Preferred Citation: Hatch, Elvin. Respectable Lives: Social Standing in Rural New Zealand. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1992 1992. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2v19n804/

Respectable Lives Social Standing in Rural New Zealand Elvin Hatch UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford © 1991 The Regents of the University of California

Preferred Citation: Hatch, Elvin. Respectable Lives: Social Standing in Rural New Zealand. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1992 1992. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2v19n804/

Acknowledgments

Photographs following page 90

This study has profited considerably from the help of others. Several people read an earlier draft of the manuscript, and their comments not only saved me from some serious errors but added considerable insight to the analysis as well: above all I thank Michèle Dominy, Cheleen Mahar, Eric Olssen, David Pearson, and Sandy Robertson. I am indebted, too, for the encouragement and good judgment of Sheila Levine, my editor at the University of California Press, and for the excellent help of Anne Geissman Canright, my copy editor at the Press, whose efforts have significantly improved this book. My family, Deanna, Kristen, and Catherine, also deserve thanks for their willingness to be uprooted for the duration of the fieldwork; Deanna, my wife, was also particularly helpful both in gathering information and providing perspective. Portions of the analysis were worked up originally as oral presentations at seminars and professional meetings, and I am grateful for the very helpful comments of those in the audience. The New Zealand portion of the research was funded by the National Science Foundation, while the California research was funded by a Public Health Service fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health. My debt to both of these agencies is, of course, considerable. But the greatest debt of all I owe to the people of South Downs, whose hospitality, friendship, and patience seemed unlimited.

Chapter One
Introduction

People everywhere conduct their lives in milieux that are saturated with ideas about prestige—or standing, status, social honor, distinction. Certain features of a prestige structure or status system are within conscious awareness, such as who stands higher than whom; but much of it is not, including most of the cultural framework by which relative standing is defined. Any system of social rank entails a complex and unrecognized body of ideas—a cultural theory of social hierarchy—which is the basis of the hierarchical order and defines achievement for those who are part of it. These same ideas also help to shape one's sense of self, for they identify what kind of person one should be and what kind of life is worth living.

This book is about a small, sheep-farming community on the South Island of New Zealand, and its central argument is that the local system of social standing and conceptions of self are grounded in historically variable, cultural systems of meaning; thus, the social hierarchy cannot be perceived directly by the senses, because it takes form only when viewed from the cultural perspective of the people. These are also contested systems of meaning, for various sectors of the community have an interest in defining personal worth and social standing differently. A crucial part of the hierarchical order, therefore, is the processes by which these differences are worked out over time.

Choosing the Community

This study grows out of work that I did previously in a California community, a locality that consisted chiefly of dryland grain farms, cattle ranches, and a very small town.^[1] A central problem of that research was the question of community. This locality was more than a “collocation of houses,”^[2] for most of the residents displayed the sense that they had something in common, and whatever that was, it gave the district its identity. Part of what made this a community is that the people knew about and interacted with one another, and, more important, they participated in a set of institutions in which they had a common interest. They cared about the schools, for example, and about facilities for holding local events. But an equally if not more fundamental (and less obvious) aspect emerged as I lived there: that is, the community was a significant reference group,^[3] and one of its fundamental features was a hierarchy of standing. Everyone in the district, whether they liked it or not, was placed by others within this hierarchy. People in the locality had their reputations at stake, or their local sense of personal worth and identity, and the dynamics of the community reflected this principle.

I later decided to pursue a similar study in another country, one similar enough to the United States both culturally and historically that I could undertake a close comparison. I also wanted to choose a community that would be very much like the one in California: it should be fully modern, and family farms should make up the economic base of the district. But above all I wanted a locality that exhibited the characteristics I described above: it should constitute an important reference group and a significant arena for social achievement, for I was interested in exploring the nature of the local status system.

I chose to do the work in New Zealand, and in 1978 I traveled from Auckland to Invercargill looking for a suitable place. The region of Canterbury, on South Island, seemed ideal, and, following the advice of people in the University of Canterbury and the Ministry of Agriculture,^[4] I chose a community that I refer to as South Downs, a pseudonym.*

South Downs was ideal in part because it is a distinctly bounded community, as we shall see, and also because it is far enough from larger towns and cities that it exhibits the characteristics of a vigorous reference group. In March 1981, my family and I moved into a house in the township, and we stayed until just after the new year, over nine months in all.**

The Local Region

South Downs is several hours' drive south of Christchurch, which in turn is one of the leading cities of New Zealand and the focal point of Canterbury.

Much of Canterbury consists of the fertile Canterbury Plains, a long shelf, bordering the ocean, that was formed by alluvium washing down from the Southern Alps. The plains are devoted mostly to

mixed farming, although even the most casual observer can see that sheep are especially important in the region. Serving the farms is a network of villages and towns, the most important of which are located on the main railway line.

The width of the Canterbury Plains varies, reaching a maximum slightly south of Christchurch, but at any spot the topography follows a common pattern. If we begin on the coast and proceed directly inland, traversing the plains at a right angle, we eventually come to the foothills or downlands. These are intersected by a series of rivers that run more or less parallel to one another and flow directly across the plains and into the sea. Moving into the downlands we continue to climb in elevation, until eventually we come to the base of the Southern Alps, which are steep, rugged, and high enough for glaciers to form. Passage over the mountains to the West Coast of South Island is possible only through a few difficult passes; consequently the Alps form a very effective divide between Canterbury and the West Coast.

The county of South Downs is located in the downlands and is divided into three main parts. First is the district of South Downs, or South Downs proper, which occupies the upper two-thirds of a narrow valley some thirty miles long; the valley floor is about 1,000 feet above sea level, and above it the hills rise another 2,500 to 6,000 feet. The township of South Downs, located in the valley bottom, has a population of about nine hundred, with another nine hundred individuals populating the surrounding farmland. The district is devoted almost entirely to sheep, although a few cattle are raised and some wheat and other crops are grown. These are predominantly farms, not runs,*** although a few runs occupy the higher and rougher portions of the district.

The second section is Midhurst, which occupies the lower end of the same valley. Midhurst has a township even smaller than that of South Downs, consisting of slightly over one hundred people; the Midhurst district as a whole also has fewer residents—less than five hundred all together. Like South Downs, most of the landholders in Midhurst are sheep farmers, although again, some sheep runs are located in the higher and rougher regions.

The third section completes the county. This is the Glassford dis-

trict, with a population of nearly fifteen hundred and including a township of slightly more than three hundred people. Taking in the comparatively high country situated between South Downs and Midhurst, on the one hand, and the Southern Alps, on the other, Glassford is topographically diverse, a combination of relatively flat land, steep hills, and the slopes of the Southern Alps. The area is considered very cold, difficult country, and the properties there are quite large, since several acres are needed to feed a single animal. These are runs, not farms; here, sheep are grazed to as high as the animals can forage during summer, and whereas the properties in the South Downs and Midhurst districts generally are between 350 and 500 acres, in Glassford they are several thousand at least. Many of these runs are very isolated, a fact that has helped to stimulate a strong sense of community among the run-holding families there.

These three districts are thought of as separate but closely related communities, and what underlies their common identity is that they form a single county. Each district elects its own representatives to the county council, which among other things oversees the roads and bridges of the region, a matter of considerable interest to land-holders.^[5] The three districts also share the same high school and are part of a single telephone system. In a sense the South Downs district is the most notable of the three, in that it has the largest population and its township contains the greatest number of businesses; the county offices, high school, and telephone exchange are also in the South Downs township. Nevertheless, the Midhurst and Glassford districts do not see themselves as subordinate to South Downs, but rather as equal (though grudging) partners. Indeed, Midhurst tends to see itself as slightly superior to South Downs: it thinks of itself as a more cohesive community and of its farmers as more progressive. And the Glassford district sees itself as superior to both, since run-holding confers greater distinction than farming.

The most important basis for the distictiveness of each of these districts is that they have separate social hierarchies. Landholders know all the other farmers and run-holders in their own district and can place them at least roughly in a single hierarchy of standing, but that hierarchy stops at the borders of the district. For example, virtually every farmer in the South Downs district can discuss the quality of the sheep and paddocks of any other South Downs landholder, and he can comment on his credit worthiness, business acumen, financial well-being, and so on—all of which (among other things)

are important for placing that person within the local social order. The same farmer may know most of the Midhurst landholders by name, and some by reputation; but he would have trouble placing them in a hierarchical order, and in any event he would resist trying to place them within the hierarchy of his own district.

The boundedness of these communities reflects the topographic characteristics of the region. The three districts are divided not only from one another but from still other communities by natural boundaries: mountain ranges, escarpments, and rivers. In this respect these communities are unlike other Canterbury farm districts located on the plains, where natural boundaries are fewer and communities tend to overlap or merge a good deal more.

The three districts are not isolated, however. They are geographically part of, and they identify with, a larger subprovincial section of Canterbury. The east-west borders of this subprovincial section are defined by the ocean and the Southern Alps, respectively, and the south-north borders by major rivers. The people living in South Downs county know the names of at least a few of the leading people in each of the communities making up this larger region, and many have friends and relatives in nearby communities as well. At the economic and symbolic (but not the geographic) center of the subprovincial region is Jackson, its largest town, situated on the main railway line. Most people living in the county of South Downs travel to Jackson several times a year at least. Teenagers sometimes drive there for the evening to see a movie, and many families shop there once a month or so; most landholders visit their accountant there a few times a year, and possibly their banker as well. People also travel occasionally to Christchurch either for business or pleasure, though the drive is long enough that very few do so regularly.

In this study I focus chiefly on the hierarchy of the district of South Downs, and only secondarily on Glassford and Midhurst.

Standing and Personhood

Two main theoretical principles underlie this book. The first is that social standing, achievement, and personal worth or identity are central to most social systems. Consider the Trobriand Islanders.^[6] Trobriand yam gardeners were oriented not so much to-

ward the problem of subsistence—or toward sheer material survival—as toward the goal of maintaining or achieving a good name for themselves, their families, hamlets, and villages; this they did largely by growing very large quantities of healthy, robust yams. The relations among groups were essentially competitive ones, whereby the members sought to establish their standing and respectability through yam gardening.^[7]

Similarly, Pierre Bourdieu argues that the issue of standing or achievement is central to the dynamics of modern French society.^[8] According to Bourdieu, the dominant class in France is made up of two parts: one, chiefly the major industrial and commercial employers, enjoys a large volume of economic capital, while the other, including artists and professors, enjoys a large volume of cultural capital. The two segments are engaged in what Bourdieu calls a classification struggle, in which each seeks to advance its own criteria both for measuring standing and for defining the meaningful and worthy life.^[9]

The second principle underlying this book is that status systems are grounded on systems of meaning. Thus, a main task of the analysis will be to render those meanings. This is not all that the research should do; it should also attempt to understand the actions of individuals—to analyze the avenues of achievement that are available to them, as well as their attempts to alter the system to their own advantage by changing the cultural definitions of social standing and personal worth. Yet because the actions of individuals are unintelligible outside the context of their cultural ideas, understanding the cultural framework is an essential step in this study.

To appreciate the force of this point, consider the social structural theories that have sought to explain differences in the prestige of occupations in Western societies.^[10] These theories tend to naturalize the processes that underlie prestige, or to assume that certain qualities “naturally” stimulate respect or admiration in the individual's mind. For example, Donald Treiman asks rhetorically why positions that enjoy power and privilege everywhere are accorded high standing (a generalization, incidentally, that needs to be seriously qualified if it is to be accepted),^[11] to which he replies: “The answer is simple—power and privilege are universally valued in all societies.”^[12] For Treiman, then, it is a natural process of human thought to look up to, admire, or envy persons or positions that exhibit these features.

Treiman states explicitly that his theory applies only to occupa-

tions and not to the differences in prestige among, say, ethnic groups or family names, but this caveat seems disingenuous.^[13] He holds that his theory explains why the same occupations tend to rank at about the same level in all societies; clearly, in his view, a powerful force is at work, which is the desirability of power and privilege. To be consistent, he must extend the same explanation to other parts of the status hierarchy: for example, to state that if one ethnic group enjoys greater power and privilege than another, it must also enjoy greater prestige.

Jonathan Turner expresses a view similar to Treiman's. Turner argues that, in general, the prestige of a social position reflects the degree to which it exhibits the qualities of power, skill, functional importance, and material wealth. These four attributes, he further suggests, attract prestige because of “a social psychological process”—by which he seems to mean that people “naturally” look up to social positions and individuals that manifest these qualities.^[14] Parallel assumptions are widespread in the social sciences; for example, Robert Murphy remarks that “in hunting societies, a successful hunter will generally be accorded considerable esteem, for he shows excellence in a pursuit basic to the group's survival.”^[15] Hunting peoples, like everyone else, “naturally” admire the individual who contributes significantly to the group's material well-being.

My argument in this book is that people are not naturally attracted to certain attributes, for what is desirable, prestigious, and fulfilling is defined by culturally variable systems of meaning. Hence the critical starting point for the analysis of a prestige or status system is to render the meanings that underlie it.

Not only are the values that define what people look up to cultural and not natural, but so are the signs by which the individual judges the relative standing of a social position. Consider Treiman's theory once more. In his analysis the attributes that signify social standing are “natural” signs, the meanings of which are self-evident or transparent. On the one hand they are brute facts, directly observable by the senses; a person can literally see both the exercise of power and differences in material well-being. Thus, in principle, disagreements between two people over the relative prestige of an occupation can be resolved by appealing to objective facts: how much power does the holder of the occupation actually wield, and what is the level of his or her material compensation?

On the other hand, in Treiman's analysis universal standards are used to interpret the objective signs of social position, with the implication that the signs making up the status system of any one society are directly intelligible to the members of any other society. For example, the power and material advantages that distinguish the high-prestige occupations in our society should be as clear to another people as they are to us—one only has to look to see that the well-to-do drive better cars, have physically easier or more interesting work, own more labor-saving devices, eat better food, and live in larger and more comfortable homes. Similarly, we need only look to appreciate that the headman in a chiefdom is better off and enjoys greater power than his subordinates.

Bernard Barber has also studied occupational prestige. According to Barber, an occupation's standing is determined by its importance for the continuance of the larger society: the greater the functional significance of a role, the greater its prestige. What is more, he suggests, “most people can make pretty good estimates of what the functional significance of the various occupational roles actually is.”^[16] Thus, the quality or attribute of functional significance constitutes a set of signs for judging social standing, and the sociologist who analyzes occupations in terms of their functional significance “sees” approximately the same hierarchy as the people who view the system from their own perspective. All parties see the same brute facts that are directly observable by the senses, and they apply universal standards in interpreting them.

In this book I argue that the signs that people read when they view the social hierarchy not only are defined by cultural meanings, but they cannot be perceived apart from those meanings. For example, the economic order is an important arena of achievement in both New Zealand and California, with wealth an important factor (or set of signs) for assessing social position in both places. Yet wealth is defined differently in the two locales, with the result that the signs of wealth are different. A California farmer, stepping into a New Zealand farming community for the first time, would “see” a different hierarchy of wealth from what the New Zealanders do.^[17] Similarly, if a European man were to step into a Kachin gumsa community in Burma for the first time, he would be unable to “read” the rank of the lineages residing there because he lacks the cultural framework for doing so. By contrast, if a Kachin man from another

community were to enter that same village, he would be able to order the local lineages relatively easily, since he understands the symbols that express rank.^[18]

I have mentioned that the systems of meaning need not be fully agreed upon, because segments of society have an interest in altering the definitions of social honor and personal worth. Even in the absence of overt competition, it may be common for individuals to employ somewhat different cultural meanings in regard to the status system; consequently, they may render somewhat different interpretations of the same signs. For example, a handful of families in South Downs possess religious convictions that lead them to define moral worth by principles different from the ones I analyze. Yet the investigator has no choice but to try to enter into the cultural world of the people, however fluid and diversified it may be, if he or she is to render the status system intelligible.

It is important to be clear that South Downs is not a homogeneous community and that the patterns I describe in this book are not fully consensual. What I have set out to do here is explore the internal principles or patterns of a particular cultural system to which people adhere at various times and to varying degrees. While this is not the only cultural system for defining social hierarchy and moral worth within the community, I suggest that it enjoys a unique status among its rivals, for it is the dominant system in the district. A lack of consensus need not imply anarchy.

The Issue of Gender.

The issues of heterogeneity and dissent lead directly to that of gender, for concepts of moral worth and personhood in South Downs are different for men and women. Although gender receives little explicit treatment in this book, its significance is pervasive.

The place to begin is with a cultural ideal in South Downs concerning the differences in men's and women's relationship to the economic order. According to this ideal, men are active agents in the economic sphere—in principle, they are the ones who engage in business affairs—whereas women are dependent on the men's roles in the workplace. The strength of this model became apparent when

one of the firms in the South Downs township was forced to lay off some employees. The policy they adopted was to dismiss married women first, before any of the men, regardless of seniority; the grounds for doing so were that men are the primary breadwinners in the household, whereas the married women had men to support them. Virtually everyone I spoke to, men and women alike, regarded the policy as fitting.

The strength of the model is also manifest in the concept of the farmer. A woman may own a farm by herself, and conceivably she could do all the work on it that a male owner would do (though I know of no case in South Downs where this was true); but even so, to refer to her as a farmer would strain normal usage to the limit.^[19] The business of farming is conceived as inherently masculine, and this is so even though women's labor is extremely important on many properties, especially during the early years of ownership when there is insufficient income to hire other help. A woman may be highly regarded for her contribution to the farm operation, yet the labor she provides is considered supportive, not primary, and in an important sense she is viewed as subordinate to her husband in the operation of the business.

This conception of the relationship of men and women to the economic system corresponds to local ideals concerning the social hierarchy. Here, the status system is regarded as a hierarchy of households that draw their standing from the male household heads, and the position of women derives largely from the standing of the households to which they belong.^[20] Thus a study of the social hierarchy is essentially a study of the occupations and activities of men.

Reality presents complications that confuse the ideal models I have described. An example is a schoolteacher—a woman—whose occupation ranks substantially higher than that of her husband, a truck driver; another is the handful of adult women in the community who support themselves and their children on their own. Nonetheless, the ideal provides a dominant framework that community members use in representing the local social order.

The implications of this folk model for the present study are considerable. On the one hand, the focus of the research is decidedly on the affairs of men, not women, simply because the local social hierarchy is defined primarily in relation to males. On the other hand, this folk model implies that a man's sense of self-worth and achievement is developed largely in the context of a masculine-oriented

social hierarchy. A man measures his achievements primarily in relation to men and by reference to masculine affairs.

It has been suggested that hierarchy means different things to men and women and that ideals like those described here are not gender-neutral at all; in other words, they do not represent a middle standpoint shared by males and females equally, but reflect the perspective of men specifically.^[21] According to this argument, women's voices and perspectives tend to be suppressed by male-gendered ideals like the above. In the research for this study, I was careful to include a wide range of women. Because these women seemed to express the ideals I have described as adeptly and as readily as the men, I have no reason to think that gender differences do exist in regard to conceptions of the social hierarchy. Yet I was not particularly sensitive to the question of male/female perspectives when I was engaged in the field research, and I did not inquire specifically into the question. Consequently, I do not claim that the analysis presented here is gender-neutral, or that everyone shares the perspective that prevails in this work, that is, that women's standing in both the economic order and the social hierarchy is different from that of men. Rather, I attempt to explain how the social order looks and works when it is seen from the viewpoint of—or from within—the perspective I describe here.

The issue of gender enters into this study in another crucial sense as well. Because occupation is so central to conceptions of personal worth and social standing in the district, I devote a good deal of attention to the cultural ideas underlying the local occupational system. Yet the work that people do in the economic sphere defines personal identity very differently for men than for women. Although occupation may be extremely important for a woman's sense of selfworth, it is not central to her gender identity, whereas it is for a man's.

Consider the case mentioned above, in which a local firm, forced to retrench, laid off some of its women employees. One of these women, who had worked for the firm for many years, was severely affected personally by the loss of her job. I suggest that an important reason for her upset was that her personal identity had come to be defined largely by her employment. Her identity as a woman, however—her gender identity—was unaffected by her joblessness.

By contrast, a man's identity as a man is importantly (though not completely) defined by his work.^[22] Unemployment may thus be a

feminizing experience for the male, and the same may be true when a wife is significantly more successful in the economic order than the husband. For a man, achievement in the occupational sphere means not only the improvement of his social position, but also the affirmation of his gender identity.

The idea that occupation means something different for men and women is suggested implicitly by Michèle Dominy, who argues in a recent study that the gender identity of “traditional” New Zealand women is defined chiefly in terms of an ideology of motherhood.^[23] The cultural ideal identifies the role of homemaker or the woman's activities in the domestic sphere as definitive for her sense of feminine self-worth. Yet this ideal also allows for the inclusion of certain nonhousehold activities—including public service or voluntary activities that are conceived in terms of the domestic or nurturant model—which may contribute significantly to a woman's sense of feminine self-worth as well. Dominy suggests, moreover, that through such participation women may achieve considerable influence in the public sphere. The woman's achievement of gender identity through her activities both in the home and in voluntary public service may, I believe, be further regarded as an analogue to the man's achievement of gender identity through work.

Rather than being irrelevant to this study, then, gender occupies a central place in it. This is true in two senses. First, the book is written in the masculine voice. It assumes what may be a male-gendered perspective, by which men and women are conceived as standing in a different relationship to the economic order and social hierarchy, with women under the mantle of their male household heads. Second, it focuses largely on occupation, which is central to the gender identity of men, not women. This book may thus be regarded not as a study of personhood in general within the district, but of male personhood specifically.

My analysis of South Downs begins with an account of the occupational system, a comprehensive framework for ordering all the households in the district. First I present the “shape” of this system, or the hierarchical pattern that emerges when the local occupations are viewed as an inclusive set; I then analyze the grounds that people use in assessing the relative standing of the positions that make up this set. My purpose is to suggest the more or less implicit principles that are constitutive of the hierarchical order, principles, I argue,

that are cultural, not natural, for they are historically contingent. Next I focus on the most important occupational category in the district, landholding, the goal again being to understand the system at a level that is largely beyond the conscious grasp of the people themselves. The landholding families are ordered on the basis of three primary—and also culturally variable—sets of criteria: wealth, farming ability, and refinement. The definition of wealth among landholders in South Downs is different from that of the California farmers I studied earlier, as noted; similarly, the criteria of ability and refinement rest on cultural theories of social hierarchy that have undergone significant modifications since the 1920s as a result of the vicissitudes of history. What is more, these last criteria—ability and refinement—lead directly to the concept of person, for each implies fundamentally different ideals on which the individual models him- or herself.

