One of the most outstanding features in the process of stratification in any society pivots around status. The way that each society defines statutory conditions represents an invaluable element in historical and sociological research, as it expresses, in a reasonably accurate form, the way that society and its diverse components ...
(Show more)One of the most outstanding features in the process of stratification in any society pivots around status. The way that each society defines statutory conditions represents an invaluable element in historical and sociological research, as it expresses, in a reasonably accurate form, the way that society and its diverse components observe themselves and want to be observed, produce and reproduce (that is, reconstruct), impose and assume (even if modifying or adapting to their own necessities) the basic structures inherent to the processes of construction and hierarchical structuring of social and political identities.
This argument was not unknown to urban societies in the Middle Ages. A general analysis of this process in Fifteenth-Century urban Castile shows an undeniable tendency towards the adoption, by the upper social groups, of aristocratic behaviour formulas (a general trend in medieval Europe).
Nevertheless, the construction of status must be analysed not only from that final image, erected as a final objective structuring individual and social action. That photo-finish, of the materializing process of certain aristocratic behaviours, just shows its success while hiding other type of relevant information.
In the first place, aristocratic behaviour and aristocracy are not necessarily synonymous notions; on the contrary, their conjunction, and even the own notions, depends, to a great extent, on the society’s positive perception over the global and personal situation and behaviour of every candidate. Thus, the materializing of aristocratic behaviour formulas does not imply the automatic acquisition of a concrete status (and failure is the tail of this coin).
In the second place, it must be in mind that the aristocratic spirit developed in this process, does not necessarily constitute an end in itself; on the contrary, it can be (and most times it is) part of a long-term process, the individual and his lineage’s ennoblement. Again, aristocratic behaviour and nobility does not turn out to be synonymous statutory conditions.
Finally, the prosecution of the acquisition of a nobiliar status in Castile (and neither in urban Castile) did not depend on the unfolding of the complete panoply of possible aristocratic attitudes. Individuals were in disposition of a more ample set of strategies, not less attended than that. In the last instance, the notion of strategy, charged with an intense process sense, explains most attitudes displayed by individuals and the way that these ones thought their social position and its projection to the future. The struggle for status and its correlative socio-politic position was not the action field of just an isolated individual but the result of thinking oneself in terms of a lineage (even when the lineage itself was just a dream not yet realized) and, then, it was the result of thinking the strategies of social mobility not only in individual terms but adjusted to a generation frame.
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