Social Stratification and Inequality: Caste, Class, Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Mobility
What this domain tests
Stratification is the ranked, institutionalised unequal distribution of goods, status and power. The exam tests caste and class as contrasting systems, gender and ethnicity as stratifying axes, and the types of mobility.
Core content
- Caste: Ghurye's six features - segmental division, hierarchy, commensality restrictions, civil and religious disabilities and privileges, occupational restriction, marriage restriction. Varna is the fourfold textual model; jati is the local endogamous group. Dumont's purity/pollution (Homo Hierarchicus); Srinivas's dominant caste (numerical strength plus land, with local dominance). Change: sanskritisation, reservation, politicisation of caste, urban weakening of commensality but persistence of endogamy.
- Class: Marx defined class by relation to the means of production (bourgeoisie/proletariat) and saw class conflict as the motor of change. Weber separated class (market situation), status (social honour) and party (power).
- Gender: sex is biological, gender is socially constructed; patriarchy, gendered division of labour, invisibility of women's work, feminisation of agriculture, gender gaps in education and wages.
- Race and ethnicity: race is a socially constructed category with no sound biological basis for ranking; racism is the practice of that ranking; ethnicity rests on shared descent, culture and language, and can underlie minority status.
- Mobility: Sorokin's vertical (up/down) and horizontal (sideways) mobility; intragenerational and intergenerational; open (class) vs closed (caste) systems. Sanskritisation is mobility within the caste order, not a change in its structure.
Worked example
"A shudra caste in a district acquires land, adopts vegetarianism and claims Kshatriya descent." Reading: economic change raises the group's dominant caste position; ritual imitation is sanskritisation, a claim to higher status in Weber's sense; the caste order itself remains intact, so this is vertical mobility within a closed system.
Traps
Equating varna with jati; treating race as a biological hierarchy; defining class by income alone rather than relation to production; forgetting that gender is itself a stratification system.