past or present, is peculiar, but the opposite. I cannot empha¬ sise too strongly that the preoccupation with status is only one aspect of Hindu society, and that it is an aspect of all societies. Talking about Western societies in general and about Britain in particular, T. H. Marshall drew attention to a paradox.8 He said that the scientific study of social stratification began precisely at that historical moment when the contours of the system of stratification were themselves becoming blurred and hazy. In the Middle Ages one would not require specially trained scholars to identify the vari¬ ous strata of society. For the division of society into its various strata was what constituted the social order, recognised by and known to all. While there is undoubtedly an element of simplification in this— even the order of Hindu society was not perceived equally clearly by all—it points to certain important similarities and differences. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that all major agrarian civilisations (Europe, India, China) shared something basic and funda¬ mental in common, which is why the terms ‘feudal’, ‘feudal society’ and ‘feudal values’ continue to be so widely used, despite the attempts by European historians to give them a precise and restricted meaning. There were no doubt important differences among them in both religious ideology and organisation of social life, and it may be best to confine the term ‘feudal’ to a particular phase of European history. But what all these societies, popularly described as feudal, had in common was a social hierarchy which was more or less clear in its contours, and recognised and acknowledged by all. What I have in mind is summed up very nicely in a statement by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology. ‘Hierarchy is the ideal form of feudalism; feudalism is the political form of the medieval relations of production and commerce.’9 Here of course they are talking about feudal society in Europe which was hierarchical in its design in the same way, though perhaps not to the same extent, as Indian society in the past. Hierarchy in the strict and original sense of the term refers primarily to the hierarchy of the spiritual order and, in both cases, it is this that provides a model for the organisation of society as a whole. What Marx characterised as feudal society, Tocqueville was inclined to describe as aristocratic society, using the term ‘aristo¬ cratic’ in a broad sense and the term ‘feudal’ generally in a more restricted sense. Tocqueville had a kind of sympathetic understanding

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

43

of hierarchy which is unparalleled among writers of the modern age. Himself an aristocrat, whose family had suffered many vicissitudes during and after the French Revolution, he has left behind vivid sketches of a social order whose values find many echoes in other civilisations of the past. It is interesting to note that Tocqueville frequently uses the term caste to refer to the divisions of aristocratic society; we must remember that he was writing at a time when European scholars could have had at best a broad understanding of the nature of hierarchy in Hindu society. Tocqueville tells us again and again about the stability of groups in aristocratic society, the clarity of the boundaries between them, and the natural mechanisms for the maintenance of vertical solidarity. He saw very well that an aristo¬ cratic society was an hierarchy in which, given certain values, inequal¬ ity became a guarantee of social cohesion. As he put it, ‘Aristocracy has made a chain of all the members of the community from the peasant to the king’.10 The idea of the Great Chain of Being was a familiar one in Western theology, Christian as well as pre-Christian. Tocqueville draws attention to the parallels between the social and the spiritual orders in aristocracies. ‘Aristocracy, by maintaining society in a fixed position, is favourable to the solidity and duration of positive religions as well as to the stability of political institutions’.11 Sometimes he appears to argue, like Durkheim after him, as if man created a spiritual order in the image of the existing social order: ‘An aristocratic people will always be prone to place intermediate powers between God and man’.12 At any rate, it is clear that in an aristocratic society, whether of estates or of castes, the spirit of hierarchy animates every sphere of life: ideas, social arrangements and human action. As is well known, feudal society in Europe was divided into estates. This division did not just exist as a fact of experience, it was supported by legal sanctions. The same laws did not apply to all, and there were separate courts to deal with cases relating to persons of different estates; for a person of a superior estate to be tried in an inferior court would have been a violation of honour. Some scholars have sought to distinguish between caste and estate on the ground that in the first social gradations were based on religious and in the second on legal sanctions. This is to oversimplify greatly, for in both cases legal and religious sanctions reinforced each other, although in different ways.

44

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

The European estate system evolved over several centuries in the course of which it underwent many changes. Just as in India the varna system provided only a broad framework within which each region developed its own arrangement of groups and categories, here also there was a great deal of regional variation. No one will contend that the division and subdivision of groups was as rigid or elaborate in the estate as in the caste system, but one point should also be kept in mind. The system of estates ceased to exist long before the modern techniques of sociological and anthropological research could be applied to their study, and the full complexity of the Indian caste system, which we see in part even today, was revealed only after the application of these techniques to its study. Many have pointed to the spirit of equality which prevailed within the hierarchical framework of feudal and post-feudal society in Europe. The estates might be hierarchically arranged, but among members of the same estate strict equality was often the norm if not the practice. The Polish sociologist, Stanislav Ossowski, gives a good example of this from the history of his own country. In Poland, contrary to everyday practice and even to the statutebook, which singled out within the szlachta (nobility) separate classes with considerably differing privileges, the ideology of this estate presented the nobility as a whole or at least the landed nobility (szlachta osiadta) as a classless community, although it was not egalitarian economically or in the amount of influence commanded by individuals.13 It hardly needs to be said that hierarchy between strata is often reinforced by equality among peers. The concept of honour is central to an understanding of both equality among peers and the hierarchy of orders in medieval Europe. Here again Tocqueville is an admirable guide to follow. Talking about feudal honour, he says: ‘I select the most extraordinary kind of honour which has ever been known in the world, and that which we are best acquainted with: namely, aristocratic honour springing out of feudal society.’14 Tocqueville shows how the actions of an entire age would appear meaningless if we failed to see them in the light of this important concept. The principle of honour, like any other fundamental organising principle, is both complex and ambiguous. It applied both to the

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

45

qualities of men and to their actions. We have seen how in the caste system the quality of being pure was associated with birth in a sub¬ caste or lineage or family of pure quality. The quality of honour was also to a large extent associated with the hereditary principle in pre¬ industrial Europe. Clearly, Hobbes was not expressing just his own private opinion when he wrote: ‘To be descended from conspicuous Parents, is Honourable; . . . On the contrary, to be descended from obscure Parentage, is Dishonourable.’15 This of course is not to deny that the hereditary principle was applied far more rigorously and consistently in the caste system than in the estate or any other comparable system. It is to Tocqueville that we must turn once again to appreciate the inherently ambiguous nature of the feudal concept of honour, particularly in its relation to human action: ‘In some cases feudal honour enjoined revenge and stigmatized the forgiveness of insults; in others it imperiously commanded men to conquer their own passions and required forgetfulness of self.’16 Writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, Tocqueville spoke of the ideas behind feudal honour as ‘these fantastic notions’. How much more fantastic must the Hindu notions of purity and pollution appear to the ordin¬ ary European mind today! Fantastic though they might have appeared to Tocqueville over a hundred years ago, notions of honour and shame continue to hold their sway in many European societies even today. They have recently been studied systematically by social anthropologists in the Medi¬ terranean countries of South Europe, West Asia and North Africa.17 Historical accounts by Tocqueville and others tend to present the concept of honour as being essentially a concern of persons of noble birth and exalted rank. But, like purity and pollution, honour and shame also permeated every level of social life. Anthropological studies of Mediterranean communities show in fact how these con¬ cepts give direction to human action in day-to-day life among ordin¬ ary people. The hierarchy of estates collapsed in Europe a long time ago, and with its collapse the feudal conceptions of honour and shame became greatly transformed and attenuated. The interesting thing is that today we find these conceptions in their most active forms not in what used to be the centres of European feudalism or among the remnants of the higher strata with whom they were most closely associated in the feudal age. We see them today in areas which were

46

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

peripheral to the home of classical feudalism, and among the peasants who were denied a position of honour in feudal society proper. What about the modern world, the great age of industrial rationality ? Surely, notions of purity and pollution—or even of honour and shame—belong to the traditional or the feudal age which has passed away from the West which is the pattern-setter for the rest of the world ? Inequalities of many kinds are of course present in modern indust¬ rial societies, but there is a special reason why these appear less ‘fantastic’ and more ‘rational’ than the inequalities found in other societies. We must never forget that the concepts of sociology and the systems of evaluation prevalent in modern societies are both to a large extent products of the same culture. This makes it far more difficult for the sociologist to expose the arbitrary or fortuitous nature of inequality in these as compared to other societies. In the present state of comparative sociology, which exists more as an ideal than a reality, it is almost inevitable that the institutions of industrial society, including its system of inequality, will appear more ‘rational’, more ‘efficient’, more ‘functional’ than the institu¬ tions of any other society. The kind of conceptual problem I have in mind is revealed most clearly in the so-called functional theories of social stratification which were until recently dominant in American sociology and continue to be popular there. There is a strong tendency in these theories to associate social rank with occupation, particuarly occupa¬ tional capacity and occupational efficiency. At the same time, hardly any rigorous test is proposed for measuring either capacity or effici¬ ency except in terms of differences in rewards which themselves need to be explained. Where these are not explained, but taken as given, the line of distinction between sociology and the ideology of a particular society becomes hazy and tends to disappear. I do not pretend to have a solution to the problems I have raised, and I doubt that a fully satisfactory solution will be found in the foreseeable future. But we must never lose sight of the fact that the problem exists. It is one thing to see that all societies, Western industrial societies included, have their systems of classification and evaluation. Here modern sociology has made a great advance over earlier systems of social thought in exploring the nature and dimen¬ sions of these systems. The problem arises because in the course of

Evaluation and Hierarchies of Status

47

these explorations one particular system of classification and evalu¬ ation has tended to come out as more rational, efficient and function¬ al, and, to that extent, as privileged in comparison with all the others. Comparative sociology must ask again and again whether it really deserves the privileged position which has been granted to it by most modern sociologists, wittingly or unwittingly.

Notes and References 1. Melvin M. Tumin, Social Stratification, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 27. 2. The most persuasive recent statement of this argument is in Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchies, The Caste System and Its Implications, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970. 3. Nirmal Kumar Bose, Hindu Samajer Garan, Vishva Bharati, 1949 (in Bengali; English translation by A. Beteille, forthcoming). 4. Ibid. 5. J. N. Bhattacharya, Hindu Castes and Sects, Thacker Spink, 1896. 6. Nagendranath Basu, Banger Jatiya Itihas (in Bengali). First published in the Bengali year 1305 at the turn of the present century. I have relied much on this authoritative work (and others in Bengali) for a discussion of the Kulin and the Mel systems. Unfortunately, books in English, with the partial excep¬ tion of the one in n. 5, are not very satisfactory on these points. 7. This itself became an object of ridicule, as in the following Bengali rhyme Dosh dekhe kul kare, eki chamatkar, Agnan kulin putra, kule hai sar. (They fix lineages by their faults, how marvellous! The ignorant progeny of the Kulins are lost in their lineages.)

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Quoted in Basu, op. cit., p. 227. It is well to remember that while social ranking is always a serious business, its excesses are viewed with humour by at least some members of all societies. T. H. Marshall, Sociology at the Crossroads and Other Essays, Heineman, 1963. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Progress Publishers, 1968, p. 190. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Alfred A. Knopf, 1956, Vol. H, p. 99. Ibid., Vol. H, p. 72. Ibid. Stanislav Ossowski, Class Structure in the Social Consciousness, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963, p. 98. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 231. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Dent, 1973, p. 46. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 232. Two good collections are: (1) J. G. Peristiany (ed.), Honour and Shame, The Values of Mediterranean Society, University of Chicago Press, 1966; and (2) Julian Pitt-Rivers (ed.), Mediterranean Countrymen, Mouton, 1963.

3 Organisation and Structures of Power And Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all Hobbes Leviathan

Power is in its nature fundamentally different from status. Unlike status, which has its source in human ideas, power is rooted in the human will; it is backed in the end by the use or the threat of use of physical force. Will and power are both extremely general concepts, and, naturally, we are not concerned with all aspects of power, but with only those that have a bearing on human action in a social context. We must try to give as concrete and specific a meaning to the concept as possible (although this is not easy) and avoid (but this too is difficult) metaphorical uses of the term as in ‘the power of ideas’, ‘the power of religion’ or ‘the power of science’. It hardly needs to be said that a concept that is of such fundamental importance and has been so widely discussed among philosophers, political theorists and sociologists does not lend itself easily to a concrete, specific and precise definition. Men impose their will on others, i.e. they dominate them through a variety of means and with a variety of ends in view. What concerns us particularly is that there is generally, some would say invariably, a measure of asymmetry in relations having to do with dominance. Some dominate over others; the latter submit to the will of the former. One can no doubt think of a contest of wills among individuals or, in more general terms, of a balance of power between groups; but this clearly would be a limiting case of a more general phenomenon which commonly entails some measure of asymmetry. The primary fact from our point of view is the asymmetry entailed in relations of command and obedience. Such relations are found in

Organisation and Structures of Power

49

every society and, as I have argued, they are inherent in the nature of organised living. However, not all inequalities, whether between individuals or between groups, are in themselves inequalities of power. As we have seen, there are inequalities of status among groups, some being ranked high and others low. We have no reason to believe that a group which is ranked high can merely by virtue of its status command obedience from a group which is ranked low. In fact, such groups may not be linked directly at all by a chain of command and obedience. How is power related to inequality in the broader sense? Power is of crucial importance in maintaining as well as transforming existing systems of inequality. In the last chapter we discussed at some length the inequalities among castes, arranged layer upon layer as it were, in an elaborate hierarchy. What kept all these layers in their assigned positions ? Partly men’s ideas about the qualities to be esteemed and the persons who were endowed with such qualities; but also partly the instruments of power. The role of the instruments of power in maintaining the different castes in their assigned positions is clearly specified in the traditional texts; and it may be argued that once the new instruments of power, introduced by the British, with¬ drew their support from the hierarchy of caste, the hierarchy itself began to crumble. A similar argument can no doubt be made about the hierarchy of estates, as indeed about any established hierarchy. If the social hierarchy in the broadest sense is both maintained and transformed by the instruments of power, then what maintains or transforms these instruments themselves? This is a very large question to which no summary answer can do adequate justice. Suffice it for the moment to say that ideas play a very important part in both maintaining and transforming the existing instruments of power. Everywhere the instruments of power tend to become institutionalised, and every institutional arrangement is associated with an ideology which seeks to explain and justify it. The explanation is rarely if ever sufficient or complete from the viewpoint of the outsider, but to ignore it would be to limit oneself to a partial view of the reality. All definitions of power in use among students of society assign some importance to force or physical constraint. Again, observation of all kinds of societies shows that force is a component of the instruments of power everywhere. But this does not mean that force is directly or visibly used in every instance where some impose their

50

Organisation and Structures of Power

will on others. As a matter of fact, all kinds of institutional arrange¬ ments intervene between the control of force on the one hand and the effectiveness of command on the other. It is thus that we are often unable to identify a direct or visible relationship between the extent of power enjoyed by a group and the amount of physical force at its disposal. Given the facts considered above, there arises the need to establish differences among the types of power. This can be done in several ways, but in doing it we must keep the role of physical constraint always in mind. In an important paper, published on the eve of the Second War, Goldhamer and Shils1 distinguished between force, domination and manipulation as three forms of power. In the first case physical instruments are directly and visibly used; in the second this is not done, but the command is open and explicit; in the third case the same effect is achieved as in the second but without the issue of open or explicit commands. Clearly, manipulation is different from force: one may say that manipulation and force stand at opposite ends of the same spectrum. It is also true that in one form or another manipulation is universally present. It is found in primitive as well as advanced societies; in small as well as large associations; in private as well as public life. It is so familiar in modern societies that to provide examples of it would be both tedious and unnecessary. At the same time, it would be unwise to view manipulation in complete isolation from force: manipulation is fully effective only when it is combined with force. We must also distinguish between a use of force that is generally regarded as justified and a use that dispenses with any appeal to justice; or, in other words, between a power that is legitimate and one that is not. Some have argued that the sociologist is concerned less with power as such than with legitimate power. The principle of legitimacy is again a universal feature of all human societies, and it is difficult to conceive of a stable distribution of power that does not enjoy some legitimacy, some ideological support. On the other hand, the line between legitimate and non-legitimate power is a thin one, and is likely to be drawn differently by the beneficiaries and the victims of power. This much is certain that no regime of power is fully acceptable to all, and no regime can survive unless it is partly acceptable to some. How far a given regime enjoys legitimacy is a difficult question which has to be answered separately for each particular case.

Organisation and Structures of Power

51

The principle of legitimacy does not eliminate the asymmetry between those who command and those who obey, it merely ensures that commands are generally circumscribed by commonly acknow¬ ledged ‘rules of the game’. But when these rules become sufficiently clear and precise, shall we not approximate to a state of affairs in which they become equally binding on all, with no one having any significant advantage or disadvantage ? We know of no actual case where this has happened; indeed, modern societies, which have gone furthest in rationalising the ‘rules of the game’, provide as much scope for the arbitrary misuse of power as societies of any other kind. We shall see a little later why rationalisation by itself can do little if anything to eliminate the asymmetry inherent in the social distribution of power. Perhaps the majority of people think of power in social life as a limited and scarce resource; some have it while others do not, and, even further, that some have it at the expense of others. This leads to what has been described as the ‘zero-sum’ approach to power according to which an increase in the power of some leads necessarily to a decrease in the power of others. A minority of scholars maintain that this is too narrow a conception of power, and that one can think of a net addition to power in society without any necessary diminu¬ tion in the power of any individual or group. Whichever view of power we adopt—‘zero-sum’ or ‘nonzero-sum’ —we cannot escape the fact that in every society some have more power than others. For even when x has no power over y, he may have more power than y in determining which collective goals should be pursued, according to what priority and by what means. Thus, any sociological analysis of power must take both these features into account: the power of some over others, and their power to interpret, alter and create the rules by which all, including themselves, are bound. We have to pay particular attention to the second when we are considering power in large-scale or mass societies. Even when we know that some have more power than others, the difference is difficult if not impossible to measure accurately. Nevertheless, two related considerations must be kept in mind. The first concerns the scope of power. The same individual or set of individuals does not hold power equally in all spheres of society. It is an empirical question, to be answered differently for different societies, as to how far the power of individuals in one sphere is balanced by their lack of it in other spheres. At the same time, we

52

Organisation and Structures of Power

must never lose sight of the fact that in every society there are some spheres which are decisive in relation to the rest from the viewpoint of the exercise of power. Given the fact that in no society is power held or exercised by only one individual, we must also ask how far the different individuals who hold and exercise power, in one sphere or several, constitute a unified and cohesive group, clearly marked out from the rest of society. Here there are significant differences of opinion between what are called the ‘elite theorists’ and the ‘pluralists’. We take the view that these are questions to which satisfactory answers can be provided only by an examination of the facts, which differ from one case to another. But it can certainly be said on the basis of what we already know that the elite is nowhere completely separated from the rest of society, and that it is everywhere internally differentiated in terms of inequalities of power. In discussing inequalities of power we shall base ourselves primarily on what contemporary observers have recorded about existing realities. The evidence from the past is less clear about the realities of power than about qualities which were ideally valued. When earlier authors wrote about power they concerned themselves more with the ideal than the actual distribution of power. Our concern in studying the inequalities of power will, on the other hand, be more with the actual than the ideal. Fortunately, we have reliable accounts by contemporary authorities of the actual distribution of power in every kind of society, ranging from the Bushman band to the Nazi state. For industrial societies alone we have a vast and growing body of literature on the distribution of power in every form of association, from peer groups to communities. These studies all show that however small or informal the association, as soon as it acquires some stability and structure, inequalities inevitably emerge within it. To be sure, these inequalities of influence or power are not always associated with the use of physical force, but unless they are backed by sanctions of some sort, the association itself tends to become unstable or amorphous. We may thus say that inequalities of power or influence are found in every type of stable or structured association whose working has been investigated at all seriously. The inequalities of power inherent in all forms of organised living are best illustrated by studying relatively stable associations of

Organisation and Structures of Power

53

individuals whose activities require to be co-ordinated on a continuing basis. The most characteristic examples of these are territorial associations such as the village, the district or the state. It is no accident that all traditional political philosophers have regarded territory as a defining feature of the state, and even Max Weber, whose work marks a significant departure from the past, placed territory at the centre of his definition of political systems. Living together in a common territory creates certain fundamental problems always and everywhere, and no society has succeeded in solving these problems without devising some structures of power. In recent years students of animal behaviour, known as ethologists, have brought to light valuable findings about forms of collective life among different species of animals. These findings, particularly about langurs, baboons, chimpanzees and gorillas have obviously some bearing on our understanding of collective life among human beings, although their full implications are as yet not at all clear, and any analogy between group life among monkeys and among men must still be viewed with the utmost caution. The territorial principle and the principle of dominance are both very important among animals which live in groups, and they have been studied with particular care among langurs and baboons belonging to various species. These animals live in groups of variable size, each such group being associated with a particular territory which it jealously guards against intrusion by other members of the species. The defence of the group’s territory is associated, particularly among the baboons, with a measure of internal differentiation which is used also for maintaining some kind of order within the group itself. Internal differentiation is in its turn clearly associated with the principle of dominance, so that the strong and mature male plays a decisive role in defending the group’s territory, in directing its movements and also in regulating its internal life. Quarrels among baboons are frequent. They often centre around access to food or to females. ‘High-ranking baboons intervene in quarrels between members of the group, threatening in their turn. If this is of no avail they attack, which ends the fight at once.’2 It is precisely through interventions of this nature that a rank order of dominance among members of the group emerges and becomes established. Ethologists have, however, a somewhat different kind of interest in studying dominance from what we have. Their primary interest is in determining how far dominance and submission, among

54

Organisation and Structures of Power

animals as well as men, are pre-programmed drives which are transmitted by the genetic code. Are there genetically transmitted drives among human beings towards dominance and submission? Eibl-Eibesfeldt, a leading ethologist, maintains, ‘But for obedience to authority there is experimental evidence pointing to the probability that this is a disposition innate to human beings’.3 I must emphasise that this is not an issue of very great importance to our discussion. As far as we are concerned, what the study of group life among baboons or langurs teaches us is that there are certain problems of organised living which can be handled only in a certain way, i.e. through the exercise of dominance. The patterns of dominance that actually emerge are naturally very different among men as compared to animals because the complexity of the problems is very different in the two cases, and the alternative mechanisms available for their solution are also somewhat different in the one as compared to the other. As to the transmission of these patterns, we know that the cultural code is of fundamental importance among human beings, however simple their mode of life; the genetic code can play only a residual part whose true magnitude cannot be estimated without first comparing rigorously and systematically patterns of dominance in different human societies. Since our concern is with inequality among human beings and not animals, we must turn now to forms of human association. The best starting-point would be the simple hunting and gathering bands—or ‘hordes’ as they were once called—among people such as the Bushmen of South Africa or the Aborigines of Australia. Unfortunately, the evidence here is not as clear as we would like it to be. It is ironical but none the less true that the might of industrial civilisation has done far less to disrupt normal forms of life among langurs and baboons than among human beings with a simple food-gathering technology. While most ethologists have recorded a clear rank order among the higher monkeys and apes wherever they live in fair-sized groups, Isaac Schapera, one of our best authorities on the primitive tribes of South Africa, has reported that no clear inequalities of rank are visible in Bushman or Bergdama bands.4 This evidence is difficult to interpret, especially in view of the fact that others have given a somewhat different account of similar bands elsewhere. The bands observed oy Schapera were small in size and, as I have just mentioned,

Organisation and Structures of Power

55

there is every reason to believe that they were going through a process of disintegration. Further, we must remember that Schapera was comparing these bands not with troops of monkeys but with more advanced tribes having a developed system of ranking, in contrast to whom inequalities of power among the Bushmen or Bergdama might well be so small as to appear almost unrecognisable. One must make a distinction between the exercise of dominance by specific individuals as and when occasions arise, and a structure of power in which individuals are linked by a continuous chain of command and obedience. In the first case a structure of power has to be created afresh, as it were, each time the occasion arises. In the second, one can think of the structure as existing independently of the individuals who are assigned different positions in it. The distinction is useful for analytical purposes provided one does not apply it mechanically for distinguishing between types of associa¬ tions. When we turn from wandering bands of hunters and gatherers to more settled groups whose members live by primitive agriculture or stockbreeding, or some combination of the two, we already see wellestablished structures of power. The population is larger, the local groups are more stable and the co-ordination among these groups more effective. Here clearly it is no longer a matter of the dominance of some over others exercised sporadically and in consequence of the individual qualities of particular men. Among the Bantu-speaking tribes of South Africa we have a regular arrangement of roles through which internal co-ordination and protection from external agencies are ensured. I would like to consider briefly the structure of power in the Zulu kingdom about a hundred years ago, basing myself on the excellent account provided by Max Gluckman.5 The Zulu at that time numbered around three to four hundred thousand people and had a simple economy of slash-and-bum cultivation and cattle herding. They had been a relatively insignificant tribe till the end of the eighteenth century when, through conquest and expansion, their chief, Shaka, succeeded in building up a powerful kingdom. Shaka is believed by all to have been a tyrant, but he gave the Zulu a new and powerful organisation which made them feared and respected by their neighbours. The Zulu kingdom, like most such kingdoms in Africa, had a pyramidal structure of power and authority. The king was at the

56

Organisation and Structures of Power

top, and his decision on all matters of public concern was binding and final. The kingdom was divided into territories, each being placed under a chief; below the chief were subchiefs and below them headmen, having jurisdiction over territories of diminishing size. There was delegation of power from the king down to the headman, and appeals could be made against the decisions of the headman all the way up to the king. Public activities were thus organised through this apparatus which was a concrete and visible embodiment of inequalities of power among the Zulus. The king had ultimate control over the instruments of force, although his subordinates had some control, delegated to them by the king. The Zulu had a simple technology, hence the instruments of force were also simple among them. However, Shaka was respon¬ sible for a truly important organisational innovation. He organised all the able-bodied men into age-regiments, quartered them in barracks and controlled them through one of his two principal chiefs. These men were required to live in barracks and were forbidden to marry until the king gave them permission, as a regiment, to do so. It was this organisational innovation more than anything else that made the Zulu feared and respected throughout this part of South Africa. Gluckman provides us with a very valuable insight into the relationship between law and power in Zulu society, an insight which in my belief can be applied to all human societies. The Zulu king, however despotic, could not set himself above the law. He was bound by the law and could not take a decision which openly violated it. ‘Nevertheless, the king could in deciding a case create new law for what he and his council considered good reason.’6 We may be sure that the king created new law not for considerations of good reason alone, but in the pursuit of his own interest, the interest of his lineage and the interest of his supporters. What the king did on a large scale was done on a smaller scale by his chiefs and headmen. We may think of the pyramidal structure of power, from the king to the headmen, as a system of roles. The concept of role, as is well known, is central to the sociological approach. It enables us to view a set of arrangements independently of those who actually carry them through, to see the office’ as being separate from and in a sense external to the ‘person’. A role (or office) may be viewed in terms of entitlements; it must also be viewed in relation to other roles. The

Organisation and Structures of Power

57

different roles are related to each other by a variety of rights and obligations and, in that sense, they constitute a system. We are primarily interested in roles which embody the distribution of power. What are the entitlements of the king, or the chief, or the headman? What are the rights and obligations attached to these various roles ? How are they related to each other and to others in society ? The roles which embody the distribution of power constitute only one set of roles. Every society has many other sets, pertaining to the domains of kinship, economics, religion, etc. Thus, in addition to king, chief, headman, etc., we have the roles of father, mother’s brother, wife s sister; carpenter, potter, barber; priest, magician, sorcerer, and so on. Some societies have a vastly larger inventory of roles than others, and in some different roles might be assigned to the same individual which in others would be assigned to separate individuals. But all societies have some roles, including roles embody¬ ing the distribution of power. Ideally, one can think of a role map for the whole of society; in practice it has proved impossible to construct such a map for any society for reasons we need not enter into here. We can think of the role map of a society as a kind of plan, a blueprint, for its division of labour. For, clearly, king, chief and headman have jobs to do just as potter, sorcerer and mother’s brother have. Up to a point it is also convenient to regard the division of labour as being selfregulating. But the distribution of power is an aspect of the division of labour in only one sense; in another sense it stands above it, regulating it, at times reinforcing it and at other times altering it. Kings, chiefs and headmen no doubt have obligations as others have; but they have, in addition, not only the right but also the power to define the obligations of everybody, including themselves. It is not merely that kings and princes have more of the good things of life than others; their modern counterparts, presidents and prime ministers, might do with fewer of these than some. What is important is that they have the decisive say about who should have how much of the good things of life. It is in this sense that inequality is inherent in the distribution of power in all organised societies. I shall now take up for consideration the case of Nazi Germany under Hitler. It may be said that here power defeated the purpose of

58

Organisation and Structures of Power

organisation, and revealed itself very soon as naked force which failed to hold together the new society it sought to create. My argument is that unless we understand the limits within which power must be used for the organisation of human activities, we will fail to recognise the real relationship between power and other aspects of human society. It is true that the Nazi case is an exception in many ways, but it is an exception whose study deepens our under¬ standing of what is universal. We must remember that totalitarian societies set themselves the task of creating classless societies, and in the opinion of some— critics as well as enthusiasts—they succeed in this. If one talks of a hierarchy of power as a feature of most societies under ordinary conditions, a kind of pyramidal structure in which ranks follow each other in orderly succession, it is precisely this that a totalitarian regime sets out to destroy. It was this kind of promise that Hitler offered to the Germans and Stalin to the Russians. We must remember that not only were millions of Germans and Russians persuaded by the promise, but in outward appearance also these societies did present themselves as relatively classless to many who were not necessarily their admirers. The point however is that the dissolution of the existing system of classes was achieved in both Germany and Russia substantially, though not solely, through the use of force, domination and manipulation. There is no doubt that Hitler sought to destroy the existing system of classes and the hierarchy of ranks in German society. Opinions differ sharply on the extent to which he succeeded. This much is certain that the Nazi regime at the height of its success was divided between an elite in whose hands the instruments of coercion became increasingly concentrated, and the masses whose individual members became increasingly constrained by these instruments. It is not easy to determine how cohesive the elite was and how atomised the masses, but clearly a society of elites and masses exemplifies the logic of inequality no less relentlessly than a society of graded ranks. Some students of Western society, like C. Wright Mills for instance, have argued that the replacement of a society of stable classes and graded ranks by one of elites and masses is a general feature of our times. This represents, in the language of Wright Mills, the emergence of a mass society at the expense of a society of publics. While Mills provides indubitable evidence of the concentration of power even in democratic societies, we must be careful in the use of terms like ‘mass

