Page 200 - DSOC202_SOCIAL_STRATIFICATION_ENGLISH

Unit 9: Gender and Stratification

It is therefore necessary to see the various stages of human civilization and the scientific knowledge Notes
at that stage and its impact on social conditions so that we come to know one more dimension of
human civilization, The stages are (i) the hunting stage; (ii) the cattle breeding stage and (iii) the
agricultural stage.
The Three Stages of Evolution of Culture

The Hunting Stage
According to the historians and political theorists of antiquity, all peoples had passed through
three successive phases. First they lived by hunting and fishing, next by cattle breeding then by
agriculture. However, this was not only a chronological succession but also a social advance.
Hunting and fishing were the occupation of primitive people; with very little civilization, not far
from the savage state. These were not stages of economic development, but modes of activity
destined to survive into higher forms of civilized society. From the hunting stage great effort and
progress raised them to the rank of pastoral populations, but to attain the dignity of agriculturists,
settled on a cultivated soil was the final stage of progress. The three stages of evolution of culture
were not just three chronological phases but three ladders of emergence of civilization.
The conception that man is supernatural set apart from all other animate finds no support in the
study of comparative anatomy. On the anatomical grounds it is obligatory to class man, apes and
their allies together in a single order of primates. They have the same ancestry. The earliest
condition of human life is called as the hunting stage. It was not just a quest for food but a war for
security and mastery. The human beings were not solely hunters but they also gathered the fruits
and roots of the trees, caught fish from the lakes.
The word ‘Hunters’ takes us back to the most distant periods - to those men of stone-age. They
lived on trees or built fragile huts of branches of which no trace remains. They lived near the
streams and carried on their war with animals with flint weapons, heavy clubs or snares and pits
for the larger animals. They used stones, thrown at first by hand, then by a sling against the birds.
They also used a bow. However, while they wandered from place to place, on the banks of rivers,
there flourished vegetation rich in natural produce. The primitive man was omnivorous.
At this stage, the history of man and woman was the same. As pointed out by Mrs. Ray Strachey
in her article ‘Women : Her Status and its Influence on History’, famine, fire and flood must
always be the same for men and women. The cold strikes both alike and the Sun warms them, life
and laughter, love and sorrow, and death at the end of it all. When these things alone made the
history of mankind there was no woman’s question’.

What do you mean by hunting stage ?

Will Durant suggests that it is highly impossible that first human beings lived in isolated families
even in the hunting stage, because man had inferior physiological organs of defense and this
would have left them a prey to wild animals. The individual was not regarded as a separate entity
in a natural society. He was primarily a member of a family. Such a family was a natural out
growth of animal family of the mother and her litters. The first social institution was the family.
Since it was the mother who fulfilled most of the parental functions, the family was organised, on
the assumption that the position of man in the family was superficial, but that of the woman was
supreme. We cannot say whether the term ‘matriarchate’ can be used or not but it was certainly a
mother-family. William Graham Sumner calls mother-family as a system in which the descent and
kin are reckoned through women and not through men. In this form the relation between women
and her husband was that of contract. Woman lived in her home, with her kin and the husband

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