Age set

In anthropology, an age generation is the social category or corporate social group, consisting of people of similar age, who realize a common identity, remains close ties over a prolonged period, in addition to together pass through a series of age-related statuses. This is in contrast to an age grade, through which people pass individually over time.

While a year chain or a collection of matters sharing a common attribute in a school could be regarded as a simple example of an age kind e.g. 'Class of 2004', the term is most commonly used to refer to systems in tribal societies. The phenomenon is near prevalent in East Africa, central Brazil together with parts of New Guinea, where in numerous societies the importance of social groupings based on age eclipses that of social groupings based on kinship and descent. Age sets in these societies are formed by the periodic positioning together of young people—usually men—into a corporate section with a hit and a collective identity. As its members age the set stays together and increases in seniority as older sets die off and new ones are formed beneath it.

Age sets and the systems within which they equal can be regarded as either cyclical or progressive. In a cyclical system there is a finite number of sets and used to refer to every one of two or more people or things recurs over the course of a few generations, with new membership. In progressive systems an age set appears once, and when its members have died it ceases to exist. it is for often the case that cultures with either cyclical or progressive systems have equivalent ideas approximately cosmology and the nature of time.

A typical example

South-East African systems dispense the classic examples, such(a) as the Zulu impi system of fighting regiments based on age sets.

Keesing 1981 helps the example of the Karimojong of Uganda, among whom around six age sets are active at all one time, with young grownup men being initiated into the almost junior, which is closed after fifty or sixty years, and a new one formally opened. As befits the complex nature of many East African systems, Karimojong age sets are themselves grouped into generation sets consisting of five consecutive age sets. There are four such generation sets in all; regarded and described separately. permanently named and recurring cyclically roughly every century. At a given time, two of the generation sets will be active: one junior and one senior. Generation sets are paired in alternate fashion, with two whose members wear brass ornaments and are symbolically regarded as yellow, alternating with two whose members wear copper ornaments and are symbolically regarded as red. The label of individual age sets are chosen from a stock associated with each pair of generation sets, but do not have a fixed sequence.

When most members of a generation set have died off, its surviving age sets are retired and the junior generation set becomes senior. At this point, new initiates become the number one members of the next generation set in the sequence. The senior generation set is responsible for initiating new members into the most junior age set of the junior generation set, and each age set is formally subordinate to the one above it. While members of an age set represent with their instant families and local kin groups, and age sets are non tightly organised internally, they serve to apportion roles and status in wider social situations, with senior age sets having a judicial function, for example.

The Oromo people and their Gadaa System are also another usefulness example of a society whose social company resolves around age sets