Organisation and Structures of Power

59

society’ and ‘totalitarian regime’. We cannot usefully apply the insights gained from the study of the Nazi regime to other industrial societies without first identifying the distinctive features of the former. It may be misleading to ignore the differences between the Hitlerite and Stalinist regimes, and to group them together under the blanket category of ‘totalitarianism’. The two regimes were different in terms of the stability of their organisations, and their specific combinations of coercion and persuation. Besides, there were important differences in the types of legitimacy they sought, if not in the degree to which they successfully acquired it. Unlike the Soviet, the Nazi system was elitist in principle, claiming validity not in terms of a universalist ideology but by an appeal to race, folk and blood. It is therefore best to consider it separately, whether as a type of its kind, or as the most extreme case of a more general phenomenon. Germany under the Third Reich had a political system organised on a totally different scale from the Zulu kingdom of Shaka. It had a territory of nearly a quarter million square miles and a population of over 85 million people. Its scientific technology was among the most advanced in the world. This technology made it possible to devise and concentrate instruments of coercion and persuasion in ways which were inconceivable in the past. We must keep these demographic and technological factors in mind whenever we are considering the inequalities of power in a comparative framework. The material prerequisites for certain forms of dominance are just not available in small-scale, technologically backward societies. The Third Reich did not emerge in Germany in 1933 out of the blue. There was much in the existing society on which it built. Just as India was viewed among traditional societies as the most extreme example of a hierarchical society, among modern societies Germany was known to have a notoriously authoritarian society. There is a vast literature on authoritarian values in German society before, during and after the period under Hitler. But we are not concerned at the moment with these. Our concern is to identify the organisa¬ tional basis of the authoritarian regime in Germany. As in other Western societies, in Germany also bureaucratisation gained ground rapidly with the progress of industrialisation. By the end of the nineteenth century many European thinkers had begun to view with misgiving the growing power of this relatively novel mode of organisation, although Marx had drawn attention even

60

Organisation and Structures of Power

earlier to the growth in the size, autonomy and power of the bureaucracy in mid-nineteenth-century France. By the beginning of the present century the trends observed by Marx were confirmed in varying degree in Britain, France and Germany. The Prussian bureaucracy, in both its civil and military branches, had taken shape as a particularly disciplined, rigid and monolithic organisation by the beginning of the First World War. The Prussian bureaucracy came to be well-known for its ‘elitist’ character. The officer corps in the army and the police as well as in the other branches of the civil administration was recruited sub¬ stantially from the landed aristocracy so that the social distance between superior and subordinate ranks in the organisation was reinforced by differences of social background. But the elitist or authoritarian character of a modern organisation can be maintained to a large extent independently of its mode of recruitment. In the Prussian army this was done by training in a kind of discipline which ensured strict and unquestioning compliance to commands from above. What is the exact relevance of bureaucratic organisation in the broadest sense to the problem of inequality? There are two ways in which this question may be approached. Firstly, as Max Weber repeatedly pointed out, a bureaucracy, in whichever field or domain, is itself a hierarchy; to be sure, it is not a hierarchy in the sense in which the term has been used in the last chapter, but its internal structure is based on the principle of superordination and subordina¬ tion. Secondly, the bureaucracy, whether civil or military, is an apparatus whose control is decisive for the exercise of power in a modern society. The bureaucratic apparatus as a whole suffered considerable damage as a result of the German defeat in the First War. A defeat in a war of that kind not only damages the military apparatus but also dislocates the whole of civil administration. But Germany built up with remarkable speed a new apparatus that was in many ways better organised and more efficient than the old one. No modern industrial society can survive, let alone make rapid economic advance, if it is unable to sustain an efficient system of civil admini¬ stration. The militarisation of German society that began shortly after the First War is also too well-known to call for fresh evidence. All that requires to be said here is that there is nothing surprising about the effort made in Germany after the War to build a powerful

Organisation and Structures of Power

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organisation if we see it in the light of the material objectives that most industrial societies set for themselves. As has been said more than once, the transition from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich was effected in 1933 in accordance with the prevailing constitutional principles. But if we look at power not simply in constitutional terms but in its broader social aspects, the changes that accompanied the transition were of a momentous nature. It is not that the existing instruments of power were destroyed, but they were transformed, reorganised and put to new uses which were often totally at variance with those for which they were originally designed. What was distinctive of Nazi Germany was the effort to bring into being what has been called the ‘movement state’. The political structure in such a case rests on a delicate balance between the state and the movement in which the state constitutes the ‘static political part’, and the movement ‘the dynamic political element’. In ideolo¬ gical terms, the dynamic element is generally given precedence over the static part, or, in ordinary language, the state and its apparatus are denied monopoly over the instruments of power which they have to share with the movement and its party. A proper balance between the two was to be maintained through the leadership principle which in a sense was to be the foundation of the new social order. The movement state—of which the Third Reich is not the only example from modern times—is designed not to maintain the existing social order but to create a new one, or, better, to energise the process of its creation. It assigns a crucial role to the mobilisation of human energy and for precisely this reason it discards the traditional conception of the state as a fixed framework of action. All states combine ideology with power in achieving their ends, but the movement state leaves the relationship between the two deliberately open as it were. Much has been written and said about the successful appeal made by the National Socialist movement to ideas of blood, folk and race. It would be foolish to deny the role of ideology in the growth and development of a movement of this kind. Our immediate concern, however, is not with the ideology of the Nazi party or state, but with the instruments of power they created and utilised. The ideology itself could hardly achieve the success it did without the support of the organised power of the party and the state. Movements of the

62

Organisation and Structures of Power

kind that swept through Europe after the First War could be successful only in large-scale industrial societies with an advanced technological apparatus. It is not easy to provide an exact description of the distribution of power in Nazi Germany. What was designed to be a Thousand-year Reich did not in fact last very long. While it lasted it was marked by a high degree of instability some of which, as we have seen, was created by design. Firstly, the power structure was highly expansive in its relation to the external system; this led to considerable growth of the military machine. Secondly, it was highly repressive in its treatment of internal obstacles; this led to considerable growth of a para-military machinery. In what follows I shall give a brief description of the distribution of power in Nazi Germany, basing myself largely on the classic study by Franz Neumann.7 Neumann’s argument in sum is that National Socialism did not lead to a dissolution of the class structure of Germany. On the contrary, it led to a strengthening and consolida¬ tion of the ruling class at the expense of the masses which became increasingly fragmented and atomised. According to Neumann, there was a systematic destruction of all intermediate groups between the masses and the ruling class through ‘the creation of a system of autocratic bureaucracies interfering in all human relations’.8 National Socialism sought to consolidate its power by carrying to an extreme ‘the one process that characterizes the structure of modern society, bureaucratization’.9 Neumann takes care to point out that in the modern world bureaucratisation covers both the private and the public spheres. Indeed, the process became so allpervasive under the Nazi regime that the distinction between the two spheres lost much of its conventional meaning. There is, in short, a huge network of organizations covering almost every aspect of human life, each run by presidents and vice-presi¬ dents and secretaries and treasurers, each employing advertising agencies and publicity men, each out to interfere with, and to act as the mediator in, the relations between men and men.10 This kind of development leads inevitably to the destruction of many of the opportunities for spontaneous activity ordinarily available to the individual. The bureaucracy is not a monolithic system in all modern societies,

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although there are conditions under which it might appear to be so to those who increasingly become or feel they are becoming its victims. The interlocking of the different bureaucracies (private and public, the different branches of the public bureaucracy) differs in nature and extent from one society to another. This interlocking is loose, allowing some flexibility and freedom to the individual in what are called pluralistic societies; it is tight and allows little freedom and flexibility to the individual in a totalitarian society. However, the difference between the two types of society becomes clear, if at all, only at a distance and in retrospect. The interlocking of the different structures of power was achieved in Germany by a process of social engineering known technically as ‘synchronisation’ (Gleichschaltung). This was in effect designed to achieve absolute control of all public activities from the top. The cabinet was invested with virtually unlimited legislative powers, and the autonomy of provincial, municipal and other local bodies was reduced to the minimum. All this was achieved within a very short span of time, again something that could be possible only in a highly efficient and advanced industrial society. The outbreak of war further strengthened the tendencies towards the synchronisation and concentration of power which was started almost immediately after Hitler acquired control over the state. There was a massive increase in the number of civil servants under the National Socialist regime. This was caused partly by an enlarged definition of civil servants among whom were now included the officers and professional soldiers of the standing army, the expanded police force (including its armed wings), labour service leaders and officials of a large number of newly created economic organisations. Aside from this, there was also an increase in the number of those who were traditionally classified as civil servants. In other words, the state increased both the scope of its activity and the size of its apparatus. At the top of the civil service in the restricted sense was the ministerial bureaucracy, comprising assessors, governmental and ministerial councillors, ministerial directors, secretaries of state, etc. The ministerial bureaucracy, recruited generally through state examinations from among university-trained people, tended to form a closed caste whose senior members enjoyed considerable powers of decision-making. The lowest levels of the service were manned by various categories of petty functionaries such as postal and railroad

64

Organisation and Structures of Power

officials who as individuals enjoyed very little power, but whose combined weight made the state apparatus appear formidable in the eyes of the ordinary citizen. The militarisation of German society under the Nazi regime has already been alluded to. The expansive character of the German state was bound to bring the army increasingly into prominence. As it grew in size, it changed somewhat in character. The typical officer in the German army during the First War came from the Prussian landed aristocracy which was known for its ‘feudal’ and unenlightened character. Talking about the Second War, on the other hand, Neumann says, ‘The army officer of today is a technician, interested in keeping the army machine running’.11 This transforma¬ tion of the officer corps was associated with the increasing inter¬ penetration of military and economic functions. In addition to the civil and military establishments just considered, there emerged a large number of new economic units whose formal organisation was bureaucratic even when they were run on private capital. To quote Neumann again: ‘Some measure of bureaucratisation of the economy is inevitable in our society. The joint stock corporation, the cartel, the combine are all bureaucratic forms.’12 What was distinctive of the Nazi system was not the organisation of economic life according to bureaucratic forms, which is a feature of all industrial societies, but the tight interlocking between the apparatus of state and the apparatus of industry. It is this that widened the gap between those who controlled the organisations and those who were controlled by them. Cutting across the civil service, the army and industry was the organisation of the Nazi party which was ‘before all else a huge bureaucratic machine’.13 The party hierarchy derived its legitimacy from the leadership principle, symbolised at the top in the personality of Adolf Hitler. As the only legitimate party and the sole director of the National Socialist movement, it enjoyed a unique position in German political life. Its penetration into the army and the civil service only completed the interlocking of the different structures of power through which the Nazi regime was able to acquire, how¬ ever momentarily, its uniquely monolithic character. I have mentioned earlier that in every society those who exercise power bring together in their hands the instruments of coercion and of persuasion. The extent to which such instruments can be built up and concentrated in a few hands varies greatly from one society

Organisation and Structures of Power

65

to another. There are obvious physical limits beyond which they cannot be consolidated in a technologically backward tribal society with a scattered population. Modern industrial societies seem to offer almost unlimited possibilities for such consolidation. At least this much is certain that the scale on which the Nazi elite combined the use of terror and propaganda was unprecedented in human history. Apart from the army and the police, the Nazi party itself built up a number of powerful para-military organisations such as the sa (storm troops), ss (protective platoons) and nskk (National Socialist motor corps). After a brief inner-party struggle, the sa chief Rohm was liquidated, and the ss under Himmler emerged as the pre-eminent para-military organisation. With Himmler’s appoint¬ ment as chief of the Gestapo, the two organisations could become effectively interlocked. The combination of the Gestapo or secret police and the ss, which began as Hitler’s personal bodyguard, provided a formidable basis for the organisation of terror. The Nazi reign of terror was maintained by skilfully combining violence with secrecy. The sa (Brownshirts) was founded ostensibly for the protection of Nazi meetings, and the ss (Blackshirts) for the protection of Nazi leaders. The violence and destruction in which their members engaged are too well known to call for detailed description. Terror reached a new level of organisation with the opening of the first concentration camp in 1933. There were six such camps by the time Germany entered the War, and nine more were added during the War. The concentration camps were under an administrative wing of the ss, and special units of the ss, known as the Death’s-head Batallions, were responsible for their security. Hundreds of thousands of people (Jews and Gentiles; men, women and children) were exterminated or perished in these camps under the most brutal and inhuman conditions. Much has been written of the horrors of Nazi concentration camps, and they certainly leave an indelible mark on the human mind. It is far more difficult to give an objective account of the horrors involved, for the ordinary unprotected citizen, in living in a society organised on the basis of terror. It is by now a truism that terror cannot be sustained solely by violence and destruction; these exhaust them¬ selves all too quickly. To be truly effective as an instrument of terror, violence must be combined with secrecy, so that the victim is caught unprepared and nobody knows till the very end whether or not he

66

Organisation and Structures of Power

is to be the victim. In the end, the most acute form of fear is fear of the unknown. The secret police of the Nazis used the most ingenious devices to keep this fear continually alive in the minds of larger and larger sections of the population. The machinery of terror was supported, and in a way also protected, by an elaborate machinery of propaganda. The Nazi movement started as a people’s movement, and this was an important source of its strength. Even while it unleashed its instruments of terror, it was essential to retain this image and to maintain that its victims were not the people, but particular individuals who were enemies of the people. Once again, the scale and manner in which the machinery of propaganda was organised could be possible only at a particular level of economic development, or, if the phrase be permitted, of social development. It is easy enough to expose the horrors of a regime after it has been effectively crushed and when nobody is left to openly defend it. It is in the nature of the case impossible to write without fear of contradic¬ tion about the horrors perpetrated by successful regimes which command the allegiance of millions. It is far from my intention to argue that all regimes are equally repressive or equally callous about human suffering. But we realise how ineffective the available tools of sociological analysis are as soon as we try to compare the Nazi repression of the Poles with, say, the Soviet repression of the Ukrainians or the American repression of the Vietnamese. Despite the difficulties involved, in what follows I shall try to say something about the distribution of power in the Soviet regime. The very fact that the comparison of Hitler’s Germany with Stalin’s Russia is a stock-in-trade with liberal political theorists in the West ought to put us on our guard while we approach the subject. The reason for my choice of the Soviet case in the present context is not that I believe that the Soviet regime is the most repressive among existing political regimes.14 Rather, social inequality is more clearly related to the distribution of power in the Soviet Union than in most contemporary societies. The Soviet regime is in many ways different from the Nazi, although both have been described as totalitarian. The Nazi regime was marked by extreme instability. It was very shortlived, and both its rise and its fall were spectacular. Some would say that the Nazi system was inherently unstable. This cannot be said of the Soviet

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system, although many would no doubt have said it fifty years ago. The Soviet system has survived several crises and, although it has altered somewhat, not many serious scholars would today question its viability. The distribution of power in Soviet society has over the years acquired a fairly stable character which makes it easier for us to taik about inequalities of power independently of particular actors, no matter how prominently they might figure on the stage. The Soviet system never was elitist in the way the Nazi system was; it did not give a prominent place to the ‘leadership principle’ as either an ideal or a basis of social organisation. There no doubt was a cult of personality in the Soviet Union under Stalin. But the system has outlived the cult which was exposed and denounced shortly after Stalin’s death more than twenty years ago. Soviet society is classless in a very important sense of the term, which was by no means the case with Nazi society. Private ownership of the means of production does not exist or is insignificant in the Soviet Union, and this means that differences of property are not important as bases of social inequality. It would, however, be wrong to believe that there is no social differentiation in the Soviet Union. According to Soviet sources themselves, their society is divided into three principal categories, viz. peasants, workers and the intelligentsia. The term ‘stratum’ is sometimes used for all three; at other times the first two are described as classes—the means of production being controlled in the case of peasants by the collective and in the case of workers by the state—and only the third is described as a stratum. The very use of the terms ‘stratum’ and ‘strata’ indicates that the Soviet authorities themselves acknowledge the presence of inequalities in their society. These are, however, based not on property but on the evaluation of different ‘functions’ on the one hand, and the distribu¬ tion of power on the other. I shall in this discussion confine myself to inequalities in and arising out of the distribution of power. The evaluation of functions can itself be altered by authoritative decisions more directly in the Soviet Union than in other industrial societies. Despite the ideology of classlessness, all kinds of inequalities persist in socialist societies. The noted Polish sociologist, Stanislav Ossowski, tells us that ‘the witty Warsaw cockneys defined the two classes in socialist countries by the terms “proletariat” and “chevroletariat” \15 The proletariat are the rank and file, the masses, so to say. The chevroletariat are the ‘classes’, those who have access to the good things of life including imported consumer goods; they

68

Organisation and Structures of Power

are, characteristically, not property owners, but government and party functionaries. It may not be altogether misleading to say that ‘intelligentsia’ is a kind of euphemism for what are broadly referred to as the ‘classes’ in Western societies. Soviet authors are always careful to point out that the intelligentsia are not a class, being recruited as they are from the most diverse sources and distributed through every major sector of the economy. They are nevertheless a very important category, and we must try to find out wherein their importance lies. Even a cursory examination of the problem will reveal that the intelligentsia owe their pre-eminence to their relationship to the distribution of power in Soviet society. The Soviet state, whether in its liberal or its authoritarian phase, is an extremely powerful institution. If, following Max Weber, we maintain that there are two principal sources of power in modern societies, viz. power deriving from established authority and power deriving from a constellation of interests in a formally free market, we will see at once the importance of the first in the Soviet type of society. The apparatus of state is here not only the ultimate source of power, but in many cases also its immediate source. Closely intermeshed with the apparatus of state is the apparatus of the party. Just as the apparatus of state does not have to contend seriously with independently established economic interests, so also the Communist Party of the Soviet Union does not have to contend with rival political parties. The noted Yugoslav writer, Milovan Djilas—at one time a close confidant of President Tito—has given currency to the phrase ‘new class’ in describing the forms of inequality in socialist societies. Djilas contends that the source of origin of this class, unlike of ruling classes in other industrial societies, is clearly political and not economic. In other societies the privileged class acquires power after it has formed itself into a class; the new class in the Soviet Union formed itself into a class after it acquired power. In other words, we have here the clearest confirmation of Ibn Khaldun’s statement that the possession of power is the source of riches. Djilas reveals very clearly the link between the new class and the Soviet type of political system. He says, ‘The new class may be said to be made up of those who have special privileges and economic preference because of the administrative monopoly they hold’.16 And further, Since administration is unavoidable in society, necessary

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administrative functions may be coexistent with parasitic functions in the same person’.17 The new class is generated by certain very specific types of organisational requirements; after coming into being, it acquires a parasitic character, using the organisation or ‘apparatus’ to prey upon society as a whole. There are close links between the party and the state in the formation of the new class. ‘The core and the basis of the new class is created in the party and at its top, as well as in the state political organs.’18 Djilas emphasises the crucial role of the party in the creation of new patterns of inequality. It is in the dialectics of revolutionary move¬ ments and revolutionary organisations rather than of economic development that, according to him, the roots of these inequalities lie. With the consolidation of the revolution the new class sets itself above both party and society. The direction of the new society, in continuity as well as change, comes increasingly to rest in the hands of those who control both the party and the state. The intelligentsia, or even the functionaries or bureaucrats, do not constitute a single homogeneous category in Soviet society. There are vast differences between those who control the commanding heights of the economic and political systems, and those who perform ordinary routine tasks. There must also be conflicts of interest, within the class or stratum, among people controlling the different organs of society. The fundamental point, however, is that there are inequalities of various kinds in Soviet society, and that these are related directly or indirectly—often directly—to the differential access people have to the commanding positions in the organisations through which social life is planned and regulated. It would be tedious to make an inventory of all the manifestations of inequality in Soviet society. Clearly, there are inequalities of income, and the policy of uravnilovka or income-levelling, which was tried out in the ’twenties, had to be reversed. There are differences in levels of education, and also in the educational opportunities available to the different strata and to the different nationalities. Mental and manual occupations are unequally ranked, and indeed one may identify a whole scheme of evaluation in terms of which both objects and persons are ranked. We do not enter into the details of these because the purpose of the present chapter is simply to elucidate the nature of inequalities which arise out of the distribu¬ tion of power in society. Because of the abolition of the private ownership of the means of

70

Organisation and Structures of Power

production and the severe restrictions on the accumulation and inheritance of private wealth, inequalities in Soviet society are perhaps less visible than elsewhere. Inequalities of power tend on the whole to be less visible than inequalities of wealth under ordinary conditions. But when a society of the Soviet kind is gripped by an internal crisis the inequalities in it become palpable and real. Soviet society under Stalin has known its forced labour camps, purges and bloodbaths. When a reign of terror is unleashed in a society which has the most scientific instruments of coercion at its disposal, the gulf between those in control of these instruments and ordinary, unprotected citizens becomes as stark and unbridgeable as the gulf between the Brahmans and the Untouchables. The principal cases I have used for elucidating the inequalities of power and of status, in this and the preceding chapter, have been chosen with some deliberation and care. But is the peculiar concentra¬ tion and misuse of power by the Nazi leadership something normal, given the fundamental rationality of industrial societies ? And is not the peculiar preoccupation with purity and pollution, and the segregation of the Untouchables in traditional Hindu society, also something pathological ? I believe that there is much wisdom in the argument of the French sociologist, fimile Durkheim, that we ought to study the pathological if we are to fully understand the normal. As is well known, Durkheim tried to establish a science of social pathology which could be placed by the side of the science of social physiology. Today we realise that Durkheim failed in his effort and that there will perhaps never be a science of social pathology comparable to what there is in biology. The distinction between the ‘normal’ and the ‘pathological’ is nevertheless one that we cannot root out of our minds, and so long as it is there we must find some sensible way of grappling with it. At the very least, we must try to apply it in the same way to our own and to other societies. There has been much discussion in India about the place of untouchability in the normal scheme of things in traditional Hindu society. Gandhi believed that untouchability was an excrescence, a pathological growth which had nothing to do with the essential nature of caste which was a design for the division of labour. He maintained that caste had existed in the past without untouchability, and that untouchability could be purged from it without doing any

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damage to its fundamental design. As to caste itself, Gandhi did not believe that it was morally indefensible, although he was less articulate in his defence of the system in his later than in his earlier phase. Most educated Indians today would perhaps agree with Gandhi that untouchability is abnormal or even unnatural. The rules of caste which regulate marriage and occupation are one thing, but it is a totally dilferent thing to require some people to keep a distance of 64 feet or 128 feet from other people. Educated Indians are often inclined to attribute the evils of untouchability, or, in general, the excesses of caste to external causes such as British rule or even Muslim rule. Being progressive and well-intentioned people, they find it difficult to accept that such a pernicious thing as untouchability could be an integral part of a cultural tradition which they believe to have been essentially tolerant. Professional sociologists, particularly from the Western countries, are inclined to take a different view. They argue that there is both sanction for untouchability in the traditional texts and evidence of its practice for hundreds of years. Hence it is not a matter of great moment whether untouchability is or is not consistent with the ‘spirit of Hinduism’ as defined in a particular way. Personally, I am inclined to accept this argument because without it a great deal of what has been a part of Indian social reality for centuries would be very difficult to comprehend. It is far more difficult to get agreement from Western sociologists on the question whether modern totalitarianism is normal or pathological. Most of them would regard Hitler’s concentration camps, the death’s-head battalions of the ss and the gas chambers as pathological. As to the worst of Stalin’s purges, they would say either that these also were pathological or that reports of them are grossly exaggerated or unfounded. But the basic question to my mind is not whether particular persons have or have not misused power, but the extent to which the inequalities of power inherent in particular social arrangements allow this kind of misuse. There can be little doubt that the last five decades have witnessed violence and repression on an unprecedented scale. The purges under Stalin, the tortures of Hitler’s concentration camps, the violence of the War, the brutal and cold-blooded destruction of human, animal and plant life in Vietnam are all a part of the experience of the present or the recent past. What we need to ponder is whether

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there are certain structural conditions which make the exercise of this kind of dominance by some over others a common if not inescapable feature of societies of a certain kind. These are all questions that we can so far discuss only in qualitative, not to say impressionistic, terms. There is no easy or reliable way of measuring inequalities of power. There are different types of power, and different contexts in which they are exercised. While conceding this and more, we have to point out that the difficulties in measuring inequalities of status are not much smaller. Yet it seems to be assumed by a large number of people, sociologists included, that inequalities of status are greater in pre-industrial than in industrial societies. We must ask ourselves at least if the opposite may not be true of the inequalities of power.

Notes and References 1. Herbert Goldhamer and Edward A. Shils, ‘Types of Power and Status’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. XIV, No. 2, September 1939. 2. Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Love and Hate, The Natural History of Behaviour Patterns, Holt, Reinhart & Winston, 1971, p. 106. 3. Ibid., p. 102. 4. Isaac Schapera, Government and Politics in Tribal Societies, Watts, 1956. 5. Max Gluckman, ‘The Kingdom of the Zulu of South Africa’ in M. Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (eds.), African Political Systems, Oxford University Press, 1940. 6. Ibid., p. 33. 7. Franz Neumann, Behemoth, The Structure and Practice of National Social¬ ism, Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1942. 8. Ibid., p. 298. 9. Ibid., p. 299. 10. Ibid., p. 300. 11. Ibid., p. 312. 12. Ibid., p. 314. 13. Ibid., p. 304 14. I think it would be fair to say of the two major powers that if the Soviet Union has shown itself to be the more repressive in its internal relations, the United States has shown itself to be the more repressive in its external rela¬ tions. 15. Stanislav Ossowski, Class Structure in the Social Consciousness, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963, p. 137. 16. Milovan Djilas, The New Class, Thames and Hudson, 1957, p. 39. 17. Ibid., p. 40. 18. Ibid., p. 40.

4 Wealth, Property and Social Class ‘Father,’ he asked, ‘are the rich people stronger than any one else on earth?’ ‘Yes, Ilusha,’ I said, ‘there are no people on earth stronger than the rich.’ Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov I have so far discussed social inequality in terms of the inequalities of status and power. This is mainly because I wanted to relate in¬ equality to the general conditions of social existence. If societies are to be what they are, certain conditions must be met; these conditions themselves constitute the source of inequality. Status and power are both analytical categories; as such they have a somewhat abstract character. Ordinarily people view social inequality not in terms of status and power as the sociologist thinks of them, but in more concrete terms. People’s perception of in¬ equality varies from one society to another, depending upon the specific institutional matrix in which it is embedded. While in abstract and general terms the sources of inequality are the same in all societies, its concrete manifestations differ greatly from one society to another. To a very large number of people in the modern world, social inequality means above all the division of society into classes, and the unequal distribution of property, wealth, income and other ‘economic’ or ‘material’ factors. We must remember that ‘class’ has not been viewed as the quintessential form of inequality in all societies or even in Western society until recent times. In ‘aristocratic’ or ‘feudal’ or ‘traditional’ societies people viewed inequality as much in terms of birth as in terms of wealth. However, modern societies of every kind are greatly preoccupied with the problems of property and social class, and to deny them a place of importance in a discussion of social inequality would be an act of evasion. By the middle of the nineteenth century a new type of society had

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established itself in the countries of Western Europe. This type of society came to be governed on the one hand by the rule of property and on the other by the market principle, and its internal division into capitalists (or mere owners of the means of production) and workers (or owners of mere labour power) began to acquire increas¬ ing prominence. The new society was in many ways different from the society of fixed estates it had come to displace. Some welcomed t in it the promise of equality, for it set itself against hereditary privilege which to many of the critics of the old regime had been the quintessence of inequality. Others condemned it for the seeds of new inequalities which they said they saw embedded in the very soil on which it grew. Almost from the very beginning the critics of the new society, which they described as capitalist or bourgeois society, saw private property as being both the basis of its structure as a whole and the principal source of inequality in it. In the old society hereditary privilege had been the main target of attack, in the new it was private property. These two were viewed, rightly or wrongly, as the principal sources of inequality in the one and the other type of society. In the light of this perception it is not difficult to understand even today the appeal of Proudhon’s famous formula that property is theft. The classic ideological debate of the nineteenth century was the debate over property. On the one side were the defenders of property who maintained that it was the best safeguard of liberty, and that in a society based on fair competition only the best would be economically the most successful. On the other were the opponents of property who argued that a regime of property could not but be a regime of classes, of exploitation and of social inequality. If the debate over property assumed such a critical importance, the inference must be that its role in social life as a whole must have become either more enlarged or more visible at that time. It was through this debate that in mid-nineteenth century Europe the concept of the future society took shape, a society that would be at the same time more rational and more humane than bourgeois or capitalist society. This society of the future, referred to alternatively as communist or socialist society, would abolish private property and through this means the division of the world into classes. Clearly the most important social thinker of this whole period was( Mar^, and it was through the writings of Marx more than anyone else that

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75

the concept of class came to be linked indissolubly with the concept of property. The division of the industrial societies of today into two categories the capitalist societies of the Usa and Western Europe, and the ‘socialist’ societies of the ussr and Eastern Europe—had its origin in the debate over property and social class, and the marks of this origin are conspicuous even today. The capitalist societies are economically organised through private ownership in the means of production, and the presence of classes there is freely acknowledged. The socialist societies do not allow private ownership in the means of production, and the presence of classes there is acknolwedged only conditionally. Has the abolition of private property in the means of production in the socialist countries led to the disappearance of classes? Certainly, if we define classes in a particular way. But we have seen that inequalities that are both real and substantial continue to exist m the Soviet Union and in other socialist countries. This merely confirms the point earlier made that inequality is a much broader concept than class; by abolishing the latter we do not necessarily get rid of the former. The debate on property and social class has not remained confined to the economically advanced societies in which capitalism acquired a mature form. It is now an issue of very great importance in the economically backward societies of the Third World. No matter what the nature of the traditional economy here might have been, there is some evidence in most of them of the extension of what is called the capitalist mode of production. Wherever there is evidence of this, there is some room for applying the classic method of class analysis developed by Marx in the context of mid-nineteenth century European society. I mentioned a little while ago that status and power are abstract categories whereas class is believed to be something concrete and tangible. But is there a generally acceptable definition of class ? No sooner do we ask this question than we realise that the mere fact that people discuss something widely and intensely is not a guarantee that they will be agreed even on the terms of their discussion. Raymond Aron has said that a striking feature of modern societies, particularly in the West, is that they are obsessed by the idea of class and at the same time incapable of defining it.1

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Part of the ambiguity behind the concept of class is rooted in ideological controversy. The most important distinction here is between the Marxian and other conceptions of class. In the Marxian conception class is linked indissolubly to private property in the sphere of production. It is a crucial element in a whole theory of history in which the rise and fall of classes is attended by changes in the form of property. Other definitions widely used in the West, and particularly in the United States, do not view property as an essential criterion of class. They employ a variety of economic as well as non-economic criteria; in the extreme case class is equated with structured inequality as such, an equation which renders the concept of class all but useless. Commitment to a particular ideological position or a particular theory of history does not guarantee a consistent or unambiguous definition of class. The critics of Marx have not been slow to point out that although he repeatedly stressed the cardinal significance of class, he nowhere gave a precise definition of it. The concept of class was used by Marx in all his important writings on society and history, but the meaning attached to it shifted from one context to another. The various meanings given by Marx to the term ‘class’ have been pointed to not only by his American critics but also by the leading Marxist sociologist of Poland, Stanislav Ossowski.2 The point to bear in mind about the Marxian concept of class is that it is part of a larger theory which deals with a fluid and amor¬ phous reality in the process of acquiring shape. The concept tries to grasp the amorphous nature of the present reality and at the same time to anticipate the shape it will take in the future. It might be said on behalf of Marx that while the meanings he attaches to the term ‘class’ appear different if we take them one at a time, taken together and as a whole, they reveal a certain structure. What impressed Marx so much about his time was the growing / separation between capital and labour. On the one side, vast enter¬ prises were becoming concentrated in a few hands. On the other, the masses of people were becoming alienated from the instruments as well as the fruits of their labour. It was this asymmetry between capitalists (or owners of the means of production) and workers (non-owners) that Marx took to be the basic fact about class as well as capitalist society. At no time in human history did private owner¬ ship appear so decisive in dividing society into groups with conflicting interests.

