Chapter 6
‘Your station in life’: social identities
in our time
Social stratification
Societies are not amorphous collections of individuals, but structured aggregates
in which everyone has a place, a station in life. Since these stations are not
allotted or acquired at random, their distribution can be studied. This is the job of
sociologists; they investigate inequality. Societies differ in how they are
stratified, that is, how inequality is organized, and in terms of the rigidity and
possibilities of choice of social categories.
People can be classified according to various systems of partitioning. The
sociologist’s task is to discover the categories that are pertinent for his/her
society and design a model that represents the relevant social divisions. For
example, medieval European feudalism was a social order characterized by
relatively fixed ‘estates’ that determined one’s life course and the nature of
personal relationships between aristocrats and peasant serfs. A similar system
obtained in Japan until the mid-19th century where the Samurai elite were at the
top followed by farmers, artisans, and at the bottom of the pyramid, merchants.
One’s station in life (social identity) in such a system was inherited rather than
accomplished on the basis of merit. A feudal hierarchy could be more fine-
grained, including knights, vassals, merchants, artisans, and a special place for
clerics, but there wasn’t much question about its stable nature. Social segregation
manifested itself in terms of endogamy (marrying neither below nor above
(one’s) estate), the right to bear arms (or lack thereof), common customs and
traditions, food preferences, and dress. Taken together, these features made