Status

Maine was the one of the first to use notion of status and to distinguish between societies or social relations where one's position in the society is determined at birth and those in which one's position may depend upon one's actions during one's life time.

The functioning of societies depends upon the presence of patterns for reciprocal behavior between individuals or groups of individuals.The polar positions in such patterns of reciprocal behavior are known as statuses.

A status is a position in a particular pattern.The status of any individual means the sum total of all the statuses which he occupies.It represents his position with relation to the total society.Status and role serve to reduce the ideal patterns for social life to individual terms.

The majority of the statuses in all social systems are of ascribed type.

All societies prescribe different attitudes and activities to men and women.Most of them try to rationalize these prescriptions in terms of the physiological difference between the sexes or their different roles in reproduction.

All societies recognize three age groupings as a minimum child,adult and old.Certain societies have emphasized age as a basis for assigning status and have amplified the divisions.

In the case of age the biological factors involved appear to be secondary to the cultural ones in determining the content of status.