The Interconnectedness of Gender, Race and Ethnicity in a Stratified Society
             When you meet someone new, if social etiquette was not a factor, what questions about that person would you like to have answered? Maybe questions such as: What does your father or mother do? Where do you live? What organizations do you belong to? Where do you go on vacation? Now, how would you react is their answers to some of the questions were: "My father is a ditch digger. I live in a slum area in Houston, Dallas, etc. We belong to Narcotics Anonymous, and we don't vacation because we spent all our savings on drugs." One might react with an "Hmm, I don't know if I want to stand around and talk to this person anymore." Now lets say on that same very day you meet another person and ask him the same exact questions and he answers, " My father is a very wealthy politician, I live in a country club on the edge of the pacific ocean, we belong to many exclusive clubs, and we love to vacation on our private yachts and planes." Your reaction might be something like, "Oh, that's wonderful, we also have a house on the pacific coast. Lets sit down and get some tea or coffee." Why do we wish to know this information? We wish to know because we as humans begin to categorize others. We tend to classify them and then interact with them on the basis of our classification system. When we think of castes and classes, and of social stratification, we have in mind groups who occupy different positions in the social arrangement of society and enjoy different amounts of prestige.
             Now, as one looks at all the different cultures of the world, we find that no society is unstratified or has no definitions of class within it. There are some very primitive communities that were so minute that there is no visible form of social stratification. But as these social organizations began to grow one could see that chieftainship, i
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