Before proceeding further, however, I need to answer an obvious question: Apart from historical interest, why study ternary societies? Some readers might be tempted to think that these relics of the distant past are of little use for understanding the modern world. With their strict status differences, aren’t these societies diametrically opposed to modern meritocratic and democratic societies, which claim to offer equal access to every occupation—that is, both social fluidity and intergenerational mobility? It would be a serious mistake, however, to ignore ternary society, for at least two
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Why study
Before proceeding further, however, I need to answer an obvious question: Apart from historical interest, why study ternary societies? Some readers might be tempted to think that these relics of the distant past are of little use for understanding the modern world. With their strict status differences, aren’t these societies diametrically opposed to modern meritocratic and democratic societies, which claim to offer equal access to every occupation—that is, both social fluidity and intergenerational mobility? It would be a serious mistake, however, to ignore ternary society, for at least two reasons. First, the structure of inequality in premodern ternary societies is less radically different from the structure of inequality in modern societies than is sometimes imagined. Second and more importantly, the conditions under which trifunctional society came to an end varied widely by country, region, religious context, and colonial or postcolonial circumstances, and we see indelible traces of these differences in the contemporary world.
