Social stratification is a concept that can be confusing when you first encounter it. What even is stratification? And what does social mean in this context?
Historians like their ten-dollar words. This one is useful, but not always the most intuitive. So if you've been puzzled by this word, worry no more! We're doing a deep dive today to straighten out what social stratification is and why we care about it in AP World History.
Breaking It Down
Let's break this phrase down to get a better understanding of it. We'll start with the second half.
Stratification
Social Stratification
In history, social organization refers to interactions and relationships between people. We're going to drop "organization" in this word because stratification is a specific kind of organization. What kind of organization? One that is stratified, or layered. This has two implications for stratified societies.
- There are distinct groups within society. Just like the Grand Canyon, onions, ogres, cakes, and parfaits, we can see distinct groups within society. These groups have characteristics that make them similar to each other, and different from other groups. Just like each of the layers at the Grand Canyon, each group is called a social strata.
- These groups are distinguished by having different amounts of wealth and power in society. By arranging the groups in layers, we are emphasizing this relationship. The groups at the top of the stack have the most wealth. They also tend to have more status and power in society. As you move down, each layer becomes successively less wealthy and powerful. So, a layer in the middle is generally less powerful than the groups above it, but more powerful than the groups below it.
What's Up With The Pyramids?
This is a good question. Social layers often depicted inside of a pyramid. For example, here is a classic depiction of social stratification in Europe during the Medieval Period.
Using a pyramid is intentional, but it's uncommon to see an explanation of why that shape is used so often. So, here goes!
Higher social classes have fewer people. The narrow top of the pyramid reflects that fewer people fall into this category.
On the other hand, lower social classes tend to have more people. This base of the pyramid is larger, which reflect that more people fit into this group.
If you know this, then you can unlock a lot of information at a glance. For example, here the "Peasant/Serf" layer is at the bottom of the pyramid. This tells you they don't have a lot of social status. However, their layer takes up more space than the other layers, so you know that a larger portion of the population of Europe were serfs and peasants than vassals.
Why Do We Care?
Big picture, people care about social class for a lot of reasons. Some people are concerned with inequity and the negative impacts of low social class. Others may track how social classes change as a result of political or economic changes. This can help people propose policies that achieve specific goals. For others, it helps people understand aspects of their lives, like any other type of identity. And there's dozens of other reasons.
We're going to gloss over many of them so we can focus on what's most relevant for AP World History. That doesn't mean the other aspects of this topic are not important and meaningful.
History Themes
The word social also gives us a big clue for why we care about this in AP World History. Social stratification fits into the theme of social organization. This is one of our six themes of AP World History. It's the S in SPICE-T, if you're familiar with the acronym. (If not, check out this article for a quick overview of all of the themes.)
The Long Essay Question and Document-Based Question often use specific themes in their prompts. This means that it's important to understand what "counts" as social organization, and what does not. Social stratification is a form of social organization, and you can comfortably write about for relevant prompts.
Intersectionality
Social organization includes a lot of other relationships that people have with each other. For example, family relationships, gender roles, and racial groups are all part of social organization. AP World History, social stratification typically emphasizes groups based on wealth in a hierarchical arrangement.
It is important to note that people's different identities interact with each other, and shape their experiences. Studying these interactions is called intersectionality, and it appears several times in the course. A classic example in AP World History involves women. Lower class women often have different expectations and opportunities than than upper class women. However, often both groups have different opportunities as men in their same social class.
These relationships shape people's lives. They help us develop a more complex understand of social class. This is something that you could explore to earn that famed complexity point.
Broadening Our Perspective
One of the reasons we study history is to learn about other ways of doing things. When you grow up with a specific way of doing something, it can seem like that's the only way to do that thing. That's especially if it's something people avoid talking about.
Social class has worked differently in different times and in different places. Sometimes social class has been very rigid, in others it's easier to move between social classes. In other places, high status and wealth may have belonged to different groups than those that exist today. Studying social class helps make us aware of the wider human experience.
Finally, social stratification has been the cause of much debate throughout history. Some people have fiercely defended this system of social organization. Others spawned new social movements that condemned these systems as unjust and inhumane. It would be impossible to fully understand the merits of these ideas without understanding the world that created them.
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