The Great Status Divide

Bourdieu's insights are relevant for the study of the macrosocial space of Tokugawa society and most pointedly for the micro fields of power that

[16] Bourdieu, In Other Words , 136-37; the quotation is from 137.

[17] Ibid., 138. Bourdieu further elaborates on these "indices of consecration" as "objective marks of respect calling for marks of respect, a spectrum of honours which have the effect of manifesting not only social position but also the collective recognition that it is granted by the mere fact of authorizing such a display of its importance."

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid., 139. Bourdieu has mentioned and discussed his indebtedness to Weber on numerous occasions; see, for example, ibid., 21, 27-28, 46, 49, 106-7.

were the villages. From this perspective, Tokugawa feudalism's ever-multiplying status stratifications and hierarchies, literally embodied through codes of dress and address attached to hereditary households especially in the dominant class (thereby endlessly split into dominant and dominated fractions), can be seen as defense strategies of particular groups against the aspirations of neighboring groups. Although conceivable and indeed real because realistically possible in the turmoil of the sixteenth century, skipping several rungs on the hierarchy became gradually unthinkable, which strengthened domination in that the range of people's aspirations became more and more circumscribed. Those occupying the intermediary positions would certainly resist such ambitions by people below them.

Status legislation with regard to the peasant class developed over time and aimed mainly at reinforcing the distance between peasants and warriors. Peasants were not allowed to use surnames in public documents or to carry long swords, and they had to wear cotton, dismount when encountering samurai, use respectful forms of address, and so on.^[20] Overlord authority, which through its land surveys had identified certain peasants as "titled peasants," did not differentiate further among this peasant elite except by lifting some of the prohibitions, allowing the use of surnames and the wearing of one sword by peasant officials such as village headmen and village group headmen.

It should be understood that the prohibition was not against having surnames but against using them in public, such as on official documents, and it was not a Tokugawa innovation, since it had existed already in the mid Muromachi period, as a prohibition of 1485 reveals.^[21] And exceptions during the Tokugawa period were perhaps less frequent than one might think.

In the 1820s in Tsuyama domain (Mimasaka province), only 44 commoners from 266 villages were granted the privilege of using their surname; in Katsuyama domain (also in Mimasaka province) only 59 from 106 villages; and in Matsushiro domain (Shinano) only 2 out of 871 village officials were granted the privilege. Moreover, the prohibition on surnames was directed most specifically at peasants. Doctors

[20] Minegishi reports such legislation for clothing in 1628 and for behavior in the 1640s in bakufu territories and in Choshu^[*] domain (Kinsei m ibunron , 114).

[21] Kobayashi Kei'ichiro^[*] , "Shomin no myoji^[*] wa itsu goro kara tsukerareta ka," Nagano , no. 99 (1981): 1-2; see also Sekigawa Chiyomaru, "Shomin no myoji^[*] ni tsuite," ibid., no. 3 (1965): 14-15, 16.

and Shinto priests were exempt, and exceptions made for other commoners seem to have been far more numerous among townspeople than among peasants.^[22]

Overlords identified peasants with the land, rather than the other way around. The peasants' generic (and public) identity was not related to their family, their household, or their lineage, but to the land, an identity that was sometimes inscribed in documents, next to their first name, where, in "sidescript," the size of their field was added, such as "Yohachi^{2.785 koku} ." That this prohibition spilled over, to various degrees at different points, into the "private" sphere is clear from the way documents of religious organizations for the management of festivals or membership lists of confraternities were signed. Only in the mid or late Tokugawa period did all the signatures on some membership lists analyzed by Kobayashi Kei'ichiro^[*] include surnames.^[23] This is an indication that the status markers created by the overlords were being accepted by and large within peasant communities.

As we have seen, the political concerns of seventeenth-century peasants were intravillage divisions rather than the macro divide between samurai and peasants. In the villages the confrontations were between economically and socially neighboring groups, which is where such struggles always take place, as both Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu have pointed out.^[24] In premarket economies, according to Bourdieu, economic power must be partly converted into symbolic capital, "a

[22] Sekigawa, "Shomin no myoji^[*] ," 15.

[23] One complete list, covering the years 1592-1902, of the organizers of a yearly festival at a Hachiman shrine reveals that until 1612 only first names were entered; a few surnames were included in some years between 1613 and 1669, when the list reverts back to first names for the next eighty years; and after 1748 all signatures include surnames. A Koshin^[*] confraternity list (1693 to the present) includes the surnames of all its members starting in 1858 (Kobayashi, "Shomin no myoji^[*] ," 3).

[24] As Weber put it, "It is not the rentier, the share-holder, and the banker who suffer ill will of the worker, but almost exclusively the manufacturer and the business executives who are the direct opponents of workers in wage conflicts. This is so in spite of the fact that it is precisely the cash boxes of the rentier, the share-holder, and the banker into which the more or less unearned gains flow, rather than into the pockets of the manufacturers or of the business executives" (Economy and Society , 2:931). And Bourdieu writes that "minimum objective distance in social space can coincide with maximum subjective distance. This is partly because what is 'closest' presents the greatest threat to social identity, that is, differences (and also because the adjustment of expectations to real chances tend to limit subjective pretensions to the immediate neighborhood)" (Logic of Practice , 137)

legitimate possession grounded in the nature of its possessor," or symbolic power, "the power to secure recognition of power," before it is accepted as legitimate by those subjected to it.^[25] In Tokugawa villages this symbolic capital, grounded in but not identical to material conditions, consisted of status and was largely generated and manipulated from within.^[26]