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The vast majority of people think of class in terms of economic inequality or economically determined inequality. This remains true despite the somewhat confusing attempts made by certain people to distinguish between ‘economic’ class on the one hand and ‘political’ or even social class on the other. Even if we ignore for the time being the distinction between economic and economically determined, it is not easy to decide what the label ‘economic’ ought to cover. Actually it is used to cover a large variety of factors including property, wealth, income and even occupation. As is well known, Marx rejected both income and occupation as criteria for the definition of class, although these criteria are still very widely used. If we divide society on the basis of the distribution of income, we will get a very large number of categories representing more the schemes of the investigator than the perceptions of the people themselves. Moreover, Marx would argue, the distribution of income is a surface phenomenon whose true significance cannot be grasped unless we examine the property structure of a society. Similarly, he would argue, the distribution of occupations is an aspect of the division of labour of a society rather than its class structure. By linking the class structure to the institution of property Marx was able to argue that it would be possible to create a classless society. In such a society there would of course be different occupations and even differences of income, but once the distinction between owners and non-owners of the means of production was eliminated, classes in at least one important sense of the term would cease to exist. If we accept this mode of reasoning, we can argue further that classes in this sense are not equally important in all societies. They are most important in those societies—like mid-nineteenth century England— where private ownership of capital is a decisive factor in the organisa¬ tion of production. Where individual ownership in the means of production is not clearly defined, and the line between owners and non-owners is difficult to draw, they are likely to be less important. Marx’s conception of class has been extended by Max Weber. To begin with, we must note that he is basically in agreement with Marx in regarding property as the crucial factor. ‘ “Property” and “lack of property” are, therefore, the basic categories of all class situations.’3 From here he goes on to argue that classes may be further differentiated according to ‘the kind of property that is usable for returns’ and according to ‘the kind of services that can be offered

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in the market’.4 Owners are thus differentiated according to the quality and quantity of their property (landowners, owners of enterprises) and non-owners according to the types and conditions of their service (unskilled casual workers, legal consultants). Along with property, Weber attaches great significance to the market in defining classes. As he puts it, ‘ “Class situation is, in this sense, ultimately “market situation” ’.5 He maintains that what justifies our placing individuals in a particular class is the fact that by virtue of possessing either certain types of property or certain types of skill, they have identical chances in the market. Once again we see the close link between class as conceived in a certain way and certain institutional systems, viz. property and the market which are, moreover, themselves closely related. Weber’s formulation of the concept in terms of property, market situation and life chance provides perhaps the best clue to an under¬ standing of what people mean when they talk about class being basically an economic category. If in a certain type of society property and wealth are the most effective determinants of the life chance of the individual (or his class position), then in the same type of society income is probably its best indicator. Following the same reasoning, it is not difficult to see why education is so widely viewed as both a determinant and an indicator of class in this type of society. For the time being I shall leave the question open as to whether classes exist in all societies, or are a feature of only a particular type of society or a particular phase of human history. Opinions differ greatly on this question, depending upon and in turn determining the definition of class employed. In the discussion that follows I shall view classes mainly in terms of the institutions of property and the market, without denying altogether the relevance of other ‘economic’ factors such as income, occupation or even education. Since Marx has contributed most to our understanding of the subject, it is only proper that we begin with his conception of class. I have now prepared the ground for the main argument of this chapter which is that wealth and property are bases of inequality because their possession confers either status or power, or both. I have said enough about status and power in the two preceding chapters to make my meaning clear without needing to provide a formal definition of either. In the modern world it seems almost self-evident that riches,

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wealth and property should be valued in themselves. We can find evidence of this from all around us. The possession of land, of estates, mansions, jewels and other forms of wealth is actively sought for the status they confer on their owners. Those who amass fortunes in business or industry are esteemed not only for the qualities of which their success is believed to be a guarantee, but also for their possessions. These possessions are visible markers of their superior status, and are valued both when they are self-acquired and when they are acquired by inheritance. The possession of wealth is of course not the only criterion of status, and societies differ greatly in the extent to which mere wealth is valued in itself. Again, there are different kinds of wealth, and they do not all confer status of the same kind or to the same degree on their possessors. In agrarian societies land is the pre-eminent form of wealth. The status conferred by money differs from one society to another. It tends to be more effective in societies which are characterised by mobility and change, although even in a country like the United States the old rich enjoy a higher social status than the new rich. Even where capitalism is most deeply entrenched money has to contend with other factors as a criterion of status. Money has generally more room for play in countries like the United States and Australia which have a shorter history than in countries like England or France which have a longer history. In the older countries a high value is attached to family tradition over and above family wealth; whatever the original basis on which the tradition was established, a number of intangible factors always become incorpora¬ ted in it. In a new society, where opportunities for monetary success are relatively open, ‘wealth’ tends to displace ‘tradition’ as a criterion of status. In all societies there is a time lag between the acquisition of property and its acceptance as a criterion of status. As Weber puts it, ‘Property as such is not always recognised as a status qualification, but in the long run it is, and with extraordinary regularity’.6 The time lag, which is in some sense crucial, varies from one type of society to another. ‘Traditional’ or ‘aristocratic’ societies are less inclined to concede status to the newly rich. In modern, democratic societies the rich find it easier to acquire status, although even here at least a generation must elapse before property becomes fully acceptable as a qualification for status.

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What happens under capitalism is that there is increasingly a market for most things that are associated with status, whether as qualifications or as symbols. Here lies the significance of the market when we view property, wealth or income as criteria of status. In all societies these can be translated into status, but the translation is made more smooth and effective with the extension of the market. Thus the ‘economic’ factor as a criterion of status becomes generalised under capitalism in two ways: economic opportunities become avail¬ able to increasingly larger sections of people, and the translation of economic gains into gains of status becomes increasingly easy for all. I have in the preceding paragraphs used the terms ‘property’, ‘wealth’ and ‘money’ somewhat loosely, without applying rigorous distinctions. In this I have followed the convention among con¬ temporary sociologists to group together the various economic factors and to treat them as being of the same broad kind. This is permissible under certain conditions, but not under others. I have followed this procedure only while relating these various economic factors to status, my argument being that here they act broadly in the same way, and increasingly so under capitalism. This probably is the main reason why ‘class’ and ‘status’ are so frequently and easily confused in modern usage, not only in ordinary conversation but also in textbooks of sociology. Property confers not only status but also power, although it operates somewhat differently in the two cases. In both cases the fact of scarcity is important. Property is an object of value as well as an instrument of control, but because it is scarce, some have it and others do not, or some have more of it than others. At the same time the objects of value that may be secured through income from property may also be secured through income from other sources. Hence property is not decisive for acquiring status in every instance, although in some societies its role clearly overshadows that of other factors. In a society where the means of production are privately owned, property secures control not only over things but also over persons. Productive activity, involving the reciprocal actions of persons, requires some measure of organisation, and, in general, the larger the scale of activity, the more insistent the demands of organisa¬ tion. Now, it is invariably the case that under a regime of property those who own capital and land also control the commanding heights of the organisation through which production is achieved.

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Again, the power of property becomes particularly conspicuous in those societies where the cleavage between owners and workers is sharpest. Property becomes power mainly through its role in the organisation of production. On the other hand, property can be a qualification for status without being put to productive use. Individuals who own enterprises acquire power over men without always using their wealth to acquire the symbols of status. No doubt their property itself entitles them to some status, but not necessarily in proportion to the power it enables them to command. One can find numerous well-documented examples from societies in the early stages of capitalism of men who gained very little in status as they rose from humble origins to own enterprises, but whose power over the increasing number of their employees, sometimes of better ‘social class’ than they, would be beyond question. We can now see why it is misleading to equate property and income, or even property and wealth while talking about class. For while income from property and from other sources might have similar consequences for status, their consequences for power are generally different. The equation of various ‘economic’ factors such as property, occupation, income and even education is made on the implicit assumption that classes are to be viewed essentially in terms of prestige or status. Our argument, on the other hand, is that the inequality among classes has to do not merely with status but also with power. At the risk of some simplification, one may say that American sociology views classes mainly in terms of prestige or status, paying less attention to power, whereas Marxism views them mainly in terms of the inequality of power, paying less attention to status. Property is not the only basis of power any more than it is the only qualification for status. In all societies it has to contend with other bases of power, but less so in some societies than in others. At one extreme are societies like the Soviet Union which have done away with private ownership in the means of production; here wealth as such might bring prestige but hardly power. At the other extreme are countries like the United States where private ownership is predominant in the system of production; here property brings both prestige and power. It is well known that, according to Marx, in capitalist societies property is not merely a basis of power, it is the predominant basis

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of power. There is indisputable evidence that the apparatus of production exercises pressure on the apparatus of government, and we shall examine some of this evidence a little later. But it would be an exaggeration to say for any society that all inequalities, or even all inequalities of power, follow directly from the distribution of property. The United States of America is generally held to be the best example in the contemporary world of a capitalist society, or a society in which private property has a pre-eminent place in everyday life and is also upheld as a legitimate principle of social and economic organization. Property is valued both for itself and for the things it can procure, and it is also an instrument of control over persons through its role in the system of production. In other words, property is an important basis of both status and power. In the following paragraphs we shall consider the question of ‘class’ in American society, taking up first the question of status and then the question of power, and at the end asking how far classes may be viewed as corporate groups. A large number of community studies have been made by sociolo¬ gists and social anthropologists in the United States in course of the last fifty years. Irrespective of the theoretical positions adopted, they all bring out the importance of money as a criterion of social class and, indeed, of social position in general. The importance of money comes out particularly clearly in those studies which deal primarily with ‘prestige classes’ or with social class viewed primarily in terms of status. Differences of wealth are readily visible in small communities, and the rise and fall of family fortunes are noted with diligence and care. Money is, of course, not the only criterion of status. Money loses value when combined with the wrong ethnic identity, and gains value when combined with the right family background. In other words, money in Jewish or Italian hands does not have the same value as it does in the hands of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants; and, of course, money cannot change one’s skin colour. At the other end, families of long standing require only moderate wealth to enjoy high social status. Money is a necessary, even an important, criterion of status, but given the salience of race in American society, it cannot be a sufficient condition. In addition to the amount, the source of wealth is also important.

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It is good to be a man of means, but it is better to be a man of independent means. In the United States, partly for historical reasons that have been widely discussed, a high value is attached to economic independence. Hence, other things being equal, income from property, whether land or capital, has the highest value. Next to these come the independent professions, notably law and medicine. Well below are the white- and blue-collar occupations which do not in any case, provide very high incomes. Perhaps it is no accident that the extent to which an occupation is independent or is deemed to be independent is closely related to the amount of income it provides. A large number of community studies have shown that one’s economic worth is assessed not just by what one earns, but also, and perhaps even more, by what one spends. Patterns of con¬ sumption are differentiated by both how much one spends and on what one spends. People who have the same income may spend different amounts, and people who spend the same amount may spend it on different things. Here again there are important differences between pre-capitalist and capitalist economic systems. In the latter money tends to become the pre-eminent measure of consumption, so that what is exclusive is also expensive, and what is cheap is at the same time common and vulgar. Capitalism makes possible and also fosters on an unprecedented scale the consumption of its multifarious products. ‘In turn, inevit¬ ably, this affects social values. A family’s standard of living becomes an index of its achievement. It helps ensure that the production and, pari passu, the consumption of goods will be the prime measure of social accomplishment.’7 While these values tend to become internal¬ ised through the entire range of society, the extent to which they can be effectively realised varies greatly from one stratum to another. Differences in expenditure are most readily visible in regard to material objects. The kinds of houses in which people live, the furniture and domestic appliances they use, the cars they maintain, the dress they wear, can all be graded relatively easily in terms of their price, and those who own or use them placed accordingly on a socio¬ economic scale. Expenses on non-material aspects of social life, particularly on entertainment and other leisure-time activities, may be similarly graded, although with less ease, and this gradation also serves as an indicator of social class. What I am trying to argue is that in a capitalist society the expenses on most items are relatively

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easy to calculate, and this fact itself tends to make money the pre¬ eminent measure of status. It has been widely documented that in American communities there is a close relationship between social status and membership in voluntary associations. American society is well known as a society of joiners. But joining a club is not merely an expression of the urge to be sociable; it has economic costs as well as economic advantages. The more exclusive clubs are invariably the more expensive, although factors like race and ethnicity are also relevant to exclusion. The socially more successful people or those who enjoy higher social status are usually members of several clubs of which some at least are both exclusive and expensive. Members of the lower income groups cannot afford to participate fully in these socially rewarding experiences even though they might have every inclination to be sociable. It is in a sense a truism that something is expensive because it has a high social value, for then it is widely in demand. Rather more interesting is the converse propostion that things acquire a high social value because they are expensive, even when they do not have much use or much beauty. This proposition has been a subject of much debate among social critics in the United States ever since Thorstein Veblen published his famous book, The Theory of the Leisure Class8 at the end of the last century. Despite his flair for large generalisations, Veblen was in effect reacting to what he saw around himself, and his arguments have a particular force when applied to the America of his times. A dominant feature of American life is, in Veblen’s terms, its pecuniary culture. A pecuniary culture is one in which the ultimate, and not infrequently the immediate, measure of most things is their cash value. In such a culture the standards of evaluation are in one way or another pecuniary standards. A pecuniary culture legitimises pecuniary canons of taste. Veblen gives many examples, some rather overdrawn, of pecuniary canons of taste in American life. These range from gardens and flower arrangements to pets and domestic animals. The pecuniary culture has a fascination for everything that is costly: ‘The superior gratifica¬ tion derived from the use and contemplation of costly and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty’.9 Conversely, it disdains everything that is cheap: ‘It puts us on our

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guard against cheapness by identifying merit in some degree with cost.’10 Despite the exaggerations, Veblen’s work draws attention to an aspect of American culture whose significance has been noted and commented upon by many from both within and outside. A more recent and, on the whole, more careful and reliable student of American society, Robert Merton, has presented a view of it which in our perspective is substantially similar to the one described above. Merton addresses himself specifically to the relationship between cultural goals and the institutional procedures made available for their attainment. He maintains that such goals are in every society ‘ordered in some hierarchy of value’,11 and that a problem of adjust¬ ment arises for the individual whenever ‘there is an exceptionally strong emphasis upon specific goals without a corresponding emphasis upon institutional procedures’.12 Our concern here is not with deviant behaviour, which is Merton’s principal interest, but with those cultural goals on which there is, according to Merton, ‘an exceptionally strong emphasis’ in American society. Merton notes the very strong emphasis placed on success, and the significance of pecuniary standards in measuring success. Being a careful observer, he says, ‘It would of course be fanciful to assert that accumulated wealth stands alone as a symbol of success just as it would be fanciful to deny that Americans assign it a place high in their scale of values.’13 He goes on to add: ‘In some large measure, money has been consecrated as a value in itself, over and above its expenditure for articles of consumption or its use for the enhance¬ ment of power.’14 The American Dream is conceived largely and characteristically in terms of monetary success. Merton’s analysis points also to the fact that the dream of monetary success is not equally a feature of all human societies. Merton attempts to uncover the structural basis of the value placed on pecuniary success in societies of the American kind: ‘Money’ is peculiarly well adapted to become a symbol of prestige. . . . However acquired, fraudulently or institutionally, it can be used to purchase the same goods and services. The anonymity of an urban society, in conjunction with these peculiarities of money, permits wealth, the sources of which may be unknown to the community in which the plutocrat lives or, if known, to become purified in the course of time, to serve as a symbol of high status. Moreover, in the American Dream there is no final stopping

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point. The measure of ‘monetary success’ is conveniently indefinite and relative. At each income level, as H. F. Clark found, Americans want just about twenty-five per cent more. ... 15 In other words, in a capitalist society, based on the principle of individual achievement through competition, pecuniary success becomes almost inevitably a pre-eminent cultural goal. The emphasis on the goal of pecuniary success is revealed when we examine the process of socialisation in America. The American is exposed to pressures for achieving pecuniary success from every side and at every stage in his life. In the family parents inculcate these values among their children. In the school teachers and fellow students define success, implicitly or explicitly, in terms of monetary standards. In the workshop and the office the same values are emphasised at every point. American literature at its worst expresses these values crudely and aggressively; at its best it portrays the ultimate futility of the same values. The strong emphasis placed on pecuniary values or on ‘consumer¬ ism in American culture has been a subject of wide comment and, indeed, of growing anxiety in American society. No account of the culture of capitalist systems will be complete without some reference to what has now come to be known as the counter-culture.16 It is precisely because the earlier promise of capitalism to bring satisfac¬ tion to all through an economy of abundance has failed to materialise that the young in particular are now looking for an alternative. But this alternative, as a coherent system of values, still lies in the future, and it is difficult to foresee by what kind of social arrangement it will be sustained. One can no doubt find examples of the pecuniary habit of mind from most if not all complex societies. In many pre-capitalist societies there are sections of people (money-lenders, traders, artisans) who place a high value on pecuniary success. But in capitalist societies these values become generalised and tend to displace other values, such as those of honour or purity, from their former position of pre-eminence. American society appears to have gone further in this regard than most societies. Soviet society, on the other hand took a somewhat different turn at its very inception; there the official restrictions on consumption and the attachment to collective as opposed to individual goals arrested at least in some measure and tor some time the growth of a pecuniary culture.

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Having considered property and wealth as criteria of status in American society, I shall now consider them as bases of power. It cannot be too strongly emphasised that just as there are other criteria of status in American society, there are also other bases of power in it. It is only fair to add that no serious student of property and class is likely to assert that an understanding of these will provide an immediate answer to every question regarding inequality in any society. The linkage between property, or, more specifically, capital and power is of course most closely established in Marxian theory. But that such a linkage exists would now be widely, if not universally, accepted. As Galbraith says, ‘In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians’.17 This linkage has far-reaching significance for our understanding of inequality in any capitalist system. A number of community studies made by American social scientists address themselves specifically to the problem of community power, identifying the positions of power in the community and examining their social and economic bases. One of the first studies of this kind was Floyd Hunter’s book on an urban community he calls Regional City.18 This work has become a subject of controversy, although its findings are broadly in agreement with earlier studies such as those by Robert and Helen Lynd, and later studies by several scholars. Put in very simple terms, Hunter’s findings are that in Regional City there are marked inequalities in the distribution of power. A small number of persons, closely related by background and interest, run the city. The big decisions are taken by them, either openly or from behind the scenes, and most people in the community recognise and acknowledge their power even when they do not occupy import¬ ant official positions. Further, according to Hunter, the people who have real power, as opposed to official position, are men of wealth and property, and their power is based mainly on the economic advantages they enjoy. Some recent and fairly careful students of American politics, such as Robert Dahl19 and Nelson Polsby,20 have come to conclusions about the distribution of power in American communities that are somewhat different from those of Hunter. Objections have been raised against the kind of study made by Hunter on grounds of method. Hunter relied heavily on what has come to be known as the

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‘reputational approach’ according to which people are considered to wield power if such is their reputation among representative sections of the community. As against this, it may be said that reputations are often misleading, and tell us less about power than about prestige. Both Dahl and Polsby maintain that the notion of a small, welldefined and cohesive elite taking all the important decisions in a community is largely a myth. The idea that this elite owes its power primarily to its wealth is, in their view, also false. American com¬ munities are governed not by a single elite but by a plurality of decision makers who differ considerably from each other in both background and interest; also, they owe their influence to a variety of different factors, and not wealth alone. These, according to Dahl and to Polsby, are the conclusions which follow from analyses of actual political decisions. Dahl’s conclusions, when looked at closely, do not contradict altogether the point of view adopted here, although there is un¬ doubtedly a difference of emphasis. He concedes, firstly, that political influence (he seems to prefer ‘influence’ to ‘power’) is unevenly distributed, and, secondly, that political resources are also unevenly distributed.21 Beyond this, the degree to which political power is concentrated in a few hands and the relative importance of wealth among the various political resources are questions of fact to which there will be different answers for different communities. The analysis of political decisions can take us only up to a point in providing these answers, for not all decisions, particularly decisions that are crucial to the exercise of power, are made available for analysis to the social scientist. More important than this is the fact that the inequalities of power in a national society might be rather different in kind from the inequalities of power in each one of a number of local communities. After all, a national society like that of the United States is something more than a mere aggregate of local communities. Even when a few men with substantial economic resources live in a particular town, they may be more interested in exercising power in the larger society, and relatively indifferent to the exercise of power in the local community in which they happen to reside. From the sociological point of view the most striking recent discussion of the power of property in the United States is to be found in the work of C. Wright Mills.22 Unlike those we have just considered, Mills concerns himself mainly with the distribution of

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power in the national society. He contends that, despite the rhetoric of democracy, there are marked and growing inequalities of power in America, manifested in the division of society into an elite and the masses. The elite, in Mills’s language, comprises an interlocking directorate of the corporate rich, the military establishment and the political directorate. The relative importance of these three com¬ ponents might fluctuate, but, considered over a period of time, the first has been the strongest and the last the weakest. We do not need to follow Mills in all his arguments or to examine all the criticisms to which they have given rise. Obviously, he has not considered the full body of evidence, and some of his evidence might be interpreted in a different way. But his argument about Big Business has, in its essential features, stood the test of criticism fairly well. Big Business is owned and controlled by the corporate rich who not only have power over those in their employ, but, by being able to influence Government policy through economic pressures of various kinds, can exercise a measure of dominance over society as a whole. Who are the corporate rich? To what do they owe their power? How are they able to hold on to the power they inherit and acquire ? How is their power exercised? A consideration of these questions will give us some insight into the role of property in maintaining inequalities in a capitalist social and economic system. As is well known, American society is characterised not only by great wealth, but also by extremes of wealth and poverty. While we shall focus mainly on the power of property, we must not lose sight of the fact that there is both poverty and unemployment in the most affluent society in the world; indeed poverty and unemployment themselves contribute in no small measure to the power of property. Just as in totalitarian systems the power of office reveals its full might in times of political crisis, so also in capitalist systems the power of property reveals its full strength in times of economic crisis. When such a crisis is on, even the pretence of equal opportunities for the rich and the poor, or for the propertied and the propertyless has to be abandoned. In the USA, according to Wright Mills, those who are really wealthy, i.e. whose annual incomes in the middle ’fifties exceeded $100,000, derive their incomes mainly from property rather than from salaries or fees; and much of their property is inherited rather than self-acquired. However, the wealthy are in general an economic-

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ally active set of people, and not mere rent receivers. Many of them combine inherited wealth with the high salaries they receive from their top executive positions in the corporations which they control and which in turn control the economy. It is in this sense that, according to Mills, ‘family wealth’ is being transformed into ‘corporate wealth’ in the United States. The tremendous expansion in the economic power of the corpora¬ tion is a fact to which Mills—along with many others—attaches much importance: Not great fortunes but great corporations are the important units of wealth, to which individuals of property are variously attached. The corporation is the source of wealth, and the basis of the continued power and privilege of wealth. All the men and the families of great wealth are now identified with large corporations in which their property is seated.23 The expansion in the scale of economic activities of the modern corporation is often justified in terms of increased efficiency. However, it is just as easy to find proof of the increased economic power of the expanding corporation as of its increased economic efficiency. Thus, a notable feature of mature capitalist systems is the progressive displacement of the entrepreneur by the corporation at the commanding heights of the economy. The economic basis of inequality is perhaps most clearly manifest in a system dominated by individual enterpreneurs: ownership of capital and power over others are visibly combined in the same hands. With the partial separation between ownership and control the picture becomes a little less clear. At the same time, the expansion in the scale of activities of the modern corporation places enormous power in the hands of those who effectively control it. It is not as if there have been no checks on the powers of the corporations: in their expansion they have had to contend all along with the powers of the state. In America the public as well as the state have regarded monopoly as an evil to be resisted. A whole series of enactments, beginning with the Sherman Act of 1890, have sought to restrict the monopolistic advantages of the large corpora¬ tions. Despite these well-intentioned efforts, the large corporations have grown larger and have increased their powers.

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The powers of the large corporation extend to the whole of society. They have used their vast resources—and the skills these are able to buy—to contain or frustrate the many attempts that have undoubtedly been made to restrict these powers. To quote Mills once again, ‘the very rich have used existing laws, they have circumvented or violated existing laws, and they have had laws created and enforced for their direct benefit .24 This is not to argue that heads of corporations, any more than heads of state, are above the law; only, they have a better chance than most people to define the terms of economic competition in their own favour. Or to put it in the language of Max Weber, the power derived from a constellation of interests in a formally free market is a source of inequality no less than the power derived from established authority. Having seen how the distribution of property is related to in¬ equalities of both status and power, we must now ask how these inequalities are in their turn related to class. Scholars differ very much in their views about the nature and significance of classes in capitalist societies today. Some regard the class structure of these societies to be their most fundamental feature while others talk about the withering away of class. Some view the relations between classes as relations of conflict while others see them in terms of emulation. Some see the class structure of America as becoming increasingly polarised while others view America as being essentially a ‘middle-class society’. Clearly, inequality is not synonymous with class. Classes are formed when divisions between groups not only exist but are generally perceived to exist by the members of society and become a basis for organised political action. Inequalities of the kind we have discussed, even when they arise from the distribution of property, may be a necessary condition for the formation of classes; they are not a sufficient condition. To what extent the social inequalities arising from the distribution of property and wealth have led in the United States to the formation of classes in the specific sense of the term used here is a question of fact which cannot be examined in detail here. But the evidence we have from the United States and from societies similarly constituted is clear on one point: neither the polarisation of classes nor the conflict between them follows automatically from a given distribution of material resources. Indeed it is by now a truism that the class struggle failed to emerge in those societies where it was most expected

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by its theoreticians, and has erupted in societies where it was least expected. Without denying to property its position of importance in American society, there are two features of this society that we must keep in mind. Firstly, there are other bases than property, wealth and income for the inequalities of both status and power. Secondly, the inequalities of status and power, even when they are based on property, wealth and income, do not necessarily coincide. When we try to divide the population of a modern capitalist society in economic terms, we cannot but be struck by the ambiguities of these divisions. The effort to present them in a clear and unified theoretical framework has bedevilled generations of sociologists, and their mood is perhaps best expressed in the words of Raymond Aron: If there are so many ways of conceiving of class, and if it appears that the more one speaks about it, the less one knows what it is, the reason is partly that they really are indeterminate. The ambi¬ guity is there in our science because, to begin with, it is there in reality.25 This of course is not in any way a concession to the argument that the inequalities with which we have been concerned in this chapter are imaginary and not real.

