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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VIII. Social Stratification - 31. Caste and Class - 2. The “Meaning” of the Concepts “Caste” and “Class”
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Chapter 31. Caste and Class 673
In a vague way we mean, of course, somewhat the same thing by social
status in all the capitalistic democratic civilizations within the Western
sphere, and we know that social status is ordinarily connected with income,
wealth, occupation, education, family background, home ownership. Owing
primarily to the great immigration to America, nationality, length of resi-
dence, language, and religion are additional factors indicating or deter-
mining class in this nation. These characteristics have different relative
importance for the class structure in different national cultures. And none
of them gives the full ^‘meaning” of class in any one of the Western cul-
tures.
One school of thought defines class in terms of class feeling: the con-
sciousness of the individuals of a class that they belong together in a cor-
porate unity, and that they have different interests from individuals in other
classes. This criterion—which has been worked out partly under the influ-
ence of Marx’s class sociology and which is closely related to the idea of
‘^ass struggle”—is obviously inadequate at least as far as America is con-
cerned. In America, particularly in the lower strata, class feeling, in this
sense of interest solidarity, is undeveloped. It does not give the true mean-
ing or importance of class to any ordinary American.
The Warner group defines class as ^^the largest group of people whose
members have intimate social access to one another.”® This suggestive
definition seizes upon the fact that, even when class consciousness and
class solidarity are not developed,^® people do feel social distance and act
it out in their everyday life by forming more or less cohesive groups for
leisure time activity.^^ This group formation centers around the family
and has the most important effects in controlling the behavior of Individ-
uals even outside the leisure time spheres of their life, and particularly in
determining the social orientation given children and youth.^®
This viewpoint is certainly wholesome as a reaction against the tendencies
to use the most easily available class indices—income and occupation—^as
more than approximate measures of social class.^® But it obviously over-
emphasizes the role of purely social contacts and under-emphasizes the
importance of other criteria. It fails to consider such important things as
the imperfect correlation of leisure groups, the continuity of the social
status scale, the arbitrariness of class demarcations, the differential infre-
quency of social contacts, the difficulty of separating social from purely
personal distances, the relation between social structures in all the various
American communities, the desire of some individuals to gain a position of
leadership in a lower class rather than rise to a higher one. The ordinary
American—particularly the male American—will not recognize his own
class concept in this definition.
Class Is in America one of the ^Value-loaded” terms and has to be related
to our value premise. Classes and class di^erences in America are thus in
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