Ralph Linton (1936), Identity Politics, and the Concept of Ascribed Status

Yves here. Below, albrt discusses what could well be considered the first discussion of identity, in the sense used in discussions of identity politics. He focuses on Robert Linton’s notion of ascriptive identity, which are inherent qualities that confer status (like gender and race, but apparently not height). Linton observed that someone’s position was a function of multiple status-conferrers, including “achieved status” like education, profession, club memberships, as well as ones that are ascribed, like family position in the community.

Linton, in a more open-minded view than was common for his era, saw ascribed status as largely a function of diligence, in that he thought most could be trained to fill any role….except requiring special talent. However, he also argued men would always out-do women and that it was inconceivable that a woman or a negro could ever become President.

albrt attributes some of Linton’s blinkeredness to thinking in terms of an industrial society, where there would be comparatively few roles requiring special training or talent.

This viewpoint seems odd in light of the work of the father of sociology, Émile Durkheim. In his 1912 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, he contrasted mechanical societies, where almost everyone was an interchangible part, as in little role differentiation (think subsistence agriculture) versus an organic society, with many many different possible positions. Durkheim went further to argue that in an organic society, the life of the factory worker was enriched by that of the opera singer, and vice versa, since each benefitted from the other’s existence. I read this discussion decades ago, so my recollection may be wrong, but Durkheim, in an earlier phase of industrialization, seemed to anticipate that its progress would produce even more opportunities to create specialized work that would enrich the community and individuals.

By albrt. Originally published at hisSubstack

Preamble

I had a long 2025, for reasons other than (or in addition to) the reasons everyone else in the United States had a long 2025. But I’m fine. Really. Doing better than most, so no right to complain. Hoping to post more in 2026. This is a post that has been in progress for a long time and I felt compelled to read a bunch of books before finishing it, so I hope you like it.

I wrote several posts a while back about the modern concept of identity (1, 2, 3). I wanted to understand how “identity politics” short-circuited rationality at all wavelengths of what passed for a political spectrum in the United States, back when politics was still sort of considered a legitimate thing. Musa al-Gharbi captured part of the dynamic in his 2024 book We Have Never Been Woke, but I still have questions about how the wokeness wars caused everybody on both sides to become completely incompetent and irrational about nearly everything, not just race, gender, and culture.

The world of wokeness flipped upside down last year, but I think it would be a mistake to say that identity politics is over. Democrat-leaning DEI and cancel-culture were unceremoniously ejected from federally funded institutions and replaced with anti-anti-Zionism, canceling people based on perceived lack of support for the ongoing Isreali genocide against Palestinians.1 It’s an interesting lesson in how social and legal mechanisms can be turned and used against different targets for different purposes. But the failings and flailings of the dominant identitarian para-ideologies, MAGAtism and reactionary woke liberalism (aka Bidenism), are a subject for another day. Today I’m returning to the underlying project of trying to figure out what the identity part of identity politics even is.

This post addresses aspects of identity (such as skin color) that are not a result of individual achievement or choice, but that nevertheless affect an individual’s position in society. Academics sometimes call this type of individual characteristic an “ascriptive” trait. Race (defined by skin color) and sex have traditionally been the most prominent examples in the United States, but the concept refers to any intrinsic characteristic that confers status within a social system. This can include less physically obvious characteristics such as class or caste that are determined at birth by social rules.

There are several forms of the word that can be used as tags for this concept. “Ascribed” and “ascription” have multiple meanings, but the word “ascriptive” does not have any common meaning, and exists almost entirely as social science jargon. This makes it particularly easy to track, so I spent some time on Google scholar looking at usage over the years. Virtually all of the articles I found cite the same source for the basic idea:

Ralph Linton

When you see a footnote for the concept of ascription in a social science text, it will almost always be “Linton, 1936.” That means Ralph Linton’s 1936 introductory anthropology textbook The Study of Man (TSoM).2 Linton’s claim to fame arises relatively early in the book, in a chapter titled “Status and Rȏle” (pretentious diacritic in original).

[T]he functioning of societies depends upon the presence of patterns for reciprocal behavior between individuals or groups of individuals. The polar positions in such patterns of reciprocal behavior are technically known as statuses. . . . A status, in the abstract, is a position in a particular pattern. It is thus quite correct to speak of each individual as having many statuses, since each individual participates in the expression of a number of patterns. However, unless the term is qualified in some way, the status of any individual means the sum total of all the statuses which he occupies. It represents his position with relation to the total society. Thus the status of Mr. Jones as a member of his community derives from a combination of all the statuses which he holds as a citizen, as an attorney, as a Mason, as a Methodist, as Mrs. Jones’s husband, and so on.