Property is a basis of inequality not only in the United States, but also in a large number of both ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ societies. The capitalist system, based on the principle of private ownership in the means of production and governed by the market principle, has become widely generalised and has had far-reaching consequences for the system of inequality in many of the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Even in India, the caste system, which as we have seen was based on a different principle, has had to adapt itself to the new principles of economic organization, and today members of the upper castes are losing their traditional position wherever their economic position has become weak and insecure. The countries of the Third World are predominantly agrarian rather than industrial, but capitalism, though associated in its characteristic form with industrial production, can be applied to

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agriculture as well as to industry. In agrarian societies land is a factor of very great importance, and this becomes particularly evident as soon as it comes into the market. Talking about the importance of land in the South Asian countries, Gunnar Myrdal says, ‘Particularly in the South Asian rural setting, inequality is in fact mainly a question of land ownership—with which are associated leisure, enjoyment of status and authority. Income differences are considered less significant’.26 In what follows we shall discuss how in contemporary India land constitutes an important basis for inequa¬ lities of both status and power. When we examine the relationship between landownership and social inequality in India what strikes us at once is the scarcity of land and the relentless pressure of population on it. Moreover, even after the reforms since independence, land continues to be very unevenly distributed, so that in every region there are large landowners, small landowners and owners of dwarf holdings. At the very bottom are the landless whose proportions are rising, because of the growth of population and the slow transfer of this population from agriculture to industry. In short, one of the most pressing problems in the countryside is what is widely described today as the problem of land hunger. Asian societies are often described as peasant societies, creating the misleading impression of vast and homogeneous masses of people living in the countryside, owning small parcels of land on which they work in family teams. This is very different from the reality in most Asian countries and certainly in India. The villages often contain non-working landowners, large and small, cultivating owners having holdings of various sizes, tenants with occupancy rights, and landless people of whom some are sharecroppers and some are wage labourers. In India the land reforms have broken up the large estates and today a holding of fifty or even twenty-five acres might be considered large; but the categories enumerated above are all still present and constitute an important aspect of the system of inequality. Traditionally the distribution of land was at least in principle an aspect of the caste system. The Brahmans and Kshatriyas held land by virtue of their superior position in the caste hierarchy, and it was caste again that denied control over the land to the Untouch¬ ables. Today control over the land has become in principle detached from the hierarchy of caste. Land is bought and sold in the market,

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and anybody, no matter of what caste, is free to sell or buy it. The individual today owns the land in a much more exact sense of the term than he did in the traditional village community. In other words, the ownership of land as such is now a more important determinant of the individual’s social position than it was in the past. Landownership is an important criterion of status in villages throughout India. It is by no means the only criterion, but we see its significance from the fact that the ownership of land entitles the individual to high social status even when it is not combined with membership in a superior caste. Even before independence there were many substantial landowners who were not of the highest caste, and there were members of the highest castes who owned little or no land. Today the dissociation between caste and landownership has gone a little further, and when we view this along with the decline in the value attached to ritual purity, landownership is seen to gain as a criterion of status at the expense of caste membership. In the Indian village land has as a criterion of status a higher significance than other forms of wealth, and this is particularly true of ancestral land. In India, as in agrarian societies generally, status attaches not so much to the individual as to his family, and the family is there conceived much more broadly than in the West. Money as such may be made in various ways, not all of them equally reputable, but the ownership of land is always a matter of pride. Moreover, land is perhaps the most visible form of wealth; when somebody owns land, everybody in the village knows exactly how much he owns and what its value is. The establishment by the British rulers of India of the well-known Permanent Settlement in 1793 brough into being a new type of land¬ lord or zamindar throughout Eastern India. The British did not create landlords or zamindars as such, but they gave a new character to landownership. Instead of being received as a grant from the king for honourable or ritual service, land could now be bought in the market. The sale, purchase and auction of estates, which gradually became a routine during British rule, led to the collapse of many old families and to the rise of new ones. From now onwards families were to rise and fall in the scale of social esteem more and more according to their fortunes in the market. At the turn of the century the landlords or zamindars stood at the top of the social hierarchy in Bengal. They enjoyed the highest social esteem whether they were Brahmans or lower in the scale of

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caste. Caste certainly continued to be important, but there was a world of difference between the status accorded to a Brahman cook and to a Brahman landlord; and broadly the same status that was accorded to a Brahman zamindar would be extended to zamindars of somewhat lower caste, and, indeed, to Muslim zamindars. What is more, zamindars, whether of high or not-so-high caste, whether Hindu or Muslim, began increasingly to adopt a common style of life in which secular symbols of status were gradually displacing ritual ones. As I said earlier, the land reforms have broken up the large estates. The old zamindar families are in disarray or have left their ancestral villages. This of course does not mean that inequalities in the distribution of land have disappeared or that land has ceased to be a criterion of status. The land and its produce are becoming more tightly integrated into the mechanism of the market. A new ‘capitalist’ type of landowner is rising to the top at the expense of the old ‘feudal’ type. Land continues to be a very important criterion of status in the village although it may have to compete increasingly with other forms of wealth in the future. Land is not only a criterion of status, it is an important basis— some would say the most important basis—of power in rural India today. As I mentioned earlier, this has to be seen in the context of the rising demand for land as a means of livelihood among a large and increasing number of landless people. But it has to be seen also in the context of the breakdown of the traditional sanctions that ensured employment at least in some measure to all sections of the village community irrespective of their place in the social hierarchy. It has been said against the Permanent Settlement that it gave the landlord power over the cultivator of a kind he did not enjoy in the traditional set-up. In the past the cultivator could not be evicted from his land at will, no matter how low his social position; there would be traditional sanctions to protect him. These sanctions were undermined when the landowner acquired absolute or near-absolute rights of property in the land. This is not to suggest that there were no inequalities of power in the past, only that their economic basis was not as clear as it became after the Permanent Settlement. The British, having in due course come to realise the unintended consequences of their land policy, sought to extend protection to the cultivator by enacting a series of tenancy laws. These laws were

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only partially successful in protecting the tenants, for having transformed land into property which was being bought and sold increasingly in the market, the British had tilted the balance of power decisively in favour of the landowners. With the increase in population, labour became plentiful, but land remained scarce and its value rose proportionately. In any legal contest the landowner could use his resources, and the skills these could buy to harass, confound and crush his tenants. The collapse of the large estates has not reduced the role of land as a basis of power. If anything, its role has become strengthened with the increased pressure of population and with little prospect of employment outside agriculture in the village. Someone who owns twenty or even fifteen acres of land can be a master of the destinies of more than one family. In virtually every village in India there are people who own no land but need to work on it in order to earn a livelihood. They are therefore in a very important sense in the power of those who can provide them with an acre or two of land to cultivate as tenants or sharecroppers. The enormous demand for land leads sharecroppers to have generally a higher position than wage labourers. To quote a case from my own field material from South India: Just before the commencement of the agricultural season one can see landless people waiting on the mirasdar [landowner] and approaching him for the lease of a small plot of land. Failing in this, they may request that the mirasdar provide some work on his own farm, if he has any.27 The wage labourer may have to seek employment from day to day; he is therefore more beholden to the landowner than the share¬ cropper whose position is secure for at least a season. Economic inequalities can be studied at every level, from the village to the national society. They can also be studied in the relations among nations. Sociologists have, for a number of reasons, confined themselves largely to the framework of the national society whose internal structure they have examined from various points of view. ‘International relations’ has been considered a separate field to which the sociological approach has rarely been extended. However,

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nations exist in a larger international context whose role in shaping their destinies has become increasingly manifest in the second half of the twentieth century. There are some contemporary scholars who view the relations among nations on an analogy with the relations among classes. Just as there are rich and poor classes, so also there are rich and poor nations. Some would even argue that there is growing polarisa¬ tion among nations so that the rich nations are becoming richer and the poor nations, poorer. A step further from this would be to say that the rich nations are advancing at the expense of the poor ones; or, to put it in the language of a noted Brazilian economist,28 that there is a structural relationship between ‘development’ and ‘under¬ development’. It will require a separate work to discuss fully the arguments about colonialism and neo-colonialism, and their consequences for social inequality. A proper sociological framework for such a discussion hardly exists as yet. The whole discussion at present is, for under¬ standable reasons, charged with a high degree of polemic. Those who represent or are believed to represent the interests of the advanced countries try to present evidence that tends to show that the idea of polarisation is a myth; on the other side, scholars from the Third World are inclined to talk increasingly about polarisation as well as exploitation. Without making any pretence at full objectivity, I would like to present, in this concluding section, some of the issues that we must keep in mind while talking about inequalities in the international context. Frantz Fanon has written forcefully and vividly about the way in which ‘the native intellectual has thrown himself greedily upon Western culture’.29 The fascination for Western culture, which is not confined to intellectuals but is to be found among all sections of people in the Third World, constitutes one important dimension of the problem of social inequality with which we are here concerned. What are the material factors which contribute towards this fasci¬ nation? The economically advanced countries are today viewed throughout the world as having most of the good things of life. But how did the present evaluation of the good things of life come about ? This is an extremely difficult question to which no simple answer is available. But one thing is clear: if we are to ask which are the things that are valued in India, in Indonesia, in Senegal or in Brazil today,

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no satisfactory answer will be reached unless we also consider what was valued yesterday in West Europe and North America. The superior value attached in the Third World to what is ‘foreign’ or ‘imported’ is seen particularly in regard to material objects. It might be argued about countries like India that the high value attached to material possession as such in contrast, let us say, to ritual purity may itself be in some measure a consequence of the colonial experience. There is no denying the fact that among the higher strata of urban society imported gadgets of almost every kind have become the new symbols of status. It is also well known that what is imported from the West is given a disproportionately high value in comparison with the value given to corresponding local products, primarily because they are imported. Clearly, the high value placed on Western products cannot be attributed solely to the superior capacities of the Western productive system. We cannot dicuss here the historical reasons why certain objects and certain styles of life come to displace other objects and other styles of life as criteria of status. We can only take note of the fact that in many of the economically backward countries some of the crucial standards of evaluation are external standards and, more specifically, the standards prevalent in the economically advanced countries. The material advantages enjoyed by the economically advanced over the economically backward countries manifest themselves not only in inequalities of status but also, and perhaps more markedly, in inequalities of power. Within a colonial system the asymmetry between metropolitan country and colony is institutionalised through a framework of established authority. The classic pattern is where the colonies provide the raw materials which are processed in the metropolitan country through the application of advanced industrial techniques, and then fed back again into the colonies. In this kind of system the colonies provide the raw materials and the markets, and the profits are syphoned off into the metropolitan country. This kind of asymmetry or inequality survives the breakdown of the colonial system as a framework of established authority. What sustains it is the superior economic power of the advanced countries in relation to the backward countries. The pattern of investment in the backward countries, the balance between agriculture and industry, the factor and the product markets are all shaped in some measure at least according to the interests of the countries with superior

Wealth, Property and Social Class

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material resources and technical skills. In other words, in the international system no less than in the national economic system, some have a more decisive say than others in defining the terms of competition. It would, however, be wrong to conclude that inequalities in the international economic system have a fixed or stable character. The crisis created by the steep and sudden increase in oil prices shows in fact how fragile the system is.30 There is no doubt that the massive oil wealth of the opec countries has given them a new accession of power while being a source of deepening anxiety to the wealthy industrialised nations of the West. The recently poor Arab nations have now acquired more wealth than they are able to dispose of without causing serious imbalances in the international economy. One can at this point hardly venture to predict the full consequences of the oil crisis for inequalities in the international system. The opec countries are, with a few exceptions, very small in size; several of them have few resources other than oil; there are also many differ¬ ences among them in their short- and long-term economic and political interests.31 The industrialised countries of the West are in their turn different: some will be able to withstand the shock more effectively than others. But what seems more than likely is that the really poor countries of South Asia, Africa and Latin America will come off rather worse from the oil crisis than the rich countries of North America and West Europe.

Notes and References 1. Raymond Aron, La lutte de classes, Gallimard, 1964, p. 57. 2. Stanislav Ossowski, Class Structure in the Social Consciousness, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963. 3. Max Weber, ‘Class, Status, Party’ in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948, p. 182. 4. Ibid., p. 182. 5. Ibid., p. 182. 6. Ibid., p. 187. 7. John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, Penguin Books, 1974, p. 55. 8. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1925. 9. Ibid., p. 128. 10. Ibid., p. 158. 11. Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, The Free Press, 1968, p. 186.

100 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Wealth, Property and Social Class Ibid., p. 188. Ibid., p. 190. Ibid., p. 190. Ibid., p. 190. , „ See, for instance, Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, Anchor Books, 1969. Galbraith, The New Industrial State, op. cit., p. 65. Floyd Hunter, Community Power Structure, University of North Carolina Press, 1953. Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? Yale University Press, 1961. Nelson W. Polsby, Community Power and Political Theory, Yale University Press, 1963. See his Modern Political Analysis, Prentice-Hall Inc., 1963. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, Oxford University Press, 1956. Ibid., p. 116. Ibid., p. 99. Aron, La lutte de classes, op. cit., p. 72. Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama, Penguin Books, Vol. 1, 1968, p. 569. Andre Beteille, Caste, Class and Power, University of California Press, 1965, p. 123. Celso Furtado, Development and Underdevelopment, University of California Press, 1964. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Penguin Books, 1973, p. 176. Gerald A. Pollack, ‘The Economic Consequences of the Energy Crisis’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 52, No. 3, April 1974, pp. 452-71. Hollis B. Chenery, ‘Restructuring the World Economy’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 53, No. 2, January 1975, pp. 242-63.

5 Race and Social Stratification If we reason from what passes in the world, we should almost say that the European is to the other races of mankind what man himself is to the lower animals; he makes them subservient to his use, and when he cannot subdue he destroys them. Tocqueville Democracy in America For many people in the contemporary world the most immediate and oppressive form of inequality is that which they see as being rooted in race. In the United States, in South Africa and in certain other countries it is skin colour rather than income or occupation which is the most visible indicator of one’s place in society. Men and women belonging to different races have unequal opportunities, and when this manifests itself in a more or less fixed pattern of inequality between groups, we may use a geological metaphor and speak of society as being stratified in terms of race. In a racially stratified society the opportunities available to members of disfavoured races are severely restricted. Where one works, what one earns, where one lives, how one brings up one’s children—all these appear to be determined by the race into which one is born. Skin colour, unlike income or occupation, cannot be easily concealed or changed. This makes it appear all too often that those who are placed in a disfavoured condition are, as it were, fated to be in that condition. The relation between race and stratification is both variable and complex, and there is no satisfactory theory to deal with it. The middle of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of one kind of theory which based itself on the argument that the different races were unequally endowed. The unequal positions occupied by people belonging to different races was then explained as a natural conse¬ quence of a biological fact. This theory enjoyed a certain vogue in

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Europe and America, but broke down in the face of evidence which showed that differences in social condition had very little, if anything at all, to do with differences in biological endowment. In retrospect the biological theory of statification appears more as a rationalisation than an explanation of the prevailing pattern of relations between races. There is a second kind of theory, much more persuasive than the first, which seeks to account for stratification by race in terms of economic factors. Clearly, there is a close relation between ‘race’ and ‘class’ in all multiracial societies. Those who belong to the favoured races have proportionately a larger share of property and wealth, and those who belong to the disfavoured races have a correspondingly smaller share. Where property and wealth are crucial in determining life chances as well as life styles, all forms of inequality, whatever their ultimate basis, are bound to have a strong economic component. It is also true, however, that race and class often cut across. Thg^ mere possession of property or wealth does not offset the disadvantage of colour. Indeed, it can be easily shown that the disadvantage of colour itself limits access to property and wealth. How exactly does this disadvantage operate? This question takes us back again to a consideration of specific aspects of status and power in societies of a particular kind. It hardly needs to be said that stratification by race is visible only in some societies and not in all. Much depends on the extent to which the racial components out of which the society is constituted retain their distinctive identities. All complex societies are made up of diverse racial elements. In some cases these elements intermingle and lose their identity; in others they are made to retain, their identity through segregation, the segregated elements being ranked as high and low. Viewed in this light the key to the problem of race and social stratification lies in a study of the segregation of races—the moral value placed on this segregation and the material instruments through which it is enforced.

• The concept of race, like that of class, is inherently ambiguous. This ambiguity is there because race is at the same time a biological as well as a cultural fact. It is undeniable that races exist, like other biological taxa, as a part of nature. But it is also true that their existence acquires human significance only when they are socially

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recognised and assigned cutltural values. The point to keep in mind is that the natural divisions into biological daxa may not coincide exactly with the divisions that are recognised as socially significant. Two societies may be made up of the same biological taxa, yet the races recognised in them by the people themselves may be different. The understanding of race became a major preoccupation with anthropologists from the very inception of their discipline. Initially anthropologists directed much of their effort towards correcting popular or mistaken notions about race, and replacing them with a concept that would be scientifically acceptable. This proved to be rather more difficult than was at first imagined, and we are perhaps as far from a scientific definition of race today as our predecessors were a hundred years ago.1 However, we now realise that it is not enough to know what race is in the scientific sense, we must also know what people understand by race, whenever they have a definite idea of it, no matter how mistaken or unscientific that idea might be. Let us consider first the physical aspect of the problem: all students of the subject are agreed that race is a biological category. In simple terms a race is a group of persons who share and display a set of distinctive biological traits that are relatively stable, being acquired and transmitted through heredity. In other words, the members of a race not only resemble each other in their physical features, but there is also the presumption of their being related to each other through common descent. Now obviously the evidence on which common descent is presumed by ordinary people will not always be found very satisfactory from the scientific point of view. There is scope for disagreement in the choice of the traits to be used in the identification of races. Scientists use a large number of traits whereas popular classifications use only a few. Popular classi¬ fications are apt to pick upon traits that are readily visible whereas scientists, who have more refined instruments of discrimination, prefer traits that are more stable and can be more directly linked with genetic processes. Skin colour, which is so widely used in popular classifications, is given less importance by the human biologist than, let us say, blood type which, on the other hand, can be put to little use in the distinctions people make in their day-to-day living. Students of race have found it convenient to distinguish between ‘phenotypical’ and ‘genotypical’ traits. Phenotypical traits refer to

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what may be called surface structures, and genotypical traits to what may be called deep structures. The biologist naturally gives greater importance to genotypes whereas the sociologist concentrates more on phenotypes for in social life people react to observable differences rather than to the invisible factors that underlie these differences. The external characteristics most commonly used in conventional classifications of race are skin colour, hair form, nose shape, head form and stature. If we take the human species as a whole we will find enormous variation in each one of these characteristics, and such variation may be encountered even between sections of the same society. Further, the variations tend by and large to be stable, and this becomes particularly clear when we contrast extremes, e.g. a light-skinned, wavy-haired and narrow-nosed population with a dark-skinned, woolly-haired and broad-nosed population. In other words, the differences with which we are concerned here are, at least in their physical aspect, both visible and real. However, while differences between extremes are both clear and stable, there is so much overlap between adjacent populations that the division of a society into its constituent races is very often a purely arbitrary matter. It is one thing to be able to distinguish between Caucasoids and Negroids; distinguishing between the different races among Frenchmen becomes an exercise of a totally different kind. It is for this reason that those who study human populations from the biological point of view are sometimes reluctant to use the concept of race or, when they use it, are likely to stress that it is a statistical concept or an ideal type rather than a real human population. There are of course cases in which a real population may approximate to the ideal type of a race, although this is unusual rather than general. We come back to the point that the concept of race is inherently ambiguous: in the human species the continuity of races is ensured by social and not merely biological processes. The enormous diversity of physical types encountered within the human species has few parallels in the animal kingdom; perhaps the only true parallels are among domestic animals where also human culture has been at work. Among human beings neither the differentiation of phsysical types nor their admixture takes place through the operation of simple biological rules. A variety of cultural codes intervene at every level to give the phenomenon its distinctive human character. The perpetuation of the species is achieved among animals through

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mating which is circumscribed by biological and geographical factors. Among human beings we have to deal with marriage which is a social process rather than mating which is a biological process; no human society, however primitive, is without its own culturally prescribed rules of marriage. There appear to be no biological constraints against the interbreeding of populations, however differ¬ ent, within the human species. There are no doubt geographical constraints, but these become less and less important with the advance of technology and the improvement in communications. The most effective constraints against interbreeding among human beings are the rules they themselves make about prohibited, permitted or preferred partners in marriage. In the nineteenth century it was often asked how much race had contributed to the formation of culture; people believed that only some races were endowed with creative energy and that humanity owed the fruits of civilisation to the creative activities of these races. Today it seems more pertinent to ask how much culture has con¬ tributed to the perpetuation if not the formation of races; had human beings been fully free to mate with each other, subject only to the constraints of geographical distance, would we have the pattern of races that we find in the world at present ? It is of utmost importance to realise that where human beings of different races live together in the same territory the constraints against their union are cultural and not biological. Where NegroWhite marriages have been prohibited by law or custom, White masters have often mated on an extensive scale with their Negro slaves or servants. In such cases the women are almost invariably of the disfavoured race, and the offspring are in effect placed in the race of the mother although biologically they are equally close to the father. In course of time the disfavoured ‘race’ becomes less and less of a race in the purely biological sense, although socially it continues to be treated as a race, particularly when it comes to the regulation of marriage. It is necessary to make a distinction between race and ethnicity. The two concepts have certain things in common, but the second is very much broader than the first. Ethnicity refers to a feeling of identity among people which may be based on language, religion, provenance or any other criterion. Race, on the other hand, is always based on visible physical features.3 Also, the criteria of race are in general more enduring than those of ethnicity which may be

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acquired or discarded during one’s lifetime. In the United States Irishmen, Italians and Jews constitute ethnic groups; they differ in language and religion rather than in physical appearance. Negroes and Whites, on the other hand, constitute races; their primary difference is in physical appearance rather than in religion or language. There are societies in which some of the most deeply cherished values are those that centre around race. Here the races came to be socially segregated because they were believed to be of unequal worth; the myth of unequal worth in turn helped to justify and perpetuate their segregation. But myths alone do not explain either the creation or the perpetuation of a system of stratification by race. Men have plundered and enslaved people of other races, and have used force to keep them in an inferior condition. It is impossible to see how societies of the kind that became established in South Africa or the United States could be brought into being without the massive use of organised violence. The relation between race and social stratification can be best examined in those societies where members of the Black and White races coexist without losing their distinctive physical features through inter-marriage on any significant scale. While there are other types of multiracial societies, nowhere are racial identities as sharply maintained as in those where the principal components belong to the Caucasoid and the Negroid (or Australoid) races. The inequalities between the races also tend to be much clearer and more persistent where the principal components are Black and White than in other cases. Practically every society in which members of the Black and White races co-exist in significant numbers is of relatively recent origin, and came into being under broadly the same set of historical condi¬ tions. If we were to go solely by racial composition it would be difficult to find a society of the kind that we have in South Africa or the United States anywhere in the world prior to the seventeenth century. What were the conditions that led to the creation of this new type of society? What light does their study throw on the problem of stratification by race ? The seventeenth century marks the beginning of the European dominance of the world. Two processes can clearly be seen at work from this period onwards. European countries like Britain, France

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and Germany began to forge increasingly ahead of the other countries of the world in the level of their technological development. Along¬ side this, European explorers and settlers from Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland and Germany began to penetrate areas of the world which had till then remained isolated and technologically backward. These two processes together led to the creation of colonial systems which left very few societies in the world untouched. Colonialism affected the lives of people in myriad ways both in the metropolitan countries and in the colonies. We are here concerned with it to the extent that it set the scene for a confrontation on an unprecedented scale between people of widely different races. This confrontation produced very different results in the different arenas in which it took place. Much depended on the density of the indigen¬ ous population and on the level of its technological development. Colonial rule had very little effect on the racial composition of the population in India. On the other hand, it changed completely the population of Australia. White settlers did not find all the countries which came under colonial rule to be equally congenial. Settlement did not take place on a large scale in Asia because of demographic, geographical and other reasons. The different parts of Africa were affected differently: South Africa and Rhodesia attracted settlers on a large scale, but elsewhere settlers either did not come in large numbers or left after the loss of empire. It was only in Australia and the New World that the settlers outnumbered the indigenous population. The encounter between settler and native was a traumatic experi¬ ence, marked by violence. The circumstances of the encounter were often such that each party was likely to find both the appearance and the customs of the other bewildering. The moral values of neither the settlers nor the natives could cope with the new situation. Viewed in this light, it is hardly surprising that moral values were often replaced by force and guile. The penetration of White settlers into the remote corners of the world led to what has been described as the destruction of aboriginal society.4 This happened in many parts of the world, but most conspicuously in Australia and the United States, two countries which are widely commended for their ethic of equality. In Australia the natives were in no position to offer any effective resistance to the settlers. They lived in small wandering bands, and did not know either the art of agriculture or the use of metals. They were dis-

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possessed of their land, and either exterminated or scattered.5 So effectively were the Aborigines pushed to the margins of White society that they were not even counted in the census of population until a few years ago.6 In the New World the fate of the aboriginal population differed, depending upon their level of technology and the policy of their conquerers. Alexis de Tocqueville contrasted the encounters between settlers and natives in North and South America in the following memorable words: The Spaniards pursued the Indians with bloodhounds, like wild beasts; they sacked the New World like a city taken by storm, with no discernment or compassion; but destruction must cease at last and frenzy has a limit: the remnant of the Indian population which had escaped the massacre mixed with its conquerors and adopted in the end their religion and their manners. The conduct of the Americans of the United States towards the aborigines is characterized, on the other hand, by a singular attachment to the formalities of law. Provided that the Indians retain their barbarous condition, the Americans take no part in their affairs; they treat them as independent nations and do not possess themselves of their hunting-grounds without a treaty of purchase; and if an Indian nation happens to be so encroached upon as to be unable to subsist upon their territory, they kindly take them by the hand and transport them to a grave far from the land of their fathers. The Spaniards were unable to exterminate the Indian race by those unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, nor did they succeed even in wholly depriving it of its rights; but the Americans of the United States have accomplished this twofold purpose with singular felicity, tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, and without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world. It is impossible to destroy men with more respect for the laws of humanity.7

Tocqueville greatly exaggerated the legal and non-violent nature of the dealings between Whites and Indians in the United States. Violence was used and the laws of humanity were flouted both before

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and after he wrote about the problem.8 But the point is well made: it is not always necessary to use a great deal of violence in order to destroy the vital springs of a society. When people see their homes overrun and are driven from their ancestral lands by an alien race, their traditions, customs and ways of life suffer a loss of dignity in their own eyes. The aboriginal tribes were sometimes scattered to such an extent that it became impossible for their members to keep alive and perpetuate their collective representations in a coherent or meaningful way. Having lost their own categories of evaluation, they were often inclined to either retreat into a realm of fantasy or judge the world and themselves by the standards of their conquerors. The aboriginal tribes of Australia and North American were scattered by the onslaught of White settlers, but they did not have always very far to go. The case was different with the Negroes who were brought to the New World from Africa. They were scattered from their ancestral homes in Africa, collected together and trans¬ ported across the oceans, and then scattered again in their new settle¬ ments in America. Further, besides being scattered, these Negroes bore the additional stigma of being enslaved. The aboriginal tribes contributed little to the building of the new society in the United States; after being defeated and dispossessed they withdrew from the centre of the stage. The Negro slaves who were brought from Africa, on the other hand, contributed vitally to the building of this society, both before and after the American War of Independence. In the United States the principal protagonists in the drama of race, the Whites and the Negroes, both entered the stage as outsiders. It was the colonial system that brought them together and defined the terms of their initial interaction. The terms on which Negroes and Whites interacted in the colonial society of North America were not and could not be terms of equality. There was first the inequality inherent in the relations between masters and slaves, but there was more than that. The Whites brought with them a cultural heritage from the Old World of which they felt justifiably proud. They had achieved many things, and the New World seemed to offer unlimited possibilities for their civilisation. The Negroes, on the other hand, had lost their religion, language and culture. If they were to interact as human beings, even among themselves, they had only the culture of their masters to fall back upon. They came to absorb the values of this culture without

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fully understanding what it signified for them. It is no wonder therefore that so many things about the Negro appeared to be lacking in worth and dignity in the eyes of the Negroes themselves. Colonialism led to the encounter of Negroes and Whites not only in America but also in Africa. This encounter took its most dramatic form in South Africa where it led to the creation of a society in which race has come to permeate every sphere of life. The terms of the encounter between Negroes and Whites in South Africa, although unequal, have been somewhat different from the terms of their encounter in North America. For one thing, here Negroes have outnumbered Whites. For another, while the present-day Negroes of South Africa are not all descended from the aboriginal inhabitants of the area, here they are much closer to their traditional homeland than in America. As a result, their language, religion and culture have not been destroyed in South Africa as they were in America. Although Negro culture was not destroyed in South Africa, it was judged by the standards of White culture and given a low place within the framework of colonial values. These values came to bloom in an era when Western supremacy was accepted without question in every field, and it seemed natural to people of European origin to regard themselves as being destined to lead humanity. So palpable were their achievements that others also came to regard them as a race of supermen. Colonial rule has come to an end, but the idea of White supremacy dies hard—even among non-Whites. There are far too many inequalities in the actual conditions of life. At the same time, the ideal of equality has begun to challenge the framework of colonial values in every part of the world. Wherever Whites and Blacks coexist the relations between them are becoming increasingly uneasy. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Negroes were a little less than 20 per cent of the population of the United States; today they are around 10 per cent of the population. After slavery was abolished in 1865 the Negro migration into the United States was minimal, but immigrants from eastern and southern Europe have increased the White population substantially since then. Between Abolition and now the distribution of the Negro population con¬ sidered regionwise and in terms of rural and urban settlements has changed substantially. There have also been considerable changes in Negro patterns of life. But very little change appears to have

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taken place in the identity of the Negroes as a race distinct from the Whites. It is of course not true either that Negroes and Whites are physically homogeneous categories or that there is no overlap between the two. As is well known, between the ‘pure’ White and the ‘pure’ Negro there are all kinds of intermediate physical types: Mulattoes, Quadroons, Octoroons and the rest. There is also a correspondence between lightness of skin and social standing, the lighter-skinned mixed-bloods being generally better placed than the darker-skinned. However, socially all mixed-bloods are categorised as Negroes, even those who are much closer to the Whites by both appearance and genealogical connection. It is for this reason that some authorities avoid using the term ‘race’ in talking about Negroes and Whites in the United States.9 The vast majority of those who are socially categorised as Negroes can be identified by sight as such. There are some who cannot, including a few who are lighter-skinned than the average population of several European countries. Even here Americans are peculiarly sensitive to any trace of Negro blood among those who might pass for White in another society. As one distinguished American author has written, I do not go around looking for Negroes behind pale faces and blue eyes, but I carry the experience of America in me. I am quick to classify by race; I do not mean to be, but I am.10 As one would expect, Negroes are even more sensitive in these matters than Whites. Every culture develops its own standards of beauty according to which certain physical features are preferred to others. Skin colour, hair form, shape of the nose and the mouth, and stature are the features most commonly taken into account. No doubt there are differences in individual preferences, but these differences oscillate around certain poles. In America the White physical type has clearly been the preferred type—among both Whites and Negroes, even though the preference might manifest itself differently in the two cases. Negroes have for generations made use of skin bleachers and hair straighteners in order to approximate to the physical type preferred by the dominant culture; even as infants they learnt to prefer White dolls to Black.

