The Way the World is "d0e3032"

Less Sharing Among Members of the Same Named Statuses than Among Fellow Family Members with Different Family Statuses

As noted earlier, one of the first—and still one of the few—alternatives to the view that everyone in a society shares all culture with everyone else is the view that culture is distributed according to status membership. Linton (1936:113–115) holds that members of the same status category share more with one another—especially as concerns matters directly affecting the status—than they do with members of their society who do not belong to the status category in question. This view is probably more nearly in accord with observations of behavior than is the one that holds that all culture is shared by everyone. Nevertheless, there are a number of questions about sharing within statuses that can usefully be examined even if only with the limited data obtaining with questionnaires. Table 6 gives the sharing coefficients for the sample as a whole, within the families, and for the four basic family status categories.

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Table 6. Mean Sharing Coefficients within Status Categories
A. Mean Sharing	Swahili	Kahl	La Jolla
Within total sample	.317	.305	.325
Within families	.473	.377	.405
B. Mean Sharing in Status Categories	Swahili	Kahl	La Jolla
Mother's category	.327	.319	.335
Father's category	.342	.332	.333
Sons' category	.312	.288	.326
Daughters' category	.287	.276	.328

By making comparisons among these, it is possible to consider a question of basic importance to the place of statuses as foci of cultural distribution: whether members of a given status share more with one another than with fellow community members in different statuses. For the family, the question is, do, for example, mothers share more of the understandings concerning family life with other members than they do with members of their own families given that the latter are not mothers?

Table 6 shows that for the Swahili and the comparison groups, the coefficients for sharing within the designated status categories (i.e., mother, father, etc.) are uniformly lower than those for sharing within families without regard to internal status differences. That is, members of the same family share more of the total family culture despite belonging to different statuses than do members of the same statuses who belong to different families. According to the sign test, this lesser sharing among members of the same status category as compared to sharing within the family is significant for the Swahili, and the other two groups, at the 0.01 level.