Constructing Inequality

Constructing Inequality

Raymond C.. Kelly makes a crucial contribution to a central and enduring issue in social theory: the primary source and central locus for the production of inequality in simple (classless) societies. Kelly grounds his thesis in an incisive critique of prior theoretical formulations and a comprehensive analysis of a key ethnographic case, the Etoro of Papua New Guinea.

Previous theorists have designated “brideservice” or “simple” societies—in which age, gender, and personal characteristics are the predominant basis of social differentiation—as models of egalitarian societies. But Kelly departs from this view. He evaluates such theories against the relevant data derived from studying the Etoro, and, in so doing, shows that a close examination of the Etoro case reveals basic flaws in both the brideservice model and the theory of social inequality that informs it.

Kelly traces the foundations of Etoro social inequality to a male-exclusive shamanic elite’s propagation of a metaphysical doctrine that comprehends reproduction, the spiritual constitution of a person, and the life-cycle transformations of ‘growth, maturation, senescence, and death. Kelly determines that this cosmological system grounds a scheme of social differentiation in which moral evaluation is intrinsically embedded. Social inequality is thus fabricated as a moral hierarchy, or hierarchy of virtue.