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We know that many Negroes try to pass for White, whereas the opposite rarely if ever happens. Passing is in part a calculated move aimed at securing concrete material advantages in the short or long run. But it also expresses, and at the same time confirms, a certain inbuilt structure of preferences. In other words, those who pass seek to improve their image in the eyes of others and, perhaps, also in their own eyes. Apart from other difficulties, there are emotional costs involved in passing. It requires the individual to repudiate an important part of his self for a gain which is not always certain. For this and other reasons not all Negroes regard passing as desirable or dignified. Rather than repudiate their own identities, some of them now seek to challenge the prevailing scale of values. This challenge is best expressed in the slogan: black is beautiful. Slogans certainly alter the strategies for action, but it is difficult to say how deeply they affect the basic values of individuals. The first point to keep in mind while studying the relations between race and stratification in the United States is that Americans are ‘quick to classify by race’. We have indicated the broad historical conditions that have contributed to this kind of sensibility. It cannot be too strongly emphasised that it is not equally developed in all societies. But where it has taken root, human beings are likely to be both segregated and evaluated according to race. The kind of sensibility referred to above is probably to be seen most clearly at work in matters relating to marriage and mating. Sociologists have always maintained a distinction between the two, and we see its importance when we take a historical view of the relations between Negroes and Whites in the United States. Before Abolition marriages between Negroes and Whites were rare although mating occurred extensively. The abolition of slavery, the movement of Negroes from the intimacy of rural society to the anonymity of urban life, and the general improvement in Negro standards of living have restricted the easy access of White men to Negro women so that mating now takes place on a smaller scale than before. At the same time, intermarriage between Negroes and Whites does not seem to have increased substantially. This means that the races are probably more stable biologically now than they were in the middle of the nineteenth century. In racially stratified societies we see in its clearest form an aspect of inequality which is present in probably all stratified societies,

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i.e. inequality in the access to women. The superior race is strict in protecting its women from sexual contamination by men of inferior standing, but regards as fair game women of the inferior race. In the Southern plantation before Abolition, White men had more or less free access to Negro slave and servant women without being restrained by the obligations of matrimony. The sexual use of Negro women by White men continued long after the abolition of slavery, and the inability of Negro men to protect their women from this kind of use was perhaps the clearest mark of their inferior condition. Individually some Negro women found it to their advantage to offer themselves sexually to their White superiors who could not only give them better protection than their own men but also make better provisions for their offspring. But such relations were profoundly demoralising for the Negroes collectively, and have left a permanent mark on their self-image. Negro men compared their women with White women, and found their own women to be morally lax. Negro women compared their men with White men, and found their own men to be weak and irresponsible. All the circumstances conspired to confirm the Negro’s inferiority in his own eyes. In the rural South, where the majority of Negroes were concentrated before World War I, the sexual use of Negro women by White men was condoned by custom, but intermarriage between Whites and Negroes was forbidden by law. Both law and custom have changed. There are now more Negroes in the northern cities than in the rural South. Custom is less tolerant of the sexual exploitation of women, and the law more tolerant of intermarriage. But intermarriage between the races is still too infrequent and too confined to particular segments of society to alter substantially the distinctive identities maintained by Whites and Negroes for more than three centuries in the United States. The regulation of marriage and mating is by no means the only way in which stratification by race is maintained in the United States. Segregation of residence is another process that contributes to the same effect. Residential segregation was strictly maintained in the rural South, and the same process was continued in a different form in the cities of the North into which Negroes began to move increasingly from the time of World War I. This has led to what one prominent student of the problem has called the ‘ghettoization’ of Negro life.11 The points to bear in mind in talking about residential segregation

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are that living space is an object of evaluation in all societies and that not all members of a society have the same access to every type of living space. The factors that enter into the evaluation of living space are many, and the instruments used for the restriction of access are diverse. But in general it may be said that in the United States residential areas inhabited by Negroes acquire a low value, and residential areas having a high value are inaccessible to Negroes. In a slave society there is little ambiguity about keeping inferiors in their place. In the Southern plantation slaves lived in their own quarters away from where their masters lived. It is true that domestic slaves enjoyed a certain intimacy with their masters, but here distance was maintained by means of elaborate rituals of etiquette. The Southern town had its slave quarters, and free Negroes also lived apart from the Whites. In nineteenth century Southern society both Negroes and Whites accepted the logic of segregation. The Civil War disturbed the prevailing pattern for a while but the equilibrium was restored before long. The problems of maintaining residential segregation are much more complicated in a free society than in a slave society. Yet residential segregation has been successfully maintained in the North¬ ern cities until now. When the Negroes began their northward migration early in the present century many among them felt that they were moving into a land of opportunity and freedom. Life in the South, whether in rural or in urban communities, was too rigidly set in a mould to offer much choice to the racially disfavoured. The Northern city had a more impersonal character and seemed to offer more scope to the Negro to become his own master. The Negro soon discovered that although he could get better jobs and earn higher wages in the North, he could not move as he chose. Even when he had the means to pay he could not easily rent a house in a White neighbourhood; buying property there was even more difficult. Negroes were as a result forced into neighbourhoods already occupied by other Negroes. As a rule, when Negroes move into a new neighbourhood property values decline, Whites begin to sell out and other Negroes move in. The upwardly mobile professional Negro is forced to live with other Negroes whom he does not find congenial, for the Whites of his class with whom he might like to live do not find him congenial. Residential segregation acts against disfavoured groups to some extent in all stratified societies. Irish, Italian and Polish immigrants

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were initially all pushed into the inferior residential sectors of American cities. But, as one American demographer has put it, Negroes differed from these White ethnic groups on two counts: ‘First, the Negroes were more highly segregated than white ethnic groups; and, second, Negro segregation has, in general, increased rather than decreased over time.’12 Residential segregation in its turn acts as a formidable obstacle against the Negro’s attempt to improve his condition. The growth of the Negro ghetto follows broadly the same pattern in most American cities. Cayton and Drake describe the growth of the Black Belt in Chicago in the following terms:

Before the Great Migration, the usual process of filtering-in seems to have been one in which a few Negroes would move out of the Negro colony into surrounding areas. As others followed them, small nuclei of Negroes were formed. Then, when the proportion of Negroes to whites became large, the white popula¬ tion would move, leaving the areas all-Negro.13

This process, repeated over and over again, provides a clear idea of how the American community evaluates its Negro members. Life in the Negro ghetto has been described in vivid detail by a number of sociologists and other writers. It is on the whole such as to confirm the worst prejudices of those sections of the White population which set the standards by which people in the community as a whole are judged to be desirable or undesirable. Ironically, these are the very standards by which the traditional leaders of the Negro community have themselves evaluated their neighbours. Here again it seems as if the circumstances have all conspired to make these people look small in their own eyes. In the American city the neighbourhood is, next only to the family, the field in which the more intimate kinds of interaction take place. Neighbours are jointly responsible for maintaining common amenities. They must have enough in common to be able to apply and accept a variety of informal sanctions. Most important of all, they should be able to feel that the neighbourhood is safe for their women and suitable for the upbringing of their children. Individually many Whites may be tolerant or liberal, but in the face of such anxieties the average individual finds it natural to submit

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to the pressure of collective sentiments for keeping the neighbourhood exclusive. The upwardly mobile Negro professional who is denied access to White neighbourhoods learns that there is something decisive about race in American society. He learns that the Negro’s inferior condition cannot be attributed to either slavery or poverty or lack of education. Paradoxically, the more ‘open’ American society becomes, the more starkly does the significance of race appear. Until a hundred years ago the Negro could ascribe his inferior condition to slavery; there¬ after it could be ascribed to poverty and ignorance. After all these have been conquered there is still something that keeps him down, and this he can ascribe to nothing but race. Negroes have undoubtedly improved their economic condition since Abolition. American society as a whole has made tremendous economic advance during the last hundred years, and the Negroes have derived some benefit from this advance. They earn higher wages, eat better food, wear better clothes and live in better homes than they did a hundred years ago. But while Negroes may now compete for a much wider range of jobs than before, their chances of success decline sharply from lower to higher categories of employment. Negroes can earn decent wages from skilled manual or lower nonmanual occupations, but beyond this is what has been called the ‘job ceiling’ which very few Negroes can get past. The reasons for which qualified Negroes are kept out of higher( occupations are many, and the mechanisms by which their exclusion is effected are complex. It is interesting, however, that qualified Negroes have far better chances of upward mobility as employees in the ‘public sector’ than as employees in the ‘private sector’. Further, the federal government has on the whole taken a more positive attitude towards Negro employment than have the state governments. Indeed, qualified Negroes might have better chances of employment with some agencies of the federal government than Whites with similar qualifications. In the United States only a small proportion of employees work under Government. In the private sector the conditions of competi¬ tion are clearly against Negro employees. Higher supervisory positions are virtually closed to them. Only a few are able to get as far as lower supervisory and clerical positions. The vast majority of them are employed as skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers, and as servants. In the world of commerce and industry, which is

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governed by the principle of competition among equals, it is con¬ sidered an anachronism for Negroes to be put in positions in which they will have Whites working under them. In the United States the real measure of economic success has been not in salaried employment, but in the independent professions, and, above all, in independent business. If we are to understand how far Negroes are able to advance economically we must see what success they have had as professionals and as businessmen. Negroes have entered both these fields in increasing numbers over the last fifty years, and leaders of the Negro community tend to be drawn principally from them. But here also there is a ceiling beyond which Negroes are not able to go very far, and the achievements of even the more successful Negroes appear very small in comparison with the achievements of their White counterparts. The most outstanding fact about Negro ministers, lawyers and doctors is that their clientele is predominantly Negro. This means two things: it means that the White public does not generally accept Negroes in roles on which it confers status, and it also means that the income of Negro professionals is relatively small, since their clientele, being Negro, is also poor. By and large the same general observations hold for Negroes who set themselves up in independent business: their success in pursuing the American Dream is infinitesimally small in comparison with the success of their White counterparts. The contradictions inherent in the situation of the Negro bourgeoisie have been vividly brought to light by the distinguished Negro sociologist, E. Franklin Frazier. In order to achieve success in American society these Negroes have had to assimilate the basic values of American culture. But the full assimilation of these values only deepens their conviction of their own inferiority. As Frazier puts it, ... the black bourgeoisie suffered spiritually not only because they were affected by ideas concerning the Negro’s inferiority, but perhaps even more because they had adopted the White man’s values and patterns of behaviour. Consequently, they developed an intense inferiority complex and because of this inferiority complex sought compensations.14 These compensations have alienated them from other members of

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their own race without bridging the gap between them and the Whites. Thus we see how a complex system of values, accepted by Negroes as well as Whites, has contributed to the maintenance of social distance between the two races. But it would be misleading to ignore the part played by power in maintaining the system of inequality. In American society the Whites are the dominant race, and when their superior position has been challenged by the Negroes, they have reacted repeatedly by applying the instruments of power against them. These include the use of naked coercion at one extreme and the manipulation of property rights at the other. We saw how inequality between the races was maintained in the domain of sex through the contrastive evaluation of Whites and Negroes, acccepted to some extent by both. This is only one side of the picture of which the other side reveals the play of power. Negro women did not always offer themselves voluntarily for sexual use to White men, but were often coerced into submission. On the other hand, any sexual advance or suggestion of it by a Negro man towards a White woman was met with swift reprisal. The regulation of sex is of crucial importance in any society where racial distinctions are sought to be maintained, and it is here that we see most clearly the use of coercion by Whites against Negroes. In the Southern states of the usa lynchings were not only of common occurrence but came to be widely accepted as the ultimate weapon for keeping Negroes in their place. The interesting fact about lynchings is that they were commonly associated with sex offences, real or alleged, by Negro men against White women. When a lynching took place in a Southern town, not merely the person directly accused, but the entire Negro community suffered from violence or the threat of violence. A lynching is typically the action of a mob. The violence is spontaneous and unorganised, although it tends to follow a pattern. While a lynching might be sparked off by an accusation of assault or rape or homicide, it is usually the culmination of increasing bitterness and resentment between the two races, caused not infre¬ quently by Negro attempts at upward mobility. A sociologist who studied a Texas lynching in the 1930s, noted: Meanwhile all of Leeville’s 2000 Negro inhabitants were under cover. Some were given refuge by White friends and employers in

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Leeville; the others, with their old people, their sick, their babies and children, hurried away in old automobiles, wagons, buggies, on mules, and by foot. Some reached Negro friends in adjacent cities; less fortunate individuals spent a harrowing night in ditches, ravines, clumps of bushes, under houses or bridges, etc.15 In other words, the effect of the lynching was the re-establishment of inequality between Whites and Negroes on the basis of power. Not all use of force against the Negroes was spontaneous or unorganised. After the Civil War a number of organisations grew up in the South with the sole or predominant objective of dealing with Negro attempts to challenge White supremacy. The most notorious of these was the Ku Klux Klan which at the height of its power had a membership of between four and five million people. These organisations, like the mobs referred to above, acted in violation of the laws of the state, but they were an important part of American society, particularly in the South. The Ku Klux Klan was first established in Nashville, Tennessee, in order to safeguard the interests of the Southern Whites. It came to be known as the Invisible Empire of the South and was divided into realms, provinces and dens. At the head of the Empire was the Grand Wizard, and below him dragons, titans and cyclopses. The organisation was clandestine, and it made systematic use of terror and violence against Negroes and White advocates of racial equality. It enjoyed a high degree of legitimacy among Southern Whites at a time when they felt that traditional racial distinctions had been threatened by the Civil War. When White supremacy was decisively restored in the South after an interval of confusion and uncertainty, the activities of the Klan declined, and the old organisation became gradually defunct. The northward migration of the Negroes which started at the time of World War I brought in an era of new opportunities for them, and a new organisation under the old name of Ku Klux Klan was started again in 1915. This time it was on a larger scale in terms of both membership and money, and its use of terror and violence was more extreme. The new Klan directed its attacks also against Jews and Catholics, although the main targets were, as before, Negroes. It was discredited towards the beginning of World War II when links were discovered with European Fascist organisations, and by the end of the War it had become defunct. There was once again a

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revival of Klan activities in the early ’sixties, this time in the wake of the Civil Rights movement. The connection between the attempt by Negroes to achieve racial equality and the use of violence and terror by Whites appears to be clearly established. It is not as if only Whites use violence against Negroes; Negroes also use violence against Whites, and increasingly so. But violence, whether by Negroes or by Whites, must contend with the apparatus of state, and this apparatus deals with Negro violence far more severely than it has dealt with White violence. Besides instruments of violence there are other political resources which Whites command in far greater measure than Negroes. Thus, in denying Negroes access to the better neighbourhoods, Whites have manipulated property rights with considerable success. As Negroes take increasingly to violence, Whites will probably use economic sanctions with increasing efficiency and skill. In a society where property can achieve so much and where it is so decisively controlled by Whites, and where, besides, Negroes are so heavily outnumbered, the terms of the relations between the races will be set by the Whites and not the Negroes. Clearly, many things have changed in American society, and these changes have affected the position of Negroes in it. At the level of values there is perhaps greater ambivalence, among both Negroes and Whites than in the past. There is a greater urge for self-expression among Negroes and a more visible sympathy for this urge among Whites. But it would be difficult to infer from this that a completely new scale of values is replacing the old one. There is greater formal equality between Negroes and Whites today and, despite all the ups and downs of race relations in America, one can say that the movement towards greater formal equality has been a continuous one. Negroes now enjoy fuller rights as citizens than they did even a generation ago.16 This indicates some change not only in official policy but also in public opinion. The Civil Rights movement of the ’sixties involved the active partici¬ pation of many Whites in addition to Negroes. More specifically, programmes of affirmative action have sought to reverse some of the disadvantages from which Negroes have traditionally suffered. It is not easy to assess the full significance of these recent develop¬ ments for the future of race relations in America. In the past Whites have resisted the inclusion of Negroes as full members of American society. Today what appears to be a change of heart among the

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Whites is increasingly resisted by militant Negroes on the ground that inclusion can take place only on the basis of a tacit acceptance by Negroes of their inferior condition in American society.17 It is in South Africa rather than in the United States that we see stratification by race in its clearest and most extreme form. South Africa is also the more typical example of what happened under colonial rule: the conquest of Black people, the settlement of a White population among them, and the creation of a new society based on the unequal relation between White settlers and Black natives. The distinction between natives and settlers is of great importance. In the eyes of many Blacks (whether in South Africa or in neighbouring African states) the White South Africans still appear as settlers; the situation is quite different in North America. In South Africa the segregation of races is not only widely practised in social life, but is also accepted as a basic principle of social organisa¬ tion. Segregation or apartheid (an Afrikaans word meaning ‘apart¬ ness’) is the official norm of South African society, and it seeks to regulate every sphere of social life from marriage to politics. In the United States the values which keep racial distinctions alive come increasingly into conflict with the law of the land; in South Africa the two are in harmony. Despite the apparent harmony between norms and values, the maintenance of racial inequality in South Africa is dependent on the massive use of state power. Indeed what is striking about the regime of apartheid there is the manner in which the apparatus of state is called into play in regulating every type of relation between Whites and non-Whites. In the United States the Whites are able to maintain their superior position in society without much recourse to state power; in South Africa this would appear impossible. Society is built on a smaller scale in South Africa than in the United States. The population is much smaller and the institutional system less complex. The most important difference from our point of view is that in South Africa the Whites constitute a minority, comprising only about 20 per cent of the population. The geopolitical situation of South Africa is also different, and is likely to become less and less favourable to the Whites. It is for these reasons that in studying race and society in South Africa we are struck by the anxieties of the Whites, whereas what strikes us in the United States is the ambivalence of the Blacks.

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According to official classifications, South Africa is divided into four racial groups: Whites, Africans, Coloureds and Asians.18 The Whites, who account for about 20 per cent of the population, are at the top, and at the bottom are the Africans who contribute a little under 70 per cent to the population. The Africans in South Africa have a much smaller admixture of White blood than have the Negroes in the United States. Also, they have retained their own modes of speech and many of their traditional ways of life. The cultural gap between Whites and Africans is large although there are many economic ties between them. In the usa people of mixed Caucasoid and Negroid blood are treated as Negroes. In South Africa they are put in a separate category, called Coloured, which accounts for roughly 10 per cent of the population. The presence of a separate category of Coloureds heightens the gap between the Whites and the Africans. The Coloureds are culturally very close to the Whites, speak their language and follow their customs. Together with a small and somewhat marginal group of Asians they occupy an intermediate position between Whites and Africans, closer in many ways to the Africans than to the Whites. The preoccupation of South African Whites with racial purity has struck even White observers as an obsession. The maintenance of racial purity among them serves, in the language of contemporary sociology, both expressive and instrumental functions. Clearly, many Whites in South Africa regard their racial identity as being part of a whole way of life which they value for its own sake and which they consider to be worth preserving. At the same time this identity enables them to project themselves as a kind of Herrenvolk or master race, and the more strictly they maintain it the more effectively will they be able to exercise their dominance over others. Intermixture between Whites and non-Whites took place in the early phase of settlement, particularly in the Cape province. The White settlers in the Cape imported slaves, mainly from East Africa and Madagascar (and also some from the East Indies), and there was considerable miscegenation between White men and slave women throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The descendants of these women, whether by White or non-White men, constitute the Coloured population of today, although some clearly have passed into the White group. The Coloured group includes also the offspring of unions between White men and the indigenous

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Hottentot women, a sub-category popularly designated as ‘Bastards’. The designation ‘Bastard’ indicates clearly enough not only the value attached by the Whites to the offspring of mixed unions but also the conditions under which such unions generally took place. The relations were from the start asymmetrical: the men were White and the women non-White. Marriages were infrequent, the extra¬ marital relations ranging all the way from concubinage to casual encounters. Initially there was not much stigma attached to inter¬ racial unions as such, provided the men were White and the women non-White, and van den Berghe points out that ‘Dutch boys frequently had their first sexual experience with slave girls’.19 The attitude against miscegenation hardened in the twentieth century. Not only intermarriage but sexual union in whatever form between Whites and non-Whites has been banned by law. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act was instituted in 1949 and a year later the Immorality Amendment Act whose provisions are far reaching indeed. Intimacy of any kind between men and women of different races may be taken as a presumption of Immorality, and a White man and a non-White woman driving alone after dark risk being summarily arrested. Two other enactments, related to the ones noted above, are the Population Registration Act and the Group Areas Act, both of 1950. The former Act sought to fix the racial identity of each and every individual so that, together with the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, it might ensure against the confusion of races in the future. But this ideal cannot be achieved, for the Whites have indelibly stained the purity of their race by their own past actions. Continued miscegenation for over two centuries has given rise to many indivi¬ duals of mixed blood who are physically indistinguishable from the Whites; these have passed as Whites and in course of time injected non-White blood into the White race. But the distinction, once made officially, generates its own consequences, although these might be very different from what was at first intended. The Group Areas Act is part of a larger programme to keep the races territorially, residentially and otherwise physically segregated. According to van den Berghe, this programme ‘has ranged from “macro-segregation” into monoracial regions (the “Bantustans”) to “meso-segregation” into ghettos within urban areas to “micro¬ segregation” in the form of separate facilities in situations where close physical proximity is unavoidable, for example, on the job’.20

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It is quite clear that the dominant White minority in South Africa leaves nothing to chance or to instinct to keep the races apart. The advocates of apartheid are inclined to argue that separateness does not necessarily mean inequality. They maintain that each race is characterised by its own history and culture, and that the mixture of races will be detrimental to all. According to this argument, if the Whites consider themselves to be endowed with superior qualities, the Africans also are free to take the same view of their race. We know that in fact Whites and Negroes occupy unequal positions in South African society. This is because inequality does not rest merely with the evaluations made by the different races of their respective qualities. The whole apparatus of state power in South Africa is in the hands of the Whites who also have over¬ whelming control over economic power. Thus it is one race that not only decides that there should be segregation but also determines what the terms of this segregation will be. The decisive facts of inequality in South African society are clearly to be sought in the domain of power. It might still be asked why only the Whites insist on segregation while the other races are on the whole opposed to it. Is it because the Whites value their distinctive qualities while the others do not value theirs ? While this might be true to a limited extent (particularly for the Coloureds), there are other reasons of far greater importance. The distribution of resources and opportunities in South Africa is such that Whites have a decisive advantage over non-Whites in practically every field. While this is true today it may not remain so for ever. The policy of apartheid serves to freeze the inequalities in the distribution of resources and opportunities that exist between the races at present. To put it a little differently, it is the Whites who insist on segregation because they are the ones who determine the terms of segregation. The best facilities the Whites reserve for their own exclusive use; the others get their deserts as the Whites choose to give them. The Whites have the best lands in the country and the best quarters in the city; they have the best jobs and the highest earnings; the best medical and educational facilities are reserved for their use; above all, they have complete control over both state and industry. They have every reason to wish others to be kept at arm’s length. The fortunes of the Whites in Africa reached a turning-point towards the middle of the present century. Colonial empires which

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had been built over two to three hundred years were breaking up everywhere. Nationalist movements, asserting the rights of the native peoples to rule themselves, were spreading throughout Asia and Africa. White rulers and settlers were withdrawing from one country after another. It is no accident that it was around 1950 that the dominant White minority in South Africa determined to establish a regime of apartheid. They were too numerous to withdraw into Europe, and they could no longer depend upon history to favour them in the future as it had favoured them in the past. It might at this point be asked whether there are indeed common values shared by the four races in South Africa, given the substantial differences in their conditions of life. These differences must not blind us to certain facts. After all, the four races have had a common history for two to three hundred years, and they have together created a society which is in many ways unique. All the races have a common awareness that the Whites have the best of most things and the Africans the worst, at least in those spheres in which the races interact. This itself shows that there is some minimum agreement on what is good and what is bad, what is positively valued and what is negatively valued. There is nothing ‘biological’ in these values in the sense that there is no intrinsic relation between them and the members of any particular race. They have been created and absorbed by members of various races in the course of their mutual interaction in a given social and historical setting. The relation between race and culture is ambiguous, which makes it easier to talk about it in negative rather than in positive terms. There is no clear evidence to show that any race has a biologically inbuilt predisposition to create any particular type of culture. But while there may be no inherent relation between race and culture, there clearly has been a historical relation between the two. When in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contacts took place on a massive scale between races, they encountered each other as bearers of cultures which differed very greatly in scope and complex¬ ity. The nature of the colonial system which grew out of these contacts was such that the relation between race and culture which was historical and contingent all too frequently appeared as structural and intrinsic. It is difficult even for the educated modern man to distinguish clearly and consistently between race and culture. This distinction

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was often lost sight of by the Europeans in their dealings with the native races of Africa, America and Asia. It was quite natural for the Europeans to feel that their own culture was enormously superior to the cultures of these native races. Indeed, the differences in achievement between the Europeans and the natives were often so vast and palpable that from the very beginning many among the former (and some among the latter) must have felt that the Europeans were an innately superior people. As the Europeans extended their conquests in the various continents more and more among them became confirmed in the belief in their innate superiority. The natives offered so little resist¬ ance. They appeared ignorant, weak, shiftless, corrupt and dis¬ organised. Often they did not have the material means to resist the might of the invading race, and this confirmed their inferiority. Even when they had the means they did not make the necessary effort, and this confirmed their inferiority further. The European’s belief in his innate superiority was functional in its colonial political setting. It served to provide a semblance of legitimacy to European rule in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. European administrators and soldiers often found themselves in isolated pockets, surrounded by masses of people belonging to alien races. They needed a faith in their inborn superiority if only to get on with their work efficiently and well. They not only needed this faith for themselves, but also found it useful to convey it to their subjects. It is remarkable how widely the myth of the innate superiority of the Europeans came to be disseminated among people throughout the world in the phase of colonial ascendancy. Colonial rule has come to an end, but the colonial legacy has not completely disappeared. The myth of the White man’s superiority dies hard even outside countries like South Africa and the United States where Whites and non-Whites live together in unequal partnership. Many of the cultural forms of modernisation in the new nations owe their origins to the West, and it is difficult to over¬ come the lurking suspicion that non-Whites can at best imitate but not create these forms which appear to be equally valued by all. Further, while colonial rule has come to an end, the dominance of Whites over non-Whites continues to be a feature of the international system of power Race and race consciousness play an important if indefinable part in international relations. The subject is difficult to analyse because

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127

the ethic of international relations debars the open expression of ‘racist’ sentiments. But such sentiments are no less there for not being openly expressed. The dividing line between White and nonWhite nations follows rather closely the one between rich and poor nations. Further, the rich White nations are developing at a faster rate than the poor non-White ones. This makes it often appear that Whites and non-Whites are not only different but in some fundamental sense unequal. The analogy between the international system and national systems characterised by racial stratification must not, however, be carried too far. The international system is both more amorphous and more fluid. Nations are not easy to distinguish by race. There are numerous cross-cutting ties between nations that obscure the racial distinctions between them. The international balance of power is determined by a combination of factors in which race plays at best a submerged role. This balance of power has its own logic which is quite different from the logic of race. There is little reason to believe that the inequality among nations will disappear when people give up being concerned about race.

Notes and References 1. Leo Kuper (ed.). Race, Science and Society, The Unesco Press, 1975. 2. See, for instance, Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, Harper, 1944. 3. See, for instance, Nathan Glazer, ‘Ethnicity: A World Phenomenon’, The American Review, Vol. 20, No. 2/3, 1976, pp. 34-46; also Fredrik Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, Allen & Unwin, 1969. 4. C. D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Australian National University Press, 1970. 5. Ibid. 6. F. Lancaster Jones, The Structure and Growth of Australia's Aboriginal Population, Australian National University Press, 1970. 7. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Alfred A. Knopf, 1950, Vol. I, pp.354-55. 8. For a vivid account see Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Holt, Reinhart & Winston, 1971. 9. Myrdal, An American Dilemma, op. cit. 10. Everett C. Hughes, ‘Anomalies and Projections’, Daedalus, Fall 1965, p. 1138. 11. St. Clair Drake, ‘The Social and Economic Status of the Negro in the United States’, Daedalus, Fall 1965, pp. 771-814. 12. Philip M. Hauser, ‘Demographic Factors in the Intergration of the Negro’, Daedalus, Fall 1965, p. 852. 13. Horace R. Cayton and St. Clair Drake, Black Metropolis, Jonathan Cape, 1946, p. 175. 14. E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, Collier Books, 1962, p. 124.

128

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13. Durward Pruden, ‘A Sociological Study of a Texas Lynching’ in P. Baxter and B. Sansom (eds.), Race and Social Difference, Penguin Books, 1972, p. 443. 16. Talcott Parsons, ‘Full Citizenship for the Negro American? A Sociological Problem’, Daedalus, Fall 1965, pp. 1009-54. 17. Stokley Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power, Penguin Books, 1969. 18. For a good general account see Pierre L. van den Berghe, South Africa: A Study in Conflict, Wesleyan University Press, 1965. 19. Pierre L. van den Berghe, ‘Race and Racism in South Africa’ in A. Beteille (ed.), Social Inequality, Penguin Books, 1969, p. 321. 20. Ibid., p. 332.

6 Continuity and Change In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored . . . T. S. Eliot East Coker

In talking about social inequality I have on occasion used the geological metaphor of stratification. This is in fact quite frequently done, so that one sometimes argues as if castes or estates or classess were placed one above another much in the same way in which rocks may be arranged in beds or layers in the earth. It is also fairly common to use the organic analogy and to speak of the morphology of a human society as though it were made up of parts placed in a definite arrangement, comparable to what may be seen in an animal organism. The metaphors and analogies referred to above help to focus attention on the framework within which individuals live their lives. Much of sociological analysis, whether of inequality or of some other problem, takes the existence of such a framework for granted. It is indeed a truism that there are certain objective conditions, certain givens with which individuals have to contend wherever they live. It was a consideration of these that constituted the point of departure for our discussion of inequality. The facts we have so far presented provide sufficient confirmation of the argument that there is a social framework which is both external to particular individuals and con¬ strains their actions in a variety of ways. But geological metaphors and organic analogies can also be mis¬ leading. Fot what we are dealing with is neither a visible nor a tangible reality. Society, as has often been pointed out, is not a sub¬ stance but a process. In a very important sense it exists only in and through the actions of its individual members. Its boundaries are fluid, its parts run into each other. Even while we treat social facts

130

Continuity and Change

as real and objective, we must not lose sight of their essential plast¬ icity. It is these things taken together that make the problem of social inequality at once so fascinating and so elusive. As we have seen, in most societies the population may be divided into classes or strata (using these tei ms very broadly) whose members are unequally placed with regard to each other. These divisions differ greatly in their nature and complexity from one society to another. Quite often there are in the same society different types of divisions that partly coincide and partly cut across. Thus in the United States there is a complex relation between the division of the population according to property and wealth on the one hand, and its division according to race and colour on the other. Or again there is the equally complex relation between caste and class in contemporary India. It is possible to construct a fairly simple scheme of gradation by taking one single criterion, say income or skin colour, and dividing the population on the basis of that. But from all that has been said so far it should be evident that this will give us a very limited view of what we are seeking to understand. As a result, most sociologists construct synthetic schemes, using a combination of important criteria.1 But we must realise that there is something arbitrary about all such schemes because not only the criteria chosen but also the weightages given to them may vary from one sociologist to another. Or in other words, the ‘strata’ that a sociologist might construct in this way are different from the strata that a geologist observes. There is one important aspect of social inequality that tends to get somewhat obscured by the metaphor of stratification. In talking about the stratification of society we tend to focus attention on the way in which people are placed in layers, above and below other layers of people. But what we are interested in is not merely the placement of people, but the ongoing relations between individuals occupying different positions. The problem of social inequality is above all the problem of how people interact with each other, how they compete and contend, how some succeed in moving up while others are pushed down despite their resistance. We will have to admit that there is something peculiarly inappropriate in talking about social inequality in a language that might suggest a static arrangement of inert entities. There are then these two aspects of social inequality which may be called the ‘distributive’ and the ‘relational’ aspects. We do learn

Continuity and Change

131

a great deal about a society by seeing how its population is distributed among the different classes or strata, and on this basis we can make some quite useful comparisons between societies. These comparisons will show marked differences between tribal societies with a simple technology and the agrarian societies of traditional India, China or Europe, and again between these and modern industrial societies. A great deal of technical advance has been made by sociologists in the study of the distributive aspects of inequality. One needs to be a specialist today in order to be able to follow the literature, particu¬ larly as it relates to contemporary American society. There are tables, matrices, diagrams, charts and sometimes quite complicated mathematical exercises. These studies tend to emphasise factors like income, occupation and education whose distribution can be accurately measured, and sociologists have displayed considerable ingenuity in devising measures for an increasing variety of items. But we must remember that they will serve only a limited purpose unless they help to deepen our understanding of the relational aspects of inequality. The inequalities that are so often present in the rights and obli¬ gations that bind people together are less easy to study than, let us say, the inequalities in the distribution of income. There are very few relations, if any, in which all the rights are on one side and all the obligations on the other. Yet it is not difficult to see the asymmetry in relations that are marked by either deference or obedience. This kind of asymmetry is often brought out with remarkable clarity in works of fiction or drama. The sociologist only tries to bring out the pattern in such asymmetrical relations through a patient and systematic examination of facts. Inequality manifests itself in the interaction between people in myriads of ways. Each situation, each encounter has its own unique significance. It is true, as we have indicated, that people are invested with rights and obligations which define the terms of their inter¬ action in a more or less standardised way. These rights and obli¬ gations cannot be set aside or altered at will in an arbitrary fashion. At the same time, they are rarely free from ambiguity and contra¬ diction, and almost always provide scope for divergent interpretation and manipulation. Therefore, in studying inequality we must take into account not only where people are located in society and what rights and obligations they have, but also how they view each other and the context in which they interact.

