Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Translator's Preface
- Preface
- 1 Characteristics of age class systems
- 2 The anthropological study of age class systems
- 3 Legitimation and power in age class systems
- 4 The choice of ethnographic models
- 5 The initiation model
- 6 The initiation-transition model
- 7 The generational model
- 8 The residential model
- 9 The regimental model
- 10 The choreographic model
- 11 Women and age class systems
- 12 The ethnemic significance of the age class system
- 13 History and changes in age class systems
- Glossary
- References
- Index
10 - The choreographic model
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Translator's Preface
- Preface
- 1 Characteristics of age class systems
- 2 The anthropological study of age class systems
- 3 Legitimation and power in age class systems
- 4 The choice of ethnographic models
- 5 The initiation model
- 6 The initiation-transition model
- 7 The generational model
- 8 The residential model
- 9 The regimental model
- 10 The choreographic model
- 11 Women and age class systems
- 12 The ethnemic significance of the age class system
- 13 History and changes in age class systems
- Glossary
- References
- Index
Summary
In the anthropological literature, the term age societies has come into use to refer to a type of association found among certain peoples of the North American prairies. These associations show certain clear similarities to the age class systems found in Africa. There were basically five Indian societies involved here: the Mandan, the Hidatsa, the Arapaho, the Blackfoot, and the Gros Ventres.
The prairie Indians, just as all North American Indians, over the past two centuries have traversed an ineluctable process of cultural transformation. The changes that have occurred over this tragic period have irreversibly brought these people into the complex structure of advanced industrial society.
From the ethnographic vantage point, our only firsthand accounts of these independent societies are the descriptions provided by the first European explorers of the eighteenth century. Later research and reconstructions, even that conducted by Lowie earlier in our century and employing professional criteria, have had to be content with indirect sources of information and not participant observation. A few years ago, Stewart (1977), in the second part of his book on the fundamentals of age groups, compared the various ethnographic sources, from von Wied-Neuwied (1839, 1841), to Lowie (1913, 1916, 1919), to Bowers (1959, 1965), coming up with a well-documented and intelligible descriptive synthesis, which I will rely on in the analysis and descriptions that follow.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Age Class SystemsSocial Institutions and Polities Based on Age, pp. 120 - 131Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1985