Before starting with the analysis of South Downs, however, I need to sketch the history of stratification in rural New Zealand. This will provide context that is essential for what follows.

Chapter Two
The Historical Pattern

The earliest year-round European settlements in what is now New Zealand were established in the 1820s and consisted of whaling stations and Christian missions.^[1] Shortly thereafter a growing interest was expressed by British citizens in claiming the islands for colonial settlement, and within a few years the British government acceded to the demands. Britain annexed New Zealand in 1840, making it a Crown Colony the following year.^[2] New, permanent settlements soon appeared on both North and South Islands, two of which were particularly important for the present study. One was Otago, founded in 1848 at the site of the present city of Dunedin by adherents of the Free Church of Scotland, with the original colonists chiefly Presbyterian Scots.^[3] The other, the Canterbury settlement, founded in 1850, was Anglican and was established at what is now Christchurch.^[4] As we shall see, in South Downs the distinction between the Scots and the English, and between Otago and Canterbury, was to occupy a prominent spot in people's discourse about interpersonal relations.

A guiding principle behind the Canterbury settlement was the idea of recreating the British rural hierarchy, whereby the citizenry would be dominated by country gentlemen—men of means, education, and high standing, and also devout Anglicans. The dominant class would have a strong sense of obligation toward their inferiors, a sense that had declined in England and Europe, it was believed, owing to the selfish pursuit of wealth that had become so prominent with industrialization. The guiding figures behind the Canterbury

settlement therefore opposed social equality, for they believed that the lower classes would achieve high standards of civilization only if they lived in an environment of discipline and order.^[5] The social hierarchy that the Canterbury organizers had in mind for the new settlement was manifest in the terms that distinguished the two main classes of settlers. “Colonists” were those who could pay their own passage and who had the capital to purchase land, whereas “emigrants” were laborers and artisans who came as assisted passengers: being unable to pay their fare, they were assisted in emigrating by funds from the Canterbury Association.^[6]

The plans of the organizers went awry almost from the start. For one thing, it was difficult to convince members of high social and economic standing to come to this distant land. The “colonists,” it seems, were chiefly men and women of the middle classes.^[7] Another problem was that upward mobility for working people was easier than expected. The demand for labor pushed wages up, and land was fairly cheap, so substantial numbers of working people were soon able to acquire small farms of their own. As a result, working people developed a strong sense of independence, and both social and economic relations in New Zealand acquired a strongly egalitarian cast almost from the start.^[8] Significant differences in wealth existed within the colony, to be sure, but these differences were not associated with patterns of social deference like those in England.^[9]

In the earliest stage of settlement the farms were devoted exclusively to feeding the small local population, but by the early 1850s land was being put to a new commercial use. This new use was very different from what the settlement's founders had envisaged, however, for it was soon realized that the Australian system of sheep husbandry was the most feasible economic enterprise for the new colony.^[10] This was not a system of small farms raising such agricultural goods as grain, vegetables, and dairy products for local consumption. Rather, the holdings consisted of vast sheep runs devoted to extensive pastoralism, with the land remaining (at first) in its native tussock. A run consisted of at least ten thousand acres and was inhabited by only a handful of people—the run-holder's family, together with a small hired staff of shepherds and other station hands.^[11]

Not only was land cheap, but it could also be acquired as leasehold from the Crown, at least initially, and the lease payment was not due until the wool clip was sold. According to one account, £1,050 to

£1,200 was needed to start a sheep station during the early years.^[12] This was enough to purchase a small flock of eight hundred to a thousand breeding ewes, employ hired help, make a few improvements to the property (for example, a small hut was needed until a proper house could be built), and provide a small amount of working capital. The land itself did not require much labor, since sheep thrived on the native tussock; and fences were unnecessary to begin with (boundary keepers could be hired to prevent the flocks of neighboring stations from becoming mixed). The system had the added advantage that it was easy to learn, so inexperience was not a great handicap.

The sheep were raised for their wool, not the meat, for until the 1880s the meat could not be shipped abroad without spoiling. The local people consumed some of the animals, but the sheep population quickly exceeded the human head-count. Because the wool was what mattered, the dominant breed was the small, temperamental merino, which produces meat of only modest quality but grows a large amount of fine wool. The merinos require very little labor; indeed, they can be left to themselves most of the year. On many stations they were mustered only once annually to be shorn, when the lambs were also marked and the entire mob was treated for disease.^[13]

The original run-holders in Canterbury fell into two distinguishable categories. First were people already established as pastoralists in Australia who saw fresh opportunities in New Zealand and quickly moved there, bringing both capital and a knowledge of sheep production. The second were the Canterbury pilgrims who were sufficiently well-to-do to establish sheep runs of their own.^[14]

The Scottish settlement at Otago underwent a similar transformation as a majority of the land became devoted to wool production. There, however, few if any of the original settlers joined the ranks of the early run-holders, since these early immigrants were in general even poorer than the Canterbury settlers and so lacked the capital needed to occupy and stock the runs. Rather, the original Otago run-holders were chiefly Australians on the one hand and a few Canterbury settlers on the other; collectively, they were identified as English and Anglican, and thus represented a challenge to the early Presbyterian dominance in Otago.^[15]

By the 1860s virtually all of the land of Canterbury and Otago that was suitable for pastoral use had been claimed.^[16] Sheep runs

were now the economic backbone of the colony, and they produced almost exclusively for the international wool market.

Although the pastoral system was well beyond the means of working people, the man who wanted to farm could find other opportunities. A local market existed for farm goods like vegetables, fruit, grain, and milk products, the supply of which could be undertaken by small, affordable family farms. The areas surrounding towns such as Christchurch, Ashburton, and Dunedin were soon devoted to agricultural production for the local market. Most of the work on these properties was done by the farmer himself and his family, because the cost of labor was too high for hired help to be profitable.

The local food market expanded over time as New Zealand's population grew, and this in turn facilitated upward mobility. One important source of population growth was the program of assisted immigration from 1855 to the 1880s, whereby agents in England organized a regular flow of workers to the colony;^[17] another was the gold rushes in Otago and the West Coast during the 1860s, which brought a sudden influx of people from such places as Australia and the United States. Still, the local market was severely limited, as were the opportunities for upward mobility that this type of farming provided; all told, a mere fraction of the population could produce all that the people needed.

Wheat Farming

Between 1875 and 1895, wheat came to rival wool as an export item in New Zealand, a development with important implications for the local social organization, especially on the Canterbury Plains.^[18] An example is the Longbeach estate near Christchurch, which, though originally claimed for the purpose of wool production, for a period became one vast wheat farm employing up to three hundred men at the peak of harvest.^[19] The owners of Longbeach, who were among the most innovative in the development of wheat production, were not alone, for a number of Canterbury landholders kept twenty or thirty teams busy all summer.^[20]

One very important effect of the wheat boom was that it created a sizable need for farm workers, most of whom, however, could find

work only during the busy summer months. Another effect was to increase the range of differences among large landholders. Initially all large property-holders operated their holdings along similar lines, as sheep runs; but now those in a position to take full advantage of wheat production were able to engage in a very different form of agricultural enterprise.

Several factors limited the landholder's ability to shift to wheat, one being that some properties were more suitable than others for this type of crop. The hilly and mountainous regions were too steep for the harvesting equipment that was used and typically lacked drinking water for the draft animals. Rather, the properties that could make the shift were located chiefly on the plains, in the river valleys, and on the downlands adjacent to the plains.^[21] The rougher areas, and particularly the high country, remained in tussock.

Yet the properties that turned to wheat never fully abandoned sheep farming. When the tussock was first plowed, the soil was rich and productive, but soil exhaustion set in after two or three years. The landholder eventually plowed the wheat stubble into the ground, planted permanent English pasture grasses, and returned to full-scale sheep production.^[22] The conversion to exotic grasses was highly desirable, because pasture of this kind supported a larger number of sheep per acre than tussock—perhaps tripling the carrying capacity.^[23] The wheat boom in Canterbury thus ended up increasing sheep production considerably on the properties that switched to grain crops.

The wheat boom was important for another reason. Because wheat farms did not have to be large to be profitable, this form of agriculture was within the reach of men with limited means—as long as they were able to do most of the initial back-breaking work on their own. The wheat boom made it possible not only for farm laborers to move into the ranks of farm owners, but also for many small farmers to acquire larger holdings.

During most of the 1870s small farmers felt reasonably prosperous, while the young man starting out found that loans and therefore farms were relatively easy to acquire. But suddenly, in 1879, depression set in, lasting until 1896.^[24] A farmer who had purchased his land in the 1860s, say, before the inflated land values of the seventies, was able to establish himself on a secure basis before the depression got under way; but the person who bought a farm in the late 1870s was likely to lose his investment.^[25]

Acquiring a Small Farm

An account from Otago in the 1880s describes how an agricultural laborer set out to acquire land in that period.^[26] He might buy about fifty acres of unimproved land, at a price of perhaps £2 an acre. This would probably take all the money he had. Lacking the capital to buy a horse, he got to the farm by walking, carrying his tools on his back. Having purchased seed potatoes and rations from farmers living nearby, he then made camp on his property. After the potatoes were planted and he had done what he could to improve the land, he walked back to a more settled district, where he found work to support himself and his family, whom he had left behind. When the potatoes were grown he returned to his farm, planted a larger crop, and built a primitive shelter for his family. The family moved to the farm as soon as they had a crop of wheat to make their own bread, as well as vegetables and potatoes for their own use. They raised poultry and, if they could afford it, bought a cow. To supplement their diet they hunted pigeons and wild pigs and fished for eels. The farmer slowly upgraded the family dwelling and increased the amount of land that was cropped, relying less and less on subsistence farming and more and more on cash cropping.

The case of one Ashburton settler, Thomas Taylor, provides a detailed look at the process.^[27] Taylor emigrated to New Zealand from Ireland in 1864, when he was twenty-three. He landed in Auckland, where he got work as a carpenter, but when gold was discovered on the West Coast of South Island he set off to make his fortune (presumably in 1866). His tour as a miner was reasonably profitable—until his gold was stolen, whereupon he set off on foot across the mountains, carrying his few belongings in a swag, to find work in Canterbury. Taylor worked for several years as a farm laborer and threshing-mill driver in a farm district outside Christchurch, where, soon after his arrival, he also leased a small farm plot that provided additional income. At one point he entered into a partnership in a flax mill, but this proved unsuccessful, and once again he lost virtually everything he had.

Taylor continued saving as much of his wages as he could, and in the early 1870s—he now had a wife and two children—he went to the land office in Christchurch to consult the official maps of available properties. He decided on a plot of two hundred acres near

Ashburton and drove there in a trap to see what it was like. Although the land was swampy and covered with a thick and tall growth of flax, he decided to purchase it anyway. He returned immediately to Christchurch to pay his deposit; payment of the full price could be deferred until a future date.

While his wife and children stayed in the farm district near Christchurch, Taylor set out for the new farm, accompanied by a man he had hired to help with the move. The two men drove a dray loaded with equipment and supplies, and they camped in a tent when they arrived. Immediately, however, they set to work building a sod hut for the family to live in, and Taylor brought his wife and children to the farm when the small home was built but before the farm was actually in production. During the first years on the property he worked as a carpenter, building the houses of other settlers who had purchased small farms nearby—with payment often in kind, for his neighbors were as poor as he. Taylor's wife raised fowl, and they had several milk cows; with the money thus earned, plus what he made as a carpenter, the family was able to survive until farming was fully under way. Taylor must have dug a system to drain the swampy areas before he could begin farming, and he had to plow the flax and seed the land, but by about 1877 his enterprise was on a solid footing as a mixed farm devoted to both dairying and cropping. His main crop, presumably, was wheat.

It is significant that Taylor acquired his farm in the early 1870s, for the price he had to pay for the land then was probably much less than it would be just a couple of years later. In addition, his farm was in production during a good part of the prosperous 1870s, so he was probably able to clear his debts before the depression set in in 1879. Had he delayed another five or six years in buying the property he might not have succeeded.

Social Hierarchy in the Late Nineteenth Century

I want now to present an overview of the stratification system of rural New Zealand in the last two or three decades of the nineteenth century.^[28] I focus largely on male occupations, since I assume that the single most important factor in assessing class stand-

ing was the occupation of the household head, who typically (and certainly in theory) was a man.

The lowest of the three primary occupational categories comprised workers or the working classes.^[29] The run-holders hired yearround crews of shepherds, boundary keepers, general laborers, and the like, as well as occasional or seasonal workers, particularly shearers who came to the station in gangs for a few days each year to work the mob of excitable merinos and half-breds. The need for hired workers was even greater on the farms than on the runs; some farms were large enough to require year-round help for such jobs as plowing, fence building, and tending livestock, and virtually all farms required some additional help during the summer for harvesting and sowing. The workers were hardly homogeneous, and it is reasonable to suggest that one basis for sorting them was by the skills that their jobs required: surely a teamster enjoyed a higher standing than the unskilled laborer who acquired occasional jobs digging drainage ditches and cutting gorse hedges. This measure suggests another, namely income. Some jobs were better paid than others, and some provided more regular employment. Only a minority of rural working men had year-round jobs; most were hired on a temporary basis by farmers and run-holders and so were idle during at least some of the winter, when even the farmer himself had little to do. The problem of winter unemployment—indeed, of unemployment in general—increased during the long depression of 1879–96, when a constant stream of itinerant swaggers moved from station to station in search of handouts. The swagger occupied the very bottom of the rural social ladder in New Zealand.

The second category of this rural hierarchy included the small farmers, who were referred to as “cockatoos” or “cockies,” a term imported from Australia, where the avian cockatoo was considered a pest: in New Zealand as in Australia, the “squatters” (or large pastoralists) found the small farmers a serious nuisance.^[30] Because many of these men began their careers as hired workers, we might assume that their life-style was similar to that of the people below them. Yet the evidence from South Downs suggests that not all cockies were of the working classes or exhibited working-class patterns. At least a few came from middle-class families—some were sons of minor English clergymen or small business owners, for example. These were people who paid their own passage to New Zealand and who had financial resources beyond what they might earn in wages,

but whose wealth was sufficient to buy only a farm, not a run. In turn, they probably exhibited somewhat greater “refinement” in lifestyle than either working people or farmers with working-class roots^[31] —one significant criterion for distinguishing among farmers. A second criterion was wealth. Some farmers were barely able to afford a very small plot of land, at least at first, whereas others had sufficient resources to buy larger and better situated properties. Some of those who acquired their holdings early (say, in the 1850s) were relatively prosperous by the 1880s, even in spite of the depression—including many of those with working-class backgrounds who exhibited a working-class life-style. By contrast, those who acquired their farms in the mid to late 1870s were, in the next two decades, in a very precarious financial position.

The third social and economic category comprised the large landholders, sometimes referred to as New Zealand's “gentry”;^[32] they were set apart from both the working classes and cockies not only by their greater wealth but also by the fact that they employed, and thus had direct authority over, large crews of workers. The average estate in one county on the Canterbury Plains, for example, employed twenty men full time.^[33] In 1890, one prominent squatter and a member of Parliament, Captain Russell, commented that he could put a small country settlement for working people, “the whole lot of them, settlers, sheep, cattle, and all, in a corner of my run, and not know they were there.”^[34] Because large landholders were typically better off financially than the rest of the population, they could afford a more elegant way of life, including in many cases fine homes surrounded by several acres of gardens and the attendance of uniformed servants and a crew of gardeners. Yet it would seem that differences in life-style were not a function simply of wealth, but of class background as well. In Canterbury at least, the large landholders included a significant number who came to New Zealand with what the working and lower middle classes would have considered a rather highbrow way of life. A substantial number of them were educated in English public schools, for example, and a few had attended either Oxford or Cambridge.^[35]

Still, the large landholders, like the cockies, were a heterogeneous group. For one thing, they represented a wide range of social backgrounds. Oral history from South Downs, for instance, includes cases of very poor Scotsmen who immigrated to New Zealand to work as shepherds on the large estates and proved to be especially

capable sheep men; before the end of the century some had acquired small or moderate-sized runs of their own, often in remote and difficult areas where the original run-holders had failed, and at least one astute and experienced Scots shepherd eventually became a very wealthy landholder. For another, run-holders differed considerably in wealth. Some had holdings that were small, poorly situated, and barely profitable, whereas others owned or leased several estates, any one of which could support a family in elegant fashion.

Despite the differences among run-holders, they tended to become linked together in a common social network, which was facilitated by a variety of institutions. In Canterbury, for example, it was common for the families of the large landholders to visit Christchurch regularly, and many had residences there. The social season in Christchurch was marked by a busy schedule of dinner parties and visiting among the well-to-do.^[36] The countryside also had a relatively genteel social life dominated by some of the local run-holders. This included such private social events as dinners and tennis parties, as well as “public” affairs like hare hunts, using hounds brought from England. Since the large landholders tended to intermarry, many were related to one another through ties of kinship and affinity; many had also been to private boarding schools together, and some even to public schools in England.

The line between run-holders and cockies was somewhat indefinite and permeable. Some of the more affluent and “respectable” farmers participated in such events as hunts, for example; and in terms of sheer life-style, cockies from an upper-middle-class background probably had more in common with the more genteel runholders than did some of the very wealthy people with working-class roots.

I focus here on rural New Zealand, yet scattered throughout the colony were population centers of various sizes. These were inhabited chiefly by the working and lower middle classes, including the men who provided the seasonal labor on the farms and stations, artisans such as bootmakers, small shopkeepers, and the like. The towns typically included a more affluent middle class as well, made up of such medium-sized business owners as drapers and auctioneers, and a few lawyers and doctors. The people of highest standing in these communities were sometimes included in the run-holders' social circle as well.

Relations Among Classes

The relations among classes are as important a topic as the class distinctions themselves. I mentioned that a more egalitarian ethos prevailed in nineteenth-century New Zealand than in England, by which I mean that the markers of social distance, or the observable symbols by which social hierarchy was publicly expressed, were less pronounced in the colony. For example, it was probably easier for farm workers and domestic servants in New Zealand to slip into casual conversation with their employers than in England.^[37] Similarly, although some run-holders supervised the men but did not engage in manual labor themselves, many others worked alongside their men at such jobs as mustering and running the animals through the sheep dip. In this respect they had more in common with the American rancher than with the English country gentleman.^[38]

As upward mobility slowed, however, social lines hardened, such that as the century wore on it probably became less acceptable for workers to converse casually with their employers. The relations among classes likewise became marked by varying degrees of tension.^[39] The explicit focus of hostility included such bread-and-butter matters as wages, working conditions, and the availability of land, but the question of egalitarianism and hierarchy—or social standing and honor—was another major grievance. A theme of the political speeches of the spokesmen for the labor movement late in the century was the “dignity of labor”^[40] —an expression of anger over the pretensions of the employer and the well-to-do and the subservience of working people, in part.

Farmers as a rule sided with the large landholders and other members of “the capitalist classes” when it came to issues concerning working people. Generally opposed to labor actions, farmers sided with the “capitalists” in the traumatic Maritime Strike of 1890, for example. When the strike reached the port town of Timaru, a number of farmers in the district expressed a willingness to send both teams and men to the harbor to do the work of the strikers “as a practical protest against the strike.”^[41]

The strongest hostilities, though, were expressed by both workers and farmers toward the large landholders, over the explicit issue of land. By the end of the 1850s all the usable land in both Canterbury

and Otago had been taken up, the vast majority of it by squatters who held leasehold rights from the Crown.^[42] Anyone who wanted land was confronted by a phalanx of run-holders determined to protect their investments. In turn, the run-holders felt threatened by the persistent efforts on the part of their social and economic inferiors (and of one another as well) to acquire the most valuable and productive portions of their estates. Very little land was acquired as freehold initially, so the squatters' concern was not irrational: anyone with the capital could attempt to buy any part of the propertyholders' leasehold from under them.

Disagreements with the run-holders over land policy was manifest within the Canterbury provincial council as early as the mid 1850s.^[43] By the 1860s the run-holders dominated the council, and they proceeded to pass legislation that protected their interests by making it difficult for people of limited means to acquire small farms.^[44] Although the Otago run-holders apparently were not as powerful as the Canterbury pastoralists in provincial politics, the same antagonism between pastoralists and agriculturalists was manifest there as well.^[45]

In the 1870s a land boom was under way in Canterbury. Land agents with the necessary capital managed to purchase large sections of runs in advance of the farmers' demand, and many of these speculators apparently made handsome profits. As a result, some of the hostility that people felt toward the large landholders was redirected toward the land agents. The seventies land boom spurred a large number of squatters on the plains, where the demand for farms was particularly high, to buy their land from the Crown as a defensive move; these purchases, together with the many small farms that were bought during that decade, meant that by the end of the 1870s virtually all the comparatively flat and fertile portions of Canterbury had been acquired as freehold. Remaining in leasehold were chiefly the higher and less desirable runs, those not in great jeopardy of purchase by land agents or small farmers.^[46]

The hostility that many people felt toward the large pastoralists grew intense during the depression of the 1880s and 1890s.^[47] It was now hard enough for the working man to find a job, let alone acquire a farm;^[48] and the well-to-do seemed to take advantage of the workers by lowering wages and cutting costs to such an extent that working conditions became unbearable. The colony as a whole was suffering

from economic malaise, and the run-holders by and large were blamed.

Refrigeration and Farming

In 1882, a technological development occurred that changed the economic fortune of New Zealand and fundamentally altered the relationship between squatter and cockatoo. This was the invention of refrigerated shipping, whereby sheep carcasses could be frozen and transported to Britain for sale at the local butcher shop. Now, miraculously, the meat was at least as valuable as the fleece. Within a few years—by the late 1880s—a number of freezing works (where livestock are slaughtered, dressed, and frozen) were constructed near the leading ports, a small fleet of refrigerated ships was fitted out, and the new industry was in business.^[49]

Refrigeration revolutionized not only the sheep industry in New Zealand but dairying as well, in that butter and cheese could now become profitable export items. Refrigerated shipping therefore resulted eventually in a very substantial increase in dairy farming, along with the development of a complex of cooperative dairy factories throughout rural New Zealand.^[50] Yet the dairy industry grew more slowly than the refrigerated meat industry, for it did not come into its own until well after the turn of the century. What is more, dairying was—and still is—more important in North than South Island. Sheep remained the preeminent livestock type in Canterbury and Otago, although some dairy farming became mixed with other agriculture in the more suitable areas, such as around Christchurch.^[51]

Refrigerated shipping provided alternative avenues of upward mobility for the working man and for the small farmer, and eventually it resulted in a large increase in middle-class farmers and a relative decline in the number of working people. In the case of dairying, the work was hard and the hours long, but the ambitious and energetic laborer did not need much capital to begin. I do not focus here on dairy farming, however, because dairying never became very important in the region of my research. I focus rather on sheep production, a type of farming that required greater capital resources

for the beginner than dairying, but that was still within the reach of at least some working people.

