This doesn’t seem to cover all uses of “status” in the Johnstonian sense; one of his first examples is a small group of men and women competing over who has the most interesting and debilitating physical difficulties.
I’ll be pretty disappointed if our community accepts the idea that humiliating other people has less to do with status than comparing Pokemon collections. Which situation makes you more conscious of status: when your Pokemon collection is smaller than Bob’s, or when Bob beats you up and takes your girlfriend? To really feel the concept, you have to be close to the monkey life.
In particular, the fact that armies are typically controlled by older men (in rare situations, by older women, and in one unique situation (Joan of Arc) a young woman) implies that status among humans isn’t about who can personally beat up who.
Football players take orders from managers and team owners.
That sounds like an allusion to dominance hierarchy theory, which my informal survey suggests is a muddle. Do you have pointers to solid, recent research on dominance hierarchy theory that could plausibly apply to humans?
People do sometimes react strongly to things we think weird, like not having the bigger Pokemon collection.
Mrs X: “I had a nasty turn last week [...] I thought I should faint or something.”
Johnstone comments: “Mrs X is attempting to raise her status.”
My anaysis would be: Mrs X is fishing for a “stroke”, the way you’d fish for compliments. It is a ploy to manipulate others in her group into a particular self-esteem transation, namely commiseration. She expects something like “Oh, you poor thing. What happened, did you have to go to the hospital?”
Mrs Y: “You’re lucky to have been going to a cinema.”
Johnstone analyzes Mrs Y as “blocking” Mrs X, and I’d tend to agree—this move denies the request for a stroke. There’s a subtext, too, that Mrs X is something of a spoiled child: that she has an inflated estimation of herself.
I could go on to analyze the rest of the dialogue in that vein, but for me there’s little value in saying the same thing except using “self-esteem” instead of “status”, that’s just fighting over definitions.
More interesting is the idea that everything Johnstone refers to are fleeting components of status, whereas there are attested long-lasting components (class, power, prestige) and the connotations of the term “status” tend to conflate all these components.
This doesn’t seem to cover all uses of “status” in the Johnstonian sense; one of his first examples is a small group of men and women competing over who has the most interesting and debilitating physical difficulties.
I’ll be pretty disappointed if our community accepts the idea that humiliating other people has less to do with status than comparing Pokemon collections. Which situation makes you more conscious of status: when your Pokemon collection is smaller than Bob’s, or when Bob beats you up and takes your girlfriend? To really feel the concept, you have to be close to the monkey life.
This is true, but status still isn’t about who can beat up who.
In particular, the fact that armies are typically controlled by older men (in rare situations, by older women, and in one unique situation (Joan of Arc) a young woman) implies that status among humans isn’t about who can personally beat up who.
Football players take orders from managers and team owners.
That sounds like an allusion to dominance hierarchy theory, which my informal survey suggests is a muddle. Do you have pointers to solid, recent research on dominance hierarchy theory that could plausibly apply to humans?
People do sometimes react strongly to things we think weird, like not having the bigger Pokemon collection.
Well, there’s anecdotes.
Mrs X: “I had a nasty turn last week [...] I thought I should faint or something.”
Johnstone comments: “Mrs X is attempting to raise her status.”
My anaysis would be: Mrs X is fishing for a “stroke”, the way you’d fish for compliments. It is a ploy to manipulate others in her group into a particular self-esteem transation, namely commiseration. She expects something like “Oh, you poor thing. What happened, did you have to go to the hospital?”
Mrs Y: “You’re lucky to have been going to a cinema.”
Johnstone analyzes Mrs Y as “blocking” Mrs X, and I’d tend to agree—this move denies the request for a stroke. There’s a subtext, too, that Mrs X is something of a spoiled child: that she has an inflated estimation of herself.
I could go on to analyze the rest of the dialogue in that vein, but for me there’s little value in saying the same thing except using “self-esteem” instead of “status”, that’s just fighting over definitions.
More interesting is the idea that everything Johnstone refers to are fleeting components of status, whereas there are attested long-lasting components (class, power, prestige) and the connotations of the term “status” tend to conflate all these components.