Chapter 9 Flashcards
What is ascribed statuses?
Social positions people are assigned at birth.
What is stratification?
is a recognizable structural hierarchy of people wherein some members have more access to wealth, power, and prestige than others.
What are achieved statuses?
Social positions people may attain later in life, often as the result of their own (or other people’s) effort.
What is privilege?
The experience of advantage, status, power, and opportunities by specific individuals or groups of individuals in society.
What is systematic inequality?
When institutions, norms, and practices privilege certain identifiable groups over others. Over generations, these privileges and disadvantages are compounded and naturalized, creating enduring inequalities between groups.
What is strategic essentialism?
The use of essentialist rhetoric as a conscious political strategy to create a temporary solidarity to facilitate a specific social action.
How did Marx define classes?
He defined them in terms of their members’ different relations to the means of production
What is a class?
a ranked group within a hierarchically stratified society whose membership is defined primarily in terms of wealth, occupation, and/or access to power
How is class seen in North America v Europe?
North America- Fluid
Europe- Rigid
What is a caste?
a ranked group within a socially stratified society that is closed, prohibiting individuals from moving from one caste into another
Often endogamous, occupational, and linked to religious worldviews
Observe purity and pollution rules and food taboos
The stratification system of South Asia, most commonly India, is often used as the prototype of a caste system.
What is a varna?
a caste that refers to the widespread notion that Indian society is divided into four functional subdivisions:
Priests
Warriors
Farmers
Merchants
What is a Jati?
a caste that refers to localized, named, endogamous groups
What did Srinivas observe?
Lower castes can gain upward mobility through Sanskritization
What is race?
A socially constructed category of humans that has been naturalized in pseudo-scientific language that often conflates geographic ancestry and physical type.
What is racialism?
The belief in the distinction of biologically distinct races
What is racism?
The systemic oppression and discrimination of people based on their membership in racial or ethnic groups that are typically historically marginalized.
What is racialization?
Process of assigning people or groups of people to categories of “race” that historically have been oppressed by colonial powers and continue to experience inequality
What is a cline?
The pattern of gradually shifting geographic frequency of a phenotypic trait (such as skin colour) across human populations
What is whiteness?
A socially constructed and context-specific process in which people who appear as white and are not racialized possess power and privilege in society. This power and privilege is normalized and their language, behaviour, and identity become the unmarked standard.
What is blackness?
hypodescent, or the “one drop of blood” rule, where children of a mixed union are always assigned to the subordinate group.
The purpose of this criteria was to expand and secure an unpaid or cheap labour source through the enslavement of Africans and the subsequent legal and political institutions such as segregation laws in both Canada and the United States.
What is indigeneity?
has been measured by blood quantum or levels of purity (full, half, quarter, etc.).
The purpose of this criteria was to dilute, assimilate, and even eliminate Indigenous people through genocide to secure European control of land and resources.
Indian Act and Status
What do racialized groups experience?
generations of systemic discrimination and oppression that lead to lower socioeconomic outcomes, lower education levels, poor access to housing, poor health, increased encounters with the justice system, and extensive intergenerational trauma (e.g., Residential Schools)
It is important to understand that privilege is also experienced across generations. This includes the transfer of wealth and property (economic capital) as well as the transfer of knowledge, social connections, institutional literacy, and political power (social and cultural capital).
What is sistema de castas?
A system developed by colonial rulers in Latin America (Oaxaca, Mexico) to classify all people of mixed racial heritage
People could move in and out of these categories depending on class, gender, and language
What is ethnicity?
A social classification based on common cultural characteristics, including language, religion, ancestry, traditions, shared homeland, or country of origin.
Ethnicity develops as insiders try to come terms with how they define their identity (self-ascription) and how outsiders attempt to define other groups (other-ascription)
E.g., Serbian ethnicity in Post-war Sarajevo
While it is certain that identities associated with ethnicity predate colonialism and the nation-state, today ethnicity is most commonly used to describe groups who have a minority status in a nation-state.