TSoM at 113. Linton purported to distinguish between the concepts of status and rȏle, but rȏle is basically the performance of a status. This distinction is super-cool and insightful if you are into the performativity aspects of critical theory, but is not terribly important for our purposes today. Linton’s other idea that generates the citations is summarized as follows:

[H]uman beings are so mutable that almost any normal individual can be trained to the adequate performance of almost any rȏle. Most of the business of living can be conducted on a basis of habit, with little need for intelligence and none for special gifts. Societies have met the dilemma by developing two types of statuses, the ascribed and the achieved. Ascribed statuses are those which are assigned to individuals without reference to their innate differences or abilities. They can be predicted and trained for from the moment of birth. The achieved statuses are, as a minimum, those requiring special qualities, although they are not necessarily limited to these. They are not assigned to individuals from birth but are left open to be filled through competition and individual effort. The majority of the statuses in all social systems are of the ascribed type and those which take care of the ordinary day-to-day business of living are practically always of this type.

In all societies certain things are selected as reference points for the ascription of status. The things chosen for this purpose are always of such a nature that they are ascertainable at birth making it possible to begin the training of the individual for his potential statuses and rȏles at once. The simplest and most universally used of these reference points is sex. . . . Family relationships, the simplest and most obvious being that of the child to its mother, are also used in all societies as reference points for the establishment of a whole series of statuses. Lastly, there is the matter of birth into a particular socially established group, such as a class or caste. The use of this type of reference is common but not universal. In all societies the actual ascription of statuses to the individual is controlled by a series of these reference points which together serve to delimit the field of his future participation in the life of the group.

TSoM at 115-116.

Ascribed statuses, whether assigned according to biological or to social factors, compose the bulk of all social systems. However, all these systems also include a varying number of statuses which are open to individual achievement. It seems as though many statuses of this type were primarily designed to serve as baits for socially acceptable behavior or as escapes for the individual. All societies rely mainly on their ascribed statuses to take care of the ordinary business of living. Most of the statuses which are thrown open to achievement do not touch this business very deeply. The honored ones are extremely satisfying to the individuals who achieve them, but many of them are no more vital to the ordinary functioning of the society than are honorary degrees or inclusions in “Who’s Who” among ourselves.

Most societies make only a grudging admission of the fact that a limited number of statuses do require special gifts for their successful performance. Since such gifts rarely manifest themselves in early childhood, these statuses are, of necessity, thrown open to competition. At the same time, the pattern of ascribing all vital statuses is so strong that all societies limit this competition with reference to sex, age, and social affiliations. Even in our own society, where the field open to individual achievement is theoretically unlimited, it is strictly limited in fact. No woman can become President of the United States. Neither could a Negro nor an Indian, although there is no formal rule on this point, while a Jew or even a Catholic entering the presidential race would be very seriously handicapped from the outset. Even with regard to achievable statuses which are of much less social importance and which, perhaps, require more specific gifts, the same sort of limited competition is evident. It would be nearly if not quite impossible for either a woman or a Negro to become conductor of our best symphony orchestra, even if better able to perform the duties involved than any one else in America. At the same time, no man could become president of the D. A. R., and it is doubtful whether any man, unless he adopted a feminine nom de plume, could even conduct a syndicated column on advice to the lovelorn, a field in which our society assumes, a priori, that women have greater skill.

TSoM at 128-29. Linton showed a singular lack of interest in the specific reasons why a woman, a Negro, or an Indian could not become President in 1936 America. His point was that ascribed statuses are arbitrary but (in his view) necessary in order for a society to be stable. He seems to have been satisfied with this theoretical point, even though he did not believe that ascribed statuses were based on inherent suitability for different rȏles.

These limitations upon the competition for achieved statuses no doubt entail a certain loss to society. Persons with special talents appear to be mutants and as such are likely to appear in either sex and in any social class. At the same time, the actual loss to societies through this failure to use their members’ gifts to the full is probably a good deal less than persons reared in the American tradition would like to believe. Individual talent is too sporadic and too unpredictable to be allowed any important part in the organization of society. Social systems have to be built upon the potentialities of the average individual, the person who has no special gifts or disabilities. Such individuals can be trained to occupy almost any status and to perform the associated rȏle adequately if not brilliantly. The social ascription of a particular status, with the intensive training that such ascription makes possible, is a guarantee that the rȏle will be performed even if the performance is mediocre. . . .

