Social stratification

Social stratification means the existence of structured inequalities between groups in society, in their access to material rewards (wealth, income) and symbolic rewards (respect, prestige). The word comes from geology: society is pictured as layers (strata) of rock, one above another, with the more favoured on top.

Four basic systems of stratification have existed in human history:

• Slavery: an extreme form, in which some people are literally owned by others; the major examples are ancient Greece and Rome and the southern states of the USA in the 18th and 19th centuries. As a formal institution slavery has been abolished, but bonded labour, often even of children, still exists.
• Caste: position fixed by birth (below).
• Estates: characterised feudal Europe (clergy, nobility, commoners).
• Class: groups ranked mainly by economic position (below).

Caste. In a caste system, a person's status is ascribed: fixed by birth, not by achievement. Caste groups were ranked on ideas of purity and pollution.

• The scriptures speak of four varnas (Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras), but in reality there are innumerable occupation-based caste groups, called jatis.
• Endogamy (marrying within one's own caste) and the so-called upper castes' ritual avoidance of contact with castes they treated as lower were used to maintain 'purity'.
• Urbanisation, industry and democracy challenged these rules: in mills, trains, buses and restaurants, people of all castes worked, travelled and ate side by side. The sociologist A.R. Desai described these changes. But the book is clear that discrimination was not easy to end: a mill worker's account tells how, in private, some co-workers still refused water from his hands and used abusive language.

Class. In a class system, position depends on economic factors and is, in principle, open and achievement-based. Three views:

• Marx: classes are defined by their relation to the means of production (land, factories). Some groups own them; others own nothing but their own labour.
• Weber: used the term life-chances, the rewards and advantages afforded by market capacity (skills, qualifications, property). He also stressed that inequality rests on social prestige (status) and political power, not on the economy alone.
• Functionalists: every society is stratified because important positions must be filled by the most able people, so these positions carry higher rewards.
• In practice, movement between classes is far from perfect: family background, education and contacts still shape where people end up.

Example (new): two children are born the same day in the same town, one to a landowning family and one to a landless labourer's family. Under caste rules their futures were fixed at birth; in a class society both can, in principle, rise or fall, but their starting life-chances are already very different.