Conclusions

Summary

In the course of this study I have attempted to illuminate two interrelated sets of problems. The first has to do with the historical process which has distributed political and economic power unevenly throughout the population of Akhdar, and with the social structures, chiefly the multi-dimensional system of social stratification, which provides the framework for this process to continue, resulting in the chronic impoverishment of the mass of the population and the enrichment of a few. The second set of problems concerns the way in which this process affects the roles and social circumstances of women in different milieux, and is in turn affected by them.

Two major categories of people are excluded from the exercise of formal political and economic power. These are women, who have never controlled offices or property, and the rural and urban proletariat, who cannot produce enough for their needs, as farmers or artisans, nor sell their labour for wages. The exclusion of women has important repercussions. Even if those men who can get a living within the market economy can resist the demands of their less fortunate male kin by acting according to the tenets of the market and of class, it is more difficult for them to act in the same way towards women, who control the means of reproduction.