132

Continuity and Change

The study of social inequality cannot turn away from the flow of events and activities which makes every society what it is. The more closely we are involved in these events and activities, the more we are likely to be struck by their singularities. The remarkable thing is that, despite their seemingly endless variety, the same broad patterns are replicated in a society over and over again. However freely people interpret their rights and obligations, and however much they manipulate the rules, the distributive aspects of inequality retain a high degree of continuity over time. From one generation to the next we encounter the same broad classes and strata in a society and similar patterns of relations among their members. How are we to account for this continuity ? Sociologists and social anthropologists have written a great deal about the persistence of societies over time. The concept of social structure is in fact concerned with what is persistent in social life, and all sociologists use this concept in one form or another. The British social anthropologist, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown was one of the first to attempt a systematic formulation of the concept, and his ideas have had a great influence on students of human society. What is important in this context is the distinction that Radcliffe-Brown made between the ‘static continuity’ that we see in a building or a statue, and the ‘dynamic continuity’ that is characteristic of an organism or a society.2 In the case of dynamic continuity, which is what we are concerned with, the parts might change but their total arrangement remains broadly the same. In all human societies people are born and they die, and individuals move from one position to another. These might appear as major changes in the eyes of those who are directly in¬ volved in such movements. But those who view them from the out¬ side, with a certain detachment, are more likely to be struck by the fact that the positions and their arrangement generally remain un¬ altered. This is not to say that there is never any break in the continuity of these arrangements, but that is a fact of a different order. In the most general terms what accounts for the continuity of given structures of inequality are the two prerequisites of social life with which we started our discussion, namely evaluation and organi¬ sation. Systems of evaluation and of organisation may be viewed as active agents which order the relations among people, and, in so doing, give stability to the prevalent patterns of inequality. These

Continuity and Change

133

systems vary from one society to another, and when they change, the patterns of inequality change along with them. In every society there is a set of common values which give co¬ herence to the activities of its individual members. This becomes at once apparent to the anthropologist or any outsider when he tries to play a part in a community with whose values he is not in tune. His actions at first appear arbitrary to the members of the community just as theirs appear to him. If he is to play a proper part in the com¬ munity he must attune himself to its values, which means that he must be able to discriminate, along with the members of the community, between right and wrong, good and bad, superior and inferior. The simplest way to understand the part played by common values in the direction of human activities is to study how children are brought up, or what is called the socialisation process. A great deal of this process consists in teaching the child how to cope with particular situations of one kind or another. But it is nowhere possible to anticipate every kind of situation, and the child learns to play his part only as he absorbs the guiding principles, the funda¬ mental concepts and categories of his society. Much of this learning is unconscious so that in later life people often react without reflec¬ tion, their reactions flowing along familiar paths. It is impossible to understand a system of activities without refer¬ ence to the common values of those who participate in it. These give coherence as well as continuity to what goes on in society. Because people share certain values and pass them down from one generation to the next, the same pattern of activities continues over time, ensuring in turn the continuity of broadly the same arrange¬ ment of classes or strata. People frequently disagree over the evalu¬ ations they make of themselves and of others, but disagreement over the basic principles of evaluation is far less frequent. We must not assume that there is always full agreement even on fundamental values among the members of a society. In some cases, as in South Africa, the area of agreement may be precariously small. Here, as we know, coercion and constraint play an important part in holding society together and ensuring for it a measure of continuity over time. Indeed, coercion and constraint are in some measure used for ensuring the stability of existing arrangements in all societies. This becomes at once clear to those who try in a deliberate way to change the existing social order and to replace it by a new one.

134

Continuity and Change

The organisation of. social activities through the use of power is a highly complex process. Firstly, direct physical force is used only in the extreme case. There are all kinds of sanctions, both formal and informal, through which social relations are regulated. These are woven so intricately into the fabric of social life that compliance with prescribed modes of conduct is generally achieved without a great deal of exertion. To the extent that the instruments of power protect the prevalent rights and obligations among people, they also provide stability to the prevalent arrangement of classes and strata in a society. It is not as if there is no ambiguity as to who can exercise how much power in a given social situation. This ambiguity makes it possible for individuals to compete for access to and control over the instruments of power. But this competition does not necessarily disturb or alter the net balance of power between groups in a society. On the contrary, it is through it that the balance is maintained and continued over time. I have tried to emphasise that the arrangement of strata in a society has a dynamic continuity. The implication of this is that social action might have different consequences for the individual actor and for society viewed as a whole. Even when certain activities leave the larger social arrangements undisturbed, they might effect a real change in the positions of the actors considered as individuals. Indeed, individuals are continually moving from one social position to another, and this can create the illusion that there is a real change in their conditions of existence. The movement of individuals from one position to another, far from disturbing the broader social arrangements, generally serves to confirm them. If all societies place individuals in unequal positions, they all allow individuals some scope to move from one level to another. The study of social mobility thus becomes an integral part of the study of social stratification. The term social mobility has a very wide connotation, and may refer to either ‘vertical’ or ‘horizontal’ mobility. Our con¬ cern here is with vertical mobility which may be either upward or downward, and of which the units may be individuals, families or larger social groupings. There is competition for both status and power in human societies. This competition is not fully an open competition in any society; if it were, then inequality would probably have a very different signifi-

Continuity and Change

135

cance from what it has. Untouchable farm servants cannot compete for the symbols of highest status in Indian society just as Negro factory workers cannot compete for the highest offices of authority in American society. The extent to which competition for status and power is tolerated in a society is itself an important aspect of its system of inequality. This tolerance is undoubtedly higher in con¬ temporary industrial societies than in agrarian societies of the past, although it is very easy to exaggerate the difference. It is a matter of common observation that individuals not only act in accordance with the roles to which they are assigned but also seek to emulate others whom they consider to be their superiors. Emulation is often attended by material gain for those who are successful in the process, but there is clearly much more to it than merely the desire for material gain. Those who emulate others con¬ cede, implicitly if not explicitly, that these others have qualities or endowments which are superior to their own. In other words, it presupposes a whole scale of values which is accepted in common by people occupying unequal positions. Emulation is not merely a matter of individual preference; it is a social fact which is characterised by well-defined patterns and tend¬ encies. People do not imitate each other at random. There is a gradation in styles of life and symbols of status that cannot be understood independently of the gradation of strata in a society. Certain symbols acquire a high social value largely by association with those who are highly placed in society, and sometimes old symbols are discarded and new ones adopted by members of the highest stratum so as to remain exclusive in their style of life. Where inequalities are very marked and visible those at the bottom rarely attempt to emulate those at the top. Quite apart from the cost in material terms, there are all kinds of sanctions, both formal and informal, against conspicuous social climbing. In most pre-industrial societies there were elaborate sumptuary rules which restricted the use of the important symbols of status to members of the highest social strata. In India until recent times individuals belonging to the lowest castes were forbidden the use of gold, silk and many other objects of varying economic value. In all such societies people generally sought to emulate only those who were immediately above them. There are no formal legal sanctions against the adoption by any¬ body of exclusive symbols of status in contemporary industrial

136

Continuity and Change

societies. But there are other kinds of social sanctions. The social climber who makes his pretensions grossly manifest has to face the ridicule of his peers; indeed a lack of discernment in such matters might lead to a loss rather than a gain in status. It is not enough to adopt the symbols associated with superior status; others must acknowledge one’s right to their use. The adoption of a style of life that is highly esteemed does not lead automatically to an enhance¬ ment of status even where nobody is explicitly forbidden to adopt it. In contemporary industrial societies the use of exclusive symbols of status tends to become ‘privatised’ to a considerable extent. The accent on their public display tends to be muted. This does not mean that the symbols of status become reduced in number and signific¬ ance. Only, the new symbols are not on view to the same extent, and their correct use cannot be easily learnt outside of exclusive social circles. This kind of privatisation acts to some extent as an alter¬ native mechanism for the maintenance of social distance in place of the formal legal sanctions by which it was maintained in the past. We cannot understand the dynamics of emulation without a consideration of the two related processes of inclusion and exclusion which may be seen at play wherever there are gradations of status.3 Inclusion is the process by which individuals seek incorporation with those above them by defining their identity in a particular way. Exclusion is the converse process by which they define the bound¬ aries of their own group in such a way that those below them may be kept out. Social situations are sufficiently ambiguous to enable the same set of individuals to operate both these processes at once. Emulation, inclusion, exclusion—all these not only presuppose the division of society into strata, but are the very processes through which gradations of status are kept alive. It is not that there is no difference between a society in which the system of stratification is relatively rigid, allowing little scope for individual mobility, and one in which it is relatively fluid, allowing much scope for such mobility. The difference is certainly important, particularly when we take the individual as our point of reference. But the fact of individual mobility, whatever its rate, does not in itself negate the logic of social inequality; on the contrary, it confirms it. Individuals not only compete for status, they also contend for power. In no society is the allocation of power so fixed or rigid as to rule out altogether the possibility of change in individual positions. Much of what we understand by politics lies precisely in this, i.e. the

Continuity and Change

137

attempts by individuals to increase their control over the instruments of power and thus to improve their position in relation to others. The rise and fall of individuals is a part of the political process, leaving the distribution of power as such on the whole unaffected. The operation of democratic political systems clearly reveals the processes through which individuals regularly displace each other from positions of power. These processes are to a large extent forma¬ lised, which means that individuals vie with each other according to prescribed rules. Here again, while all are formally free to participate in the political process, the chances of success are generally limited by the positions from which individuals contend with each other. Dramatic changes in the political fortunes of individuals are far less common than movements that take them a few steps upwards or downwards. Individuals do not contend for power merely within the formal political system. The political system has an inner life which is in many ways more rich and complex than what we see from the outside by way of the outcome of elections and other formal processes. The informal side of politics has been studied in great detail and at vari¬ ous levels by anthropologists, and these studies show how structures of power perpetuate themselves through actions whose outcome is never fully foreseen by the actors themselves. Individuals do not change their positions as often or as much as they hope to, and, even when they do, the structure generally remains what it was. It is generally believed that democratic systems provide the widest scope for participation in the political process. It is true that political competition is most fully legitimised in such systems where people are not formally denied access to positions of power and authority because of the station in life to which they belong. In other societies the political arena might be more restricted, and one might be required to meet certain criteria, such as birth in a particular family or lineage, in order to be able to contend for positions of authority. But even in the most rigidly traditional societies there is some scope for individuals to move from one position to another through the political process. Traditional authority, as was pointed out by Max Weber, has in general a dual character: its exercise is bound on the one hand by specific and unchangeable custom, but beyond this there is also the freedom to act in ways that may not be questioned.4 This led in practice to two modes of recruitment to positions of power and

138

Continuity and Change

authority: birth in the appropriate clan, lineage or family, but also close personal ties with the king or chief, irrespective of birth. One can find many examples from Oriental states of slaves who became counsellors to kings and emperors; this kind of mobility, in a less dramatic form, was common at every level of the political system in societies of the past. Those who have studied the distribution of power in different societies have been much struck by what Pareto described as the ‘circulation of elites’. There is, according to Pareto’s theory, a con¬ tinuous cycle through which elites renew themselves by drawing in fresh elements from the lower ranks; as some individuals rise, others fall. One can find examples of this process from almost every type of society. The circulation of elites may of course lead in some cases to a change in the distribution of power itself, but in most cases the change is more apparent than real. Here again one must make a distinction between the fortunes of individuals and the structure of society; the rhythm of change is very different for the two. Even when the political fortunes of individuals change quite dramatically, the distribution of power might remain unaltered. Some students of tribal political systems were struck by the frequency of civil strife in a number of African chiefdoms. Such strife might lead to the displacement of a king by his brother or son, or it might lead to the secession of a part of the kingdom from the whole and its setting up as an independent political unit. It might affect the fortunes of only a few or of a large number of individuals. But the new king or chief rarely sought to establish a new type of political order, either after displacing the old incumbent or after secession. A close study of what at first appeared paradoxical led Gluckman to draw a distinction between ‘rebellion’ and ‘revolution’.5 A rebellion exemplifies what Gluckman describes as ‘repetitive change’, or what Radcliffe-Brown would describe as the dynamic continuity of the social structure. In Gluckman’s words,

Rebellion in most of these African states has therefore to be examined as a process of ‘repetitive change’, since after it occurs there is no alteration in the structure of authoritative offices or the character of the personnel who hold them. . . . Even if a state splits, and a new state is established, the latter duplicates its parent-state.6

Continuity and Change

139

Gluckman rightly points out that a study of such ‘repetitive rebel¬ lions can throw much light on the problem of stability and change in more complex political systems. A similar distinction has been made by the French political theorist, Maurice Duverger between what he calls ‘lutte dans le regime’ and lutte sur le regime’7. The former refers to competition for power between individuals within the framework of the existing regime whose basic rules are not put in question. The latter calls into question the basic rules of the existing regime which it seeks to replace by a new type of regime. Political conflict in which one of the parties seeks consciously to create a new type of society is more characteristic of the modern world than of earlier times. Conflict over the regime does not necessarily lead to the creation of a new society or even to the dissolution of old inequalities. On the other hand, such changes might come to pass independently of any conscious design. The emphasis on continuity should not blind us to the fact that societies do change, and sometimes quite funda¬ mentally. We should be particularly careful not to define continuity so very broadly that we fail to detect the differences between two societies, or in the same society when viewed at two points of time. Conflict over the regime, as Duverger points out, is also a conflict over legitimacy. When one regime is replaced by another there is a change not only in the mode of organisation but also in the pattern of values.

The Indian caste system has served as a textbook example of a rigid and immutable system of social inequality. Caste has often been contrasted with the more flexible and fluid system of classes pre¬ valent in contemporary Western societies. Some again have argued that caste represents class in its most extreme form. According to Kroeber, the term ‘caste’ might be used in a broad sense to refer to the systems prevalent in medieval Europe and Japan, although it is the Indian case that is truly exemplary.8 A description of the pro¬ cesses through which the caste system in India maintained its struc¬ ture will tell us a great deal, by means of concrete examples, about the continuity of systems of inequality. As is well known, the term caste refers to two different systems, varna and jati. The system of varnas—the units as well as their arrangements—is broadly the same throughout the country and has

140

Continuity and Change

remained more or less unaltered for over two thousand years. The jatis, on the other hand, differ somewhat from one region to another, and their mutual positions in any given region have also changed from time to time. The two systems (varna and jati) have throughout history been closely related, and we learn much about human societ¬ ies by seeing how the one remained unaltered while the other appeared to be changing. The varnas are only four in number, viz. Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra. (There is a fifth category, Panchama, of Untouchables who are literally outside the system.) They are ranked in the order mentioned, and there is no way of changing the order, short of changing the very nature of Hindu society. It is primarily this aspect of the system that people had in mind when they spoke of the fixed and immutable hierarchy of caste. But there is also another side of caste, its more active side, so to say, consisting of the jatis of which neither the number nor the order of ranking re¬ mained constant. Let us turn to an examination of the inner dynamics of the caste system, viewed as a system of jatis. Although this system varies in its details from one linguistic region to another, there are broad simi¬ larities of structure throughout the country. Each jati is a named and relatively small endogamous group with a distinctive style of life and often a distinctive traditional occupation. In the traditional system it was the jati which fixed the individual’s identity in the context of marriage, work, worship and many other things. This is not to say that the individual had no other kind of identity, but only that the jati to which he belonged had some bearing on much of what he did in his everyday life. The jati encompassed so many areas of life that some have been inclined to argue as if in traditional India there was no individual identity but only a collective identity as manifested in caste. This is undoubtedly an oversimplification, but one which we will adopt for the moment as it helps us to set out the terms of our argument. If we ignore the individuals and deal only with their castes, we may think of society as being made up of a number of blocks, arranged ideally in a vertical order; which brings us back to the geological metaphor of stratification. The problem then is to see how the arrangement worked in practice, what changes it underwent over time, which of these changes were real and which ones merely apparent. Each linguistic region in India is estimated to have had between

Continuity and Change

141

two and three hundred jatis or castes. It is difficult to give a more exact figure because these units were highly segmented, and individu¬ als identified themselves sometimes by their caste and at other times by their subcaste or even sub-subcaste; indeed, the difference between caste and subcaste was always relative and never absolute.9 The seg¬ mentary nature of the system makes it difficult to fix each unit in a definite order of rank. Also, the number of units changed over time, although in the past this change was so gradual that it might go unnoticed. The different castes in a region were broadly arranged in a vertical order. Here it is important to note the discrepancy between principle and practice: while people might believe that, ideally, each caste should occupy a definite place below or above the others, they could rarely reach agreement on the exact order of placement for all the castes in their village or region. There might be general agreement about the top and the bottom, but there was always a measure of disagreement concerning the middle. Castes which were of roughly equivalent standing generally made competing claims to superiority. This ambiguity, which has often been attributed to our imperfect knowledge of traditional society or to recent changes in it, can be shown in fact to be an inherent feature of the system. The ambiguity referred to above was both a cause and a conse¬ quence of changes in the mutual positions of castes. These changes were rarely dramatic in character and might take several generations to become effective. Further, when a caste or subcaste raised itself in the hierarchy in course of three or four generations, its members would generally deny that there had been any real change in their position; their superior position was, according to their claims, one which they had enjoyed from time immemorial, although others might have on occasion tried to deny them what was their due. While some castes moved upwards, others moved downwards, although, as one might expect, more evidence of the former has come down to us than of the latter. But whether the movement was upwards or downwards, what was characteristic of it is that whole groups and not merely individuals changed their position. It is not that there was no individual mobility as such, but a change in the individual’s position became fully effective socially only when he carried his family, his lineage or even his subcaste along with him. This is why it took several generations for changes in positions to

142

Continuity and Change

become effective, making the system as a whole appear peculiarly static and immobile. An effective change in the social position of a group was the culmination of a number of different processes acting in combination. There was first the gradual improvement in the material condition of its members which was most commonly achieved through increas¬ ing control over land, either by clearing new land, or by dispossessing others of their land or by being granted land by a king or prince in return for some service. Material advancement could also be achieved through trade and commerce, but the gains from these were not in¬ frequently used for acquiring land. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, land was not only valued in itself but also gave power over others. Changes in material conditions were usually accompanied by changes in styles of life. As was earlier mentioned, food, dress, habi¬ tation—almost every item of culture was elaborately graded in traditional Hindu society. Those items which had a low value were gradually discarded, and new ones having a high value were adopted in their place. In this way people might give up taking meat or liquor, and require their daughters to marry before puberty or their widows to remain celibate. The change had to be slow and gradual because it was of the essence for the upwardly mobile to show that they had a natural claim to their superior style of life by virtue of long and immemorial traditions. This claim would no doubt be challenged by their rivals, hence the ambiguity to which reference was earlier made. In the traditional system there was a broad measure of consistency between the material condition of a group, the style of life of its members, and the social rank which they claimed and others con¬ ceded. Since the social system was never fully static, these were never fully consistent with each other, but there was a tendency towards their consistency. A group had to improve its material condition and its style of life in order to make good its claim to a superior position. Those who made arbitrary and fanciful claims had to face a variety of social sanctions: loss of face, ostracism, even the use of physical force. Generally a caste as a whole did not change its position in the manner sketched out above. It was more common for a section of the caste, consisting of a number of related families, to embark on a new course and to gradually establish itself as a separate subcaste.

Continuity and Change

143

These families would then restrict intermarriage among themselves, and in course of time cease to give their daughters to those with whom they were once related. In some cases they might continue to receive daughters from them without giving any in return, and this would constitute a recognition of their superior standing. The regula¬ tion of marriage has played an essential part in maintaining as well as altering the positions of groups in the hierarchy of castes. Louis Dumont has shown how in one case it led a section of a caste to move upwards, while in another, for converse reasons, the section was led to move downwards.10 We thus see that although the traditional system was one in which groups were believed to remain in their allotted positions, changes did in fact take place in these positions. Further, however slow or gradual they might be, these changes did not escape the notice of the people themselves. They were recognised and repeatedly com¬ mented upon. On the whole they were viewed as departures from the ordinary course of life whereas we know by hindsight that they did not alter or divert this course to any significant extent. In the Tamil-speaking region there is a proverb which says: Kalian, Maravan, Ahamudiyan, Mella mella wandu, Vellalar anar. Vellalar ahi, Mudaliyar shonnar. Roughly translated, this means: ‘Kalian, Maravan, Ahamudiyan by slow degree became Vellala; having become Vellala, they called themselves Mudaliyar.’ Kalian, Maravan and Ahamudiyan are three closely related castes of cultivators with a low standing; Vellalas are also a cultivating caste, but of superior standing; Mudaliyar is a title associated with the highest among the agriculturists. Similar proverbs may be found from all parts of the country, including some which relate to mobility among the Muslims. These proverbs sum up in a nutshell a process which, as we have indicated, is highly complex in its actual operation. M. N. Srinivas has given the name ‘Sanskritisation’ to the process by which a lower caste adopts the style of life of a higher caste in order to raise its position in society. This process has been noted by a number of different observers, and I have only tried to draw atten¬ tion to the fact that in the past Sanskritisation was generally accomp¬ anied by some real improvement in the material condition of a group.

144

Continuity and Change

Srinivas has himself emphasised the complex and variable nature of the Sanskritisation process.11 There was not just one model which all groups sought to emulate everywhere and at all times. In addition to the ‘Brahmanical model’ recognised by many, some have pointed to the use of a ‘Kshatriya model’ and even a ‘Vaishya model’ by lowly castes in various regions. Sometimes, as the Tamil example quoted above would indicate, a locally dominant jati might serve as a reference group for the upwardly mobile. There need be no contra¬ diction between the two, since the locally dominant caste might be the only known exemplar of a model associated with one of the superior varnas. The net result of Sanskritisation has been summed up by Srinivas in the following words: It is necessary to stress that the mobility characteristic of caste in the traditional period resulted only in positional changes for particular castes or sections of castes, and did not lead to a structural change. That is, while individual castes moved up or down, the structure remained the same.12 This is not to say that no change whatsoever took place in the struc¬ ture of traditional society. But these were generated by forces of a different kind with which we are not concerned at the moment. Sanskritisation reinforced the structure of traditional society to the extent that it reaffirmed its fundamental values. Those who Sanskritised their style of life acknowledged that there were others above and below them. They sought to emulate their superiors, and used what power they had to keep their inferiors in place. Not surprisingly, it was usually the upwardly mobile castes which were the most vigilant against attempts by others to upset the hierarchy. If all groups were free to Sanskritise their style of life to the same extent, the process would lose its social significance. The traditional system could retain its hierarchical structure to the extent that only some were successful in winning the prizes which were valued by all. Those who sought to Sanskritise their style of life did not question the superior status of the Brahmans; rather, they took it for granted. Recognition by the Brahmans was in a sense the acid test of upward mobility within the caste system. This recognition might take various forms, and be passive or active. Brahmans might at some stage in the process agree, usually for a consideration, to act as priests or to

Continuity and Change

145

render other ritual services to the members of the group concerned. When this happened others had to acknowledge that the group had some claim to superior status. It is not as if the Brahmans were themselves fully free to accord social recognition to all and sundry. For while the Brahmans as such were recognised as being at the top of the hierarchy of castes, the status of particular Brahmans might rise or fall according to how they acted. Any group of Brahmans risked some loss of status by rendering ritual services to people of questionable standing. Thus they had to exercise discretion in both extending and withholding their services; what was gained in material terms might well be lost in terms of status. We must not forget that each region had several types of Brahmans who vied with each other for status, this status be¬ ing to some extent dependent on the services they rendered to others. Reciprocally, each upwardly mobile caste or subcaste had some stake in the good repute of the Brahmans whom it could induce to serve its members. If these Brahmans extended their services too freely, they might withdraw their patronage from them and transfer it to other Brahmans who were more strict in such matters; ruling lineages had to be particularly cautious in choosing their priests. In this way each group contributed to the maintenance of the hierarchi¬ cal system by the very actions through which it sought to improve its own position in it. We are far from suggesting that whenever individuals acted in concert in traditional Indian society, they sought only to improve their own position in it while keeping others where they stood. Throughout Indian history there have been social movements which have sought to challenge not only the existing hierarchy but the very principle of hierarchy. Conspicuous among these were the medieval bhakti movements such as the Veerashaiva movement in Karnataka, the Chaitanya movement in Bengal and the Kabir movement in North India which all set themselves against the division of human beings into superior and inferior castes. It would be oversimple to believe that Indian society was based on the sole principle of hier¬ archy; the idea of equality has a long history in it, as it no doubt has in every civilisation. It would take us too far out of our way to examine the causes and conditions which gave rise to the various egalitarian movements in medieval India. There is, however, one fact which we cannot pass by, viz. the manner in which each such movement came to generate its

146

Continuity and Change

own hierarchies and its own myths. What seems remarkable at this distance in time is the fidelity with which the new order replicated the old, so that the sect became in course of time a caste or a system of castes. While we must guard ourselves against oversimple generalisations about the character of past societies, it would still be broadly true to say that the general design of traditional Indian society was hier¬ archical. Such movements as took place in it either accepted this design or failed to alter its broad character which is why we see a high degree of continuity in it. The same may be said about pre¬ industrial civilisations in general, although the nature of the hier¬ archy and the extent of its continuity varied from one case to another. When we turn to contemporary societies we cannot but be struck by their differences from those of the past. These differences stand out most prominently in the industrial societies of the West where certain far-reaching changes began towards the end of the eighteenth century. No society has been left untouched by these changes which have put in to question the whole premise of inequality in a way in which it had never been done in the past. We must proceed with the utmost caution in examining these changes, for nothing is more easy than to exaggerate the uniqueness of our own age. It is a characteristic of our times that inequality as such is nowhere accepted without question, but exists in an ambiguous moral environ¬ ment. It is not as if there are now no scales of evaluation; rather, the co-existence of alternative or even competing scales tends to expose the arbitrary nature of each. When people are seized with the idea that inequalities in the existing social arrangements are arbitrary, they seek to replace them by new arrangements, even though these in their turn reveal the seeds of new inequalities. Nothing is more characteristic of the modern age than the conscious endeavour to replace old social arrangements by new ones. Many students of stratification in contemporary Western societies have noted the difficulty of identifying the very object of their study, and have contrasted this with the ease with which the same object might be recognised in past societies. T. H. Marshall put it thus: It is both remarkable and slightly ludicrous that it should prove necessary to carry out the most elaborate research in order to dis¬ cover what the shape of stratification is in modern societies. To

Continuity and Change

147

past generations it constituted the ‘social order’ by which their lives were, and should be, governed, and they had no doubts about its nature.13 Marshall attributed this difference to the ‘gradual replacement of a simple, clear and institutionalized structure by a complex, nebulous and largely informal one’.14 We have just seen that the traditional hierarchy of caste, though highly institutionalized, was by no means simple or fully clear. Yet there is a difference between this structure and the structure of strati¬ fication in contemporary Western societies. Even today one might go to an Indian village and identify without too much trouble the different castes in it and the people who belong to each. It is impos¬ sible to do this in regard to the classes in an American city or town. Different people would have different opinions on the number of classes in it and on who should be assigned to which. One kind of contrast, sometimes made explicitly and often impli¬ citly, is that which regards traditional societies as hierarchical and modern societies, particularly in the West, as egalitarian. It was characteristic of social and political philosophers in the West who wrote in the first half of the nineteenth century that they saw them¬ selves as entering upon the great age of equality. The best example of this is Alexis de Tocqueville who believed that there was some¬ thing providential about the onward march of Western civilisation towards a condition of equality among men. Tocqueville’s vision was gradually replaced by more secular theories, but the belief in the imminence of the age of equality became widespread. Many things contributed to the kinds of change which Tocqueville and others witnessed and foresaw. Foremost among these were the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution which both began in the second half of the eighteenth century. They set about in a hundred different ways to destroy the material as well as the moral foundations of the traditional social order with its old hierarchies and myths. In Europe people were not only being imbued with new aspirations, but new opportunities were being created by and for them on an unprecedented scale. Elsewhere, as we have seen, the story was a little different, but as they seized their ever-expanding opportunities, people in the Western world were inclined to feel that what was benefiting them would in the end benefit the whole of man¬ kind.

