Status Membership and the Sharing of Status Culture

Members of the various named statuses in the family have been seen to share less of total family culture as represented by all the items on the questionnaire than do those in what might be called the "same family member" status. It would seem, however, that if what is measured is sharing of the cultural elements directly concerned with their own status and its relationships, the members of any status category could hardly fail to share more than others share those same elements.

Since fathers and mothers from different families share more across family boundaries than members of other family statuses do, an examination of their sharing provides a useful test of the hypothesis that understandings concerning statuses are shared more fully by those who are classified in those statuses than by those who are not.

Tables 7 and 8 present the results of comparing informants' responses on questionnaire items (all available in Swartz 1982a :335–338) concerned with the mother/wife and the father/husband statuses, respectively. Table 7 concerns the elements that make up what can be called "the mother/wife scale." This scale is simply a list of questions concerning beliefs and values bearing on the mother/wife's behavior. It has five component questions, and the comparable scale for father/husbands has the same number.

The items in the two scales differ only in their subject, with each focusing on the status concerned. Thus, one question in each scale asks whether or not wives advise husbands (for the mother/wife scale) or husbands advise wives (for the father/husband scale) about the work the husband or wife (respectively) does; another asks who wives (or husbands) consult when something is worrying them; another asks whether or not most wives (or husbands) are happy in their marriages; and the final one asks how much fathers (or mothers) take into account the interests and wants of other family members in what the fathers (or mothers) do.

Obviously, the questions in these scales are removed from behavioral reality, but taking the scales as wholes, it seems reasonable to argue that if members of a status do share more of the cultural elements concerning their status with one another than they do with members of other statuses, this will be seen in the results of tabulating responses to these questions. In fact, such status-centered sharing is not what is found for either the father or the mother status.

In Part A of tables 7 and 8 are the coefficients of sharing for the mother/wife and father/husband scales among pairs outside the family (i.e., "Total Sample"). If it is true that sharing of cultural elements concerned with a status is at a higher level within that status, table 7 would be expected to show that the pairs of mothers (Mo-Mo) have the highest coefficients and table 8 would show that the pairs of fathers (Fa-Fa) have the highest coefficient.

In Part A of table 7, it can be seen that neither for the Swahili nor for the comparison groups do mothers have the highest sharing coefficient for the mother/wife scale. Part A of table 8 shows that fathers have the highest sharing coefficients for the father/husband scale in one of the comparison groups but the lowest coefficient in the other and somewhere in the middle for the Swahili. In neither case does the data strongly support the Lintonderived hypothesis that those classified in a status category share items directly concerned with their own status at a substantially higher level than do those in other categories.

Thus, for both mothers and fathers, our data drawn from comparisons among members of the same societies but different families fail to show a higher level of sharing among those actors classified in the same status category even when the elements in question are all directly concerned with that status.

Family statuses may well be quite different from such technically focused statuses as surgeon, potter, or navigator, among whose members we would expect far more sharing of the cultural elements directly concered with the status than among nonmembers. The fact that there are any statuses whose members do not clearly share cultural elements concerning the statuses at a higher level than nonmembers is striking and the additional fact that these statuses are part of so broadly important a group as the nuclear family makes the finding even more challenging.

However distinctive the mother and father statuses may (or may not) be as concerns sharing, the data collected for this study do seem to raise serious doubts about the fruitfulness of continuing to assume that all statuses are equally uniform foci for cultural sharing with all that entails for the way culture operates as a guide to social life. The role of statuses in cultural distribution has long been taken as a central one and as the main alternative to an all by all model of cultural sharing. This alternative model, some by some, has received little empirical attention since Linton introduced it, although work by Holland (1985, 1987a ) provides a notable contribution. The indications from this study, and they are in accord with Holland's findings, are that, useful as it is, it requires a good deal of elaboration and modification if it is to serve as an adequate basis for understanding culture's operation.

It is not that statuses have no role in the distribution of culture but rather what role they have and how they can function with only limited sharing among those who occupy them requires examination. Even granting that all cultural items shared among some members of a group are not necessarily shared among all group members, we still are called on to account for the finding that classification together in a status does not ensure a high level of sharing of even the cultural elements concerned with that status.

As noted in chapter 1, the all by all model of cultural sharing is no longer respectable, and Holland's work together with the findings here suggest that even the some by some model (i.e., the portion of the group's total cultural inventory which concerns the operation of a status is shared by those who occupy the status) cannot be used with confidence.

The fact that the understandings concerning statuses are by no means uniformly shared among the occupants of the statuses in question throws into doubt some aspects of the view formulated by Goodenough (1965) and elaborated by Keesing (1970) that if we fully grasp the schemata in the minds of status occupants, we will have most or all of the basis for understanding how culture operates as the basis for social life.

Important as the distribution of culture by statuses is, recognizing its existence by no means provides all—or even most—of the answers to the question, how does culture work as the basis for social life if it is only partially shared? The data just considered suggest that not only is there substantial variation in the general sharing of culture but there are also important differences

in sharing among the occupants of the same status even as concerns those statuses directly.