ABSTRACT
The social class status of subjects was determined by the make of their automobile. Many wealthy individuals engage in an inverse process, avoiding purchase of luxury consumer items to escape unwanted critical and potentially criminal attention. A scientific understanding of how status works and why human societies are so demonstrably tied up with the phenomenon would do well to bracket the evident moral self-righteousness of this mainstream position. The founders of the discipline demonstrated more willingness than people find in contemporary sociology to take stratification on scientifically. Material inequality, up to and including the existence of slavery, is already in evidence in more complex hunter–gatherer societies such as those of some of the indigenous peoples of the American Pacific Northwest Coast. The emergence of material wealth surpluses in stored crops and especially in domesticated animals makes possible a rise in collective theft as a potentially easy way to grow surplus at the expense of other groups.