148

Continuity and Change

The changes that struck the attention of Tocqueville and others manifested themselves in a number of ways. The first and perhaps the most striking manifestation was the abolition in some societies and the erosion in others of hereditary ranks and privileges; these had been so central to the traditional order that people could not but regard their dissolution as portending the most far-reaching changes. Secondly, there was the emergence of a new mode of pro¬ duction with a new occupational structure. The new occupations associated with industry were fundamentally different from those associated with agriculture, and appeared to provide unlimited opportunities for economic advancement to all. Individual mobility became increasingly prominent throughout the nineteenth century. We know that there was some individual mobility even in past societies, but it affected only a few in their lifetime and appeared exceptional. What was happening in the Western countries in the nineteenth century affected many and ap¬ peared normal. Attitudes towards mobility altered enormously. In pre-industrial societies mobility was discouraged, if not forbidden, and often took place through the backdoor. In modern societies, on the other hand, mobility is not only tolerated but generally advocated as a matter of public policy: it is the lack of mobility that is regarded as unhealthy in these societies. It is true that mobility as such does not negate the principle of inequality; but there clearly is a difference between societies in which real changes in individual positions are few and far between, and those in which they are so widespread as to become a matter of ordinary expectation. What struck people in the West was not simply the magnitude of these changes but also their direction. Some, like Tocqueville, felt that the destination of an egalitarian society would be reached in slow stages without any radical break in continuity; others, like Marx, argued that cataclysmic upheavals would precede the emer¬ gence of a classless society. The belief had become widely prevalent by the end of the last century that what remained of inequality in Western societies was either transitory or residual. We know today that there are many forms of inequality in con¬ temporary societies that cannot by any means be regarded as residual or even transitory. When Western sociologists now look into the future—which they do less freely than was done in Tocqueville’s time—the goal of a classless society, free from inequality, appears more remote than it did to their predecessors. While many of the

Continuity and Change

149

old hierarchical forms have declined or disappeared, new forms of inequality have emerged and become established. I would go further and say that it is not that inequality among men has ceased to exist, but only the context in which it exists has altered. The new context generates strong pressures for the creation of equal opportunities for all sections of society. Opportunities for edu¬ cation and employment have expanded enormously in countries like the United States. These have enabled individual members of underprivileged ethnic groups to rise rapidly in the social scale, and have also led to significant changes in the social horizons of the Negroes. The American Negro is today far less resigned to his inferior condition than he was a hundred years ago. Improvement in the material conditions of underprivileged groups is today often accompanied by increased militancy against the inequalities that remain. To understand the changes that have been taking place in systems of inequality since the end of the eighteenth century it is necessary to explore a little more deeply the kind of hierarchical system under which people lived in the past and about whose nature, according to Marshall, they had no doubts. This system might be viewed as com¬ prising an existential order and a normative order. In the past there was a close correspondence between the two, so that society was hierarchical not only in fact but also by design; such a system might be called a harmonic social system.15 Traditional Indian society has often been represented as the proto¬ type of a hierarchical system. There were indeed sharp inequalities in the existential order. The conditions of life were unequal for the different sections of society. The boundaries between the strata were clear, and the opportunities for moving across these boundaries limited. What is no less important is that the normative order of this society was based on the premise of inequality, so that not only were different groups unequally placed, but it was considered right, proper and desirable that they should be so placed. Some have tried to account for the stability of the traditional order in terms of its unchanging material conditions, and others in terms of its peculiar norms and values. There have been many move¬ ments of protest against hierarchical norms and values from the time of the Buddha onwards, and it may be argued, on the one side, that these movements were doomed to failure so long as the material conditions remained basically the same. But it may also be argued

150

Continuity and Change

on the other side that it was precisely these hierarchical norms and values that stood in the way of any effective change in material conditions. Without having to assign priority to the one or the other, it would be fair to say that in traditional Indian society the existential and normative orders strongly reinforced each other. I have said earlier that the process of evaluation is universal and to be found in every human society. But when I speak of the norma¬ tive order of a society as being hierarchical I have something more specific in mind, namely that the design of such a society is con¬ sciously, openly and explicitly hierarchical. It was in this sense that the order of ranked varnas constituted the social order, recognised and accepted by people as a whole in traditional India. Social group¬ ings of every kind had to be brought into some recognisable rela¬ tionship with this order even though this relationship might not always appear fit or appropriate. People today, particularly in the West, are often struck by the extent to which the principle of hierarchy enjoyed legitimacy in traditional Indian society; everything seemed to be permeated by the idea of hierarchy. I must emphasise, however, that the corres¬ pondence between the existential and the normative orders was even in that society only a broad correspondence and not one in which the two agreed in every detail. In no society does the accepted design manifest itself completely in the existing arrangement of groups. Without some lack of consistency between the two there would be no motion, no change of any kind. It is not as if the principle of hierarchy enjoyed legitimacy only in traditional Indian society; in this matter India was not unique among the civilisations of the past. In pre-industrial Europe also society was not only divided into unequal ranks, orders or estates, but these divisions were broadly accepted in principle. There also the social hierarchy was invested with a measure of unity and coherence so that what existed was considered to be by and large right, proper and desirable. It is in this sense that we are to understand Marshall’s observation about the ready recognition and acceptance of the system of stratification by past generations. It will be agreed that contemporary American society is not a hierarchical society of the kind that prevailed in pre-industrial Europe or in India or China. This would be broadly true of all contemporary societies in the West, but the United States provides a striking example, never having had a full-blown hierarchical order.

Continuity and Change

151

(Here we have to be a little cautious because Southern communities in which racial distinctions were widely acknowledged by custom as well as law came close to being hierarchical systems; but these ex¬ ceptions confirm rather than weaken the general argument being proposed.) Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to bring out the full significance of the normative order of the new society that was emerging in the United States. As a European, steeped in the traditions of aristocracy, he could not but be impressed by the pervasive influence of the prin¬ ciple of equality in every sphere of life. The idea that people should be permanently divided into ranks invested with unequal rights and obligations was, according to Tocqueville, contrary to the spirit of American society; it was of equality and not hierarchy that law, custom and religion all spoke in one voice. Tocqueville maintained further that the spirit of equality would come to prevail over the spirit of hierarchy in Europe and the world as a whole. If we compare the laws and constitutions of Western societies today with those of the past, we will be struck again and again by the present preoccupation with equality. What is more, there are now few countries in the world whose laws and constitutions do not empha¬ sise the principle of equality. The break with the past becomes particu¬ larly conspicuous in a country like India where we may compare a traditional normative text like the Institutes of Manu with the new Constitution adopted after independence; the former spoke of hier¬ archy and an order based on caste, while the latter speaks of equality and a ‘casteless and classless society’. While the principle of equality is widely proclaimed, the practice of inequality continues to be universal; we have given ample evidence of the latter in the preceding chapters. As Raymond Aron has put it, ‘Modern industrial societies are both egalitarian in aspiration and hierarchical in organisation’.16 Modern societies are in this sense disharmonic: there is in them a lack of consistency between the normative and the existential orders. It is this lack of consistency that gives to these societies their fluid and amorphous appearance.

Notes and References 1. Stanislav Ossowski, Class Structure in the Social Consciousness, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963, p. 41 ff. 2. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society, Cohen & West, 1952, p. 192.

152

Continuity and Change

3. D. F. Pocock, ‘Inclusion and Exclusion: A Process in the Caste System of Gujerat’, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 13, No, 1, 1957, pp. 19-31. 4. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation, The Free Press, 1964, p. 341 ff. 5. Max Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society, Basil Blackwell, 1965. 6. Ibid., p. 165. 7. Maurice Duverger, Sociologie Politique, Presses Universitaires de France, 1966, p. 283 ff. 8. A. L. Kroeber, ‘Caste’, Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, The Macmillan Company, 1930, pp. 254-56. 9. Andre B6teille, Castes: Old and New, Asia Publishing House, 1969. 10. Louis Dumont, Hierarchy and Marriage Alliance in South Indian Kinship, Royal Anthropological Institute, 1957. 11. M. N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India, University of California Press, 1966, Chapter 1. 12. Ibid., p. 30 (italics in original). 13. T. H. Marshall, Sociology at the Crossroads and Other Essays, Heinemann, 1963, p. 132. 14. Ibid. 15. Andre Beteille, Harmonic and Disharmonic Social Systems, Sydney University Press, 1971. 16. Raymond Aron, Progress and Disillusion, Pall Mall Press, 1968, p. xv.

7 The Egalitarian Society . . . society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. Marx and Engels The German Ideology Those who dwell on the problem of inequality cannot avoid con¬ sidering the prospect of an egalitarian society. Has such a society ever existed in the past ? Is such a society possible in the future ? No matter what the modern reality might be, the concept of an egalitarian society appeals greatly to the modern mind. All the great revolutions since that of 1789 have drawn their strength from this appeal. It is difficult to visualise a revolutionary movement today that does not set itself the task of creating an egalitarian society. All our modern utopias are built on the promise of equality: social harmony is inconceivable to the modern mind in the absence of social equality. In the past people did not always take equality as the basis for constructing their ideal society, whether in this world or in the next. The consideration of the prospect of an egalitarian society raises questions of various kinds. It is not easy to agree on the meanings to be attached to the concepts of equality and inequality. We have seen that even Rousseau’s distinction between ‘physical’ and ‘moral’ in¬ equality is ambiguous: the identification as well as the gradation of qualities is a cultural and not a natural process. So long as evaluation and organisation remain as inherent features of social life, the problem of inequality will continue to exist. Is the search for an egalitarian society then utterly fruitless? There are, broadly speaking, two levels at which such a society may be conceived.

154

The Egalitarian Society

At the first level, the- different positions in it may be conceived as enjoying broadly the same measure of prestige and power; in such a society there would be no question of upward or downward mobility. At a different level the egalitarian society may be conceived as one in which all its members enjoy equal access to positions of power and prestige. The first may be viewed as a limiting case of the second, for if all individuals are able to change their positions at will, then no special prestige or power will attach to any position in particular. From this point of view Marx and Engels were right in seeing a close and intimate link between the problem of inequality and class on the one hand, and that of the division of labour on the other. In their monumental work, The German Ideology, they explored the effect of the division of labour on the class structure of society, and argued that a classless society could not be established without changing fundamentally the part played by labour in human society. In their own words, ‘Labour is free in all civilised societies; it is not a matter of freeing labour but of abolishing it’.1 Those who ponder on the egalitarian society all concede that it is not to be found in their immediate environment: their search for it tends to lead them into either the past or the future. Conjectures about the past and the future are fascinating exercises in themselves, and it is not difficult to sympathise with those who yield to their fascination. At the same time, we cannot lose sight of a truth that is obvious to every sociologist: the past and the future are not amenable to quite the same kind of analysis that we are able to apply to the present. We can no doubt reconstruct the past to some extent on the basis of various types of materials. Many past societies have left behind accounts of themselves for future generations to study; they also have been described by observers from outside. In some cases these accounts—from both within and without—are quite detailed and elaborate. But even the best reconstructions cannot compare for richness with what is accessible to direct observation and experience. In dealing with past societies we can never grasp the interplay between the real and the ideal, between life as it was actually lived and as it was believed to be lived, in the way in which we can do this for the present. When people talk about past societies they do not necessarily have historically specific societies in mind. The past can be recon¬ structed only up to a stage; beyond the frontier of history lies con-

The Egalitarian Society

155

jectural history. We must remember that much of the discussion relating to ‘primitive communism’—a subject of direct interest here —belongs to the domain of conjectural history rather than of history in the proper sense of the term. Now, anthropology began virtually as conjectural history, bw the more anthropologists came to know primitive societies by direct observation and experience, the more sceptical they became about conjectures regarding the origin of societies. Thus, in talking about equality in ‘primitive’, ‘tribal’ or ‘simple’ societies we must be careful to distinguish between what can be tested by an appeal to facts and what has to be deduced from first principles. We now know a great deal about the structure of simple societies from first hand studies made by social anthropologists in course of the last sixty years. These studies cannot tell us the last word about what existed in the beginning, but neither can we ignore them if our speculations about an early age of equality are to be plausible. Conjectures about the future have again their own problems. In the nineteenth century sociologists set about establishing with some confidence what they believed would be a new science with its own laws and theorems. There was much faith in particular in their being able to discover certain general laws of social change. These laws remain to this day undiscovered, and sociologists are now far less confident about discovering laws than they were a hundred years ago. At the same time, they have acquired much knowledge about the ways in which real societies work, and this knowledge helps us a great deal in deciding which conjectures about the future are plausible and which are not. For students of society and culture the great discovery of the nine¬ teenth century was the world of primitive man. It is to this discovery that the new science of anthropology largely owed its origin. Social and political philosophers had no doubt written about primitive man in earlier ages, but there is no clear discrimination in their writings between fact and fancy, or between observation and pre¬ judice. It is only from the middle of the nineteenth century that scholars began to subject to systematic analysis the increasing body of data being made available on primitive society and culture; by the end of the nineteenth century there was a recognisable body of scholars for whom this had become the principal field of enquiry.

156

The Egalitarian Society

Nineteenth century scholars were on the whole struck by the simplicity of primitive or tribal society and culture. Europeans who wrote about India or China had mixed reactions; these countries were in some ways obviously backward, but their social and cultural life was often of a peculiarly intricate appearance. The simplicity of tribal society and culture could, on the other hand, be easily attribu¬ ted to demographic and technological factors. The more rudimentary the technology, the smaller the scale of society; and the smaller the scale of society, the more simple its pattern of life. In the nineteenth century Marx and Engels propagated the theory of primitive communism. But the idea behind the theory had been expressed before, and was accepted by many independently of the theories of Marx and Engels, fimile Durkheim had, for instance, argued that there was no division of labour in primitive societies which were segmental in character, each segment being more or less an exact replica of the others. Indeed there was much in the available literature on primitive societies to confirm the view that they were homogeneous, undifferentiated and unstratified. It is no longer the current practice to describe existing tribal societies as primitive. Our more extended knowledge of them has led us to be a little wary of labels of that kind. For one thing, no tribal society has remained unchanged from its first point of origin; each has followed its own course of development, leading in some cases to the emergence of quite intricate structures of kinship and ritual even where technology remained fairly simple. For another, the so-called primitive societies differ vastly among themselves which makes it a little hazardous to rely on the kind of generalisations in which Engels or Durkheim indulged. After all these reservations have been made, it can still be said that primitive societies have been known to exist without any clear division into hierarchically arranged strata. Such, for example, were the Eskimos, the Andaman Islanders, the Bushmen and the Austra¬ lian Aborigines. These were all small-scale societies, the tribe com¬ prising only a few hundred individuals, often related by blood and marriage. Their technology was simple, based on hunting and gather¬ ing, and requiring only a rudimentary division of labour. Such tribes were broken up by the forces of colonial expansion described in chapter 5, but it is possible to reconstruct their pattern of life before this happened. Inequality manifests itself in various forms. The forms that strike

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us most in the modern world are class and race to which we have devoted two separate chapters. So great is the importance of these two forms of inequality that many people find it difficult to conceive of inequality in their absence. Now, if we are looking for inequality in primitive societies, we are likely to miss it if our attention is fixed on race and class, for these are by all accounts of little importance there. Students of primitive communities in the nineteenth century all emphasised the importance of kinship in them. The tribe was divided into clans and, since the clan was often exogamous, members of different clans were linked to each other by marriage. In many cases all the members of the community might be related, either actually or putatively, by ties of blood and marriage. Thus, the lines of cleavage as well as of alliance tended to follow the lines on a genea¬ logical chart. The preoccupation with kinship often led these nine¬ teenth-century scholars to ignore or misconstrue the role of other factors in primitive communities such as territory and even property. Primitive people were viewed in the nineteenth century as being in some fundamental sense ‘natural’, bound, in the phrase of Marx, ‘to the umbilical cord of the primordial community’.2 If there was a division of labour among them, this was ‘a pure and simple out¬ growth of nature’.3 These views were shaped no doubt by observations on two important features of primitive communities: the simplicity of their technology and the predominance of kinship in them. We, on the other hand, know today that there is nothing ‘natural’ about the extremely intricate system of kinship developed by the Australian Aborigines whose technology was that of the Old Stone Age. Engels, like many others in the nineteenth century and before, saw in the natural order of the primitive community an order of equality. ‘There can be no poor and needy—the communistic house¬ hold and the gens know their obligations towards the aged, the sick and those disabled in war. All are free and equal—including the women.’4 And, again: ‘Each was master in his or her own field of activity: the men in the forest, the women in the house. Each owned the tools he or she made and used: the men, the weapons and the hunting and fishing tackle, the women, the household goods and utensils. The household was communistic, comprising several, and often many, families.’5 Although Engels based himself explicitly on the writings of the American ethnologist, Lewis Henry Morgan, we can see here quite clearly his own theory (and that of Marx) about the natural order of human societies.

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We have to examine Engels’s theory in the light of what Morgan’s successors have had so say about primitive societies. There are here conceptual questions as well as questions of fact. Can we indeed speak of a ‘natural order’ of society based on kinship, and contrast it with an ‘instituted order’ based on property? Do all members of primitive communities have the same access to material resources? Are men and women really free and equal in these societies ? It is not difficult to understand why so many Western scholars in the nineteenth century thought there were two distinct types of society, one based on blood and the other on property. The ties of blood had become severely restricted in their own society where the role of property was everywhere conspicuous. They thought that they saw the polar opposite of this in primitive societies where the ties of blood were omnipresent but where property in the Western sense hardly existed. The contrast, however, was a little misleading. It is not so much a question of two types of society, one based on blood and the other on property, as of two principles that are differently combined in different societies. An aspect of primitive societies which marks them out sharply is the general bareness of their material culture. Particularly among hunting and gathering tribes the stock of material objects available to the community as a whole is so very limited that the first impression is of overall poverty rather than of unequal possession. But property, we must remember, is a set of rights rather than a set of material objects. Primitive societies not only recognise such rights but have, in addition, their own rules of inheritance. It is true that the most important of these rights are not always held exclusively by indi¬ viduals; there are groups of various kinds, based mainly on kinship and co-residence, through which individuals exercise these rights. Half a century after Morgan, another American ethnologist, R. H. Lowie set out to examine the nature of property rights in the simpler societies.6 Lowie used a much more extended body of ethnographic material to reveal the reality of private ownership behind the appear¬ ance of primitive communism. He distinguished between different types of property, and found that although rights in land were often held collectively, by the clan or the lineage, movable property was commonly held by individuals. There was, besides, incorporeal property which might be held both individually and collectively. Lowie made the point that, under conditions of acute scarcity, sharing and hospitality were widely practised, but this did not con-

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stitute a denial of the rights of individuals or households or lineages over what was properly theirs. All societies, including the most primitive, have definite rules of inheritance; this after all is the best proof that rights to property are differentiated everywhere. Rules of inheritance vary greatly from one tribe to another but everywhere men and women are differenti¬ ated, and some attention is paid to genealogical propinquity. Rules of inheritance are sometimes quite complex even among hunting and gathering tribes where within the same community some rights might be transmitted matrilineally while others are transmitted patrilineally. Morgan and, following him, Engels were wrong to believe that matriliny was closer to the natural scheme of things and preceded patriliny in the course of evolution. Matrilineal inheritance might be quite complicated and ingenious, and some of the most primitive tribes are known to have been patrilineal. It does not follow from what has been said above that property was necessarily an important criterion of inequality in primitive societies, only that it was a possible criterion. At least among the hunting and gathering tribes property did not divide society into clearly defined classes or strata which perpetuated themselves from generation to generation. It was at best one among several factors contributing to prestige and power. Given the limits that a primitive technology sets to the accumulation of property, it could never sustain social distinctions of the kind encountered in technologically advanced societies. It is a little misleading to contrast the emphasis on kinship and on property in terms of the contrast between equality and inequality. For, while in contemporary Western societies the domain of kinship (reduced largely to that of the ‘family’) appears to signify equality, this is by no means true of all societies. Indeed, it is facile to oppose the principle of kinship to that of hierarchy for there are societies in which inequalities are articulated mainly through the system of kinship. There are many societies whose basic design is provided by the kinship system. Work and leisure, solidarity and conflict, sacred and profane activities—these are all organised through ties of blood and marriage. There is much to be learnt from studying the interplay between the principles of equality and inequality within the domain of kinship in such societies. There are, then, these two sides to kinship which we see most

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clearly in those societies where kinship has a central place, the one side expressing equality, and the other side inequality. The tie of blood or of brotherhood is in Western society and culture acknow¬ ledged as both symbol and proof of equality; this is to some extent true everywhere. In every society to claim common blood is in some sense to claim equality, and the idea of brotherhood is commonly set in opposition to that of invidious social distinction. Marriage also, though less unequivocally than consanguinity, establishes a measure of parity between the partners; the ties of marriage give rise in the next generation to ties of blood, for the offspring of marriage are related to both spouses by blood. But kinship, which serves as a symbol of unity, also divides and discriminates. There is first the distinction between the offspring of sanctioned and unsanctioned unions; since marriage is a universal institution, this distinction is made in all societies, and it is an invidious distinction in most. Among the offspring of sanctioned unions there is again the distinction between full and half siblings who might be ranked if the wives are themselves ranked. Among full siblings distinctions are made according to age, the eldest generally being given precedence (primogeniture), although there are societies in which the youngest is the privileged offspring (ultimogeniture). Even where the material culture is too bare to enable the members of a society to accumulate and leave behind much property, all the distinctions noted above might be transmitted from one generation to the next. Kinship in these societies is not merely a personal matter, it is an important basis for the formation of enduring groups. These groups are of diverse kinds, one of the most important being what might broadly be designated as the lineage. Two lineages founded by two siblings of unequal rank themselves become unequally ranked in course of time. Their members might then enjoy unequal prestige and power without differing very greatly in their material posses¬ sions. While some societies stress the equality of the partners in a marriage, others stress their complementarity, the latter being often conceived in hierarchical terms. It cannot be too strongly emphasised that in pre-industrial societies marriage establishes a relationship between two groups of individuals and not merely between husband and wife. In many such societies bride-takers are distinguished from bride-givers, and the two are unequally ranked. The most common practice is that of hypergamy in which bride-takers rank superior

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to bride-givers, although the opposite practice of hypogamy is not unknown. In many of the so-called primitive societies the relations between groups established by marriage are continued from one generation to the next. Thus, Group B might stand as bride-takers in relation to Group C, and as bride-givers in relation to Group A. If this is a hypergamous society then Group A will rank above Group B, and Group B above Group C, whereas in a hypogamous society the order will be the reverse. In modern societies where life has acquired so much complexity, people often fail to understand that tribal societies should devise such elaborate rules in the domain of kinship and marriage. But that precisely is the point: we encounter com¬ plexity and hierarchy in unsuspected places in societies other than our own. The points made above are nicely brought out in a remarkable account of the Kachins of highland Burma provided by the English anthropologist, E. R. Leach. The Kachins are, in the accepted sense, tribal people. They have a simple technology based on slash-and-burn cultivation, and live in small settlements scattered across the moun¬ tains. Yet their social system, in which kinship figures prominently, is not without its own complexity. Kachin lineages are ranked, the lineage founded by the youngest brother being placed first, then the one founded by the eldest brother, and then the rest; there are often disputes as to these ranks, for it is possible to argue about a person who founded a lineage five generations ago that, although he was the youngest, he was in fact born outside wedlock. Furthermore, the lineage of the bride-giver ranks higher among the Kachins than the lineage of the bride-taker. Leach tells us that ‘In Kachin theory rank is an attribute of lineage and every individual acquires his rank once and for all through the lineage into which he is born’.7 But he adds that Kachin practice departs, and sometimes departs quite widely from Kachin theory. Kachins have in fact not one but two theories or models of society. The first, known as gumlao, is an egalitarian model while the second, known as gumsa, is a hierarchical model. Some Kachin communities approximate more to the gumlao and others to the gumsa model. No community is ever fully stable; there is a perpetual oscillation from one type to the other. The Kachins of highland Burma are a long way from the theory of primitive communism. It is true that they are not the most primi-

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The Egalitarian Society

tive of the tribal peoples studied by anthropologists. At the same time, they tell us much about the degree of complexity that is possible in a society of small scale with a limited technology and a rudimentary division of labour. Both status and power are real things among the Kachins, and when inequalities are not visible on the surface, they are still there in the inner structure of society. The nineteenth century raised great hopes in a future based on equality. The old order based on hereditary privilege was being replaced by a new one in which there was more freedom, more scope for everyone to compete for whatever life had to offer. A new con¬ ception of social equality was taking shape: one in which equal opportunities would be available to all to engage in unfettered com¬ petition. In countries like America, where the opportunities were indeed very large, such a society did not seem to be altogether beyond reach. Has a society based on perfect competition come into being anywhere ? Will such a society ever come into being ? There is no doubt some competition in all societies, including the most rigidly traditional. At the same time, the kind of society that took shape in the West in the nineteenth century gave to competition a place it had never enjoyed in any pre-existing society. With some exaggeration it may be said that the whole of social life came to be animated by the market principle. This principle became the basis at one and the same time of the capitalist system of production and the parliamentary system of democracy. In a society which is governed by the market principle positions are filled by means of free competition between individuals. They are not transmitted through the kinship system nor are they allotted by any centralised agency. This principle may be seen most clearly at work in the labour market in capitalist societies. But it may also be seen in the political arena in parliamentary democracies: those who seek power must put themselves in a kind of market situation. There is indeed a high degree of correspondence between capitalism and democracy, and it is no accident that the two systems came into their own together. Commenting on the new social order, Tocqueville wrote around 1840: ‘Individualism is a novel, expression to which a novel idea has given birth.’8 Individualism is to be distinguished from egoism. Past societies, according to Tocqueville, had known only of egoism and condemned it, whereas in his time individualism had become a

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desirable quality, something to be cherished and valued. It is easy to see how a market economy fosters this quality and in turn depends on it. 1 ocqueville noted in addition the relationship between individu¬ alism and democracy: ‘individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of condition’.9 Both capitalism and democracy challenged the authority of preestablished groups. In earlier societies the individual had been to a greater or lesser extent subordinated to the group: family, community or church. Each such group had its own hierarchy which was in a way a microcosm of the larger social hierarchy. The new society sought to set the individual free from the bondage of these groups. Thus, individualism became enshrined as a value, along with com¬ petition. Free and fair competition between individuals in which no one need be held back by the disadvantages of his group—it is easy to see how this must have appeared to many as a decisive step in the advance towards the egalitarian society. Individualism could become an established value in so far as people were animated by a new faith in what the individual could achieve by his own effort. In the past the individual had been held back by superstition, prejudice and ignorance; he had been borne down by the weight of a stagnant social order. With all these re¬ straints being removed one after another, there seemed no limit to the distance he could travel and to what he could achieve. Earlier societies had set limits to what the individual could achieve within the framework of his family, caste or estate; the new society seemed unprepared to recognise any such limits. The champions of the new social order no doubt saw that it only cleared the ground for the realisation of greater equality; the egali¬ tarian society itself was still to come. If it was to come through com¬ petition between individuals, many obstacles still remained in its way. There were still considerable inequalities in the external con¬ ditions of competition. Advantages of birth and wealth were too conspicuous to be ignored. All individuals were in principle free to compete with each other; but in. practice the scales were weighted in favour of some and against others. Many of the prevailing inequalities in the conditions of competition in the new society could be seen as legacies of the old. In the first half of the nineteenth century it was easy to exaggerate the rupture between the old and the new social orders. Traditional aristocracies were in disarray. Aristocratic privileges were being done away with.

