Respectable Lives: Social Standing in Rural New Zealand

Front Cover
University of California Press, 1991 M11 18 - 221 pages
Where do we get our notions of social hierarchy and personal worth? What underlies our beliefs about the goals worth aiming for, the persons we hope to become? Elvin Hatch addresses these questions in his ethnography of a small New Zealand farming community, articulating the cultural system beneath the social hierarchy.

Hatch describes a cultural theory of social hierarchy that defines not only the local system of social rank, but personhood as well. Because people define respectability differently, a crucial part of Hatch's approach is to examine how these differences are worked out over time.

The concept of occupation is central to Hatch's analysis, since the work that people do provides the skeletal framework of the hierarchical order. He focuses in particular on sheep farming and compares his New Zealand community with one in California. Wealth and respectability are defined differently in the two places, with the result that California landholders perceive a social hierarchy different from the New Zealanders'. Thus the distinctive "shape" that characterizes the hierarchy among these New Zealand landholders and their conceptions of self reflect the distinctive cultural theory by which they live.
 

Contents

Introduction
1
The Historical Pattern
15
The Occupational System
44
The Conceptual Basis of Occupational Standing
70
The Criterion of Wealth Among Farmers
91
The Criterion of Farming Ability
110
The Criterion of Refinement The 1920s
132
The Criterion of Refinement After World War II
159
Conclusion
180
NOTES
189
BIBLIOGRAPHY
201
INDEX
209
Copyright

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About the author (1991)

Elvin Hatch is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of several books, including Culture and Morality: The Relativity of Values in Anthropology (1983).

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