Salience Understandings

There is nothing unusual about two or more of an individual's statuses being involved in interaction at once. That is, salience understandings include those that allow (or, even, require) that acting and being evaluated according to one status involves simultaneously acting and being evaluated according to another.^[4]

The Swahili, to take one example of such salience understandings, differentiate among themselves on the basis of neighborhood. It is generally understood that all forms of manual labor are inappropriate for members of their group, with the partial exception of commercial fishing, which is practiced mainly by the men from the Kuze neighborhood of Old Town. These men are unquestionably classified as Swahili, but, unlike other Swahili, they are understood to be more blunt, uninterested in elaborate etiquette, and generally more direct and physical in what they can be expected to do.

This Kuze status is quite as real as the Swahili status, and both have expectations concerning their members. Since the Kuze men meet the identifying understandings for the Swahili status, they are classified that way, and since they also meet the identifiers for Kuze, they are classified that way as well. In some contexts, the Swahili status is dominant; in others, the Kuze status is. This can be seen in their own behavior and that of those interacting with them through inferring the expectations involved.

The occupancy of several statuses by each of the participants in a single event is quite common, and these multiple occupancies are often simultaneous, with the different statuses contributing differently to the expectations that guide the behavior of the statuses' occupants and of their social partners. Gender-based statuses, age-based statuses, and ethnic-based statuses often occur only or mainly in conjunction with other statuses, and, among the Swahili and others, almost all other statuses are occupied jointly with all three of these. But it is not only broad and widely inclusive statuses that are jointly operative in interaction.

The Swahili fisherman is a businessman when he sells his fish. These two statuses with their quite specific and limited expectations are occupied simultaneously, perhaps, with the broader statuses of Muslim, Swahili, Kuze resident, male, and person of whatever age. That this is so is discovered by inferring the expectations of those with whom the fisherman interacts and his expectations of them and comparing these to the expectations found in the various individual statuses at issue.

It would be possible, of course, to speak of a single status, businessman-fisherman or Kuze-Swahili, rather than a combination of the separate statuses.

However, so long as the understandings involved sometimes occur independently in association with only one of the sets of identifiers (e.g., so long as there are understandings about fishermen independent of businessmen), the analysis is better served by treating the statuses as occurring jointly.