gender and prestigeThe purpose of this essay is to show the embeddedness of the prestige system in the subsystems of cultures. We will discuss four cultures that represent four different types of social organizations; !Kung San represents the gang organization, Mundurucu represents the village type, Polynesia - Chiefdom and Andalusia represents the state social organization type. In all these cultures the prestige system, which is the gender system, is embedded in other subsystems. Three of these cultures: Mundurucu, Polynesia and Andalusia, have a hierarchical ideology, which means that in this culture males have more power than females. !Kung San culture, on the other hand, has an egalitarian ideology, in which there is no significant difference in power between males and females. Let's first start by defining the prestige system, which consists of the prestige itself. Prestige is the level of respect at which one is regarded by others. Each person in the prestige system has a status, by which other people value your prestige. Status is determined by the following factors: economic, political, personal and historical. When we talk about the prestige system we must say that the prestige system is supported by ideology and since cultures have different ideologies, prestige systems vary from one culture to another. Polynesia, discussed by Sherry Ortner, consists of a large number of islands in the Pacific Ocean, including Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, and many others. Most of the islands have the same prestige system. The prestige system in Polynesia is the hereditary ranking system that is incorporated into the political system, the kinship system, and the economic system. The type of social organization in Polynesia, as mentioned above, is the chiefdom. The chiefdom is characterized by the number of villages, where each village has its own chief, and the entire village system has a chief, of higher rank than the other chiefs. This fact is important when we discuss the integration of the prestige system into the political system. Each village, which is part of the chiefdom, has the goal of reaching the top of the symbolic pyramid, with the main chief and the fono, the governing council, at the top. Sometimes, status can be elevated with the right type of marriage, however, most villages have endogamous type marriages, meaning the spouse comes from within the village. In the case of an exogamous marriage, in which the spouse comes from outside, the groom's family will have to share part of the land with the bride's family.