Statuses, Expectations, and Evaluations

As the complexes of cultural elements that bring shared understandings to bear on the actualities of life, the effectiveness of statuses is as much due to their serving as a foundation for evaluation as their serving as a guide for behavior. The latter function, obviously, depends on status occupants having understandings that individuals not in the status may or may not share. The evaluative aspect, however, depends on elements shared by many who are not status members. Indeed, they may be shared by nonmembers more than members.

Since at least some expectations are associated with identifying status occupants, some bases for evaluation are available not only to the status occupants and those in roles involving them but to many others in the group. Thus, although statuses distribute culture in the sense that only those occupying a status may share all the understandings necessary to meeting the expectations of that status, others may well have understandings that form the basis for evaluating the behavior involved.

Soccer players are by no means the only ones who evaluate performance in the games that go on constantly in Old Town. A young man who is an outstanding player will, in fact, be admired by some community members outside contexts in which soccer is the focus. More generally, evaluations of performance in a status can affect an individual's social relations and prestige beyond the situation in which the performance occurs, and these evaluations may be made by people substantially removed from involvement in the performance. More than that, since statuses are connected to one another in a variety of roles whose expectations interlock, the meeting, or failure to meet, of expectations in one status can affect performance and evaluation in others.

Taking a simple example of the interconnection of expectations, it is not altogether unknown for Swahili men to have trouble meeting the expectations in their work statuses. A small proportion of men, especially young men, cannot get and keep jobs that provide them with the pay they need fully to meet their financial expectations as husbands, fathers, sons, and, sometimes, siblings and neighbors. Failures to meet status expectations in the simplex work

relationships which lead a man to be discharged can make it impossible for him to meet some broad and general expectations in multiplex family relationships that call for his having money.

Similarly, behavior called for to meet expectations in multiplex relations can affect performance in simplex relations. This is obviously so when the practical necessities in meeting expectations in a multiplex relationship, such as a mother's need to take time to care for a child, clash with meeting expectations in a simplex relationship, such as the expectation that the same woman be on time for her job as a sales clerk.

Clashes in expectations in the two kinds of relationships are not limited to practical matters. Thus, haya is a complex virtue involving definite but modest assertion of one's own rights combined with active consideration for the rights of others. It is valued in many Swahili multiplex relationships, but it can be quite harmful to meeting expectations in simplex relationships in business and commerce where being forward and demanding can be advantageous.