Another crucial development that came about at nearly the same time as refrigerated shipping was a return of prosperity, beginning in 1896 and continuing until 1921. Land could be expensive and hard to find, and not all who tried managed to improve their lot, but in general the economic prospects were good for those who could acquire farms or who already had them.

To raise sheep for the carcass as well as the wool required a very different kind of operation from that of the sheep runs, a fact that seems to have favored the development of the small, family farm. The story is complicated; let me begin with a description of the changes required by the new form of production.

First, the frozen meat industry strongly favored other breeds of sheep than the merino.^[52] Among the most popular were the Romney, Border Leicester, and Corriedale, which produce less wool of lower quality than the merino, but better meat, and which are also more docile and easier to deal with—an important consideration, since the new industry required that the sheep be handled rather extensively. These breeds also produce more lambs on average, and thus more carcasses per unit of time.

These other breeds have a drawback, however, in that they need exotic grasses to thrive. This leads to the second change required in the new form of sheep production: the landholder had no choice but to plant permanent pasture (an enormous job if the land was still in the native tussock). However—and here is the third point—the new type of sheep farm could be much smaller than a run. Not only did the permanent pasture support more sheep per acre, but each sheep produced more income because its value included earnings from both the wool and the carcass. Whereas a viable sheep run had to be several thousand acres, a profitable sheep farm did not have to be more than several hundred.

A fourth difference was that the new type of sheep farming was much more labor intensive than run-holding. The farmer not only had to plant permanent pasture; he also had to build fences to reduce the size of the paddocks for better stock management, and he had to move the sheep from one paddock to another occasionally to get the most value from the exotic grasses (on sheep runs the sheep were moved but a few times a year at most). Because pasture grasses grow

very little in winter, supplementary winter feed (usually turnips or swedes) had to be planted; moreover, crop rotation was considered advisable, so if possible the pasture grasses were periodically replaced by such crops as corn or wheat. The new breeds of sheep themselves required greater care as well. For example, since they generally had more difficulty than the merino in lambing, the ewes had to be watched closely and assisted at lambing time.

I have mentioned that wheat farming was not equally suitable for all parts of New Zealand; the same was true of the new sheep farming. Just as the exotic grasses did best at lower altitudes where the growing season was longer, the breeds of sheep that the new meat industry sought were less hardy than the merino and did not fare as well in higher, rougher country. As a result, sheep farming became concentrated chiefly in the same areas that experienced the wheat boom, that is, at lower elevations and in flatter areas, whereas runholding continued relatively unchanged in the other regions. In the case of Canterbury and Otago, sheep farming became dominant on the alluvial shelf bordering the ocean and in the lower valleys extending into the foothills; sheep runs, in contrast, remained dominant in the higher foothills and lower mountains (to elevations as high as the merino could survive) and in the higher, colder valleys of Central Otago and South Canterbury.

The economics of run-holding was also changing on account of the frozen meat industry. The merino carcass was worth much less than that of the Border Leicester or Romney, but it was worth something, and while most of the run-holder's income came from the sale of wool, it was now possible to augment that sum by selling the animals themselves. Hence the run no longer had to be quite as large as before to be profitable (though it still had to be counted in the thousands, and not the hundreds, of acres), because each animal produced a slightly higher income for its owner.

Refrigerated shipping, then, did not eliminate the distinction between farmers and run-holders, for now two rather different kinds of sheep raising coexisted. One, sheep farming, was a variety of intensive agriculture, for it involved the use of agricultural equipment to work the soil. The people who engaged in this production were cockies; their farms were labor intensive, they required only a few hundred acres to support their families, and their incomes came from the sale of both meat and wool. The other form, run-holding,

was a continuation of extensive pastoralism, inasmuch as the flock consisted of merinos that were fed on tussock. Agricultural equipment played a minor role in the run's operation, which was not labor intensive. A minimum of several thousand acres were needed to support a family. And a large majority of the run-holder's income came from the sale of wool.

A “Revolution” in Politics

The development of intensive sheep farming was accompanied by major changes in the stratificational pattern or class structure of New Zealand, for as the new sheep farms multiplied, the large estates were breaking up. This situation involves both myth and fact. Beginning in the 1890s and continuing today, these events have occupied a central place in the country's national ideology: according to popular thought, the New Zealanders stood up to land monopoly, economic inequality, and social injustice and brought forth a more egalitarian order. Yet much of the story is true. Certainly the size and number of large properties in New Zealand declined substantially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many large landholders left the colony altogether, and others presumably sold all or part of their holdings and put the money to other uses.^[53] Although the “gentry” did not disappear entirely, by 1917 their ranks had been thinned considerably, and the ones who remained no longer enjoyed as high a position in the social order.^[54]

One popular explanation for these developments locates the cause in the parliamentary election of December 1890, when the first Liberal majority was voted into office.^[55] By that time the colony had suffered over a decade of heavy depression, and the votes of working people, farmers, and the urban middle class together forced out of office the protectors of “the moneyed classes” and installed a government more responsive to “the people.” A major part of the Liberal government's political program was land legislation that (it was hoped) would bring an end to land monopoly. First, the government instituted a “bursting-up tax” that fell more heavily on the large landholders than others; second, it passed an act enabling the state to buy large estates at a fair price (whether the owners consented or not) and subdivide them into smaller holdings for sale to settlers;

and third, it instituted a system of loans to assist working people in the purchase of farms. The popular image at the time, then, was that the government itself had caused the demise of the large estates.^[56]

This explanation is somewhat in doubt, however, because at the same time a variety of economic forces were also at work to end the squatter system.^[57] For one, there was a rise in land values. The agricultural recovery after 1896 created a demand for farms, which increased the price of land, in turn stimulating the owners of large properties to subdivide and sell. At work here was the profit motive, not government policy. Yet one part of the Liberal land legislation may well have been a factor in the breakup of the estates: namely, the policy of cheap government loans, which enabled people with little capital to acquire land.^[58] Another significant force was that the new sheep farming was better suited to small, family farms than to large-scale operations. Because labor was relatively expensive, especially with the return of prosperity after 1896, workers' wages cut deeply into profits, whereas the labor of family members was cheap. Large-scale, intensive sheep farming may also have involved insurmountable management problems that were not an issue on the family farm. Nonetheless, one historian, Stevan Eldred-Grigg, suggests that these economic explanations are not sufficient. The main reason the large landholders sold their property, he argues, was that they were frightened by the political rhetoric of the day, a rhetoric that labeled them enemies and called for such radical measures as land nationalization. Thus, many of the large pastoralists simply cut their losses and left for Europe and elsewhere, or at least got out of the business of run-holding.^[59]

Some pastoralists became farmers, subdividing their properties but retaining significant portions for themselves; they were therefore in a position to make large profits when agricultural prosperity returned. Others, who held property in areas unsuitable for farming, perhaps continued as run-holders. Generally these pastoralists were not the wealthiest of the large landholders, however, because sheep raising was riskier and less profitable in those locales. What is more, their properties too were subdivided, though instead of being converted into small farms they were cut up into medium-sized runs. The property held by a single family in the nineteenth century was occupied by several in 1920. Not only did the remaining run-holders now have less land, but they were surrounded by newcomers, most of whom were joining the ranks of the pastoralists for the first time.

A Return of Prosperity.

The period from the late 1890s to 1921 has been called the golden age of New Zealand farming, for it was a time of agrarian prosperity:^[60] agricultural products now brought sufficiently high prices that the farmer made a very good living, farming expanded to the point that it replaced run-holding as the major form of land use, upward mobility resumed (at least for a time), and the cocky rose to a position of dominance in New Zealand's economic and political order. These developments in turn eventuated marked changes in the stratificational system.

We have already seen one of these changes: the gradual breakup of the estates. The possession of a large sheep run was no longer as clear a sign of elite standing as it had been. Moreover, the pastoralists no longer enjoyed political dominance to the degree they did before the “revolution” of the 1890s.^[61] Yet few working men held positions of genuine political significance either, for by 1893 power had shifted to the middle classes, and particularly to the farmers.^[62] Now the voice of the cocky was most audible in public affairs.

Life-style continued to distance the well-to-do from those below them during this period, however. Many better-off families could still hire large numbers of servants, for example, and the exclusive social life of visiting, hunting, and the like did not cease.^[63] An equally significant feature that set the economic and social elite apart was the way they educated their children. Some undoubtedly sent their sons and perhaps daughters “Home” (to England) for a public school education, but New Zealand also had its own well-developed and highly respectable system of private boarding schools.^[64]

The growth of the farmer's political importance occurred in the context of the agricultural recovery, but prosperity was not the sole cause of this political development, which, as we have seen, was apparent already in the election of 1893, when the colony was still deep in depression. While the agricultural recovery enhanced the farmer's position, the growth of refrigerated shipping was equally important, for it stimulated intensive agriculture, which by 1914 had outstripped extensive pastoralism in the economy.^[65] An increase in the export of meat and dairy products came about because the number of farmers increased; this could take place only because the amount of land devoted to extensive pastoralism, as well as the ratio of pastoralists to farmers, was declining.

The upswing in agricultural prices during the 1890s brought renewed upward mobility. Established farmers increased their holdings, and working people acquired small properties of their own, which in some cases they were able to enlarge over the next several years. The recovery of the 1890s to the 1920s had another positive effect, in that the farmers now felt very prosperous (assuming, of course, that the price they paid for land was not so high that their mortgage payments were a severe burden). Indeed, it has been suggested that, during the teens, the New Zealand cocky was the most affluent farmer in the world.^[66] By the 1920s probably as many farmers as run-holders lived in homes with maids' quarters, and the exclusive boarding schools may have enrolled more children of farmers than of run-holders.

The increase in the farmers' affluence and in their ability to appropriate the symbols of high standing was associated with another shift: the markers of social distinction between the elite run-holder and farmer were being effaced. Eldred-Grigg notes that members of the “gentry” class were treating the cockies “with a new respect.” He quotes one person who remarked that “the day has gone when [the small farmer] was spoken of derisively as a Cockatoo”; now the small landholder was being “spoken of respectfully … as a Farmer.”^[67] A study of a county in North Canterbury reports that the distinction between the two types of landholder was still marked before World War I but that it was declining, a fact manifested by the progressive mixing of farmers and run-holders in social and sporting activities.^[68]

It has been suggested that the prosperity of this period also hardened class lines between worker and farmer, because as the price of farmland rose it became increasingly difficult for the less well off to afford property. By the 1920s upward movement out of the working class was rare; thus landholding became even more important than before in distancing the farmer from the worker.^[69]

This development was coupled with another characteristic of the new economic order: whereas the position of the farmer improved considerably, that of the worker did not. The earnings of the working man remained low relative to the farmer's, jobs were often insecure, and in many instances living conditions had improved little since the depression of the 1880s and early 1890s.^[70]

In sum, the main changes in the stratificational pattern from the late 1890s to the 1920s were that, first, the gap between large landholders and farmers narrowed as the latter grew more numerous and,

second, the gap between farmers and workers widened. To oversimplify somewhat, before the 1890s farmers and workers were grouped together relative to the run-holders, but by the 1920s the farmers and run-holders were grouped together relative to the workers. The single most prominent division in the hierarchy had shifted down one rung.

Changes in the Wider Society

The stratificational pattern that I encountered in South Downs in 1981 was essentially a modified version of what I have described for 1921, but before I sketch the developments in rural New Zealand between those years I need to discuss some of the changes that occurred in the country as a whole.^[71]

In the 1920s and 1930s, meat, wool, and dairy products still made up a large majority of New Zealand's exports; agriculture (including pastoralism) thus continued to play a critical role in the economy, since it was the main source of foreign exchange. Without these exports New Zealanders would have had to do without the manufactured goods that all industrialized countries took for granted, such as steel, automobiles, and perfume. What is more, the importance of agriculture and pastoralism in the economy was disproportionately large relative to the number of people employed in that sector. New Zealand was now predominantly urban (it had been since about the turn of the century), and by the mid 1920s less than 30 percent of the male work force was engaged in agriculture and pastoralism.^[72] This number continued to shrink because of technological developments that reduced rural labor needs.^[73]

During this period most of New Zealand's manufacturing firms were very small establishments employing fewer than ten people; producing chiefly for the relatively small, domestic market, they were distributed widely throughout the two islands. Therefore, although this was a highly urban country in the 1920s and 1930s, it was not a country of heavy industry or of industrial cities.

A majority of New Zealand's urban work force in the 1930s was employed not in manufacturing but in the tertiary or service sector of the economy: growing numbers worked as truck drivers, shop assistants, government employees, and white-collar and clerical workers. It has been suggested that this development eventually

amounted to a transformation of New Zealand's middle class, which in the late nineteenth century was mostly entrepreneurial, consisting of such small business owners as local agents selling bicycles and agricultural implements, drapers, hotel owners, bakery owners, coach builders, and general merchants.^[74] In 1940, in contrast, the middle class was made up mostly of salaried employees, such as schoolteachers, clerical and secretarial workers, and salespeople. It was this new middle class that set the cultural tone of the country after World War II.

The war was a powerful stimulant to the economy, introducing a period of economic growth and prosperity that lasted until the late 1960s. One of the most notable characteristics of this period was that unemployment virtually disappeared—in part because of the development of manufacturing. The stage was set in the 1930s, when New Zealand's foreign exchange problems were reaching a crisis. In response, the new Labour government instituted measures limiting imports, which had the effect of protecting domestic industries from foreign competition once the war was over and, in turn, stimulating the growth of manufacturing firms in New Zealand. In addition, in the 1950s the government gave further stimulus to industry by introducing measures to increase the range and depth of goods produced. By 1960, four-fifths of the goods sold in New Zealand's shops were made domestically, and an ever-increasing number of people were being employed by the firms that made them.^[75] Still, most of these firms were relatively small in comparison with the factories of Europe and North America;^[76] consequently, the distinctions within the social hierarchy in New Zealand's manufacturing sector were less pronounced than in the more heavily industrialized countries.

The service sector of the economy was expanding at an even faster pace than manufacturing, however.^[77] Transportation, tourism, the insurance industry, and financial institutions saw varying degrees of growth, and public welfare grew particularly rapidly.^[78] Post-World War II governments have instituted programs for public housing, free education, health care, unemployment, and superannuation, among others, implementation of which required a substantial labor force, chiefly of white-collar workers.

The pattern of full employment that prevailed from World War II to the late 1960s involved several other important features, and collectively these suggest that this was a period of relative equality. Most people could afford what was considered a respectable standard of living, and the growing welfare system made health care and

education more widely available and reduced the economic insecurities of the ill and elderly. Data on the distribution of wealth and income are difficult to interpret, but it would appear that from the end of the war to the late 1960s the range from top to bottom was narrower than in most European and North American countries; indeed, the vast majority of New Zealand families were somewhere in the middle of the scale, with very few in either the top or bottom categories. This period also saw a lowering of class consciousness, or a rising ethos of egalitarianism.^[79] Although a class hierarchy did exist (in that differences in wealth and opportunity were manifest), it was not perceived very clearly and was, in principle, widely disapproved of.^[80]

The late 1960s marked another turning point in New Zealand's history. One major development was that the full employment and general prosperity of the postwar era came to an end. The economy no longer had a place for anyone who wanted a job. The range of differences in wealth and income also probably began to increase—although again, the evidence is difficult to evaluate. Certainly the rise in unemployment suggests greater inequality, since a body of workers who could not find jobs amounted to an additional stratum appended to the bottom of the scale. Higher inflation (which reached double digits in the late 1970s) likewise fostered inequality, for it affected people in different ways. The owners of downtown business property stood to benefit, for example, because the value of their holdings increased at a rate greater than inflation—and they did not pay taxes on capital gains. But wage earners generally were hurt; not only did wage increases lag behind inflation, but wage earners were also pushed into progressively higher tax brackets as their pay increased, meaning that more and more of their earnings went to the government. The graduated income tax thus became increasingly less progressive in the 1960s and 1970s.

A study of Johnsonville, a suburb of Wellington, offers a telling instance of this growing inequality. Throughout its history Johnsonville had been a working-class community. Although status distinctions and differences in affluence had always been manifest in the houses people occupied, during the 1950s and 1960s these differences were reduced significantly, apparently because even the least well-to-do had the resources to bring their homes up to middle-class standards. The 1970s, however, saw the range of housing styles increase again, reaching proportions as great as or greater than at any time in the community's past.^[81]

Another major development that began in the late 1960s was that, owing to changes in New Zealand's foreign trade policies, the manufacturing sector became more bureaucratic and more highly concentrated. The greater concentration was manifest both in ownership—there were fewer owners of a smaller number of firms, which by the late 1970s were significantly larger—and in locality, for Auckland in particular had become the principal site of manufacturing.

The concentration of ownership did not necessarily signal the emergence of a small elite of very wealthy private investors, though. Certainly, a few individuals did hold disproportionately large investments in these businesses, but for the most part the owners were either foreign investors or other large New Zealand corporations, especially insurance companies. The insurance companies in turn were capitalized by such investors as pension funds; hence ownership was apparently diffused throughout New Zealand. This pattern of broad ownership, however, may also mask certain inequalities. For example, although a large majority of New Zealanders held insurance policies from the companies that invested in the corporate sector, and although the policyholders as a whole stood to benefit from these investments, the well-to-do were more likely to be insured than the less affluent, and to have larger policies besides.^[82]

The concentration of the industrial sector also gave rise to an economic elite that wielded considerable influence by the early 1980s. This elite—a small body of financial executives and directors (as well as lawyers, accountants, and others), located chiefly in Wellington and Auckland, who managed the affairs of the emerging corporate industry—maintained close interpersonal ties, and they tended to sit on (or otherwise serve) many of the same corporate boards. Enjoying considerable economic power relative to their numbers, these men were in close touch with the leaders of government and so were well situated to play a role in national policy as well.^[83]

The Changing Position of Agriculture in New Zealand

The emergence of this elite is important because it indicates a crucial shift in the structure of New Zealand society during the post-World War II period. The urban segment of the country

had occupied a commanding place on the demographic charts since the turn of the century, and now it was moving into a central position within both the economy and the political system as well, whereas the agricultural sector (including pastoralism) was beginning slowly to move toward the periphery.

One sign of the economic slippage of the farming and run-holding sector was the decline in the number of people engaged in agricultural production after the war. By the early 1970s their proportion of the total work force was down to about one-eighth. Agricultural products also made up a progressively smaller share of all the goods shipped abroad. A high had been reached in the early 1950s when the demand for wool (created by the Korean War) pushed agricultural products to about 80 percent of total exports, but by the mid 1970s this figure stood at less than 60 percent and was falling.^[84] Even more telling, by the mid 1970s the agricultural sector earned only 13 percent of the national income—down from about 30 percent on the eve of World War II.^[85]

Agriculture (including pastoralism) was slipping from the center, but it was still some distance from the margins. For example, while it may have accounted for only 60 percent of the country's exports, this was still a substantial amount, especially when foreign exchange remained a severe problem. In addition, agriculture continued to be highly productive. In most advanced capitalist countries, the typical member of the agricultural work force produces less income than the typical factory worker; expressed differently, the proportion of the gross national product contributed by agriculture is less than the proportion of the work force engaged in that sector. But this was not the case in postwar New Zealand, where productivity per person in farming and run-holding has been higher than in the other sectors of the economy. Other advanced capitalist countries maintain agriculture for noneconomic reasons, but not New Zealand.^[86]

We come to a similar conclusion about the farmers' and runholders' position in politics. To be sure, they had lost some clout to the corporate elite and to certain other interest groups as well, especially the trade unions.^[87] But the agricultural sector was still a well-organized interest group in its own right, and its effectiveness in politics remained out of proportion to its numbers, in part because farmers were an influential group within the National party. What is more, a succession of governments continued to foster agricultural production, arguing that it was in the country's interest to keep this

part of the economy strong because of its importance in foreign exchange.* Among the incentives and benefits were subsidies for fertilizers and certain transport costs; the government also provided a system of farm advisers who offered free advice for increasing farm production, and it undertook such costly projects as the eradication of rabbits. A quasi-governmental system of marketing boards was maintained as well, which secured the landholders' earnings by ensuring a minimum price for farm commodities in years when market prices were low. Significantly, these subsidies were financed not from taxes, but by a levy imposed on agricultural goods during years when prices were favorable.^[88]

The farmer and run-holder were also moving into a somewhat less commanding and less visible spot in the larger hierarchy of social position. Early in the century landholders had occupied a special place in New Zealand, for much of the rest of the society served as an infrastructure to take care of their business needs. Moreover, the most eminent people of any region (as well as the most fashionable and genteel) were typically landholders. But after World War II the balance began to tip toward the urban centers, and particularly toward the people who ran the large corporations. Farming and runholding were still highly respectable occupations, of course. In South Downs in 1981, for example, the successful landholders enjoyed about the same social standing as doctors, dentists, accountants, and lawyers. Nor was it by any means assumed (as it often is in the United States) that because a man was from the country he was part bumpkin. Nevertheless, the occupation had lost some of its luster.

This shift correlated with a decline in the farmer's and run-holder's relative prosperity. Although the period after the war was very lucrative for the agricultural and pastoral sector, the landholders' incomes did not keep pace with those of urban people of about equal standing. A disparity became evident in the 1960s, and it grew significantly wider in the next decade.^[89]

The internal structure of the agricultural sector—that is, the relations among the strata—also changed in the postwar period, largely owing to the growing egalitarianism of New Zealand. For one thing, the affluent life-style of the earlier elite—a life-style characterized by such features as full-time servants and manicured grounds cared for by staffs of gardeners—had by now disappeared. Many of the mansions had been turned into schools or retirement homes, and even the most genteel landholders now probably did their own gardening on the weekends like everyone else. Yet even in 1981, as we shall see, traces of the old system were still in evidence. On the one hand, certain families were recognized as descendants of the old elite, and their surnames stood out from the rest. On the other, certain families continued to exhibit a more refined life-style, though this was now more subtle. Early in the century cultivation and polish were manifested in expensive ways, such as by elegant but tasteful furniture and magnificent gardens, whereas now less costly means were used, such as clothing styles and culinary and dining patterns. One conspicuous and expensive marker that remained was the boarding school education. Gradations of refinement had hardly disappeared, notwithstanding the growing emphasis on egalitarianism; nor were they unimportant.

The relationship between landholder and worker also changed during the postwar era. Oral history from South Downs suggests that it was considered somewhat risky to buy a farm or run immediately after the war, since agricultural prices had been so depressed in the preceding decades and no one could predict what they would be in the future. Nonetheless, land was inexpensive, and a significant number of men from nonlandholding families apparently took the leap. With a sizable government program in place to help returned servicemen onto the land, it seems likely that many who acquired farms under this scheme were upwardly mobile sons of nonlandholding, rural families.^[90]

A key factor in whether these new farmers and run-holders would succeed or not was the economic state of agriculture during the first few years after the war, for their level of debt was still high and a few years of depressed prices could easily finish them. As it happened, the postwar years were profitable, and so the late 1940s and early 1950s likely saw relatively high mobility as new landholders became established while established ones grew prosperous. This mobility probably began to slow in the 1950s, however, when the

price of land began to climb, making it more and more difficult to pay the mortgage from earnings. Indeed, land prices doubled during the 1950s and again in the 1960s, and they increased even faster in the 1970s.^[91] By 1981 very little upward mobility was possible, except perhaps in dairying, where a man could sometimes acquire ownership through share-milking.^[92] Rural working people now regarded themselves as almost completely shut out from the ranks of the landholders.

The pattern of mobility in the postwar era was much like that of the period from the late 1890s to the early 1920s: at first movement was fairly common, but a rise in land prices severely reduced people's ability to improve their lot, and eventually little if any upward movement was possible. Yet the relations between workers and landholders and the general shape of the social hierarchy were different in the two periods. One important distinction is that the scale of farm employment—or the ratio of hired workers to landholders—declined considerably. The owner of a moderately large farm between the late 1890s and early 1920s might have had three to five men working for him full time: at least one plowman, but probably two or three; perhaps a man to do general work around the farm; and a very young man to milk the cows that were kept for domestic purposes. He would also hire casual labor as needed. In addition, he employed from one to three women to work in the house—a cook certainly, and possibly a maid or two—and perhaps a gardener. In 1981, by contrast, the owner of the same farm needed no more than one man full time, because such technological developments as the tractor had reduced labor requirements. And instead of hiring servants, the farmer or his wife might hire a local woman to clean the house one afternoon a week. The 1980s farmer took on casual laborers occasionally (but much less often than his early-twentieth-century predecessor), and he tended to hire contract work for major, one-time jobs such as fence installation or the laying of drainage pipes. Contract workers differ from hired workers in that they are independent businessmen and are not subordinate to the farmer the same way as paid employees who are under the farmer's direct supervision.

Kurow, a district of sheep farms and runs in North Otago, illustrates this reduction in the scale of employment. In 1905, the Kurow landholders made up 18 percent of the adult males in the district, while farm workers constituted 50 percent.^[93] Farm workers, on the

one hand, continued to amount to about half the adult male population through the 1930s, but the figure dropped to 36 percent in 1950, 26 percent in 1965, and 20 percent in 1982. On the other hand, the proportion of landholders climbed to about 30 percent by 1920, remaining at about that level through 1982.^[94]

In 1920, too, about one-third of the landholders in Kurow employed regular help, whereas by 1982 this figure had dropped to about one-sixth.^[95] The rest of the farmers in both periods operated their properties mostly with family labor, employing casual help when needed—but again, more so in 1920 than in 1982. Whereas in the earlier period a crew of unskilled laborers might be hired occasionally for a week or two to cut gorse hedges or improve drainage, in the later period the equivalent work could be done more quickly and with less effort by contract firms or by the farmer himself using labor-saving equipment.

Social lines were more relaxed in the postwar era than they had been before as well (an issue I take up at length below). Perhaps the most obvious index of this change is that the practice of feeding farm workers apart from the family—either in the kitchen (leaving the family to eat in the dining room) or in a separate cookhouse—had nearly disappeared by the 1950s. The growing egalitarianism may have been related to a decline in the range of differences in the material standard of living, particularly between working people and landholders. The postwar welfare system, for one thing, reduced material deprivation among the unemployed, the ill, and the elderly. The labor shortage of the 1950s and 1960s was perhaps another factor, for it allowed working people to exert greater influence over work conditions and to resist patterns of deference and other expressions of social hierarchy.

The small rural township changed after the war as well, and also in association with the growing egalitarianism of the countryside. Formerly, the well-to-do farmers and run-holders had regarded the small town as a drab and common place, and they bypassed it both in their social lives and for business matters, looking instead to the larger regional cities like Christchurch, Timaru, Oamaru, and Dunedin. But all this altered after World War II, as the changing retirement patterns of landholders shows. Whereas in the past in Kurow, as in South Downs and presumably most of New Zealand, landholders usually moved to one of the regional cities when they retired, by the 1980s they were more likely to buy a house in the

small township near their farm and settle there.^[96] The small rural community had become a more respectable place for a middle-class person to live.

This change was apparent in another way after the war, in that an increasing number of small businesses and white-collar workers now came to be found in the rural township.^[97] The businesses may have proliferated especially during the affluent 1950s, whereas the increase in white-collar workers reflected the expansion of such state services as telephone and postal facilities and schools.

The Rural Hierarchy in 1981

At the time of my field research in 1981, rural New Zealand was dominated by the family farm, for the overwhelming majority of rural properties were family owned and operated. The elites of an earlier age—the “gentry”—no longer existed as a visible and self-conscious social stratum. Rather, landholders now were almost entirely middle-class in appearance and identity; all property-holders, even the run-holders, referred to themselves as “cockies.” The most notable social distinction in rural New Zealand—what I will later refer to as the main social reference point—was that between working people and landholders. This distinction was reinforced by an important principle: upward mobility from the one to the other was nearly impossible because of the high price of land. A corollary was that landholders were far wealthier than workers, if only by virtue of the capital value of their property; and as the price of land increased, so did the range of differences in wealth between the two categories. But despite the highly visible economic disparities, a strong pattern of egalitarianism prevailed in the rural districts and townships, for overt markers of social distinction were by and large avoided. One factor that helped to sustain this egalitarianism was that the farmers and run-holders hired relatively few workers as permanent employees. Instead, a large majority of the rural working class were sheep shearers, truck drivers, road workers, and the like, and not under the direct supervision or authority of the landholder.

Chapter Three
The Occupational System

By occupational structure or system I mean the conceptual scheme by which local people order themselves hierarchically according to the work they do. In this chapter and the next I present the hierarchy that exists in South Downs.* I am interested, however, in something other than the sheer rank order of occupations. First, I focus in this chapter on the “shape” of the local occupational system, or on the configuration that appears when the occupations in the district are viewed as a whole. Second, in chapter 4 I discuss the reasoning that underlies people's judgments when they rank occupations within the local hierarchy.

The Place of Farming in the Occupational System

When the local hierarchy is viewed as a whole an important characteristic emerges, which is that some of its parts are

more imposing than others. Like the features of a landscape, some occupational categories are more likely than others to engage a person's attention. The most prominent occupation of all in South Downs is farming, the economic mainstay of the district. Those who gain a livelihood from the land are seen by many as socially, economically, and politically dominant; as a result, the category of farmer serves as a reference point that people use to locate other occupations in the local system.

The social significance of farming was underscored by one landholder in South Downs who had moved to the district just a few years before my research. He and his family had been farming in another part of New Zealand, and in the mid 1970s they decided to buy a larger and better property. They found a suitable place in the district of South Downs, whereupon they sold the land they had occupied for the past fifteen years. For about eight months they were without a farm (their original place was now occupied by new owners, and the farm in South Downs was not yet vacant), so in the meantime they lived in the small township of the district they were leaving. Because housing there was scarce, they had to accept several short-term vacancies and moved three times. During this limbo period the social significance of farm ownership became clear to them. The farmer remarked:

While you own something and have got something it's very good—everybody's your friend. The day you haven't got anything, and you're shifting from house to house, is the day you find out who your friends are. [Question: So having land is important?] Yes. And the average person [i.e., member of a farm family] doesn't realize that, but it really brought it home to us. Until you're on both sides of the fence you never really know. Take Robert English [a respected farmer in the South Downs area]. He's regarded as a very good farmer and a good bloke in the community. If he sold that farm tomorrow and moved into South Downs, he would be nobody—he'd be a street number. While he's farming there he's an important part of the district.

The social significance of property-holding is reinforced by an important feature of farming life: it is very difficult for nonlandholders to assess where farmers stand relative to one another, in part because they lack the information they need to make these judgments. They do not attend sheep sales, for example, and so cannot see for themselves whether a person's livestock are healthy and well cared for, and they are not in everyday contact with truck drivers,

shearers, and others who periodically go to the man's farm and can report on its condition. Even if the nonfarmer does have the information needed to assess a particular farmer's standing, moreover, he or she would lack the requisite technical knowledge. For instance, the quality of a man's sheep or paddocks is not always easy for the uninitiated to spot, and the significance of an eye-witness account of events in the sheep pens or shearing shed may be lost on someone unaccustomed to the patterns that prevail there. The criteria for assessing a farmer's wealth may also be unclear to someone who is not in touch with current market conditions, the cost of labor, recent legislation on farm inheritance, and the like.

In interviews with nonfarmers I was occasionally struck by the contrast between their image of the local hierarchy of landholders and that of the farmers themselves. Not only do nonfarmers have a less clear sense of the relative placement of individual farm families than do farmers, but the opinions that nonfarmers state—for example, in identifying the wealthiest farmers in the district—are sometimes profoundly “wrong,” using the opinions of farmers as the standard.

Farmers tend to arrive at their opinions about one another's standing either by direct observation (by looking at people's farms while driving past, for example) or by assessing the reports of those who have reason to be on the property. That is, most farmers assess standing in large part by construing raw information. While nonfarmers may try to do so as well, they tend to “misread” the information they have. Equally significant, the opinions that most nonfarmers express about the standing of local landholders are arrived at chiefly by hearing the opinions of other farmers. Thus, whereas the farmers themselves read the signs by which landholders are sorted, most nonfarmers need to have the signs read for them.

This formulation perhaps oversimplifies the matter. In particular, the landholders do talk a good deal among themselves about other farmers, and so they formulate their opinions in part on the basis of information that is already cooked. But the point remains that farmers can enter the dialogue effectively either by providing new and salient information or by reanalyzing the given information; consequently, they are in a position to shape or change the popular image of any landholder in the district. Very few nonfarmers are able to do so.

What is more, whereas the farmer's reputation and standing as a

farmer is largely immune to the judgment and criticism of nonfarmers, the reverse is much less true. Consider the case of the builder or carpenter. Not only are his local clients qualified to express opinions about the work he does, but others are as well—they can assess whether or not he finishes the job in reasonable time, is industrious and hardworking, and exhibits high standards of craftsmanship. The nonlandholder may be excluded from the discourse that deals with the standing of farm families, but this does not make him any less vulnerable to the criticisms of landholding families when his performance is at issue.

Underlying this analysis of social assessment is a crucial point about the semiology of the social hierarchy. The process of assessing an individual's standing is interpretive, inasmuch as it requires that community members engage in a reading of meaningful signs. Furthermore, the meaning of these signs is not self-evident but is found by using an interpretive framework, the principles of which the “decoder” must grasp. It is therefore possible to speak of a “community of discourse” in referring to those who have a command of the framework and are able to read the signs. By and large, the farm families are part of this community, while nonfarmers are not.

Runs and Farms

Various types of farming—and therefore farmers—are found in South Downs: some properties are high-country runs, others are small, intensive sheep farms located in the valley bottoms, and still others are devoted primarily to such cash crops as wheat. This variability in farming is an important part of the system whereby farmers sort one another.

The principal distinction among farm types is between intensive and extensive operations, or between farms and runs. These terms can be confusing, because at a general level any property that is devoted to either agricultural production or livestock is referred to as a farm. A run-holder is a type of farmer, and in certain contexts he will refer to himself as such, but in normal usage the terms farm and farmer contrast with run and run-holder. In the narrow and more common sense, a farmer is someone who tills the soil; he periodically plows his paddocks in order to sow cultivated plants, in-

cluding exotic pasture grasses, winter feed for his animals (such as swedes), cash crops (such as wheat), or some combination. A runholder, in contrast, may have a few acres that he cultivates for winter feed for his sheep, but the vast majority of his property has never been touched by the plow.

Intensive farms are further differentiated on the basis of the kinds of crops or livestock raised. First, a few properties are devoted primarily to beef cattle. During the Vietnam War the price of beef was relatively high, and many farmers turned heavily to the production of cattle; when the price of beef later fell, however, the vast majority—though not all—switched almost completely back to sheep. Second, some farmers engage in cash cropping, though this too was more profitable and therefore more common in the recent past than it is today. Because the agricultural machinery and equipment needed to raise and harvest grain are expensive and the cost of labor is comparatively high, while the amount that can be raised per acre in the vicinity of South Downs is relatively small, only a few landholders continue in this line. Cropping tends to be more common nearer the coast, where soil and weather allow more substantial harvests per acre. Third, most intensive farms in South Downs are devoted chiefly to sheep (as anyone can see who stands on the surrounding hills and glances across the narrow valley), which in general have lower overhead costs than cropping and bring higher profits per acre than either cash crops or cattle. Generally, coarse-wool breeds of sheep (such as the Romney) are raised on sheep farms, and income derives equally from the sale of wool and meat. Because considerable effort is devoted to maintaining a healthy growth of exotic grasses and to growing winter feed, a farm of only 350 to 500 acres is enough to raise sufficient sheep to support a family, though farms of 700 to 900 acres are common. Most of the labor is provided by family members, additional help being hired only during certain times of the year for shearing, fence building, and the like. A few farmers need the help of one, and very rarely two, full-time men the year around.

Runs, by contrast, represent an extensive use of the land; they are widely variable in form and operation, but they tend to be organized in local thought by reference to what may be called the “ideal” or “pure” concept of the run. The “ideal” run is located in the high country. The topography may be very steep, rough mountains, undulating hills, or even flat plains, but the elevation is high enough—or the area is sufficiently far from the moderating influence of the

ocean—that winters are fairly harsh and the growing season is short. In addition, the soils tend to be rather shallow, so grass and other crops do not grow well. Because of the weather, topography, and soils, very little pasture development is undertaken on runs; with the costs of development outweighing the economic advantages, run country is allowed to remain in the native tussock for the most part. (This is the case at least with present technology and economic conditions; as time progresses, however, more and more runs will be converted into farms.) Since the sheep that do well on tussock and in rugged terrain are the fine-wool breeds, either merinos or crossbreds, the “ideal” run concentrates primarily on raising sheep for their wool, and fully 70 percent of the run's income derives from the sale of fleece.

The “pure” run is much larger than a farm, its size ranging from two or three thousand acres to over twenty thousand. A very large tract of land is needed to feed a mob of sufficient size to support the run-holder's family: whereas a down-country farm may carry four or five (or more) sheep per acre, in genuine run country several acres are needed to support a single animal. The higher and rougher the property, the larger it must be to feed enough sheep to support the household. But other factors contribute to the size of runs as well. For example, mountainous topography requires that a mixture of land-types be encompassed. Although the sheep may feed on the very high portions of the property during the warmer months, they have to be brought to lower ground for the winter, and consequently mountainous runs need a variety of contiguous blocks at various elevations, which may make for a very large holding. Indeed, some runs on rough country are so large, by necessity, that family labor alone is not enough to operate them. In the Glassford district, a number of runs have four full-time workers (including the owners). The larg est property there is owned jointly by three families, and it has eleven full-time workers (including the three male landholders themselves), one of whom is a hired cook.

A further characteristic of the “ideal” run is that it comprises Crown land held as leasehold (whereas farms generally are held as freehold). Technically, if the run-holder decides to sell, the new tenant purchases the improvements, not the land, although in practice the lease is so secure that a buyer pays virtually the freehold price.

The “ideal” run is located in a remote area. If it is sufficiently isolated, and if it is large enough that several families live on the

property, the run-holder may hire a teacher for the children. Alternatively, the children may be educated by state-run correspondence courses, augmented by traveling teachers, who regularly visit each participating household. Many run-holders' children also attend boarding schools.

Few runs conform fully to these criteria, and the variations themselves tend to fall into recognizable patterns. In particular, some of these properties are located in areas suitable for raising at least some sheep with coarse wool; thus, a greater proportion of the income from these properties derives from meat than is true of the “pure” run. Because such a property is generally more productive per acre than the “pure” run, it may be relatively small. Similarly, some runs are located in the hilly regions near a township and are hardly isolated; in these cases it is also likely that the land is held as freehold. Further, some properties consist in part of farmland and in part of run country; these landholders are considered farmers as much as they are run-holders.

In short, sheep runs are conceptually organized in terms of a rough continuum. At one end are those runs that exhibit all the “ideal” features, and at the other are those that combine the features of run-holding with those of farming. Runs at the latter end of the scale merge by degrees with the category of intensive sheep farms.

Local people typically distinguish one particular kind of run from the rest. This is the sheep station, which, although comparatively rare (only five or six properties in the entire county of South Downs qualify), is important in that it marks the top of the hierarchy of properties. One characteristic of a station is that it is very large: holdings of fifteen or twenty thousand acres are typical. Another is that the property is extensive enough and its labor needs great enough that the run-holder must employ several shepherds during all or at least part of the year. As I mentioned above, the largest property in the Glassford district has a full-time work force of eleven men, including the three co-owners. The large labor needs form the basis of an institution that people identify as essential for a property to qualify as a station—the cookhouse. That is, the hired men do not eat with the run-holder's family, but in a separate facility on the property. The cookhouse is also used to feed the additional workers who are called on to help out several times a year—musterers, who bring the sheep down to the lower elevations before winter sets in, for example, and the large crew of shearers in the spring.

The different kinds of operation that I have discussed here are

hierarchically ordered. All else being equal, a sheep run enjoys greater distinction than a farm, a “pure” run ranks higher than a run that does not share all the “ideal” features, and a station ranks highest of all. South Downs has no dairy farms, although dairying is very important in other parts of New Zealand. I have the impression that dairy farms also fit into this hierarchical order, falling below all the categories of farming that I have described here. A man who sells his dairy farm to become a sheep farmer takes a definite step up on the social ladder.

The Relative Standing of Farmers and Run-Holders

The relationship between runs and farms is an important feature of the local system of social classification, if only because the runs and run-holders enjoy greater distinction than farms and farmers. One farmer commented:

Run-holders tend to band together, even the ones from different areas …, and this holds all the way up and down South Island…. Even in Central Otago, where run-holders are separated from one another—there are small basins that are intensively farmed, with runs in behind. The run-holders there tend to stick together and to be [set] apart from the farmers.

Another said: “If you own a high-country run anywhere, whether it's in Marlborough or Southland, that sets you in a different group. You're farming in a different style, you're running vast numbers of sheep—or at least you have a vast area of land.” One run-holder originally owned a farm in the district of South Downs, but several years before my research he sold that property and purchased the run that his family now occupied. Both he and his wife had no doubt that the move had a significant effect on the way people regarded them:

Wife: When we moved here [to the run] from the farm I used to chuckle because some people felt a different attitude toward me…. We definitely improved our status by moving up here…. It's true, isn't it? Not in our eyes, but in the eyes of quite a few people we had jumped up in the world.

Husband: Yes, we had. We'd jumped up, just about got out of our perch.

The esteem that is associated with run-holding helps to explain the relations among the districts that make up the county of South Downs. Both South Downs proper (or the district of South Downs) and Midhurst are composed primarily of intensive sheep farms, with only a few runs located in the higher and rougher hills, and those chiefly qualified runs. By contrast, Glassford consists entirely of runs, many of which are of the “pure” variety and some of which are stations; consequently, it enjoys higher standing than the other two districts. In the words of one Glassford run-holder, his district is a “prestige address.”

The view that the down-country farmers have of Glassford is illustrated by a comment made by one South Downs farmer: “It's interesting. The Glassford run-holders have their little groups. The down-country farmers pass the time of day to them, but socializing is another matter…. They intermingle with each other. You say good day [to them], [but] you don't go and join them, so to say. [To] the big run-holders, we're the down-country peasants.” On another occasion I interviewed a husband and wife who farm in South Downs. The man was born and raised in Glassford, whereas the woman was from another part of New Zealand altogether.

Wife: The first time I went to the Glassford sale [an annual sheep sale held in the Glassford district] I was with Dennis [her husband], and everybody was thrilled to see Dennis because he was one of them, a run-holder's son. There was a definite distinction between [Dennis and] the other people [who were attending from outside Glassford]—[the Glassford run-holders had the reaction of] “What on earth are they doing here?” … Dennis was accepted, but the others weren't.

Husband: Up-country is certainly different from down-country….

Wife: A point of interest—Peter Crawley [a well-regarded South Downs farmer who is among the local elite] doesn't get on with the up-country people. His father was a farmer here, and they've always been here, but he wasn't a run-holder. Dennis is accepted in a way, but Peter isn't, and he's got quite a chip on his shoulder [over that].

Question: Do the farmers down here know the up-country farmers?

Husband: There's no reason they should. They're [in] two different worlds. They don't have anything in common.

On yet another occasion I interviewed a farmer from the Midhurst district, who remarked:

The run-holders in Glassford all have a similar life-style. They've had no other way of schooling except prep school and boarding school. The children get to know one another at boarding school and don't know the others [i.e., the other children from their home district]. They're probably more moneyed [than down-country farmers] and sent their children [to private boarding schools]. They really don't associate with the likes of us and South Downs people who have only gone to ordinary schools.

The relations between the down-country and up-country districts can also be observed in interpersonal relations. Once my wife and I attended a dinner at the hotel in the small Glassford township, an event hosted by the run-holders of the district. We were guests of the couple quoted above who had recently moved from a down-country farm in South Downs to a qualified run on the edge of the Glassford district, and who had nearly “jumped off their perch” in doing so. The woman was very uncomfortable at the event, and at one point in the evening she turned to my wife and said, “Unlike South Downs you'll note that social position is very important here. I'm not a part of it at all.”

The significance of run-holding and farming in determining the relative standing of these districts reflects the principle mentioned earlier that the category of landholder is a major reference point in the system of social classification. Numerous other factors could be used to order the relations among these districts. For example, the fact that South Downs is more heavily populated than the Glassford district, it contains a larger township with a greater range of businesses, and the headquarters of the county council is situated there would seem sufficient to rank South Downs higher than Glassford. But in reality the principle of farm type or land use is decisive, and places Glassford at the top.

Another basis for the eminence of the Glassford district is that it is associated in people's minds with the large estates and estateholders of the past. Although the runs in the high country have all been subdivided, what remains of the original properties—the portions with the original homes, shearing sheds, and sheep yards—still bears the names given them in the nineteenth century. Virtually every adult who has lived more than a few years in the county (not to mention many who live elsewhere) recognizes the names of these holdings, even though they have never set foot on them. These properties are also memorialized in a number of published histories of the region. On one occasion I visited a working man who is em-

ployed in the South Downs township but who once worked in Glassford killing rabbits. He was clearly very proud of his former connection with the up-country runs, and when he began talking about that period of his life he pulled from the shelf his personal copy of a regional history that contains an account of the early estates. As he thumbed through the book he mentioned in turn each of the properties he had worked on.

The down-country farms do not enjoy the same name recognition as the properties in Glassford, even though they too are often named. In part this anonymity is due to their large numbers, but more important is the fact that they were formed by the breakup of the large estates: they are associated in popular thought not with the well-to-do of an earlier age, but with the class of small landholders who came into their own in the twentieth century. The contrast between the Glassford district on the one hand and Midhurst and South Downs on the other, or between up-country and down-country, echoes the contrast between the large landholders and the cockatoos.

Working People.

Nearly as important as the landholders in defining the social and economic landscape of South Downs is the category of working people. This group constitutes a second comparatively fixed point in the occupational system. What is more, the two categories—landholder and worker—are associated in people's minds. If a landholder were asked to name the first occupation that occurred to him other than farmer, the response of “worker” or “working man” would be almost automatic.

On the surface, two criteria distinguish this pair of categories. First, the worker earns wages, whereas the farmer's income consists of profits from the land; second, the worker is under the authority of an employer, whereas the farmer is his own boss. In the words of one person, the distinction is essentially between “the employers and the employed.”

Several occupations are particularly representative of the worker category in South Downs—these are the ones a local person names immediately if asked to give examples. First are farm employees, who are referred to in New Zealand by their marital status: that is, a

farmer speaks of his single man or married couple. (The second term is also used as a verb, in that a working man might say that he is “married coupling.”) A single man is usually young, and often (though not always) he is the son of a farmer whose property is too small to require additional labor. The young man lives on the property, either in his employer's house or in a separate structure very close by, and he eats meals with the family. Both meals and lodging go with the job, and the single man is thought to be partly incorporated into the farmer's household. A married couple typically does not eat with the farm family, and normally they have a family life completely separate from their employer's; yet they are provided free lodging—a separate house on the farm—as well as mutton and firewood that come from the property. The wife of a married couple may also have economic obligations on the farm—for example, she may cook for the shearers during the short period each year when they are hired on.

Single men and married couples have become rare in the district of South Downs, in part because farmers try to avoid the expense of workers' wages. Also, technological developments have reduced farmers' permanent labor needs, as we have seen. At the same time, the farm family seems to have grown increasingly disinclined to tolerate the intrusion of a single man into its privacy; a number of farmers commented that their wives had balked at the idea of cooking for and looking after any more young workers.

If single men and married couples are the foremost examples of working people, several others follow almost immediately—including truck drivers, county council staff, and postal and telephone workers.

South Downs has three cartage firms (with three, six, and seven drivers, respectively), and since farmers and run-holders hire trucks several times a year to haul sheep, wool, and the like, the drivers are well known among the landholders. The drivers have the opportunity to observe a wide variety of farms firsthand; they are therefore a good source of information about the condition of farms and about events in the district. Two of the cartage firms also operate a daily freight service to the subprovincial city nearby: if a business in South Downs receives a special order—for fencing materials, say—the shop assistant or manager places the order by phone, and the materials are brought out on the return run that afternoon. This activity, too, increases the visibility of both cartage firms and drivers within the district.

The staff of the county council is divided into inside and outside contingents, consisting of six and twenty-five people, respectively. The outside staff includes a town gang, who do such odd jobs as fixing water pipes, mowing public lawns, and digging graves; a road gang that maintains county roads, most of which are shingled and periodically need regrading and reshingling; and a maintenance crew made up of several mechanics, tradesmen, and a plumber. Although a few of the outside jobs are skilled, the majority are not.

The postal and telephone services in New Zealand (the P&T) are part of a single governmental agency and share the same facilities. Like the council staff, the P&T employees in South Downs are divided into inside and outside contingents. The inside staff of ten was substantially larger before 1979, when the telephone system became fully automated; before then connections had to be made manually through the telephone exchange in the township, by one of nine switchboard operators. The outside staff includes about six telephone linemen. Postal delivery is carried out by a private contractor.

In general, postal and telephone workers are less visible in the community than council workers or truck drivers, partly because they are not as easily seen when they are on the job and partly because people do not fully grasp what they do. The implication is that P&T workers are more loosely bound to the occupational system of the district, or they are thought to be somewhat peripheral. These workers also have a less enviable reputation in the district. As one person remarked, “If the job takes one man, they'll send four to do it. Inefficient, typical government organization. It really annoys us…. A stigma gets attached to P&T workers…. Here the council workers have a reputation for doing a bit more work.”

A number of other wage earners are included among working people as well, such as house painters, mechanics, shop clerks, shearers, butcher's apprentices, the employees of fencing contractors and construction firms, and so on.

The category of worker is hierarchically organized internally, although there is no clear consensus over the precise ranking of jobs. One thing people do agree about (yet another reference point in the occupational system) is that skilled work enjoys higher standing than unskilled labor. The job of the council worker who collects garbage, say, ranks lower than that of shearer or carpenter.

The case of shearing is illustrative. My initial impression was that

shearers rank fairly low in the hierarchy, in part because it is a strenuous, hot, and dirty job, and in part because the shearers I observed appeared to be rather coarse. Yet I was mistaken, and the reason people gave in correcting me is that shearing requires considerable skill. In an interview with a farmer's wife I discovered that my error was not unique. She was raised in a city, and before moving to South Downs, she said, she believed that shearers were not very respectable people. But her mind was changed when she became involved in farming and learned that “a good shearer is respected for his ability.” The reason for our mistake is that we both focused on the wrong features in assessing social standing: rather than the physical conditions of the job or the workers' behavior, what really counts is the element of skill.

Egalitarianism and Hierarchy

I have mentioned that New Zealand's egalitarian ethos underwent a resurgence after World War II, and this development was strongly felt in South Downs. The character of local egalitarianism is summarized by the popular aphorism that “people in the district treat everyone the same”—which implies that this pattern is not universal in New Zealand, that some districts are more hierarchical. And in fact, at one time South Downs itself was less egalitarian. In a later chapter I will show how this change came about and explore its characteristics, but in the present context I need to make clear that the egalitarian emphasis in the community does not preclude the manifestation of hierarchy.

One working man commented: “I go to the same places as those people [i.e., farmers], and I don't think they look down upon me. I don't look up to them. But there's always that knowledge that I work for someone else and they are their own boss.” Similarly, a school-teacher reported to me a conversation he had with the mother of one of his students. The teacher commented to the woman that people in South Downs had been very friendly to him and his family since they had arrived, whereupon she remarked, “Yes, but if we had [just] come to South Downs—my husband is a truck driver—we wouldn't have got that treatment.”

The hierarchical relation between workers and landholders is

overtly expressed in the form of hotel patronage. South Downs has two hotels, the top and bottom pubs, and each has both a public bar, which tends to be male-dominated and noisy, and a lounge bar, which is considered an appropriate place for couples. The bottom pub—and in particular the public bar at the bottom pub—is associated with working people; this is where truck drivers, council workers, and other wage earners are likely to go for a beer after work. By contrast, farmers generally go to the top pub, especially on Friday evenings. One farmer revealed to me how he himself had become conscious of this pattern. “I had the shearers here shearing in the wool shed,” he said, “and they were talking the usual shearing gossip about hotels and who was drinking last night, who was tight, who had a fight, all that sort of pub talk.” At this point, according to the farmer, the shearer made a comment about the top pub, whereupon the farmer said to me, as an aside: “I drink there, basically because if I go there perhaps I'll see somebody, a farmer or somebody I can talk to, my friends. You go around to the other bar and all the truck drivers are huddled together talking trucks and the shearers are talking shearing.” The shearer then made a comment about “the elite bar around the corner,” and the farmer himself joined the conversation, saying, “The elite bar? Which bar?” According to the farmer, “He [the shearer] said, ‘Oh, the cockies’ bar. Where the farmers and everyone else drinks. That's the elite bar, that one.' It suddenly crossed my mind [that] I drink there. I never knew it was the elite bar. So immediately I realized there is this class distinction.” The shearer's comment about the “elite bar,” expressed in the egalitarian milieu of South Downs, was meant as a rebuke, a fact that the farmer surely understood.

The social hierarchy is viewed with resentment by working people. When seen from the landholders' perspective, by contrast, the class distinction marks an important moral divide, for the landholders tend to assume that, as a category, they themselves display personal qualities of a higher order than working people—that landholding families are more competent in business, for example, and that they are more ambitious, conscientious, and industrious. A farmer's wife commented: “I always felt that someone who works for council or drives a truck doesn't have much incentive [i.e., ambition]. They're content to bring in a wage and support a family and probably not get any further.”

It is also assumed that working people drink more often and more heavily than farmers. One person described the bottom pub—the workers' pub—as the one that attracts “all the noise and yahoos,” a comment that betrays a definite moral judgment. In another conversation with a farmer I mentioned that it seemed to me that some farm workers are on the same level as the store clerk. He replied:

That's quite right, and they actually mix together. You go into the pub on Tuesday night, any night, [and] that is the class of people that are there. Ninety percent of the time. They've got no ambition to do anything more than go to work at eight on Monday morning, knock off at quarter to five on Friday night, and go to the pub every night before they go home. And they wonder why they've got no money and can't do anything. It's the way they're brought up or their environment or something. It's as important [for them] to go to the pub every night before tea [dinner] and have a beer as it is to buy a loaf of bread.

It is unclear whether most farmers are as emphatic as this one about the differences in moral character between landholders and working people, and in fact this man himself expressed more moderate views on other occasions. Still, his comment illustrates the deep-seated and widespread assumptions among landholders about the contrast between themselves and workers.

Wealth is another important aspect of the hierarchical relationship between farm families and working people. The latter tend to believe that farm families enjoy substantially greater wealth than the typical New Zealand household, an assumption that the farmer vehemently disputes.

It is difficult to compare the incomes of farmers and wage earners. One reason is that certain living expenses have to be calculated differently for farmers. For example, the farm family eats its own mutton, cuts its own firewood, and may even keep a milk cow. Housing comes with the farm, and if the house needs remodeling the farmer may simply cut down some of the trees on the property and have them sawn into lumber at a local sawmill. A second reason is that the farm household enjoys significant tax advantages. Both the house and automobile may be depreciated for income tax purposes, and a portion of the gasoline used may be deducted. It is also possible to write off at least part of a family holiday as a business expense if the farmer buys, say, a ram on the trip. In one case, the owner of a large station bought an airplane and deducted flying lessons as a farm

expense. A third reason is that the farmer may be eligible for credit that a worker could not hope to receive. If the truck driver needs a new car but cannot afford one, he will do without, whereas the landholder may borrow against the farm to make the purchase.

Nevertheless, these advantages have decided limitations. For example, the sheep that the family eats do not bring in an income; similarly, slaughtering and butchering take time if the farmer himself does the job, and they cost money if done by the butcher in the township. Firewood takes time to cut. And although the farmhouse is free, it is likely to be old and to need repair; it then takes time and money to fell the trees and have them milled into lumber. As for the tax write-offs, they involve genuine business expenses in large part; for example, the farmer relies on his automobile to accomplish his work. While income-tax cheating may occur, it is surely not on a very large scale. In any case, nonfarmers may have unrealistic ideas about the tax advantages that farmers enjoy: one farm worker I spoke to believed that his employer wrote off the liquor bill as sheep drench and claimed the family's clothing as fencing supplies. Finally, even though the farmer has greater opportunities than the wage earner to acquire credit, the loan still has to be repaid.

To be sure, a wage earner who makes, say, $NZ15,000 a year is not as well off as a landholder with a similar net income (before taxes) from the farm, although it is difficult to say how much of an advantage the farmer enjoys. When I put this question to the local farm advisor, he estimated that a farm income of $NZ15,000 a year is roughly equivalent to a salary of $NZ20,000. In other words, a farmer need bring in only three-quarters of what a wage earner makes to enjoy the same standard of living.

Still another complicating factor in comparing farmers' and wage earners' incomes is that farm earnings vary widely from year to year, depending on farm prices, production costs, and the vagaries of the weather. Consequently, a farm may produce a net income of $NZ15,000 one year but only $NZ7,000 the next. Several bad years can virtually ruin the farmer, whereas several good ones can make him and his family the envy of the wage earner.

A married couple on a farm is paid about $NZ10,000 or $NZ12,000 a year, and a tractor driver working for the county council makes about $NZ10,000 or $NZ11,000 a year, or as much as $NZ13,000 if he works a good deal of overtime. High school teach-

ers are near the upper end of the salary scale in the district, earning up to $NZ18,000 per annum.

The highest income in the district is that of a station-holder in the Glassford district who makes somewhat more than $NZ30,000 a year (net, before taxes); his nearest rival, another station-holder, normally makes about $NZ15,000 to $NZ20,000 a year. Yet both of these cases are unusual. In the district of South Downs, the farmers with the highest earnings bring in about $NZ15,000 or $NZ16,000 a year, but most make no more than $NZ7,000 or $NZ8,000. When we adjust for the tax and other income advantages that the farmer enjoys, we can see that many landholders—probably a majority—do not earn significantly more than the working people in the district. True, the high earners are all landholders, but property in no way ensures an annual income greater than that of many workers.

As seen by the wage earners, the economic cleavage between them and landholders is substantial, for even if the farmer's dollar income is not much greater than the worker's, the tax breaks and other benefits give a decisive economic advantage to farm families. Besides, the landholder owns property, equipment, and livestock that are worth far more than most working people will ever have. By contrast, the landholders contend that on purely material grounds wage earners are typically just as well off, or nearly so, as most landholders. Many working people drive automobiles that are as expensive as the average farmer's, for example, and most live in housing that is equally as good. Moreover, while the landholding family may own considerable capital assets, unless they sell their property outright and leave farming altogether, the capital value of the farm means nothing. In addition, landholders feel that they ought to earn more because they face financial risks and management problems that the worker does not; stated in the reverse, the wage earner enjoys greater security and fewer headaches.

A conversation I had with three farmers illustrates the landholders' perspective on these matters. I commented that the evidence seems to show a widening of the gap between worker and farmer in New Zealand, and this provoked a strong and heated response from all three. They contended that in the 1950s (a boom period for New Zealand farming) the economic gap between worker and farmer was marked and that some workers then were genuinely poor. For ex-

ample, whereas the farmer usually drove a car, the worker often could afford only a bicycle. But, they continued, today there is no significant difference between worker and farmer—the worker has a car that is just as good as the farmer's, and he has as much if not more money in his pocket. I mentioned that the farmer does own property, after all, which is worth a good deal of money. They responded that this wealth exists only on paper, and if the landholder were to sell the property, he and his family would no longer have a place to farm.

I find this reaction perplexing. Whether or not landholders truly believe that they are not much better off than workers, why do they argue the case with such vehemence? They surely have something at stake in this issue, and I suggest two motivations in particular. The first is political. I mentioned earlier that New Zealand farmers have been granted numerous concessions by Parliament because the country depends so heavily on the foreign exchange generated by agricultural exports. The landholders' fervent denial that they are significantly better off may therefore reflect a certain defensiveness, or an attempt to justify the financial incentives that have been granted them.

The second possible motivation comes closer to the interests of this study. The farmers may be reacting to a dissonance they feel concerning the material symbols by which the social and economic hierarchy is expressed. In the 1950s, wealth was a clear symbolic marker of social hierarchy, and from the farmers' perspective appropriately so: in their view, being a farmer requires qualities of a higher order than are normally found among workers, including sound business judgment and a capacity for hard work. Thus, the opinion that the farmer's occupation is superior to the worker's is, in the landholders' view, not a matter of arbitrary convention, for the qualities required in the two types of livelihood differ on objective grounds. And while the landholders do not wish poverty on those below them, the disparities in wealth between farmer and worker in the 1950s were an appropriate expression of what farmers take to be the objective characteristics of their different occupations. By contrast (according to the farmer's cultural theory of the social hierarchy), today a state of dissonance exists. The farmer's job is still more demanding and risky, but the signs by which hierarchy is expressed—such as automobile ownership and the quality of housing—no longer mark the difference among occupations.

Wealth, then, in this context, is both a material reward that is

desirable in itself and a marker of social position that is desirable for its symbolic value.

Business Owners, Salaried Employees, and Professionals

The occupations that I turn to now are far more heterogeneous and difficult to summarize than the preceding ones. They do not fall into a clear or systematic framework, but include a wide range of differences in social standing; they are united simply in that they constitute a residual category not subsumed by the previous categories. These occupations can be divided into three very rough classes: the owners of local businesses; individuals such as store managers who work for others but whose standing is above the level of workers; and professional people, such as schoolteachers and the doctor. The concept of business owner is one that the people themselves employ, but the other two, I think, are not, or at least not in a significant way.

While the following occupations are too varied to be organized easily relative to one another, they can be ordered in relation to the categories I have already considered. The standings of greengrocers and schoolteachers, say, can be located within a larger conceptual system by reference to the categories of working people and landholders.

First I consider business owners, a category that the local people themselves use and within which positions can be organized according to fairly distinct criteria. At the bottom of the scale are several business owners whose standing is hardly distinguishable from that of skilled workers. These people began their careers by working for someone else, and the businesses they acquired had fairly small startup costs. Three examples are illustrative. First is the owner of a combination garage and filling station. He worked as an apprentice mechanic in a local garage for several years, whereupon he took a position with a cartage firm as a truck driver and mechanic. Eventually a small garage became vacant in the township, and he was able to raise enough money to purchase the business. He has no employees. The second example is the greengrocer, who worked for a period organizing shearing gangs and serving as liaison between

shearers and landholders, and then began hawking vegetables from the back of a truck in a nearby district. Recently he acquired the vegetable shop in the South Downs township, which he and his wife run together. Third are a former shearer and his wife who acquired the fish-and-chips store in the township; they, too, operate the business on their own.

Three or four local businesses fall at the upper end of the scale, the owners of which clearly rank among the farmers in local standing. These firms were begun not by the present proprietors but by their fathers, and in each case the businesses were established in time to enjoy the commercial boom of the 1950s, when they flourished and expanded. One of these concerns is Wood's Engineering, which manufactures heavy steel for large construction jobs such as bridges and metal-framed buildings. A second is Bowman's Motors, which currently repairs automobiles, trucks, and farm implements. At one time the firm also had a retail store that sold radios, television sets, and electric appliances, and in its heyday it had an engineering division (or machine shop) and a woodworking section as well. The engineering firm hires several full-time workers, both skilled and unskilled; Bowman's employs several full-time mechanics and a small office staff. In both cases the owners work chiefly in the office and engage in very little if any manual labor on the shop floor.

The top and bottom of the hierarchy of business owners have several distinguishing features. First, the capital assets of those at the bottom are within the reach of most skilled working people; this is not true at the other end of the scale. Second, those at the bottom engage in the same jobs or tasks as working people (the owner of the one-man garage, for example, spends most of his time repairing people's cars and filling their gasoline tanks); those at the top, by contrast, spend most of their time in the office and engage chiefly in managerial duties. Third, those at the bottom employ little if any labor, whereas those at the top have a number of full-time employees.

A wide variety of other small businesses are situated in the district of South Downs, and these can be placed within this conceptual order as well. Among them are the butchers (two brothers who own both the butcher shop and abattoir), the milk vendor, and the owner of a magazine, stationery, and gift store. There are also two motels that are owner-operated, seven construction firms, a spray contracting business (for eliminating weeds and insect pests), and two twoman lumber mills, among others.

A second set of occupations consists of salary earners, who, although they are employees, rank above working people and are the social equals of at least some landholders. Among them are two fatlamb buyers (they buy lambs from farmers for slaughter at the freezing works in Jackson, the subprovincial city nearby), the managerial staffs of both the county council and the postal and telephone service, and the key employees of the stock firms.

Consider this last group. The stock firms (or stock and station agencies) play a major role in the economic life of every rural community in New Zealand, with one of their most visible functions being to provide retail outlets in the rural townships. The size of the retail stores and the range of goods they carry vary from town to town, but in general the stock agencies sell most of the groceries, clothing, and general merchandise that are purchased locally. Four stock firms have retail facilities in South Downs; the largest sells groceries, clothes, hardware, and farm supplies, whereas the smallest stocks only a small selection of clothes and hardware. The firms' merchandise representatives also travel periodically to the farms and runs of the area to take orders for farm supplies. And the stock agents fulfill the literal meaning of their title, serving as the farmers' agents in selling sheep, wool, and other produce. The farmer or run-holder, in other words, rather than selling his wool to wool buyers directly, has it carted to the nearest railway town, where his stock firm keeps a large storage facility. Here international buyers inspect the wool and offer their bids. The stock firm may also act as the farmer's agent in buying and selling farms and runs.

The connecting link among all these functions of the stock agency is its role in financing. A farmer may need fertilizer and fencing supplies, for example, but until he sells his lambs and wool he may be unable to afford them. Consequently, he may strike an agreement with his stock firm whereby they provide the fertilizer and fencing, which they put on account, and he agrees to use them as his agent in selling his sheep and wool. When the latter have been sold, the stock firm deducts the cost of the supplies from the farmer's check. Clothing, groceries, and other merchandise may similarly be purchased on account. In some cases the stock agency carries the landholder for several years until his farm earnings overtake his indebtedness. Although recently the retail stores have sought to avoid charge accounts for everyday items like clothes and groceries, at one time almost everything was put on account. One farmer remarked

that until a few years ago “you bought things and [simply] signed at the bottom. Now it's a cash proposition, and you can't charge things up, although the girls will say, ‘Oh, that's all right, I'll put it on the slate until the end of the week.’ It's quite a performance taking money. We didn't use money, virtually.”

Of the four stock firms in South Downs, the largest has eight employees. Most of these workers are shop assistants, but two people are key: the manager and stock agent. Only one other stock firm in South Downs is large enough to have a manager; the smallest, in contrast, has one man running the store, one merchandise representative who visits local farms, and two stock agents.

The shop assistants are classified as working people, whereas the managers and stock agents are equivalent in standing to middleranking farmers. The manager's importance is enhanced by his supervisory role over the shop assistants, and he also plays a significant role in decisions on whether to extend financing to landholders. The stock agent, too, plays a critical role in these financial decisions. His job is to keep in close touch with all of his client farmers. If a landholder wants to purchase farm supplies on credit from the firm, the stock agent personally assesses the financial condition of the property and is highly instrumental in approving the request. One farmer remarked:

He [the stock agent] would rate as a very influential man in farming circles. Say if you wanted an extra couple of thousand dollars for something on the farm—say, a new wool press—and you haven't got the cash. You need the seasonal finance from the stock and station agency. You'd go see him. He'd come out and look over your farm and say, yes, you can go purchase that. If your account is fairly high, your farm run down, he would say no. The stock and station agents would be very influential in farming circles.

Another farmer commented:

The stock agents … have got to be well liked. And a friendly person. And they get to know everybody. They know where everybody lives, who are the good farmers and who are the bad farmers. And not just their own clients. They see the other farmers' sheep at sales and know them all. They've got to be on good speaking terms with the farmer…. [I commented that this is also a responsible job.] Responsible and—a fair bit of trust, in fact a lot of trust. They learn quite a lot about a farmer which they don't divulge to other people. If they're any good they'll know the farmer's financial setup, how much credit he has, the whole lot.

The professions constitute the third important set of occupations, and what they have in common is university training. Three of these occupations—doctor, veterinarian, and headmaster—are equivalent in standing to landholders near the top of the hierarchy: a few farm families enjoy higher standing, but not many. By contrast, the teachers and the Anglican vicar rank roughly on par with the middle-level landholders. The chemist (or pharmacist) is the one professional person in South Downs who ranks below the landholders, and indeed he tends to be conceived as not a professional so much as a small business owner. As one schoolteacher commented: “The chemist is perhaps thought of more as a shopkeeper. When you go to the chemist you're virtually getting something the doctor told you to get.” It is significant that because South Downs is so small, the chemist's business is not very lucrative; consequently, he is conceived as a small shopkeeper.

The headmaster and schoolteachers enjoy higher standing in South Downs than I expected in light of my earlier study in California, where all of the school staff were placed roughly on the same level as experienced, dependable, and skilled farmhands, or at about the top of the hierarchy of working people. The difference between the two cases is related to the fact that the people in South Downs value a university education more highly. In particular, they associate a university education with boarding schools: university students are generally considered to be drawn largely from the “class” of people who receive a private education. As a result, schoolteachers are associated with refinement, a concept that I discuss in chapters 7 and 8.

Another important consideration regarding the teachers' and headmaster's position is that they are thought to be quite autonomous in their work—and indeed, the New Zealand and California communities are strikingly different in this respect. In New Zealand, the schoolteacher and headmaster are under the authority of a governing board that covers a wide geographical area (no one from South Downs sits on the regional board, which meets in Christchurch). The board appoints the headmaster, hires and fires the teachers, promotes them, transfers them from school to school, and so on. Each school also has an elected school committee made up of local people, but such committees have very little authority over the teaching staff or headmaster, focusing instead on such matters as maintenance of school facilities. By contrast, the local school

board in the California community has considerable authority over both the teachers and principal. The school board is elected by ballot from among the families living within the local school district; at the time of my study, all of the board members were local farmers. While their actions are limited by state law, these individuals have the authority to hire and fire both the principal and teachers, to promote them, set their pay, and generally to dictate working conditions. In the California community the equation of teachers and principal with skilled workers corresponded with their subservient relationship to the school board; by contrast, in the New Zealand case the relatively higher ranking of teachers and headmaster is clearly related to their virtual independence from local authority.^[1]

No-Hopers

A final, relatively fixed point in the system of occupational standing establishes the very bottom of the hierarchy. The people of this category are usually referred to as the unemployed, the no-hopers, the dodgers, or those on the dole. Few people in South Downs fall into this category, and those who do tend to be socially invisible: typically they live in the district but a short time, they develop few social ties within it, and the contexts in which others in the community interact with them are limited.

This category comprises several types of people. First are solo mothers—single women with children. These women live in government-owned houses in the township of South Downs and came to the district specifically because state housing is available. They survive on government assistance. Second are unmarried men—or at least men living alone—who live in part on government assistance and in part on what they earn from irregular and uncertain employment. Third are heterosexual couples who combine wages with government assistance. The second and third categories are perhaps better described as underemployed than unemployed; they tend to rent unused married couples' houses, which are easily available since so many farmers no longer hire permanent help.

Local people who are not themselves no-hopers see a clear break between proper working people and individuals in this lowest social

stratum. “There is a fair gap [in the hierarchy of occupations] between the ones on the dole and council workers,” one skilled working man remarked. A key factor establishing this gap is that, from the perspective of “respectable” local people, the no-hopers are disreputable. As one relatively high-standing but sympathetic person commented:

They live quite a different life-style from what people are used to in South Downs. Some of these people have taken de facto relationships [with members of the opposite sex]. I would say a lot of these relationships result in more children. They're good for the hotel trade in South Downs—they're fond of their drink. And there is suspicion that they have drugs. There is suspicion that a lot of marijuana is grown in South Downs, and that even harder drugs are being used.

Another person (a farmer) described one no-hoper whom he knew:

He came here at Christmastime as a painter and paperhanger. He couldn't get any work—well, he got a job or two and got the sack. He was on the dole for a long time…. They can't organize money…. There is a class of people that can't get above it. And they generate more [by having children]…. Generally those people don't dress up. You can pick them out a mile away, you can tell them by their dress and attitudes. Their children are grubby.

Households and Gender

When the occupations in this district are viewed collectively, they coalesce into a pattern. Yet not simply jobs are so ordered in this pattern, but families as well. To properly grasp the position of any person within the community, then, it is necessary (among other things) to plot his or her household within the local occupational structure.

This is a strongly gendered system, for, according to the local ideal, a household's position in the order depends on the occupation of the household head, who in theory is a man. Events sometimes contradict the ideal—a number of women have jobs, and a few are household heads themselves; yet the system is predicated on the assumption that females are connected to the larger structure through their husbands or fathers. It is a masculine scaffolding, even if women occupy some of the spaces.

Chapter Four
The Conceptual Basis of Occupational Standing

The shape of the local occupational system in South Downs is a product of people's tendency to value, defer to, or respect certain attributes; consequently, a key to understanding the system lies in the complex of evaluative standards by which certain occupations are elevated relative to others. I cannot identify all of the standards that give the system its shape, but I can suggest some of the most comprehensive and important ones—the ones that apply not to a limited range of occupations but to the collective whole and that provide the overall structure.

A Comparison of Communities

It will be useful to start by comparing the occupational system of South Downs with that of the California community I studied earlier. This is difficult to do, however, in part because when I did the research in California I did not anticipate this line of inquiry and did not pursue some of the issues that would have facilitated the task. Moreover, the two localities are not entirely comparable; in particular, the California community was significantly smaller, so it had fewer kinds of jobs. As an index, the town proper (that is, excluding the surrounding farm- and rangeland) contained fewer than 100 houses, whereas the township of South Downs has over

250. Similarly, the California town had a much smaller commercial center; it had no cartage or building firms at all, for example, and the two grocery stores, one cafe, and three service stations were the only retail outlets in the community.

Yet one similarity between the two communities is clear, and that is the importance of the landholders. In the California community, the role of farmers and ranchers was signified in people's description of the district by a pattern that divided between the “haves” and the “have-nots.”^[1] The “haves,” as one might guess, were the propertyowners. Thus, the landholders constitute a major reference point in the occupational systems of both localities.

Nonetheless, the place the landholders occupied in the two communities was quite different. We have seen that in South Downs members of a variety of occupations rank as high in the occupational system as the landholders: these include the owners of several firms in the township (Bowman's Motors, for instance), stock agents, highly respected farm managers, and schoolteachers. By contrast, in the California community, to refer to the “haves” was to refer exclusively to the landholders; no one else living in the district was included within that category or ranked as high as those who were. In brief, the stratum occupied by landholders was far more exclusive in California.

I can only speculate about the reasons for this difference, but two explanations in particular come to mind. First, the distribution of wealth was different in the two localities: unlike in South Downs, the California landholders were economically set apart. In the California town, for example, no business was as substantial or prosperous as, say, Bowman's Motors in South Downs; it was therefore simply not possible for local business owners there to measure up to the property-holders in wealth. Instead the local farmers and ranchers in the California case found their social equals among business people in the nearest large town, which had a more substantial commercial section than their own community. Landholding also represented a significantly greater economic investment in the California community (in any case, the farms were worth relatively more), which meant that not only the economic gap between landholders and other community members, but also the overall range of wealth, from top to bottom, was substantially greater there than in South Downs.

The different economic structures of the two districts, then, may

help to explain the different shapes of the occupational hierarchies. But are they sufficient? It is plausible that even if the distribution of wealth had been identical in the two communities, the division between the “haves” and “have-nots” would still have been more pronounced in the California locality.

This leads to the second possible explanation for the greater exclusiveness of the California landholding stratum, in that wealth seems to have been weighted differently in the two communities. In the California case, wealth was the criterion that, above all others, determined where an occupation stood in the hierarchy. Thus, because landholders were the wealthiest members of the California community, they occupied a position distinctly above all others. By contrast, in South Downs wealth is one of at least three criteria that define the occupational hierarchy; consequently, some occupations that fall distinctly below landholding by the criterion of wealth nevertheless rank just as high in the occupational system overall, because of these other criteria.

The two criteria that underlie the system in South Downs in addition to wealth are occupational importance and asymmetry. I begin with the criterion of wealth.

The Criterion of Wealth

Certainly the factor of wealth is very important in South Downs. When people place landholders above workers, say, the fact that the former have greater assets than the latter is a major consideration. Similarly, the relatively high standing of the large business owners in the township is based in part on their incomes and net worth, which are greater than those of most working people. In general, the occupational hierarchy of the community corresponds to the distribution of wealth.

The role that wealth plays in people's judgments was illustrated by a comment made to me by a stock agent, who said: “I treat everyone the same, I don't care how much they've got.” His remark assumes that grounds exist for making hierarchical distinctions, that wealth is the standard for doing so, and that such a hierarchy is inevitable as long as some are wealthier than others. This stock agent is as much aware of these differences as the next person—how could he not be?—yet he refuses to let them influence his behavior toward

other people. When he states that he “treats everyone the same,” he means that he refuses to be submissive or obsequious toward those who are higher on the scale than he—those with greater wealth—or to demean those who are lower. The man's statement was intended to express egalitarian values, but it betrayed a definite sense of social hierarchy.

Local thought contains a folk theory that justifies using wealth in this fashion, or at least a tacit rationale for why people look up to those who are more well-to-do. According to the theory, people with greater wealth enjoy a superior level of material existence—they drive more comfortable automobiles, eat better food, have more secure lives—and that is a state of affairs that everyone desires. Thus, wealth is inherently enviable, and prestige inevitably flows in the direction of the well-to-do. The stock agent's comment that he “treat[s] everyone the same” no matter “how much they've got” illustrates this folk theory. Underlying his remark was the assumption that a hierarchy of wealth leads to hierarchical distinctions as a matter of course.

People recognize that wealth serves another important purpose besides providing a comfortable and secure existence: namely, it is a means of achieving prestige. According to the folk theory, however, this second (and secondary) purpose is disreputable, even laughable. It is a goal sought by social climbers and others who care too much about what others think of them. It is morally good that we seek wealth for the material advantages it provides, but we ought not to want it simply for the prestige it confers.

An important feature of this folk theory about wealth is the assumption that the ranking of occupations is natural. A person may object to the tax advantages of farmers, say, or to union wages, and one may try to change the tax laws and the rules governing unions; but given the material differences among occupations that exist, it is hard (in people's view) to imagine how occupational ranking could be different. In this sense, the folk theory lifts the status system beyond the level of dispute, and to a large extent even beyond the level of conscious reflection.

Yet differences in wealth patently are not a good measure of differences in material well-being in South Downs. For example, it is very difficult to say that the owners of Bowman's Motors are truly better off than the greengrocer, or that the average farmer is better off than the average carpenter, if we judge solely on the basis of an objective standard of material existence (assuming such a standard

could be made culture-free). The discriminations in wealth that people make in South Downs are much finer than the actual differences in physical well-being among them. At stake in the hierarchy of wealth, in short, is not so much material welfare as symbolic domination.^[2] The members of society use their economic resources to distance themselves from others. Recall the irritated reaction among farmers in the South Downs district to my comment that the gap in wealth between landholders and workers is growing throughout New Zealand. Their response may have been due in part to a concern about the erosion of their physical well-being, but more important was their sense that the workers' earnings have become sufficiently close to their own that spendable income no longer adequately marks the difference in standing between them.

Perceived differences in wealth entail a semiotic system of hierarchical distinctions, and to read the signs properly requires that one grasp the cultural frame of reference that the people themselves use. This frame of reference includes such elements as the distinction between ownership and leasehold, employer and employee, Jaguar and Hillman Hunter, silverware and stainless. When signs of wealth are viewed from the frame of reference of the people, a hierarchy appears that cannot be discerned in the objective world of brute facts.

Thus, the folk beliefs about wealth contain a paradox: wealth entails a semiotic system for ordering occupations and individuals in a hierarchy of standing, yet this function is morally obnoxious in local thought. The contradiction is denied by a key feature of the folk beliefs, however: that is, that the genuine and legitimate purpose of wealth—its primary purpose—is to provide a comfortable and secure existence. People may believe that others pursue wealth for the prestige it confers, but they do not conceive themselves as doing so, at least not to a significant degree.

The Criterion of Occupational Importance.

A second general or comprehensive factor behind the occupational system is the general importance of people's jobs in the

social and economic orders. All else being equal, the individual looks up to an occupation in proportion to its impact on the wider system. For example, the economic impact of a large landholder is greater than that of a postal employee, and the former enjoys higher standing on this basis alone. Similarly, because the county clerk plays an important role among landholders, he too enjoys a very high standing in the community.

In chapter 1, I mentioned Bernard Barber's theory of occupational prestige, which holds that the relative standing of an occupation derives in part from its functional significance in society; according to Barber, people in general have a good grasp of the relative importance of different jobs, which determines whether they will look up to (or down on) any given occupation. Barber's approach is rooted in structural-functional theory, an orientation reflected in his concept of functional significance.^[3] It is not clear to me, however, that the criteria by which he defines functional significance are quite the same as those used by the people in South Downs when they assess the importance of an occupation; nor is it clear that local people have a unitary or coherent set of principles to guide them in these judgments. Yet one standard does seem to be more pronounced than others, and this concerns an assumption about the basic significance of economic matters. The importance of a position is assessed primarily in terms of its role in the economic order. In local thought, it is axiomatic that material well-being is the basis of human existence, and people's jobs are the means by which their well-being is achieved. Thus, events or positions that have large implications for the economic system are (in folk theory) “naturally” more important than those that do not. The county clerk is “naturally” more important in the community than the postmaster because his decisions have greater impact on the economic life of the district, just as the stock agent's decision to recommend for or against credit for a particular farmer is “naturally” more important than the decisions of the shop clerk about how to arrange a window display.

By naturalizing the economic standard of importance in this way, the folk theory makes jobs—what people do for a living, the role they play in the economic system—the most important criterion for ordering individuals at the level of thought. It is “natural” for occupation to be rated higher as a basis for assessing people than judgments about their religious piety or generosity, for example, or their

good humor and even temper. Economic achievement, after all, is conceived as one of the most important goals that an individual can pursue.

The Criterion of Asymmetry

A third comprehensive factor in defining the local occupational hierarchy is the asymmetry of interpersonal relations. By this I mean an aspect of a relationship between two or more parties whereby one has greater authority or capacity to set the terms of that relationship, to direct the actions of the other, or to exercise judgment over a task in which the other has an interest. For example, if I hire a man to undertake repairs on my home, then the relationship between us is asymmetrical in the sense that I give him directions about what he is to do for me and when he should do it. He defers or yields to me within the context of this relationship.

The principle of asymmetry resembles what I call the importance of occupations, but the two ideas are not identical. The principle of importance ranks an occupation in terms of the role the job is thought to play in the larger social and economic system, or in terms of its perceived contribution to the fulfillment of individual or collective goals. Because people recognize that farming is the economic mainstay of the district, for instance, they regard farmers as important in the district and assess their social position in part on that basis. By contrast, the principle of asymmetry looks at the interpersonal relations between the occupation-holder and others, and in particular, at the element of submission or surrender. What is crucial is not that one job is more important than another in the larger scheme of things, but that other people yield to the job-holder's judgment or decisions.

The case of the stock agents is illustrative, for the job ranks higher than one would expect from the criterion of wealth alone. Stock agents stand at about the level of middle-ranking farmers, even though they are salaried employees who can scarcely hope to raise enough money to purchase a farm (unless, of course, they have other resources than just the income from their jobs). As we have seen, too, what people emphasize in explaining this occupation's relatively

high standing is the importance of stock agents to farmers: they have the capacity to authorize or deny credit that the landholders need.

This last fact might seem to suggest that the stock agents' key role in the economic order of the community explains their unusually high standing. Yet the stock agents' importance is rather equivocal. Because their decisions are constrained by clear-cut rules concerning such matters as creditworthiness and the amount that a landholder can borrow, their authority over the farmer is limited; surely the condition of the farm and the landholder's current indebtedness count far more than the discretionary judgment of the stock agent in determining whether credit is extended. Moreover, the problem of financing is only one aspect of the farmer's operation, and as important as that may be—and as important as the stock agent is in those decisions—the farmer, not the stock agent, is the mainstay of the district.

According to the criterion of occupational asymmetry, however, the crucial point is that the farmers must yield or defer to the stock agents, who, by virtue of their jobs and within delimited spheres of action, stand in a superordinate position vis-à-vis the landholders. Thus, the element of surrender by the farmer toward the stock agent provides the grounds for the stock agent's relatively high standing in the system. The condition of the farmer's property and ledger may be more significant in the end than the stock agent's discretionary judgment in questions of credit, but the farmer must direct his request for financing to the stock agent and accept the decision that he announces.

The postmaster and county clerk provide another illustration of the principle of asymmetry. The county clerk is the chief administrative officer of the county; he serves at the pleasure of the county council, which he advises, and occupies a supervisory role over the other county employees. Both he and the postmaster oversee sizable facilities, and both manage a fairly substantial number of employees. Yet the county clerk ranks distinctly higher; in fact, only a few of the highest-ranking landholders in the district stand above him in the local hierarchy. The reason is that he is actively engaged in making policy decisions.

I asked one schoolteacher if the county clerk ranks as high as the vet, and he replied: “Yes, I think so. He wouldn't be regarded as just a penpusher. Probably because of the [small] size of the community, people know that he's not [just] an office boy.” I then said

that, since the postmaster is also in charge of many employees and substantial facilities, he must rank about as high as the county clerk. The teacher answered: “But I don't feel that he [the postmaster] is making major decisions or helping to make them. He's more a formfiller-in than the county clerk. The county clerk makes a lot more decisions. He is the council, virtually.” Another person said: “I've never heard of anyone who doesn't hold him [the county clerk] in high regard. Mainly because he's a man who's got the information and knowledge. I think he ranks very high in South Downs.” A person who works for the council said that the county clerk ranks high in the community “because he runs the county, really. He's got all the knowledge. He knows what's going on all the time, better than anyone else.”

Note what was not said by people in justifying the higher standing of the county clerk. They did not say that he makes more money, is wealthier, or materially better off. It is possible that this was implied in people's statements, for they may have assumed that his services are so important that he earns more than the postmaster. But no one mentioned the two men's salaries to me, and I doubt that more than a handful of people know how much they make. Nor did people say that the county clerk manages greater resources (a larger staff or larger and more costly facilities). Rather, he ranks higher because his job entails more discretionary judgment; he conducts his work largely on the basis of knowledge that he personally controls, though he does adhere closely to formal rules in doing so. People's comments may also contain the implicit assumption that his decisions have greater substance, or deal with matters of greater importance, than those of the postmaster. The county clerk oversees local roads and bridges, as distinct from telephones and mail; consequently, the issues he deals with have greater impact on both the farmer and the district in general.

One might think that the criterion of occupational importance, not of wealth, influences people's judgments about the county clerk's very high standing, because it does seem that people look up to him on the basis of the role he plays in the community. But this interpretation is insufficient, for it does not explain why he ranks almost at the top of the local social hierarchy. His decision-making role relative to the maintenance and construction of roads and bridges may be important, but it hardly gives him great power or influence over farmers or the district in general. As in the case of the stock

agent, the same “facts” can be construed differently, and the intrinsic significance of the county clerk's job seems too equivocal to justify his high standing.

It is more plausible that the element of asymmetry underlies people's judgment in this case. The kinds of decisions the county clerk makes require that others yield to him, a situation that is less true for the postmaster. If a landholder wants the county to undertake an expensive project on the road leading to his property, he knows that the county clerk's judgment about financial feasibility and procedural details will be a key variable. The farmer probably will raise the matter first with his elected representative on the county council, for the issue must eventually be brought before that body for approval; the county engineer's opinion on the technical aspects of the project will also be important. But if the county clerk supports the undertaking in principle, then the farmer has a very significantally. What is more, while it is true that the county clerk is employed by the county council, he does not simply defer to that body. He has a far better grasp than the council members of county finances, the rules governing the council's actions, national legislation delimiting the authority of local bodies and the expenditure of public money, and the like; as a result, the council itself often seeks his advice and defers to his judgment. Thus, the county clerk stands in a position of asymmetry with respect not only to the landholders, but in an important sense also to the council itself. The process of reasoning that accords him his high standing, then, focuses on the privileged position that he occupies vis-à-vis both landholders and county council.

The distinction between skilled and unskilled workers can be interpreted in similar fashion. The criterion of wealth would explain the higher standing of skilled workers by reference to their greater earning power, in that the labor of the skilled worker is worth more to the employer than that of the unskilled laborer, and skilled workers are also more scarce; consequently, the one is paid more than the other, enjoys a higher standard of well-being, and is looked up to as a result. This interpretation enjoys a certain plausibility, for it is common knowledge that skilled occupations are better paid. Yet in the course of my research no one even hinted that differences in income are behind the evaluation of these jobs, nor did anyone volunteer information about what the wages of these workers might be. What they did emphasize, rather, was the importance of intelli-

gence, or “grey matter,” in distinguishing the two categories of occupation. I asked one skilled worker if a postal and telephone employee would consider an electrician above him, and he replied: “I don't think so. I think the P&T worker comes under the area of the skilled worker [i.e., is classified as a skilled worker]-he can relate [as an equal] to an electrician, carpenter, that sort of category. He's still [a] manual [worker], but it needs a little bit of grey matter—he's not just digging holes, that sort of thing.” It is conceivable that the criterion of occupational importance, rather than of wealth, underlies people's judgments in this case, but again there is a difficulty, for it is not differences in the relative importance of jobs that people stress in their comments, but rather the element of “grey matter.” Skilled workers exercise more discretionary judgment.

The relative standing of these two categories, too, is best explained in terms of the asymmetry of interpersonal relations. If I employ an electrician to work for me, I do not subordinate myself to him as the landholder does vis-à-vis the stock agent, but I do surrender the task to the worker with the understanding that his expertise gives him an element of authority over how it is done. He knows better than I what kind of wiring to install for the purposes intended, and he knows how to install it so that it will be safe and conform to the building code. In brief, fundamental to the concept of skilled work is the idea that other people yield or defer to the worker's judgment in the areas in which his or her skills apply.

A comment made by an employee of the county concil, Alec Wilson, supports this interpretation. Wilson is in charge of providing a specialized service for all the farmers of the county, and in this he himself decided how to carry out his work and how to organize his time. Wilson explained to me that the county workers have two separate rest facilities, or “smoko rooms,” one for the outside staff (which includes truck drivers, mechanics, and the like), the other for the inside staff (including the county clerk, engineer, secretaries, and a few others). He remarked: “I can't understand it that they [the outside staff] can't come into our room and have a smoko, and vice versa, why we can't go out and have it with them.” When I asked if there was a status difference between inside and outside staffs, he said:

I would like to say that there isn't, but there is. I feel it because I used to be a truck driver [for the county] myself. I can go out the back there and have a bloody yarn, but the other fellows [the other members of the inside staff] can't—they don't even try. Even David doesn't. [David is another

county employee who carries out his work with considerable independence.] … We're our own bosses, David and I, where the drivers are told what to do and where to go.

Expressed in my idiom, the relationship between Wilson and his supervisor is less asymmetrical than is the case among the outside staff, for he makes his own decisions regarding scheduling and the implementation of his job. As a consequence, he enjoys greater respect than the outside staff.

The surprisingly low position of the chemist in the district also makes sense on the basis of this criterion. Earlier I mentioned one person's comment that “when you go to the chemist you're virtually getting something the doctor told you to get.” The chemist's role does not entail much discretionary judgment; he is viewed rather as a small shopkeeper unequal in position not only to the doctor who writes the prescription, but to the customer as well, whom the chemist serves. The surprisingly high rank of the schoolteachers is equally illustrative. Because they are not under the direct authority of a local school committee (unlike the teachers in the California community that I studied before), their position vis-à-vis the local people is not characterized by asymmetry; the only authority they answer to fully is that of the headmaster.

The Prominence of Landholders

I turn now to the occupation of landholder, the most prominent in the district. It is prominent in a double sense: not only do the landholders enjoy higher standing than most people (indeed a handful of them occupy the very top of the local hierarchy), but they also, being such a well-defined and visible segment of the district, constitute a major reference point for assessing the social standing of others. I want to explore the conceptual basis for this prominence.

This issue may seem too obvious to need comment. First, from the standpoint of wealth, the landholding families are prominent simply because they are better off than most: even if farmers do not make much more money than others in the district, certainly the value of their property far exceeds the capital resources of all but a few businessmen in the township. Second, on the basis of occupa-

tional importance in the community, sheep farming and agriculture together form the chief industry in the district; indeed, there would be little to sustain the community—which would become a ghost town—if the farmers and run-holders left. The importance of the landholders is even visually apparent: every road in the district is bordered by paddocks, and sheep are seen grazing in all directions as far as a person can see.

The third criterion, occupational asymmetry, however, is a far less obvious explanation for the farmers' prominence. In chapter 3 I quoted a person who described the contrast between workers and farmers as a distinction between “the employers and the employed,” a phrase that implies the element of asymmetry. This comment is interesting in that, strictly speaking, the businesses in the township of South Downs employ more people on a permanent full-time basis than do the farms; one might therefore link the category of worker not with the landholders but with the business owners. For example, we have seen that Bowman's Motors hires several mechanics and a small office staff, while the largest stock firm in the township is made up of a manager, a stock agent, and six other employees, mostly shop assistants. Two of the cartage firms have six and seven drivers apiece, the aerial topdressing service has two pilots and two loaderoperators, the fencing contractor employs several men, and so on. To be sure, several sheep runs in the Glassford district employ one or two full-time men, and the handful of sheep stations hire larger permanent crews; but in the district of South Downs proper, very few landholders hire any permanent help at all (though a sizable number did so until about the last decade or two), relying instead chiefly on family labor.

Nonetheless, the person's comment about employers and the employed is apt, for it does express an essential element of the landholders' relationship to others in the district: that is, in one way or another, either directly or indirectly, most working people and even business owners in the community serve the farmers. For example, although the fencing contractor, like the farmer, is an independent businessman, and even though he employs several people to help him, his livelihood still depends on the jobs he gets from the farmer, and in his work he submits to the farmer's directions about where to place the fence and what kind of fence to install. Similarly, although the shearing gangs usually work by contract and the farmer is careful to keep out of their way when they are on the job—the

shearing shed becomes their domain until shearing is over—nevertheless, there is no question about who is working for whom. Even the veterinarian works for the farmer. If the lambing rate on a farm is low, or if the lambs are not gaining weight as they should, the farmer might call in the vet for help. True, the vet gives directions to the farmer, which the latter carries out—and in this sense the relationship between vet and landholder is very different from that between fence builder and landholder; yet the farmer initiates the dialogue and defines the questions for the vet to address. Even the county workers serve the farmers in an important sense, for a majority of their time is devoted to matters concerning farm roads and other services for the landholders.

Such shopkeepers in town as the greengrocer and chemist, and such businessmen as the owners of Bowman's Motors, are as independent as the farmer in one sense, for they do not work for anyone else: they are employers, not employees. But in another way they lack the farmer's independence, in that their customers and clients “direct” their actions to a degree. Nor are local businesses as active as the landholders in hiring the services of other local firms, a point that again is illustrated by Bowman's Motors. This enterprise markets its services to local people and depends on their trade, but it is seldom in a position of being a consumer itself. Although it may occasionally hire a builder to repair or remodel the shop, say, such an event is rare. Thus, unlike farmers, the owners of Bowman's Motors seldom stand in a privileged position relative to other businesses.

This principle was cogently expressed in a passage in one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books about prairie life in nineteenth-century North America. Laura commented to her future husband, Almanzo, that she did not want to marry a farmer, but he contradicted her reasoning, saying: “Farmers are the only ones who are independent.” Storekeepers, he went on, are dependent on the farmer—“How long would a merchant last if farmers didn't trade with him?” Not only must the storekeepers try to please the farmer, but they must also try to steal one another's customers. By contrast, farmers have no need to please anyone, nor do they have to compete: if they want to make more money, they merely sow more wheat. The farmer, Almanzo said, is “his own boss.”

The farmer virtually never finds himself in a position of subordination to local businesses. For example, his wool is hauled by

contract to a large warehouse in Jackson, where it is auctioned impersonally to international buyers whom he never sees. The local stock firm may act as the farmer's agent and have a financial interest in the transaction, but in local thought, the farmer is not conceived as working for or subservient to the stock firm. For example, on Christmas Eve (which in New Zealand is a warm summer evening), most of the families in the district congregate on the main street of the township to enjoy a small parade in which the local pipe band “pipes in” Father Christmas (who appears in a horse-drawn gig behind the band). During the social gathering stock agents invite their client farmers into the back room for a drink. This act provides a subsidiary focus of the evening and sets the farmers apart from the rest of the community; it also allows the firms to manifest their appreciation for the farmers' business and, thus, tacitly signal their subordination.

For all of these reasons, farming is one of the few occupations in the district for which a disagreeable or unsociable disposition is not a drawback. To be successful the farmer needs a reputation for trustworthiness, perhaps, but not personableness. By contrast, the stock agent, fat-lamb buyer, fencing contractor, even the vet, profit considerably from the qualities of salesmanship and an agreeable temperament.

The unique position of the farmer in the occupational structure of the district illuminates a case cited in chapter 3, in which a family sold its farm in another district in order to buy a larger and better one in South Downs. While they were between farms, as we saw, they experienced a severe loss of identity. This seems puzzling, since they had not yet left their home community; they therefore continued to see their old friends and to enjoy their long-standing reputation as good farmers and respectable people. They were also as wealthy now as before, although at the moment their wealth was deposited in the bank. But their position relative to the economic life of the district had changed radically: they no longer stood in a privileged position vis-à-vis shearing gangs, cartage firms, stock firm salesmen, fence builders, the veterinarian, and so on.

The landholder's position in the system of occupational relations also helps to clarify the surprisingly high standing of the managers of farms and runs. Because they do not own the properties they manage, they do not rank among the farmers by the criterion of wealth, and indeed they are even employees. But, depending on the

person and the conditions of his employment, the manager stands on a par with the landholders, or very nearly so. Moreover, he is as independent in most contexts as property-holders.

The Relationship Among the Three Criteria

All three criteria—wealth, occupational importance, and occupational asymmetry—play a role in people's judgments about the standing of occupations in the district. The role of farmer is illustrative, for landholders are classified at the upper end of the scale on all three standards of judgment, and so gain a high overall ranking. The three criteria also influence the relative standing of business owners. Compare the greengrocer with the owners of Bowman's Motors, for example. The latter stand higher, in part owing to the principle of asymmetry: unlike the greengrocer, the repair firm owners employ labor and thus occupy a managerial position. But even if it were possible to hold the element of asymmetry constant, surely the owners of Bowman's Motors would still rank higher because of their greater wealth and because their firm has more impact on the economic life of the district.

In the final analysis, though, it seems that occupational asymmetry takes precedence over the others, for in cases in which the three criteria do not correspond, or in which they lead to conflicting judgments about an occupation's standing, asymmetry carries greater weight. An example is the stock agents, who rank below farmers by the criterion of wealth and who occupy an equivocal position by the criterion of importance; but by the criterion of occupational asymmetry they rank relatively high—as they do in actual standing. The same is true for the county clerk: the element of asymmetry overrides wealth and occupational importance to place him in a very high position.

Perhaps the importance of this criterion in South Downs reflects the fact that this is a small, relatively coherent community in which most people know (or at least know about) one another, and so the relations of asymmetry among local occupations are apparent to virtually everyone. In the large towns and cities, where occupational

relations are less visible, the factors of wealth and occupational importance may be given relatively more weight.

As important as these three criteria are in giving the occupational hierarchy its shape, they are not the only ones that people use. People's judgment that run-holders rank higher than farmers, for example, could hardly reflect occupational asymmetry. Nor are the run-holders thought to be more important in either the local or national economy. And as for the principle of wealth, while it is true that the highest incomes are made by run-holders, the average run-holder is in fact no better off than the average farmer. Yet even in cases where a run-holder and down-country farmer are roughly equal in wealth, the run-holder still ranks higher. Recall the conversation I reported in chapter 3, with the man and woman who had recently sold their down-country farm and bought a run on the outskirts of the Glassford district; the husband commented that people thought he and his wife had nearly “jumped off their perch” in doing so. I am not sure if the run they acquired was more valuable than the farm they sold (it probably was), but if they had bought a more expensive farm instead—a farm that cost just as much as the run they bought—they would not have remarked to me about the change they felt in people's attitudes. The higher standing of run-holders must be explained chiefly in terms of their historical association with the large estates of the past, not in terms of the three principles I have focused on here.

Schoolteaching is another case in which the three principles do not fully account for the occupation's social standing. In the California community, the relatively low ranking of the teachers was evident in their defensiveness over how they conducted their jobs, and in the fact that both they and the principal consciously sought to win local support for any major policy changes they wanted to make. By contrast, in South Downs people assume that the teachers' judgment and authority in the sphere of education are virtually inviolate. The greater asymmetry in the California case explains this difference in part—as I mentioned, the local school board there has considerable authority over the teachers' jobs. But the deference that the South Downs people exhibit toward the teachers is so great that I suspect another element is involved as well. Even if the local school committee in South Downs had had substantial authority over the teaching staff during my research, the teachers' judgments on school matters would, I believe, still count far more than they did in the

California case; in New Zealand, namely, the teaching profession is associated with qualities of refinement—qualities that are highly valued by many and translate into respect.

The Place of Occupations in the Social Hierarchy

Strikingly, in discussing the local occupational system, people tend to discount the idea that occupations matter much in the district; they justify their resistance by singling out individuals who enjoy more esteem than is warranted considering their jobs. One person expressed this principle with the remark, “They don't seem to value you here for your assets, but for what you are”; another made the same point by a seeming reversal of terms: “It's as important what you do as who you are.” A schoolteacher commented that, in another district where he had lived not long before,

some people would come into the bar and not speak to me if certain other people were there—they'd go to the other ones—because I was on a different social ladder [or level]. People in South Downs [however] are accepted [i.e., are more easily accepted by those with higher standing]. The measure is ability to perform, maybe in a given occupation.

A similar point was made in a conversation that I had with a different schoolteacher and his wife:

Husband: I can think of one shopkeeper who was held in very high regard, John Walker [who is now retired but worked for many years in one of the stock firms]…. It was his personality. He was an excellent shop assistant. Ran the hardware department at that stage [when] you could get anything there [i.e., when local business was booming and a wide range of merchandise was available in the stores]. He was very obliging. But most of it was his personality. This is what happens in a small place—personality plays a greater part [than in larger towns], I feel. A guy on the council [i.e., a council worker] can rise above it because of his personality.

Wife: John Walker was on the council [i.e., he was elected to the community council, which oversees the public facilities in the South Downs township].

Husband: Yes, he was, and [he served in] a lot of different organizations….

I find it hard—because of the closeness of the community—to define these [social] levels. Personalities play a greater part than occupation.

The local egalitarian values are one reason for this resistance. People do not reject the idea that occupations should be differentially rewarded, or that some occupations are weightier, more desirable, and confer greater respect than others. Rather, their resistance is an expression of the moral belief that one should not treat people differently simply because of their occupation. Yet it is clear from the above quotes that some judgments are legitimate. One may judge people according to their gregariousness or sociability, for example. A mechanic or truck driver, say, who is affable and entertaining may (legitimately) be highly regarded by virtually everyone in the district, while a cranky, reclusive farmer may (legitimately) be the butt of local humor. This is one of the “personality” features that are said to count—legitimately—more heavily than occupation.

The criterion of occupation is thus inseparably linked with several legitimate standards of judgment, in that one way by which people deny the social relevance of occupational differences is by stressing these other criteria. By emphasizing a truck driver's sociability—or a farmer's irascibility—an interlocutor can, in a particular situation, suppress occupational differences that are profoundly important. These fair social criteria (as distinct from the “foul” criterion of occupation) are a means for reconciling social hierarchy with the value of egalitarianism.

Sociability is one of these (fair) criteria; another and far more important one is community participation. A limited number of people have acquired reputations for being both community-minded and effective in local affairs. For example, one local electrician does the lighting for the theatrical productions and other events held in the district hall in South Downs, a task that keeps him busy several nights a week during certain times of the year. He also often volunteers to sell tickets at these events and to set up chairs. Moreover, the man is an elected representative to three public bodies: the South Downs community council, the county council, and the regional electric power board (which oversees the publicly owned electrical generating and distributing facilities for the area). Another person, Joe Martin, is a working man who is “highly thought of as a community member.” He, too, is an elected member of the South Downs

community council, and in the recent past he spearheaded a drive to improve the appearance of the town center. Although he is very reticent, he is thought to be highly competent. As one person commented, “Thomas Barton [who owns a medium-sized business in the township] may own the business and be well off, and Martin may only be a wages man for Wood's, but there's no comparison as far as people go. In a close community people tend to work [i.e., to judge] on deeds more than just material assets.”

Yet another (fair) social criterion that people stress over occupation is the quality of a person's performance on the job. The owner of the one-man garage I mentioned earlier, for instance, is considered a good mechanic, but not as good as a second man who is employed at another garage and who is thought to be the best diesel mechanic in the district. It is true that the one-man garage owner is not significantly wealthier than the other, that he performs virtually the same tasks on the job, and that he hires no employees; still, he is an independent businessman, whereas the other is not. Yet in some people's estimation the diesel mechanic enjoys—and deserves—significantly greater respect in the district.

People's judgments about job performance can be seen in relation to council workers and postal and telephone employees. One working person said:

Some people think that if you're on the council [i.e., a council employee] you're not a worker. You lean on a shovel. I would think the P&T have a very poor standing…. If you've seen them on a job they just seem to do nothing all day. [Question: Council workers as well?] Council workers aren't quite so bad. I've noticed they are usually doing something, but P&T aren't.

The case of the greengrocer illustrates the same principle. A farmer's wife commented: “I feel now he's looking very ambitious. He first came here as a wool classer and admitted he was a lazy old guy—[although he is] quite a likable person. Getting the shop was a big step forward for John…. To me, he has really advanced in opening that shop. That was a really good move. It shows ambition.”

The reason the principle of work performance is a legitimate standard for assessing a person's worth is that it is felt to be “natural,” in the sense that one need not justify it. It is part of the natural order of things that people should be conscientious and hard working on the job, and that they should be ambitious. This leads back to the point made earlier that, from the landholders' perspective, the

distinction between workers and property-holders constitutes a moral divide. Not everyone agrees with this—certainly most working people do not—but few would dispute the underlying principle that industriousness and ability in one's vocation are genuinely important virtues.

Above I took the position that occupational differences are profoundly important, and I implied that the alternative (or fair) social criteria are less so, in that the latter are a device enabling people to reconcile their egalitarian values with the social hierarchy that exists. “Personality,” community participation, and work performance truly are not more important than occupation in people's judgments about one another. I suggest further that the various criteria are given different emphases in different contexts. In certain situations—say, in a conversation on the street or at the pub—a person's community-mindedness or work ability may be foregrounded, leaving the factor of occupation to slip out of view. But it never fully disappears. Even the most competent, affable, community-minded mechanic cannot enjoy greater local esteem than an unsociable, middling farmer of only modest ability.

I do not mean to suggest, however, that these alternative standards of judgment have no other purpose than to mask social differences in the locality. A man's competence on the job and communitymindedness genuinely count in people's estimation of him, and they provide him with avenues of achievement that he may pursue with conviction. These standards may not be more fundamental than occupation, and they may indeed be used simply to reconcile egalitarian values, but they still define worthy goals for the aspiring man or woman.

The South Downs township, situated in a long, narrow valley. The
township is surrounded by sheep farms; the higher portions of the nearby
hills are operated as runs.

Shifting sheep on a down-country farm. Because the property was to be
sold, the stock were being gathered for counting by the stock agents.

A down-country farmer shifting stock from one paddock to another. He is
accompanied by his two sheep dogs, which are trained to run ahead of
the farmer, on command, and guide the direction of the flock.

A down-country farm. This is the property of a fairly conservative farmer,
who allows the sheep to roam in fairly large paddocks.

A husband and wife working with lambs. Besides cstrating the males, the
couple are removing the animals' tails so that dung not will not become
matted in the fleece. The family is at a relatively early stage of the
development cycle, when the woman's work on the property is an
essential part of the farm's operation. Eventually the farmer will hire
casual help to assist with jobs like this.

A shearing shed on an up-country station. The landholder and two of his
men await the shearing crew.

Mustering sheep in the high country in the fall. The sheep are being
brought down to lower elevations to keep them becoming stranded
by snow.

Sheep dogs on an up-country run. High-country sheep are widely
dispersed and very skittish; it would therefore be nearly impossible to
manage the flock without the help of dogs.

Sheep being exhibited at the Agricultural and Pastoral Association show
in South Downs. Annual shows of this kind are held throughout New
Zealand, providing a context in which local farmers may complete over the
quality of their stock and other farm products.

Pet parade at the South Downs school. The event is held each year, and
most of the pets are “mismothered” lambs (the mother having rejected the
offspring) that are bottle-fed by members of the farm family; when the
animals are old enough, they are returned to the flock.

Opening day of the season at the South Downs bowling club. It is usual
for club members to wear white on special occasions such as this. The
women will later serve tea in the clubhouse.

The South Downs rugby team. Rugby is one of the most popular sports
in New Zealand, and many rural districts have their own teams, which
play in competition with other nearby districts. The members of the
South Downs rugby club (not only players by any means) invariably
gather for a drink at the clubhouse after the game.

Chapter Five
The Criterion of Wealth Among Farmers

The category of farmer occupies a very distinctive place in the occupational system of the South Downs district, for this is the single most prominent category of work. The landholders are also set apart from other local people in that they constitute a relatively exclusive community of discourse: they are able to read the signs by which they are sorted in terms of achievement or worth, whereas most nonfarmers are very limited in their ability to do so. In this and the next three chapters I focus on just how the local landholders order themselves.

Theirs is a fairly amorphous hierarchy, for the placement of any individual or family typically is arguable. The debate proceeds at the level of private conversation and is never fully settled; yet behind both the pattern of flux and the debate itself is a fairly clear set of principles. First, this is a bounded hierarchy, limited to local farm families. Farmers from nearby districts, no matter how well known by local people, are thought of as occupying a space in that hierarchy, not in this one. Second, achievement or standing rests on certain criteria that can be expressed with reasonable clarity. It is true that the standards may be given variable emphasis, even by the same person on different occasions. But each standard, whether emphasized or not, is reasonably clear-cut.

