gender and prestige :: essays papers

gender and prestigiousnessThe purpose of this es state is to show enterness of prestige placement into sub constitutions of the cultures. We will discuss four cultures which represent four different characters of sociable establishments Kung San represents band organization, Mundurucu represents village type, Polynesia - Chiefdom, and Andalusia represents state type of social organization. In each(prenominal) of these cultures prestige constitution, which is the gender system, is imbedded into other subsystems. Three of these cultures Mundurucu, Polynesia, and Andalusia, retain hierarchical type of ideology, meaning in this culture males have more power then females. Kung San culture, on the other hand, has egalitarian type of ideology, where there is no solid 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 one 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, political, personal, and historical. When we talk 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 is primer coats in the Pacific Ocean, which include Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, and many more. The islands in their majority have the identical prestige system. The prestige systems in Polynesia is the system of hereditary straying which is embedded in political 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 villages, where each village has its experience chief, and the whole village system has one chief, higher in rank then other chiefs. This fact is imp ortant 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 abide on the top 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 spouse comes from inside of the village. In type of exogamy marriage, where spouse comes from outside, the grooms family will have to share part of the land with the brides family.