Sociology Egalitarianism Across Gender Roles Term Paper

Previously we have reported that although the anthropometric status of women themselves is not associated with the number of cowives or their marital rank, the growth of children is strongly associated with the number of cowives present and the order of the mother's marriage to the husband. These analyses controlled for variation between seasons and a significant independent effect of household, but did not directly test for associations between aggregate indicators of household nutrition and wealth.

(Sellen)

As is shown, the status of women among the Datoga is determined by the respective status of their menfolk. A woman can actively raise her own status by contributing to the increased wealth and prestige of her husband, either by adding to his stock of wives, children, cattle, or cowrie shells. However, she seems to have little status on her own. Presumably if she were not married - not somehow directly attached to a man - she would have status insofar only as she would be an object of desire to a man. In other words, the more desirable she appears, the more likely would she be to acquire a husband, and the higher the status of that husband.

Thus, there are great differences in the relative egalitarianism of hunter/gatherer and pastoralist societies. These differences do not depend ultimately on the different ways of earning a living, nor on the different social organizations of the two kinds of people. Instead, what is essential to any people's definition of wealth, prestige, and success, is the prime determining factor in the relative egalitarianism, or hierarchical qualities found among that people. If the acquisition of wealth is limited to certain kinds of occupations, or to the acquisition of certain objects, then only those who can perform such tasks or obtain such objects can be considered successful. And because in societies at the level of the hunter/gatherer and the pastoralist normally exhibit an extreme demarcation of function between the genders, it is thus almost certain that greater division in status will develop among pastoralists than would be expected among hunter/gatherers. The simple explanation is found in the fact that most hunter/gatherers do not really conceive of wealth in terms of the "hoarding" of anything, and so not in terms of its "procurement." The fact that pastoralists do however associate wealth specifically with cattle (and sometimes additional objects) does mean that society is much more easily arranged according to hierarchical notions.

Works Cited

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Boehm, Christopher. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=3474489

Schweitzer, Peter R. "Chapter 1 Russian Anthropology, Western Hunter-Gatherer Debates, and Siberian Peoples." Hunters and Gatherers in the Modern World: Conflict, Resistance, and Self-Determination. Eds. Schweitzer, Peter P., Megan Biesele, and Robert K. Hitchcock. New York: Berghahn Books, 2000. 29-51. http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5002093440

Sellen, Daniel W. "Nutritional Consequences of Wealth Differentials in East African Pastoralists: The Case of the Datoga of Northern Tanzania." Human Ecology 31.4 (2003): 529+. Questia. 6 Dec. 2004 http://www.questia.com/. http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=91115227

Spear, Thomas and Richard Waller, eds. Being Maasai: Ethnicity & Identity in East Africa. London: James Currey, 1993.