Stratification in Plural Societies1

Abstract

Stratification in Plural Societies l BURTON BENEDICT Landon School of Economics and Political Science INTRODUCTION HEN one talking about W one talks talks about stratification, one is usually talking structure. When about plural societies, one is about ethnic or cultural categories (Morris 1957). It will become evident in the course of this paper that the use of ethnic and cultural criteria to differentiate sections of a society will not give us a clear description of the strata within it, nor enable us to see with clarity the relations between strata. To do this one must turn from cultural labels toward the major political and economic structures of the whole society. THE CONCEPT OF THE PLURAL SOCIETY The term plural society which is associated with the writings of J. S. Furnivall (1944, 1945, 1948) has gained wide currency in the last few years. On the one hand it has been hailed as essential for comparative sociology (M. G. Smith 1960: 763) and as a field of crucial and strategic importance for sociological theory (Rex 1959: 114). On the other hand, it has been criticized as misleading because it concentrates attention upon differences in race and custom and upon group conflict while at the same time directing attention away from the processes making for unity and integration in the society (R. T. Smith 1958). To emphasise plurality may also encourage people to look on societies with minority problems as if they did not have coherent social systems that are strictly comparable with societies that do not have 'minority problems' (Morris 1957: 125). A difficulty has lain in the attempt to push the concept to cover all sorts of differences in culture and institutions within a society. Every society has pluralistic aspects in the sense that different values and attitudes are produced by any functioning social system (Braithwaite 1960:821). In this sense, plural­ ism is apt to become a synonym for complex. A second difficulty arising from the first has been the attempt to describe all societies which contain more than one ethnic or cultural category in terms of pluralism. This has led M. G. Smith, for example, to describe the United States and Brazil as hetero­ geneous societies that contain plural communities and evince pluralism without themselves being plural societies (1960: 771). This difficulty has bedeviled both the 1960 conference on Pluralism in the Carribean and the 1957 INCIDI conference on pluralism in tropical territories. Underlying these difficulties is the fallacy of thinking that pluralism is an analytical concept, whereas it is a simple classificatory one.