The Cultural Foundations of Inequality in Households

Abstract

In this chapter I follow up on a frequently expressed argument that an elaboration of culture, especially in the realms of symbolic systems and ritual behavior, is a process central to the establishment and institutionalization of social inequality. For example, Bloch (1977:289) argues that ritual communication creates a “mystified nature” in which an order of inequality “takes on the appearance of an inevitable part of an ordered system” (cf. Bourdieu’s [1978–79] concept of “symbolic power”). I propose a hypothesis relating culture to inequality within a specific social context: the household. I then evaluate the hypothesis by analyzing a category of data commonly available to archaeologists, namely, the form of the house. Because the analysis required me to contextualize the formal properties of houses with reference to the social and cultural behavior of their residents, the data I use were coded from ethno-graphically described cases, and the method I use is cross-cultural.