Historical Summary

Beginning on the simple food and shelter level, the behavior incentives noted up to this point have shown a striving for security and personality expansion on the basis of accumulated property; the employment of kinship, symbolic kinship, and spiritual support to secure relatively superior position and adjustment; the general subordination of the personal response element in marriage to the factors of convenience and advantage; and the desire to secure a distinguished social rating as a condition favorable to all personality adjustment. While the desire for security is the most fundamental incentive and has extensive ramifications, especially in legal and governmental systems, the desire for recognition on the basis of individual performance or as a member of a distinguished group is the incentive leading to a number of patterns through which social distance is determined and regulated.

The guarding of the personality and the registration of social distance in the naive forms of etiquette and in the employment of personal names has been considered in Chap. IV, the subsequent chapters on kinship, etc., contained other expressions of social distance, and still other forms of ranking will appear in later chapters on government and law. At this point certain strivings for distinction on the customary level will be considered, including age grades and esoteric clubs.

In all populations there is, in addition to the natural sex division, a general recognition of status by age levels—young, mature, and old. Even in low cultures the divisions may be quite complicated, and in the higher ones a system of ranking into classes may be extensively developed with economic and political implications.

Perhaps the most minute classification of individuals by positions and periods in the course of life is seen in one of the tribes of lowest cultural level. The South Andaman Islanders, who have no numerals higher than "two," and who were noted, nevertheless, in the chapter on language for their excessive employment of pronouns, have an elaboration of terms describing the position of the individual in society by time periods from birth to death, designating age level, marital situation, critical periods in development, etc. These periods for males are as follows (the native terms being omitted), and there is a separate corresponding set of terms for females: