8 - Slavery and Race

Abstract

Poverty was a condition, slavery a legal institution, and as such perhaps seen as more artificial and, ultimately, removable. Yet as long as it lasted, it circumscribed the fate of those within its bounds more definitely, more ascriptively, than a sheer condition of poverty would ever do. The static character of Parsons' variables not only makes it hard to perceive ascription and achievement as the poles of a taxonomic continuum; there are two further disadvantages. With changing economic and demographic conjunctures in a given society, several patterns of alliance may succeed each other and the economic and social position of the intermediate attributive group or groups may change accordingly. Where, in a hierarchic-structure, a mixed-descent intermediate group was not recognized or only ambiguously recognized. Structures starting out with one dominant and one subordinate attributive group, based on assumed descent, may in the course of history acquire widely different attributive stratifications. These may range from a persisting dichotomy, such as that between white and black, to a diffuse and continuous stratification. In the latter, the attributes of descent of the original dominant and subordinate groups still serve as positive and negative poles of attributive prestige and preferential treatment, but the intermediate groupings occupy such a large part of the attributive scale that attributive discontinutites are no longer based on a social consensus sufficiently broad to have any social effect. In this situation, individuals can be placed in an attributive scale but not groups.