When a social system has achieved a good adjustment to the other sectors of the group’s culture and, through these, to the group’s environment, it can get along very well without utilizing special gifts. However, as soon as changes within the culture or in the external environment produce maladjustments, it has to recognize and utilize these gifts. The development of new social patterns calls for the individual qualities of thought and initiative, and the freer the rein given to these the more quickly new adjustments can be arrived at. For this reason, societies living under new or changing conditions are usually characterized by a wealth of achievable statuses and by very broad delimitations of the competition for them. Our own now extinct frontier offered an excellent example of this. Here the class lines of the European societies from which the frontier population had been drawn were completely discarded and individuals were given an unprecedented opportunity to find their place in the new society by their own abilities.

As social systems achieve adjustment to their settings, the social value of individual thought and initiative decreases. Thorough training of the component individuals becomes more necessary to the survival and successful functioning of society than the free expression of their individual abilities. Even leadership, which calls for marked ability under conditions of change, becomes largely a matter of routine activities. To ensure successful training, more and more statuses are transferred from the achieved to the ascribed group, and the competition for those which remain is more and more rigidly delimited. To put the same thing in different terms, individual opportunities decrease. . . . [W]ell-adjusted societies are, in general, characterized by a high preponderance of ascribed over achieved statuses, and increasing perfection of adjustment usually goes hand in hand with increasing rigidity of the social system.

TSoM at 129-30.

Linton’s analysis of sex discrimination was not particularly sophisticated. He recognized that women have abilities equal to men in most areas, but “[w]hether the feminists like it or not, the average man can thrash the average woman.” TSoM at 135. I don’t think I can add much to that. By contrast, Linton’s views on racism have some remarkably modern components, including attribution of race-consciousness directly to European colonialism:

From the sixteenth century on Europeans were everywhere conquering native peoples and setting themselves up as ruling aristocracies. Although members of the subject groups could readily adopt the language and customs of their rulers, they could not change their own physical type, and for the first time in history race became an infallible criterion for the determination of social status. Since any white man was a member of the ruling group and any brown or black one a member of the subject group, both sides became increasingly conscious of their physical differences.

TSoM at 47. Linton disavowed any group-genetic basis for racist ascription about as explicitly as anyone writing in 1936 could have:

“The idea of evolutionary inequalities between races is generally accepted in lay circles, but it has little justification in fact.” TSoM at 48.

“A plotting of racial characteristics on the basis of their degrees of evolutionary advance shows such an even balance between the various races and breeds that we are forced to conclude that all of them stand at about equal distances from their common ancestor.” TSoM at 48-49.

“One rarely encounters an ethnological field worker who believes that the native group which he knows best is inferior in intelligence to Europeans. Although many of these workers believe that there are racial differences in intelligence, they prefer to ascribe inferiority to groups with whom they have never worked or whom they know only slightly. Although such judgments may be tempered by sentiment, they suggest that the actual differences in intelligence between various groups cannot be very great.” TSoM at 54.

Note how Linton’s position highlights the two distinct concepts of racism that dominate popular discourse on the subject in America today. Most people outside academia think of racism as a personal belief system involving either an active dislike for people of another race, or a belief that people of other races are demonstrably inferior. The reason ordinary people adopt that definition today is because for many decades, leading intellectuals like Ralph Linton defined it that way. Linton pretty clearly disclaimed those types of beliefs, and by doing so he would have considered himself anti-racist.

By contrast, most people inside academia today (along with their Professional Managerial Class (PMC) disciples) consider racism to be a social system that grants important advantages and disadvantages based on race. This definition is a direct descendant of Linton’s concept of ascription. By that definition, anyone who denies that the system is racist (or just goes along with it) is participating in racism and is therefore racist, even if they deny having racist personal beliefs.

Being called racist on this basis seems to offend and alienate many people who regard themselves as non-racist based on the Linton-era definition. They consider it a kind of rug-pull to switch definitions just as we seemed to be making progress on reducing personal animus. That is probably important for understanding where we are in the United States today. Insisting on the current academic definition of racism when dealing with non-academically oriented people frequently impedes practical progress on racial issues, regardless of whether the definition is correct according to academia.3

But I digress. Back to Linton, 1936.

By recognizing that racial disparities are part of our social system, Linton took a step toward the current academic understanding of what racism is and how racism works. But Linton’s response to this insight was not to call for an end to systemic racism. Instead, Linton said ascription is unavoidable and perhaps we need more of it if we aspire to be a stable and well-adjusted society. And indeed, one of Linton’s hobbies seems to have been reporting colleagues with too much interest in social justice to the FBI during the early McCarthy years (Linton died in 1953).

