In Western, and indeed in all modern societies, social practice is marked by different expressions of inequality, and these have been investigated in detail at the level of the local community as well as the wider society, but more by those who are called *sociologists rather than social or cultural anthropologists. Of all these many inequalities, the ones that are most distinctive of modern societies are those relating to the social grading of occupations (Blau and Duncan 1968). In these societies, one’s social identity is defined to a considerable extent by one’s occupation: a great deal of one’s adult life is devoted to it, and one’s early life is largely a preparation for it. Occupations are differentiated and ranked in very elaborate ways (Goldthorpe and Hope 1974), and one may detect broadly similar patterns of occupational ranking across a very wide range of societies, such as the United States, Poland and India (Treiman 1977).
One striking feature of many modern societies is the simultaneous presence of inequalities of many kinds. In the United States, for example, inequalities of *race and of gender co-exist with, and to some extent cut across, those due to occupation. It is true that a very high value is placed on equality in what has been called the ‘American creed’. When, on the other hand, one looks at all the multifarious inequalities there—of wealth, income and occupation; of power and prestige; between blacks and whites; and between men and women—one cannot but ask what it might mean to say that equality, and not hierarchy, is the basic premise of American culture. The contrast between Homo Hierarchicus and Homo Equalis may illuminate the past to some extent, but so far as the present is concerned, it would appear more reasonable to say that modern societies ‘are both egalitarian in aspiration and hierarchical in organisation’ (Aron 1968:xv).
Much of the research actually conducted by anthropologists consists of detailed investigations of specific communities or societies, but the aims of anthropology are in addition both comparative and general. The *comparative method has been a central part of anthropology from the very beginning, although there have been some distinguished critics of it (Béteille 1991). At first it was used to discover the origin and evolution of every kind of social arrangement, including inequality; later it was used to discover the general laws of the structure and functioning of societies; and today it is still widely used, more or less systematically, to throw light on similarities and differences in the forms of social and cultural life, including the nature and types of inequality.
In examining inequality comparatively, the sociologist or social anthropologist is less concerned with inequalities of ability, aptitude or talent among individuals than with inequalities that are an inherent part of collective existence and that arise from the evaluation of qualities and performances and the organization of persons into more or less stable arrangements (Béteille 1977). These studies aim at investigating not only the existing patterns of inequality but also the mechanisms of their reproduction over time (Bourdieu and Passeron 1972). A major change between the past and the present has been the shift of attention from the origin to the reproduction of inequality. The reproduction of inequality can be investigated empirically, whereas it is hard to see how this can be done for its origin.
Human beings differ from animals, it is said, because they have *culture, and every human culture, irrespective of scale or complexity, *classifies and evaluates all manner of objects, beings, positions, arrangements and so on. Some qualities are highly esteemed while others are not; some types of performance rate higher than others; and persons and positions associated with qualities and performances considered superior are themselves considered in some sense superior. What is at issue here is not just individual (or idiosyncratic) tastes and preferences, but standards of evaluation that are widely shared or at least acknowledged by the bearers of a particular culture. Persons with sophisticated tastes and preferences may find it strange, but it is true never the less that a sense of distinction is a part of every human culture, no matter how impoverished it may appear from outside.
If the argument above is correct, then scales of evaluation are used for discriminating among persons and positions, and ranking them as superior and inferior in all human societies. In simple societies, the scales may be largely implicit and the ranking rudimentary. In complex civilizations, they tend to be articulated, elaborated, system-atized, justified, contested and also overthrown and replaced by other scales and other standards. While no society can accommodate an infinity of scales of evaluation, it may be a mistake to believe that any society is likely to maintain only one single scale that encompasses all the evaluations made by its members.
The fact that in a given society some evaluations predominate and prevail over others indicates that there are inequalities of power among individuals and groups. Inequalities of power are a general if not universal feature of human societies, and they have many different sources. Some have taken the view that they are all ultimately rooted in inequalities of wealth and property; these may be called ‘class theorists’. As against these, there are the ‘élite theorists’ whose position, broadly speaking, is that *power is the source of riches. Those who stress the importance of power as a source of inequality point out that every society has some division of labour, no matter how rudimentary, and some organization involving more or less regular chains of command and obedience. This involves a differentiation of social positions, some of which carry more authority or power than others. In this view, the hunter-gatherer bands, referred to earlier, are at best limiting cases and not typical ones.