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The Egalitarian Society

Careers were becoming- increasingly open to talent, and this was not merely so in principle. Was it not natural to believe that talent and ability would displace the advantages of birth and wealth, if not in the present generation at least in the future ? To those who accepted fully the logic of the capitalist system it appeared reasonable to argue that inequalities in the conditions of competition could be reduced and ultimately removed only through fuller and freer competition. Any kind of external intervention might arrest if not reverse a process whose natural movement appeared to be in the direction of equality. This argument became part of an ideology, the liberal ideology, which was most widely espoused within the ranks of the upwardly mobile in commerce, industry and the professions. By the second half of the nineteenth century, when liberalism had already come under attack, it became clear that if the new system brought equality, it could only be within a specific meaning of the term ‘equality’. In 1873 the economist Alfred Marshall said, ‘The question is not whether all men will ultimately be equal—that they certainly will not—but whether progress may not go on steadily, if slowly, till, by occupation at least, every man is a gentleman. I hold that it may, and that it will.’10 Thus far at least it was possible to create equality in the conditions of competition; if inequality re¬ mained after that it would be of a different kind from what prevailed in the past. Commenting more than half a century later on the above, T. H. Marshall sought to spell out the distinction between ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’ inequality. He felt that ‘quantitative’ or ‘economic’ inequality—measured in terms of goods consumed or services enjoyed—could exist within the framework of ‘qualitative’ equality which made available the basic rights in a society to all members as citizens. In his own words, ‘there is a kind of basic equality associated with the concept of full membership of a community—or, as I should say, citizenship—which is not inconsistent with the inequalities which distinguish the various economic levels in the society.’11 T. H. Marshall drew attention to the significance of the idea of citizenship in the modern world. He traced the growth of the various elements of citizenship (civil, political and social) from the eighteenth century until present times. The triumph of citizenship no doubt marked the progress of equality in a certain sense. Yet all this pro¬ vided only a framework within which inequality was to find new

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expressions: ‘differential status, associated with class, function and family, was replaced by the simple uniform status of citizenship, which provided the foundation of equality on which the structure of inequality could be built’.12 What, then, is the extent to which inequality is admissible in a society based on citizenship, on individualism and on free competi¬ tion? We must look for a way to compare what Marshall calls the ‘structure of inequality’ in such a society with structures of inequality in other societies. This is a difficult task, and not merely for technical reasons; this difficulty will remain so long as we refuse to question the belief that, unlike other societies, this one is built on ‘the founda¬ tions of equality’. It is not enough to say that inequality here is merely ‘quantitative’ and that it is consistent with the demands of social justice. Inequality in every society is consistent with its own conception of social justice; it is, after all, the function of ideology to make the two consistent. Inequality is thus admissible in this society, built on the founda¬ tions of equality, provided it is not imposed, provided it arises spontaneously. Durkheim puts it nicely: ‘In short, labour is divided spontaneously only if society is constituted in such a way that social inequalities exactly express natural inequalities.’13 It is not merely that Durkheim, as a product of capitalist society, was opposed to constraint and attached to spontaneity; he was, despite himself, too quick to see constraint in the institutions of other societies and not quick enough to see it in those of his own. Durkheim’s attempt to resolve the paradox of equality and inequality is characteristic. He took note of the growing belief ‘that equality among citizens becomes ever greater and that it is just that this be so’; but he also saw that ‘the progress of the division of labour implies, on the contrary, an ever growing inequality’.14 What was required therefore was to ensure that equality prevailed in the external conditions of competition so that social inequalities came to be an exact expression of natural inequalities. Durkheim shared the faith of many in his time that that condition would before long come to prevail in his own society. By what tokens are we to judge whether and to what extent, at a given time and place, social inequalities express natural inequalities? We have seen that in every society the prevailing ideology regards the existing inequalities as being in some sense natural. It is not as if the Hindus regarded the inequalities of caste, or the Kachins the inequali-

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The Egalitarian Society

ties of lineage as unnatural. Are the inequalities generated by com¬ petition in a formally free market natural in some more fundamental sense than those that have been regarded as natural in other times in other places ? The task of comparative sociology is to reveal the historically specific nature of social arrangements. It is now accepted as a truism among sociologists that the monogamous family is no more natural than the polygynous or the polyandrous family. But when it comes to inequality, they find it harder to accept that the forms taken by it in their own society correspond as little to the natural scheme of things as do the forms taken by it in other societies. For, as we have seen, the question of inequality is tied to the question of justice, and people do not find it easy to be impartial towards their own conception of justice. In Europe not very long ago certain things were regarded as natural that are not so regarded, or not as widely regarded to be so today. We must not forget that Rousseau in the eighteenth century no less than Gobineau in the nineteenth believed in the natural inequality of the races. We know today that it is not so much that the different races are unequal as that they have been viewed as being unequal, having been assigned unequal positions in the systems of prestige and power in particular societies. Is there much more to the idea of natural inequality as such than the kind of illusion held by so many for so long about the natural inequality of the races ? If we leave race aside, and turn to those qualities that ensure success in competition, no matter how free, in a market society, can we say anything definite about the ‘natural’ superiority of such qualities ? In short, it may be nothing but a truism to say that equality in the external conditions of competition will ensure a perfect match between social and natural inequalities unless we are able to devise an independent measure of the latter. We explain very little with such a statement, but merely express the values of a particular type of society in its own language. We are thus led back to the distinction with which we started, namely, Rousseau’s distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘moral’ in¬ equality. There is something paradoxical about the distinction. It is difficult to see how a sociological approach to the problem of inequality could have taken shape without it, and yet sociology has failed to come to terms with it. The more we pursue the concept of natural inequality, the more elusive it becomes; we may have to say

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in the end that there is no such thing. For the present at least, it is impossible to understand or express inequality independently of its social context. Although important in itself, the question as to whether it is possible to distinguish between ‘natural’ and ‘social’ inequalities did not, for understandable reasons, figure prominently in public discussions on inequality in the nineteenth century. The real issues then, as to a con¬ siderable extent also later, centred around the institution of private property. In a society which gives to this institution such a prominent place is it possible to ensure equality in the external conditions of competition? With the passage of time more and more people have come to realise that the answer to this question must be in the nega¬ tive. Just as in the eighteenth century the critics of society attacked hereditary ranks and titles (the ‘forced division of labour’), their counterparts in the nineteenth century attacked the institution of property. The critics of capitalist society were not prepared to regard property as a source merely of ‘quantitative inequality’; they saw in it the ultimate source of every kind of inequality. These critics main¬ tained that in capitalist society formal equality (‘equality before the law’) served only to reinforce substantive inequality (inequality of property and class). So long as the institution of property remained untouched real inequality would persist and perhaps even grow. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the United States, more than any other country, stood for the hopes and the possibilities of a new order based on equality. A new society was being created in a new land. It had no burden of hierarchical distinctions to carry from the past, opportunities were expanding indefinitely, and the inequalities of wealth and fortune were relatively small. It was not by accident that Tocqueville chose the United States as a model of the new type of society based on equality. In his own words, ‘Men are there seen on a greater equality in point of fortune and intellect, or, in other words, more equal in their strength, than in any other country of the world, or in any age of which history has preserved the remembrance.’15 By the beginning of the twentieth century it was clear that at least ‘quantitative’ inequality was not decreasing in the United States; on the contrary, it was increasing. Large fortunes had become immea¬ surably larger and poverty also had grown, if not absolutely at least

168

The Egalitarian Society

relatively. America was moving further and further away from the reality of a ‘middle-class society’, although the myth of a middleclass society remained. It is clear that at the beginning of the present century people would not have been struck as forcibly by the equality of condition prevalent in America as Tocqueville had been a hundred years earlier. In the twentieth century the new society to which people looked to find equality was not the United States but the Soviet Union. There can be no doubt that the society which took shape there after the October Revolution was without historical parallel. The old order was being demolished and a new one set up in its place with un¬ precedented vigour and enthusiasm. Further, the new society was being set up in accordance with a design which had been the subject of debate and discussion for well over half a century. This design sought to eliminate all the errors on which the structure of inequality had rested in the past. Soviet society has been in existence for more than half a century. In what sense can it be said to have become a classless society ? Has it succeeded in significantly reducing, if not altogether abolishing, social inequality? If it has removed some forms of inequality and generated others, how are we to assess their relative significance ? All these questions have a direct bearing on the prospect for an egali¬ tarian society. There are some basic difficulties in discussing Soviet society, despite the fact that its structure has now acquired a certain stability after an initial period of flux. Soviet society is even today not easily accessible to observation by outsiders. There are sharp differences of opinion on it between Soviet and non-Soviet scholars. Soviet scholars stress in particular the uniqueness of their own society and tend to regard any comparison between it and other societies as superficial, misleading and mischievous. Soviet scholars are particularly critical of the application to their own society of what they call ‘stratification theory’. In the words of one noted authority, G. Osipov, These arguments are based on the principle of applying the laws of capitalism to all other societies and the hierarchy of antagonistic society even to the vegetable and animal kingdom (as it was at one time done by Malthus). On the basis of these premises they draw conclusions about the ‘natural’ character of stratification, its

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universality for all societies, past, present and future, and there¬ by the ‘fundamental’ impossibility of a classless (unstratified) society.16 Soviet society has undoubtedly certain distinctive, even unique, features, but these do not give it immunity from comparison with other societies. Wherein does the distinctiveness of Soviet society lie ? It was the first modern society to abolish private ownership in the means of production. This was a momentous decision which altered not only the structure of classes but also the framework of competition between individuals. According to Soviet authorities, the abolition of private property marks a decisive stage in the transition from a ‘class society with its deep differentiation’ to a ‘classless society with its complete social homogeneity’.17 Soviet authorities claim that their society is moving in the direction of a classless society, not that it is already one in the full sense of the term. In the words of Glezerman, . . . socialism is a stage in society’s development when basic class differences have disappeared and only some non-basic distinctions remain. Socialism can no longer be regarded as a class society— its division into antagonistic classes and the exploitation of man by man—have been abolished. But it can not be regarded as a classless society because class distinctions have not yet dis¬ appeared.18 Thus Soviet society is neither a class society nor a classless society; certain distinctions remain in it but these are not basic distinctions. The elimination of ‘basic distinctions’ is attributed clearly to the abolition of private ownership in the means of production, following the theories of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Soviet society is still differentiated, but this differentiation has a distinctive character. It is said to be composed of two classes, workers and peasants, and one stratum, the intelligentsia. Workers and peasants form different classes to the extent that the means of production used by the former are controlled by the state, whereas those used by the latter are controlled by collectives. The intelligentsia form a stratum and not a class because their relations to the means of production are various. The structure of opportunities has undoubtedly altered in the

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The Egalitarian Society

Soviet Union as a result of the abolition of private property. The life chances of children are affected less by differences in parental income in socialist than in capitalist countries. The educational system discriminates less between children of rich and poor parents in the former than in the latter, and as a result the highest stratum is bound to be more open in the Soviet Union than in the United States. In other words, the abolition of private property after the Revolution of 1917 made a difference to the external conditions of competition much as the abolition of feudal privileges had done after the Revolution of 1789. But this is not all that is being claimed on behalf of the Soviet Union. What the Soviet authorities claim is that the structure of their society has become qualitatively different from the structure of other societies. The basic source of social inequality, i.e. the exploitation of the propertyless by the propertied class, has been abolished, hence the relations between the classes are now ‘nonantagonistic’,19 despite the differences that might remain in their levels of living. That such differences remain is not being denied, but these are to be viewed as ‘quantitative’ rather than ‘qualitative’ inequalities. Are the relations between classes ‘non-antagonistic’ ? Are classes, as defined in the Soviet way, the most significant groupings in Soviet society ? And why does Soviet society have only one stratum ? If we are to discover inequality in Soviet society, we must look beyond the categories presented by official terminology. The intelligentsia are clearly in a special position: to what do they owe this special position ? An answer to this question will tell us much more about the structure of inequality in Soviet society than an examination of the class structure as defined in Leninist orthodoxy. An analysis of class in this sense may be very useful for studying capitalist society, but it tells us little about socialist society. Soviet society is a good example of what Ossowski describes as ‘non-egalitarian classlessness’. It is ‘classless’ in all but the purely technical sense of the term, yet there are inequalities in it recognised by both insiders and outsiders. The Soviets themselves are very conscious of the distinction that persists between ‘mental’ and ‘manual’ work which they see as the basis of the inequality between the intelligentsia and the others. There are differences not only in the condition and status of work, but also in income. These differ¬ ences are to some extent, though not to the same extent as in capita-

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list societies, transmitted from one generation to the next, so that the children of the intelligentsia compete on more than equal terms with the children of the peasants. Having assured themselves of qualitative equality, i.e. ‘classlessness’, the Soviets have kept a fairly open mind on the question of quantitative inequality. This may be seen most clearly in the debates centring around ‘uravnilovka’, the equalisation or levelling of wages. This principle, which was generally accepted in the years immediately following the October Revolution, later came in for criticism in the Soviet Union. It was also criticised in other socialist countries, notably Poland, where President Bierut urged ‘the need for a further campaign against uravnilovka, since private ownership of the means of production had been abolished’.20 The campaign against uravnilovka has to be seen in the light of the need to legitimise the growing differentials in Soviet and other socialist societies. Clearly, the trend towards ‘levelling’ could not be sustained after these societies had attained a measure of internal stability. A planned society has its constraints no less than a market society. The institutional expressions of inequality may be different in the two types of society, but their ultimate source is the same. Each society has its own cycle of development. In comparing inequalities in different societies we must remember to compare them at similar points in their cycles of development. The United States and the Soviet Union show certain remarkable parallels which even scholars from socialist countries have not failed to note. Ossowski tells us, In the United States it was easier to believe in classlessness amongst the white community before the end of the expanding Western frontier with the unlimited possibilities which it offered to enter¬ prising individuals, before the disappearance of the ‘no-man’s land’, and before the great industrial concerns destroyed over large areas the free economic competition that is one of the tenets of the American Creed. And in the Soviet Union it was easier in 1918 to justify the ratios of the differential state wage scale ranging from 100 to 175 than it was in 1950 to justify the ratios of 1 to 40 which prevailed at that time.21 We must not appeal to history only when it creates hope, and ignore it when it destroys illusion.

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The Egalitarian Society

Notes and References 1. K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, Progress Publishers, 1968, p. 224. 2. Cited in F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Progress Publishers, 1970. Vol. 3, p. 267. 3. Engels, The Origin of the Family, op. cit., p. 317. 4. Ibid., p. 266. 5. Ibid., p. 317. 6. R. H. Lowie, Primitive Society, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1921. 7. E. R. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, G. Bell and Sons Ltd., 1964, p. 160. 8. A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Alfred A. Knopf, 1956, Vol. II, p. 98. 9. Ibid., p. 98. 10. Cited in T. H. Marshall, Sociology at the Crossroads, Heinemann, 1963, p. 69. 11. Marshall, Sociology at the Crossroads, op. cit., p. 72. 12. Ibid., p. 91. 13. E. Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, The Free Press, 1933, p. 377. 14. Ibid., p. 379. 15. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 53. 16. G. Osipov, Sociology, Progress Publishers, 1969, p. 132. 17. G. Glezerman, Socialist Society, Progress Publishers, 1971, p. 106. 18. Ibid., p. 107. 19. See Andr6 Beteille, ‘The Politics of “Non-antagonistic Strata” ’, Contri¬ butions to Indian Sociology, New Series, No. Ill, 1969. 20. S. Ossowski, Class Structure in the Social Consciousness, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963, p. 112. 21. Ibid., p. 116.

Index

Acephalous system 15 (see also Segmentary system) Achievement 9, 26, 83, 86, 126 Africa, African 14, 45, 54, 56, 92, 99, 101, 106, 107, 109, 110, 121, 122, 124-126, 133 Agriculture 55, 93, 96, 98, 107, 148 America 24, 27, 84, 89, 90, 98, 99, 102, 108-111, 121, 126, 162, 168 (see also Society, American; United States) Apartheid 121, 124, 125 (see also Segregation) Aristocracy 43, 60, 64, 163 (see also Society, aristocratic) Aron, R. 75, 92, 99, 100, 151, 152 Asia, Asian 34, 45, 92, 99, 107, 122, 125, 126 Association 6, 7, 13, 16, 50, 53, 55,84 Australia 54, 79, 107, 109 Authority 14, 16, 54, 55, 68, 91, 98, 135, 137 (see also Power) Bangladesh 34 (see also Bengal) Barth, F. 127 Basu, N. 47 Belief 7, 25 (see also Collective representation) Bengal 29, 33-37, 94, 145 Berghe, P. L. van den 123, 128 Beteille, A. 100, 128, 152, 172 Bhattacharya, J. N. 47 Blood 10, 59, 61, 103, 108, 111, 122, 123, 156-160 Bodin, J. 11 Bose, N. K. 31, 33, 47 Brahman 18, 30-33, 36-41, 70, 93-95,

140, 145; Baidik 34; Bamsaj 35, 36; Barendra 34, 35; Kanyakubja 34, 35; Kulin 35-37; Madhyadeshi 34; Rarhi 34, 35; Saptasati 34, 35; Srotriya 35, 36 (see also Caste; Jati; Varna)

Britain, 19, 60, 106, 107 (see also England) Brown, D. 127 Bureaucracy 60, 62, 63 Bureaucratisation 59, 62 Burma 161 Capital 76, 77, 80, 83, 87, 90 (see also Property; Wealth) Capitalism 18, 19, 22, 75, 79-81, 83, 86, 92, 162, 163, 168 (see also Society, capitalist) Carmichael, S. 128 Caste 3, 21, 28, 34, 36, 39, 41, 43-45, 49, 70, 92-95, 129, 130, 135, 139-147, 151 (see also Jati', Subcaste; Varna) Caucasoid 104, 106, 122 Cayton, H. R. 115, 127 Change 22, 27, 29, 69, 132, 134, 138, 139, 141, 142, 146, 149, 150; positional, 144; structural, 144 Chenery, H. B. 100 Chevroletariat 67 China 10, 25, 42, 131, 150, 156 Civilisation 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 26, 29, 105, 145, 147; agrarian, 7; industrial, 7, 54, 146 Civil Rights movement 120 Clan 137, 157, 158 Clark, H. F. 86

174

Index

Class 2, 22, 27, 58, 67, 68, 73-78, 87, 91, 97, 114, 129-134, 139, 147, 159, 165, 167, 169, 170; economic 77; new 68, 69; political 77; ruling 62, 68; social 21, 73, 75, 77, 81-83; Marxian conception of 76 Oee u/jo Inequality; Status) Classification 7, 8, 11, 20, 24, 31-33, 46, 47, 103, 104 Collective representation 7, 9, 11, 17, 27, 33, 109 Colonialism 22, 97, 107, 110 Colour 10, 30, 31, 32, 101-104, 111, 130 (see also Race) Coloured 122, 124 Command 18-20, 48-51, 55, 60 Community 2, 8, 12-16, 40, 43, 133, 157, 159 Community power 87 Competition 9, 22, 26, 86, 91, 99, 116, 117, 135, 137, 162-166, 169, 170 Compulsion 14, 18 Conflict 22, 91, 139, 159 Consumption 83, 86 Continuity 22, 25, 29, 69, 133, 139, 146, 148; dynamic, 132, 134, 138; static, 132 Cultural code 7, 54, 104 Culture 3, 8, 10-12, 16-19, 30, 31, 34, 36, 37, 84-86, 97, 109-111, 117, 125, 126, 142, 155, 156, 158, 160 Custom 8, 12, 105, 109, 113, 122, 137, 151 Dahl, R. A. 87, 88, 100 Democracy 1, 162, 163 (see also Society, democratic) Discrimination 11, 19, 103 Djilas, M. 68, 69, 72 Dominance, Domination 11-13, 15, 17, 21, 28, 48, 50, 53, 54, 58, 72, 126 (see also Power) Drake, St. Clair 115, 127 Dumont, L. 47, 143, 152 Durkheim, £. 7, 17, 23, 43, 70, 156, 165, 172 Duverger, M. 139, 152 Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. 54, 72 filite 52, 58, 65, 88; circulation of 138 Elite theorists 52

Emulation 22, 40, 91, 135, 136 Engels, F. 42, 47, 154, 156-159, 169, 172 England 24, 77, 79 (see also Britain) Equality 16, 120, 145, 147, 153, 155, 160, 162, 164, 165, 168; ethic of 107; future of 2; ideology of 1, 3; principle of 1, 151, 159; spirit of 44, 151 (see also Society, egalitarian) Estate 3, 27, 36, 43^15, 74, 129, 150, 163 Ethnicity 84, 105 (see also Race) Europe 2, 3, 5, 10, 25, 42^15, 62, 74, 75, 98, 99, 102, 110, 125, 131, 139, 147, 150, 151, 166 Evaluation 4, 8, 10, 11, 16, 21, 25, 33, 47, 124, 132, 150, 153; criteria of 9, 19, 109; nature of 20; object of 114; principle of 8, 133; process of 4, 9, 26, 150; scale of 32, 146; scheme of 9, 20, 69; standard of 4, 9, 24, 26, 84, 98 Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 15 Exclusion 136 Fanon, F. 97, 100 Feudalism 2, 42^16 (see also Society, feudal) Food 8, 32, 33, 53, 54 Force 11, 12, 17, 49, 50, 52, 56, 58, 134, 142 France 7, 17, 60, 79, 106, 107 Frazier, E. F. 117, 127 French Revolution (1789) 43, 147, 170 Furtado, C. 100 Galbraith, J. K. 87, 99, 100 Gandhi, M. K. 38, 70, 71 Genetic code 6, 7, 54 Genotype, Genotypical 10, 103, 104 Germany 57, 62, 65, 66, 107 Gerth, H. H. 99 Glazer, N. 127 Glezerman, G. 169, 172 Gluckman, M. 15, 23, 55, 56, 72, 138, 139, 152 Gobineau, A. de 166 Goldhamer, H. 50, 72 Government 14, 68, 82, 89, 116 Gumlao model 161

Index Gumsa model 161 Guna 31-33 (see also Quality)

Hamilton, C. V. 128 Harijan 34, 39-^41 (see also Untouchable) Harmonic/Disharmonic society 149-151 Hauser, P. M. 127 Hierarchy 2, 5, 25, 30, 31, 33-35, 37, 39-43, 49, 60, 64, 141, 161, 168; ideology of 21; principle of 145, 150; of caste 49, 93, 140, 143, 145, 147; of estate 45, 49; of food 8; of status 19, 21, 28, 38; and norm 149, 150; and status 40, 41; and value 8, 21, 85, 149, 150 (see also Inequality; Power; Status; Stratification) Hitler, A. 57, 58, 63-66, 71 Hobbes, T. 11, 12, 23 Holland 107 Honour 4, 26, 40, 43-46, 86 Hughes, E. C. 127 Hunter, F. 87, 100 Hypergamy 160 Hypogamy 161 Ideology 1, 21, 46, 49, 59, 61, 67, 164, 165 (see also Equality; Hierarchy; Inequality) Impure, Impurity 26, 31, 32, 38 (see also Pollution) Inclusion 136 Income 22, 73, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 89, 92, 101, 117, 131 India 3, 10, 19, 25, 26, 28, 29, 34, 39, 42, 44, 59, 70, 92-95, 97, 98, 107, 131, 135, 140, 145, 150, 151 Industrialisation 2, 59 (see also Society, industrial) Industry 79, 93, 98, 116, 124, 148,164 Inequality 1-3, 16, 17, 22, 46, 146, 160, 162, 164, 165, 167, 168; moral 4, 10, 153, 166; natural 3, 4, 10, 12, 165, 167; political 4; qualitative 164, 170, 171; quantitative 164, 167, 170, 171; racial 121; social 3, 4, 17, 20-22, 66, 73, 74, 91, 93, 97, 129, 130, 132, 136, 139, 162, 165-168, 170;

175

basis of 78, 90; forms of 2, 5, 19, 20, 68, 73, 101, 102, 148, 149, 157; ideology of 2; nature of 46; sources of 11, 18, 73, 74, 91; of caste 165; of income 69; of power 12, 15-17, 21, 52, 55, 56, 59, 67, 70-73, 82, 88, 89, 91, 92, 95, 98; of rank 54; of status 21, 26, 49, 70, 72, 73, 91-93, 98; of wealth 70, 167; distributive aspects of 132-139; relational aspects of 130-131 (see also Hierarchy; Power; Status; Stratification) Influence 44, 88 Inheritance 158, 159 Intelligentsia 67-69, 169-171 Intermarriage 112, 113, 123, 143 (see also Marriage) Japan 139 Jati 27, 34, 139-141 (see also Caste; Subcaste; Varna)

Jones, F. L. 127 Kachin 161, 162, 165 Kerala 39 Khaldun, Ibn 68 Kinship 14-16, 57, 156-160 (see also Lineage) Kroeber, A. L. 139, 152 Kshatriya 30, 31, 34, 93, 140, 144 (see also Caste; Jati-, Varna) KuKluxKlan 119, 120 Kulin system 37-39 (see also Brahman) Kuper, L. 127 Labour 74, 76, 96; division of 6, 13, 14, 57, 70, 77, 154, 156, 162 Land 31, 79, 80, 83, 93-96, 108, 142, 158 Landless labourer 93, 96 Landowner, Landownership 34, 40, 41, 78, 93, 94, 96 (see also Owner, Ownership) Latin America 2, 92, 99 Law 12, 43, 56, 91, 105, 108, 113, 151, 155, 167 Leach, E. R. 161, 172 Lenin, V. I. 169 Levi Strauss, C. 8, 23

176

Index

Lineage 15, 36, 45, 56, 137, 141, 145, 158-161, 166 (see also Kinship) Lowie, R. H. 158, 172 Lynd, R. & H. 87 Machiavelli, N. 11, 17 Malabar 39 Malinowski, B. 12, 13, 23 Malthus, T. R. 168 Manipulation 50, 58, 131 Market 22, 68, 74, 78-80, 91-96, 98, 166 Marriage 36, 71, 105, 112, 113, 121, 123, 140, 143, 156, 157, 159-161 Marshall, A. 164 Marshall, T. H. 42, 47, 146, 147, 149, 150, 152, 164, 165, 172 Marx, K. 2, 21, 42, 47, 59, 60, 74-78, 81, 148, 154, 156, 157, 169, 172 (see also Class, Marxian conception of) Mauss, M. 7, 23 Mel system 37 Merton, R. K. 85, 99 Michels, R. 17, 23 Mills, C. W. 58, 88-91, 99, 100 Mirasdar 96 Mobility 5, 79, 116, 118, 134, 136, 138, 141, 143, 148, 154; horizontal 134; vertical 134 Money 79, 80, 82-85, 94, 119 Montesquieu, C. de 17, 26 Morgan, L. H. 157-159 Mosca, G. 17 Myrdal, G. 93, 100, 127 Nazi 52, 58, 59, 61, 65-67, 70 Negro, Negroid 104-106, 109-122, 124, 135, 149 Neumann, F. 62, 64, 72 Nobility 44 Normative text 27, 32, 33, 151 Nuer 15 Occupation 39, 46, 71, 77, 78, 81, 83, 101, 116, 131, 140, 148, 164 October Revolution (1917) 168, 170, 171 Oligarchy 17 Order, existential 22, 149-151; hierarchical 26; normative 149-151

Organisation 7, 11-17, 20, 59-62, 64 80, 132, 139, 153 Osipov, G. 168, 172 Ossowski, S. 44, 47, 67, 72, 76, 99, 151, 170-172 Owner, Ownership 9, 21, 22, 67-69, 74-79, 81, 90, 92-94, 158, 169, 171 Pakistan 34 Palla 41 Paraiya 41 Pareto, V. 17, 138 Parsons, T. 9, 17, 23, 128 Peasant 46, 67, 169, 171 Peristiany, J. G. 47 Phenotype, Phenotypical 10, 103, 104 Pitt-Rivers, J. 47 Pluralist theories 52 Pocock,D. F. 152 Poland 44, 76, 171 Politics 14, 15, 19, 87, 121, 136, 137, Pollack, G. A. 100 Pollution 26, 29, 31, 39, 45, 46, 70 (see also Impure) Polsby, N. W. 87, 88, 100 Polygamy 36 Portugal 107 Poverty 2, 89, 116, 158, 167 Power 4, 11-14, 16-19, 28, 48, 58, 78, 81, 82, 90, 96, 121, 124, 126, 133, 137, 139, 142, 154, 160, 166; community 56; legitimate 17, 50; balance of 96, 127, 134; basis of 81, 87, 96, 119; delegation of 56; distribution of 11, 20, 21, 50-52, 57, 62, 66-69, 87-89, 137, 138; exercise of 52, 60, 64, 88, 89; hierarchy of 58; inequality of 12, 15-17, 21, 49, 52, 55, 59, 67, 70-73, 82, 88, 89, 91, 92, 95, 98; instruments of 49, 61, 118, 134, 136, 137; scope of 51; source of 68; structure of 53, 55, 56, 63, 64, 137; types of 50, 72; and authority 14, 16, 55, 137; and status 18, 19, 21, 22, 73, 75, 78, 81, 82, 92, 102, 134, 135, 162 (see also Authority; Dominance; Hierarchy; Inequality Status) Primitive communism 6, 22, 155, 156 158, 161

Index Primogeniture 160 Proletariat 67 Property 21, 22, 67, 68, 74, 75, 77-81, 83, 87, 88, 90, 95, 96, 102, 118, 120, 130, 157-159, 167, 169, 170; private 74-76, 82; distribution of 73, 82, 91 (see also Capital; Wealth) Propertyless 89, 170 Proudhon, P. J. 74 Pruden, D. 128 Purity 25, 26, 29, 31, 32, 35, 36, 45, 46, 70, 86, 94, 98, 122 Quality 9, 10, 31-33, 35-37, 45, 49, 52, 79, 124, 135 Race 10, 21, 22, 59, 61, 82, 84, 101-111, 113, 116, 118, 120, 123, 126, 127, 130, 157, 166; identification of 103; as a biological fact 102; as a cultural fact 102; attitudes to 10; and culture 125; and ethnicity 84, 105; and stratification 101, 102, 106, 112, 121, 127 (see also Colour; Ethnicity) Race relations 120 Racial group 122 Racial purity 122 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 6, 23, 132, 138 151 Rebellion 138, 139 Revolution 43, 69, 138, 147, 153, 168, 170, 171 Roszak, T. 100 Rousseau, J.-J. 3, 4, 6, 10, 12, 17, 23, 153, 166 Rowley, C. D. 127 Sanction 12, 21, 52; formal 134, 135; informal 134, 135 Sanskritisation 143, 144 Schapera, I. 14, 23, 54, 55, 72 Segmentary system 15, 141 Segregation 102, 106, 113-115, 121, 123, 124 (see also Apartheid) Shils, E. A. 50, 72 Shudra 30-32, 37, 40, 41, 140 (see also Caste; Jati\ Varna) Slave, Slavery 22, 109-114, 116, 138 Socialisation 86, 133

111

Socialism 1, 169 (see also Society, socialist) Society, advanced 2, 13, 50, 75, 92, 159; American 9, 84-87, 92, 116, 120, 121, 131; aristocratic 26, 42, 43, 73, 79, 157; backward 2, 75, 92; capitalist 9, 74-76, 81, 83, 86, 89, 90, 165, 167, 170, 171; democratic 21, 79, 137; egalitarian 9, 22, 44, 148, 153, 154, 163, 168; feudal 26, 42-44, 73; industrial 5, 6, 8, 9, 15, 16, 21, 26, 46, 59-63, 65, 67, 68, 70, 72, 75, 130, 136, 146, 151; modern 19, 26, 50, 51, 62, 66, 75, 146, 148, 151, 161, 169; pre-industrial 3, 9, 135, 148, 160; primitive 7, 13, 50, 155-159, 161; socialist 68, 74, 75; Soviet 69, 70, 86, 168-170; traditional 26, 59, 73, 137, 141, 144; tribal 6, 7, 13-15, 65, 131, 155, 156; totalitarian 16, 21, 63, 66, 89; Western 2, 5, 6, 18, 19, 42, 58, 59, 68, 73, 139, 146, 147, 159, 160 Soviet Union 66-68, 75, 81, 168, 170, 171 (see also Society, Soviet) South Africa 54, 56, 101, 106, 107, 110, 121, 122, 124-126, 133 Spain 107 State 11, 12, 16,21,22, 53, 61,68, 69, 120, 124, 138, 169 Stalin, J. V. 58, 66, 67, 70, 71 Status 18-20, 22, 29-31, 33, 36, 48, 78-82, 84, 85, 87, 94, 98, 117, 135, 136, 145, 165; claims to 36; criteria of 87, 94; gradation of 20, 136; hierarchy of 19, 21, 28; inequality of 21, 26, 49, 70, 72, 73, 91-93, 98; measure of 84; symbol of 85, 98, 135, 136; and class 165; and power 18, 19, 21, 22, 73, 75, 78, 81, 82, 92, 102, 134, 135, 162 (see also Hierarchy; Inequality; Power) Stratum, Strata 27, 28, 30, 42, 44, 45, 67, 69, 83, 98, 130-136, 149, 156, 159, 169, 170 Stratification 5, 21, 42, 46, 101, 102, 129, 130, 134, 136, 140, 146, 147, 150, 168 (see also Hierarchy; Inequality)

178

Index

Srinivas, M. N. 143, 144, 152 Subcaste 34, 39, 141, 142, 145 (see also Caste; Jati) Subordination/Superordination 12, 60 Symbol (see Status, symbol of)

Tamilnadu 29, 39 Tanjore 39 Territory, Territorial 13-16, 56, 59, 105, 157 Tocqueville, A. de 42-45, 47, 108, 127, 147, 148, 151, 162, 163, 167, 168, 172 Tribe 14, 15, 33, 54, 55, 109, 156-159 (see also Society, tribal) Trobriand Islands 12 Tumin, M. M. 47

Ultimogeniture 160 United States 5, 25, 76, 79, 81-84, 88, 90-92, 101, 106-109, 111-114, 116-118, 121, 126, 130, 149, 150, 167-171 (see also America; Society, American) Untouchable, Untouchability 38, 70, 71 (see also Harijan) Uravnilovka 69, 171

U.S.S.R. (see Society, Soviet; Soviet Union) Uttar Pradesh 34 Vaishya 30, 31, 34, 140, 144 (see also Caste; Jati', Varna) Value (see Evaluation) Varna 27, 30, 31, 33, 34, 44, 139, 140, 144, 150 (see also Brahman; Caste; Jati; Kshatriya; Shudra; Vaishya) Veblen, T. 84, 85, 99 Vietnam 71 Village 13, 15, 16, 39-41, 53, 93-96, 141, 147 Wealth 4, 19, 22, 70, 73, 77, 78-82, 85, 87-91, 94, 95, 99, 102, 130, 163, 164 (see also Capital; Property) Weber, M. 53, 60, 68, 77-79, 91, 99 137, 152 West (see Society, Western) White 105-127 Worker 74, 78, 81, 116, 135, 169 Young, M. 9, 23 Zamindar 94, 95

Zulu 55, 56, 59

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