Once you start thinking about it that way, you can see other ways that Linton’s overall expectations for the future of American society were different from our own. Linton was pretty clearly expecting an industrial future in which masses of workers would need to be trained to accept their statuses and rȏles. He was not expecting a future in which innovation and disruption of existing institutions would be celebrated as the primary drivers of the economy. When Linton talks about the need to ascribe statuses so we can train people from birth, he is not talking about the intensive training necessary to become a top level athlete or a celebrated anthropology professor. Those are achieved statuses by any reasonable definition, not ascribed statuses. Linton is mainly talking about the early conditioning needed to lower the expectations of the masses so they will accept ascribed statuses that are less prestigious, such as housewife or sanitation worker, without fussing too much about it.

This point of view was at least somewhat understandable in 1936. Linton was certainly not the only one who believed that America needed to get its act together to compete with the mass mobilization potential of communism and fascism. Things went in a different direction after World War II.

Ascription after Linton

In the immediate post-war years, Linton’s ascription-achievement dichotomy was taken fairly seriously as an analytical tool. For example, in his 1951 book The Social System (TSS), Talcott Parsons said that a distinction between performances and attributes “has become current in the sociological literature in Linton’s terms of achieved and ascribed status and hence it seems advisable to adopt those terms here.” TSS at 64. Parsons included achievement vs. ascription as one of the five basic “concept-pairs” whose “permutations and combinations should yield a system of types of possible role-expectation pattern, on the relational level, namely defining the pattern of orientation to the actors in the role relationship.”

This system resulted in thirty-two (2x2x2x2x2) possible types of role relationships describing the “role structure of the social system” and forming “the core of the social structure.” TSS at 66-67. Parsons made a few other relevant observations about ascription, including the “dynamic relations between achievement and ascription,” given that “performance-capacities” such as physical strength or intelligence are hard to classify, and that an achieved status is often treated as an ascriptive attribute once it has been recognized or credentialed.4 TSS at 92-93. But overall, in hindsight, Parsons in 1951 did not make a very persuasive case that achievement vs. ascription is one of the five fundamental variables to describe any system of social interaction. He later de-emphasized it.

The development of the social sciences in the mid-twentieth century is well illustrated by comparing The Study of Man to The Social System. The Study of Man famously has only one footnote, to a Japanese study of socially acquired responses of cats to rats. Linton is relatively easy to caricature as a classic academic who had so much privilege he could write a whole social science textbook based on whatever interesting ideas came into his head.

Fifteen years later, Parsons was trying to create a very complicated technical framework with detailed references to the work of others. Parsons was criticized for the usual reasons in subsequent decades. In my opinion, Parsons demonstrated exceptional intelligence, social perception, and sincerity in trying to figure out all the variables inherent in human social systems, and in my opinion his failure is strong evidence that his goal was (and probably still is) impossible.

The first two chapters of The Social System are nearly impenetrable, defining terms in obscure ways and placing a dozen or more individual words in quotes on each page to emphasize that the word is being used in a special way. Parsons thus became a leading example of the performative role of a social scientist “doing theory.” Parsons’ system looks superficially like an attempt to build a model, but it is not a model in the sense that it would be possible to insert data for each of the variables and test hypotheses about what will happen. Instead, Parsons created a very complex, particular, and non-quantifiable vocabulary for describing and classifying people and societies in accordance with the belief system of American social-science as it existed in 1951. It is a cultural phenomenon posing as a theory, lurking behind what Clifford Geertz later called the method of “thick description” of cultural phenomena.

But again, that is a subject for another day. This post has gotten too long and I am abruptly calling an end. I have some pretty good notes for what happened in the 1960s and 70s, when complex academic theories largely gave way to “ascription is just the man keeping us down.” I hope it will take me less than a year to write part two.

_____

1 MAGA cancellation was briefly ascribed to those who were insufficiently devoted to the memory of Charlie Kirk, but now we seem to be back to support for the ongoing Isreali genocide as a litmus test.

2 References are to my dog-eared copy of the 1936 first edition, because internet access to old social science texts has been significantly reduced since I started researching and writing this post a little more than a year ago.

3 Al Gharbi’s book offers a useful perspective on contested terminology—the fact that terminology is contested may in many cases be more important than any attempt to adjudicate whose definition is correct.

4 In my best college stoner voice: “Ooooh. That’s deep.”