Students of "primitive" societies have devoted much time and attention to the analysis of those aspects of social organization which were associated with family relationships while largely ignoring the aspects associated with formal recognition of age and sex differences. While membership in a family establishes the individual's relations with a limited series of other individuals, membership in an age-sex category establishes his relations with the total society and his participation in a particular sector of its culture. A simple method is suggested for the graphic presentation of social structure in terms of the statuses derived from factors of age and sex with or without other determinants. Two classless societies, the Tanala and Comanche, are presented as examples of the use of the method. It is suggested that the technique would be equally applicable to small, well-integrated units within our own society such as rural neighborhoods or villages, Whether it can be used for larger and more heterogenous units can only be discovered by experiment.
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Ralph Linton (1940) studied this question.