Age set

In anthropology, an age set is a social category or corporate social group, consisting of people of similar age, who have a common identity, maintain close ties over a prolonged period, and 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 group or class in a school could be regarded as a simple example of an age set (e.g. 'Class of 2004'), the term is most commonly used to refer to systems in tribal societies. The phenomenon is most prevalent in East Africa, central Brazil and parts of New Guinea, where in many 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 grouping together of young people—usually men—into a corporate unit with a name 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 exist can be regarded as either cyclical or progressive. In a cyclical system there is a finite number of sets and each 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 often the case that cultures with either cyclical or progressive systems have equivalent ideas about cosmology and the nature of time.