gender and prestige :: essays papers

sexual practice and prestigiousnessThe purpose of this essay is to show embeddedness of prestigiousness frame into subsystems of the cultures. We will wrangle four cultures which represent four different faces of social organizations Kung San represents band organization, Mundurucu represents settlement type, Polynesia - Chiefdom, and Andalusia represents state type of social organization. In all of these cultures prestige system, which is the gender system, is imbedded into opposite subsystems. Three of these cultures Mundurucu, Polynesia, and Andalusia, have hierarchical type of ideology, meaning in this culture males have more power then females. Kung San culture, on the otherwisewise hand, has egalitarian type of ideology, where there is no significant difference in power between males and females. We first start by defining prestige system, which consists of prestige itself. Prestige is level of respect at which iodin is regarded by others. Every person in prestige sy stem has status, by which other people value your prestige. Status it determined by following factors economical, governmental, personal, and historical. When we lambaste about the prestige system we have to say that prestige system is supported by ideology, and since cultures have different ideologies, the prestige systems vary from one culture to another. Polynesia, discussed by Sherry Ortner, consists of large numbers of islands in the Pacific Ocean, which embarrass Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, and many more. The islands in their majority have the same prestige system. The prestige systems in Polynesia is the system of hereditary ranking which is embedded in governmental system, kinship system, and economic system. The type of social organization in Polynesia, as we mentioned above, is chiefdom. Chiefdom is characterized by number of crossroadss, where each village has its own chief, and the whole village system has one chief, higher in rank then other chiefs. This fact is importa nt when we discuss the embeddedness of prestige system in the political system. Every village, that is the part of the chiefdom, has a goal to get on the fall out of the symbolic pyramid, with main chief and fono, the governing council, on the top. Sometimes, statuses can be brought higher with the right type of marriage, however, most of the villages have endogamy type of marriages, meaning the fellow comes from inside of the village. In case of exogamy marriage, where spouse comes from outside, the grooms family will have to share part of the land with the brides family.