Several sets of standards are involved in the process. The one I focus on in this chapter is wealth: I am interested in how local farm families judge who is wealthier than whom.^[1]

Mistaking the Local Hierarchy of Wealth

I have suggested that the “objective facts” of wealth can be read or interpreted in a variety of ways, depending on the individual's frame of reference. A central problem for the investigator is to elicit the frame of reference that the people themselves use and to avoid imposing a foreign set of standards. The full weight of this point can be felt by understanding the way I stumbled onto it.

I had not been in the community long when I realized that substantial differences in wealth separate the local farm families. For example, one family was struggling desperately to make ends meet; the farmer himself mentioned to me that the house needed repairs that they could not afford, and I had heard from others that his farm mortgage was very large and that the debt he owed to his stock firm was dangerously high. His farm looked run down because it needed more work than he and his family were able to provide, nor could he hire additional help to do it. By contrast, another farmer nearby was clearly very well off. He was semiretired, and he and his wife had sufficient resources that they traveled occasionally both in New Zealand and abroad. His married son worked on the farm, and he and his family were reasonably comfortable. A married couple also assisted on a full-time basis, and additional casual help was hired as needed. The property was large—easily big enough to support three families, if not more—so that this much labor was certainly called for.

In the early phases of my research I avoided the subject of wealth and social standing because I assumed these were delicate matters that I should not touch until I had established sufficient rapport. Eventually, though, I broached the issue directly with a few of those I had grown to know reasonably well. Even so, no matter how well I knew the individuals I spoke to, or how carefully I raised the subject, the responses were disappointing. All denied any major differences in wealth among local farmers, and when I responded by pointing out the very obvious differences that I myself could see, people consistently maintained that there are no particularly wealthy families in the district and that wealth is not an important basis for sorting the local population.

My family and I could not have been made to feel more welcome in the district, and I had developed a genuine friendship with several of the farmers I interviewed. And yet (I thought) they refused to be frank about a topic that truly was not very threatening.

Another interpretation of the farmers' reactions was possible, though it took me some time to see it. This is that I was measuring wealth by criteria different from the ones they use, and therefore I was imposing a hierarchy of standing on the local families to which they themselves did not subscribe. While they could grasp the hierarchy that I sought to identify, for some of them obviously saw what I was driving at in my questions, the hierarchy I wanted them to admit to was not the one they recognized in their everyday lives.

The place to begin in understanding the problem is with the perspective that I originally brought to the New Zealand research. This was a set of ideas that I implicitly held even before my earlier study in the California farm community, although my experience there served to reaffirm and clarify these ideas in my mind, as did a body of literature on rural America that I read subsequent to that research. These writings focused on the “agricultural ladder,” that is, the “ideal” career pattern of a farmer, whereby a young man begins by working for an established landholder and then, by carefully saving his money, gains the ability to lease or buy a small farm of his own. He then enlarges his property gradually until, by the time he reaches his mature years, his holdings—all of which he now owns—are sufficient that he employs at least one man full time to help him.^[2] In practice, the agricultural ladder has more often been the exception than the rule in the United States, for only in times of agricultural prosperity and in areas where land was available has it been possible for workers to acquire farms or for farmers to increase their holdings. Nevertheless, the agricultural ladder has been important in providing the conceptual framework for the social hierarchy of farm districts. A man who owns a small, one-man farm in rural America may have no hope of acquiring more land, but he stands higher than the man who works for wages, and in turn, both rank below the farmer who owns so much land that he needs to hire a man full time to help him.

A second part of the perspective that I carried with me to New Zealand was a double assumption about a farm's carrying capacity. First, I assumed that the capacity of any given property was definable. Again, this was something I had learned in the California com-

munity, where the amount of land needed to support a family could be determined almost to the acre: a given farm could be described as being slightly less than needed to support a family, another as a one-man unit, a third as a one-and-a-half-man unit, and so on. The farmers in the California community spoke about and compared farms in this way, and in the mid 1960s they all agreed on the minimum number of acres that were needed to support a family—two thousand acres of dryland grain, or five thousand of rangeland, or some combination of the two. It was even possible to determine how this amount had changed over time; because the matter was at the forefront of people's minds, the figures from various points in the past were readily accessible—for example, in the 1930s a family needed at least eight hundred acres of farmland.^[3]

These carrying capacities reflected fairly precise calculations about the earning power of each acre. Moreover, whereas the minimum amount of farmland was described by reference to its size, acreages could be converted directly into bushels of grain: a farm family had to produce a certain quantity of grain each year in order to acquire an adequate income, which in the mid 1960s translated to two thousand acres. The same principle applied to rangeland: to be a minimum-sized but viable economic unit, a ranch had to support a certain number of cattle to bring in an adequate income. A cattle ranch could thus be described as easily in terms of the number of cattle it would support as in terms of acreage.

The second part of my double assumption about carrying capacity is that the landholder operates his property at the maximum level of productivity. Only a fool would do otherwise. A one-man farm is a one-man farm, regardless who runs it.

An implication of this double assumption about carrying capacity is that the size of holdings provides an index of wealth. A person with less than enough land to support a family is less wealthy than a person who owns a one-man farm, and so on.

How, then, do the farmers of South Downs perceive the local hierarchy of landed wealth? Where I originally saw a significant range of differences, they see a comparatively narrow one. Although a few of the run- and station-holders in the Glassford district are well-to-do by local standards, the overwhelming majority of land-holders in the South Downs district occupy a position somewhere near the middle. The local hierarchy is thus rather flat from the perspective of local people. In addition, the farmers and I tended to

disagree about whom to place at or near the top of the hierarchies that we saw. The differences in criteria that we used thus led us not only to see hierarchies of different shapes, but also to sort the same families along somewhat different lines.

Wealth and the Developmental Cycle

The term developmental cycle is not one used by the people themselves, but it succinctly describes the main principle underlying the hierarchy of landed wealth as farmers conceive it. A key feature of this cycle is that the beginning farmer is thought to be relatively poor; this fact is, in turn, directly linked to inheritance laws.*

It makes better economic sense for a young man to buy his parents' farm than to inherit, because inheritance taxes are very high.** Thus, the beginning phase of the farm's developmental cycle is marked by constant struggle to meet the mortgage payment, and this has a significant effect on a young family's lives. First, the farm is operated on such a narrow margin (because of the high mortgage bill) that a few bad decisions or unlucky years can easily lead to the loss of part or all of the land. Second, both husband and wife have to work extremely hard during this period—much harder than their neighbors who are farther along in the cycle—because they cannot afford to hire additional help except when absolutely necessary. In effect, they trade their labor for working capital. Third, the mortgage payments leave very little for the young family to live on. They have to be content with the house as it is, for example, and to forgo all but the cheapest holidays. Thus, in terms of standard of living (as conceived locally), the young farm family is significantly poorer than another family at the mature stage of the cycle.

By the same measure, the landholders who are just starting out also stand below a substantial portion of the working people in the district. The household of an established carpenter or electrician often has more money to spend on clothes, holidays, and automobiles than the young farm family. This contradiction is keenly felt by the farmers, who generally consider it an injustice.

Working people, in contrast, do not see the injustice, for in their view the young farm family possesses a form of wealth—the farm—that is beyond the reach of virtually every working person in the district. It takes a minimum of well over $NZ300,000 to purchase a farm (that includes the price of the land, buildings, equipment, and livestock, and enough working capital to run the property for a year); a wage or salary earner cannot hope to raise enough through savings even for a down payment on such a property. Yet the farmer's son enjoys several advantages that help him over the hurdle. First, the father can cede up to $NZ10,000 or $NZ15,000 a year to a child without incurring inheritance taxes (the amount specified by law changes somewhat from year to year). The father might give the child a quantity of sheep each year, say; these not only bring in an annual income that can be put in the bank or used to buy additional sheep, but they propagate themselves as well, so that conceivably the young man can own all the livestock on the place by the time he takes over. Second, the son can buy the business at a price that is somewhat below market value. The law stipulates that the purchase price cannot be less than government valuation; but since the valuation is conducted every five years (for purposes of taxation), the farmer can sell at the old figure just before the new valuation is completed, which means that the price is now a bargain because of inflation. Third, if the father holds the land without significant debt, he can give the son a loan at a favorable rate of interest.

At least two working people in the district are thought to be on the road to acquiring farms. Both are beginning with small plots that they operate on a part-time basis while continuing to work for others. They hope gradually to increase their holdings and to become full-time farmers on their own account. It is unclear whether they will succeed, though certainly very few individuals in their situation have done so in the recent past. Both cases are clearly unusual.

The government has several programs to assist people onto the land, but these tend to favor farmers' sons over working people, if only because of the stipulation that the beneficiaries must have sub-

stantial farming experience. One program involves providing low-interest farm loans to young men with promise. Another is the ballot system. The government periodically undertakes the development of farm land, and the names of qualified applicants are drawn at random. The winners are able both to purchase the land from the government at a favorable price and to acquire cheap loans. Neither of these programs has had much impact in the district of South Downs, for the overwhelming pattern there is the one whereby farmers' sons acquire land through their fathers. Throughout New Zealand, more-over, the government programs do not provide a significant avenue of upward mobility for working people.

Although the spendable incomes of the young farm families are not sufficient to distance them from working people, then, the land itself serves that purpose. The farmer who is starting out may work very long hours for little if any immediate profit, but he is still a landholder, with all that that means in the district.

Over a period of years the mortgage bill becomes progressively less burdensome for the family, since it takes a smaller and smaller bite out of the farm's total earnings. This is partly a function of inflation, which increases the farm's gross dollar income while the monthly mortgage payment remains the same. As the mortgage bill recedes, and eventually disappears by being paid off, the family can spend more and more money on the domestic side of the ledger: they can afford to drive a late-model car, spend their holidays at nearby resorts, and remodel the house; and the mother and father might eventually take a trip to Australia or Britain. The family's growing affluence is also seen in farm improvements. They can now afford to build a new shearing shed, drain a swampy section on the property, and construct new fences. If desired, they can turn the farm into a showplace—although in that case domestic spending will have to suffer. In addition, the farmer now does not have to work so hard because he can better afford to hire others to do some of the routine jobs; he can also reduce the amount of stock on the farm and therefore his overall work load, since he no longer needs to push his gross income as high as possible in order to pay the bills. Not only can the family afford to take holidays now, but they have time to do so as well, just as both husband and wife have more time to participate in local social affairs.

By the time the farm reaches the mature stage of the developmental cycle, the farm family is clearly more affluent than the typical

working-class family in the district. Still, the landholders are not considered rich by any means. Very few of them exhibit greater affluence in their everyday lives than the families of the high school teachers, for example, or of the headmaster, stock agents, county clerk, or the owners of the main businesses in town. True, a small handful of run-holders in nearby districts are considered better off—indeed, they are looked upon as the wealthiest in the county—yet even they are not considered to be genuinely rich. I asked one farmer if there is much money in farming. His response was typical:

You haven't got the money in your hip pocket every week. Your assets are there if you sell out, you've got the money then. But day-to-day you haven't got the money to use. It's a way of life if you're interested in it. You're your own boss. You can have a day off when you feel like it. You can do a job today or tomorrow. You're not tied down. The only time you're tied down is in different times of the season, especially lambing time or harvest time.

This statement minimizes the importance of income or wealth in distinguishing farmers from the other members of the community, emphasizing instead the farmer's relative autonomy: the farmer is a man whose labor is not under the direction of someone else.

Income Tax and the Developmental Cycle.

Although the mortgage bill becomes less burdensome and the family more affluent, at the same time another economic factor comes increasingly into view: the income tax bill (table 1).^[4] Money used for farm expenses, including mortgage payments, is not taxed, but that used for domestic spending is. As a result, the family moves into progressively higher tax brackets as the mortgage gradually dwindles. An income of up to $NZ5,000 is taxed at the lowest rate of 14.5 percent, with the rate increasing to 35 percent for incomes between $NZ5,001 and $NZ11,683; to 48 percent for the range $NZ11,684-$NZ16,266; 55 percent for $NZ16,267-$NZ22,000; and 60 percent for earnings of over $NZ22,000.

The graduated income tax reduces the range of income differences in the community, including those between the young and mature farmers. For example, compare two people with incomes before taxes

of $NZ5,000 and $NZ10,000, respectively; the one earns twice as much as the other, but their incomes after taxes are $NZ4,275 and $NZ6,500, the latter being only one and a half times the first. The same disparity is true with incomes before taxes of $NZ5,000 and $NZ20,000. The second income may be four times the first, but after taxes only $NZ4,275 and $NZ9,000, respectively, are left, the second figure being only slightly over twice as large as the first.

The graduated income tax includes a system of rebates and exemptions that affect this picture to some degree. For example, a man making $NZ8,000, who owns his own home, has a dependent wife and a young child, and pays $NZ600 a year for life insurance, pays no tax at all on about the first $NZ6,700 of income. But the exemptions and rebates are also calculated on a graduated scale. For example, the low-income-family rebate does not apply to incomes of $NZ12,100 or more, and the young-family rebate disappears at an annual income of $NZ16,000.

The income tax system effectively reduces the range of differences in spendable income among community members in two ways. First, as we have seen, it takes a greater share from families with higher incomes. Second, it weakens the incentive for maintaining high levels of production among farm families whose mortgages are no longer a burden. At a certain stage of the developmental cycle it becomes possible for the farmer to reduce stock numbers significantly without greatly affecting the family's income, since higher earnings simply place them in a higher tax bracket and so are siphoned off by the government. Two farmers at different stages of the cycle are therefore interested in maintaining very different levels of gross earnings: the young farmer pushes production and gross earnings as high as he can, whereas the mature farmer does not. I asked one landholder why a close friend of his—who is considered by many to be one of the best farmers in the district—does not produce more sheep. The farmer said:

If he were to produce more he would be taxed more. He can live quite easily with the stock he's got…. If he increased his production the money in his pocket would probably go up, but not a lot. Say last year he had a taxable income of $4,000 or $5,000, and [he] paid about $1,100 tax—this would be about normal. This year he ups his stock numbers and comes out next year with a taxable income of $15,000 to $20,000—he's trebled his taxable profit. But on $15,000 he'd be paying about $7,000 in taxes. So he goes from $5,000 surplus to $7,000 or $8,000 surplus. This is a very small jump.

The tendency for the mature farmer to lower stock numbers is fostered by another consideration as well, in that fewer sheep mean that the grass in the paddocks is never completely eaten, even in a year of poor growth due to severe cold or drought. By contrast, the young farmer who pushes his stock numbers to the limit is constantly faced with the possibility of being overstocked in a bad year and of running short of feed. In any case, the fewer the stock, clearly the lighter the work load.

The tax system has still another effect, and that is to encourage farm development, because money that is used for development purposes (say, to improve drainage or fencing) is, like the mortgage payment, untaxed. As a consequence, the farmer's growing affluence is often expressed less in domestic spending than in farm improvements. A new shearing shed, well-fertilized paddocks, and an up-to-date and impeccable system of fencing are as important signs of

affluence as a late-model car, a remodeled house, or expensive holidays. It is not necessary to invest heavily in farm improvements, of course; at the mature stage of the developmental cycle it is possible for the farmer to switch to a system of farming that is not very demanding and still make a reasonable living. With time his farm becomes progressively more run down, but he and his family need not suffer materially as a result.

Let us summarize the hierarchy of wealth among farmers. The families that are starting out, as we have seen, are relatively poor because they are heavily burdened with debt. The young farmer also has to work extremely hard, in part because he must keep his stock numbers high in order to pay his mortgage bill, and in part because he cannot afford to hire casual help. By contrast, the mature farm family has more disposable income; although this places them in a higher tax bracket, they still end up with more money to spend than their neighbors who are just starting out. Nor does the mature farmer work as hard: he can now afford to hire help, his mortgage bill no longer forces him to keep farm production at a high level, and in any case he has little incentive to do so because higher earnings are taken away in taxes.

The idea of the developmental cycle, if not the term, is clearly articulated by local people. The following are three comments by as many farmers, each illustrating how the cycle is conceived:

The young farmer is keen and hungry, he's got to get going to pay his mortgages. So he's got to make everything pay. There's also the challenge at that age—he's keen to see how far he can go. That changes as he gets older—they reckon that forty-three is the change. Then you're no longer interested in pushing the farm as far as it will go but [rather] in sitting back, enjoying life. Spending more time with the kids. The emphasis changes. The tell-tale sign is when mum gets you inside to redecorate the kitchen.

A young man starting out would not want a fully developed property—he would want the satisfaction of developing it. The young man starting out is constantly in jeopardy—if you spend too fast, if the current account [with the stock firm] gets too high, you can't service the interest rate…. So you can't spend much at first…. With time the debt with the stock agent goes down—they want the current account to be clear at the end of the year. The older age group—forty-eight to fifty-five—would be debt free, [would] have paid off their mortgages.

A person like myself [a fairly young farmer] has a limited number of years to do these things [we had been discussing farm development]. I have to

do them while I'm fit and able. You stock to the limit, push yourself to the limit, hoping that by the time you're forty-five, forty-seven years old you can sit back and take it a lot easier…. The young fellows are controlling their places a lot better than the older ones, these older-identity fellows [i.e., the older landholders who have established their reputations as successful farmers], because they've got to.

Not all farmers at the mature stage of the developmental cycle are thought to be equal in wealth, for distinctions of two kinds are made among them. First, some mature farmers are excluded from the ranks of the most well-to-do because they recently bought additional land. These families have more than one child who is interested in farming, and so they go back into debt in order to acquire sufficient property. With family spending thus reduced, these people resemble those who are at a much earlier stage of their career.

Second, landholders are distinguished on the basis of farming ability. Those seen as most affluent in the district are also considered outstanding farmers in the sense that they are among the hardest working and show the best judgment and management abilities. They produce larger numbers of unusually healthy, fat, woolly, and therefore profitable sheep, and their farms are in top condition—their paddocks are among the greenest, their fences are in perfect order, and the like. Their domestic spending may not be greater than that of other farmers at the mature stage, but they never lack money to spend on improving the land. In short, they distance themselves from their peers not by earning a higher taxable income, but by making nontaxable expenditures on the farm itself. Only a handful of people qualify as being among the most affluent and most outstanding farmers by this definition, for considerable ability and effort are needed for a person to stand out in this way.

Because farming ability is the topic of the next chapter, I do not want to go into detail here. Still, it should be stressed that much attention is paid to this issue; indeed, the labor of every farmer in the district is under constant scrutiny on just this basis.

Wealth and the Agricultural Ladder

The above explains the connection in local thought between wealth and what I call the developmental cycle: only those at the mature stage of the cycle are in a position to be regarded as

well-to-do. But what about differences in size and quality of farms—do these not play a role in people's judgments about who is wealthier than whom? For example, if one farm is twice as large as another, and so worth twice as much, are the owners not considered wealthier? Similarly, if the family with the smaller farm has the opportunity to buy another farm and therefore to double the size of its holdings, would it not want to do so? The answer to both questions is no, or at least not necessarily, and the reason is that a larger property (in the farmers' judgment) does not necessarily produce a higher income for its owners.

Notice that in posing these questions I am returning to my initial misreading of the local hierarchy of wealth. When I saw that some families have substantially larger farms than others, I assumed that they are higher on the agricultural ladder and therefore wealthier than those with smaller properties. Local farmers, however, refused to verify my observation about these differences; their reason is summed up in a simple comment: “It all depends on the mortgage bill.” One could add the tax bill and the cost of labor as well.

As a rule, the reason a farm family increases its holdings is not to climb the agricultural ladder, or the ladder of wealth, but to accommodate the children. A farmer who purchases additional farmland almost invariably has at least two children who want to farm, and the home place is not sufficient for their future needs. The farmer who makes such a purchase, and who is already at a relatively advanced stage of the developmental cycle, is thought to take a giant step backward in wealth.

What if a farmer purchases the equivalent of an additional farm at some point during his career but manages to achieve a relatively advanced stage of the developmental cycle again before retirement? He is now operating the equivalent of two farms, neither of which has a substantial mortgage bill attached, and he does so with the help of a full-time married couple. Is he not considered wealthier than his neighbor who is at the same point developmentally but has no more than a one-man farm? Pursue this into the next generation: What if each of these men has only one child, a son, who takes over the property when the father retires? Would not the one family continue to be wealthier than the other?

The farmers' response is that it would be difficult to say which family is wealthier, and a primary reason is the high cost of labor. The issue can be put in the form of a question: If a man has a farm so large that he needs to hire a married couple full time to help him,

would the married couple produce more income than they take in pay and amenities? The farmers to whom I put this question did not fully agree; most think that married couples are not profitable, whereas a minority think they would be, but only marginally, and only if the land is already owned free and clear. Yet even those who think that married couples would be profitable do not themselves wish to be in a position to hire full-time help. The vast majority of farmers in South Downs do not have married couples and are quite content without them. In any event, all the farmers I questioned were clear that it would not pay to purchase land if it meant that a married couple would have to be hired to help with it; the cost of the labor, together with the mortgage and general operating expenses, would be greater than the property's gross income.

Income taxes are another consideration. If one landholder operates a farm that is twice as large as another, and if he makes considerably more money by doing so, most of this additional income (in the farmers' view) will be siphoned off by taxes.

I asked one farmer if he would want to buy more property if suddenly he had the money to do so, or would he rather keep the farm as it is. He said:

Some chaps like to have people working for them, some don't. I'm one of those who'd rather do the work myself without peering over the shoulder watching the other man. If I had the money to buy another farm I'd probably put a manager on it and leave him alone. But then if I had the money I'd probably go overseas [for a holiday]. No, I'm not interested in any more than I can manage myself.

I asked if he wouldn't be interested in making more money, to which his wife, who was listening from the kitchen, said, “What for?” The farmer replied: “Well, what's money? You can make just as much money, a lot of money, just on a one-man farm, too…. When you've got a bigger farm you've got bigger problems…. Some people like to grab land, [but] I'm not terribly interested.”

I asked another landholder, who runs his farm without permanent help, if he would have a larger income if his place were twice as large and if he had a man working full time to help him. He said:

I don't think so. No, I don't think so. Possibly it would make it easier in some ways, but with today's cost of labor that's a problem too. People are finding that when they put extra labor on there is pressure to produce enough to pay for it. By and large, still, the one-man farm [a term I had used earlier in the conversation] produces [just] as well…. I don't believe

I would find any trouble in organizing two men beneath me—but we ought to be thankful for what we've got. It takes a certain ability to make a larger farm a success. With [farm] amalgamation the potential production hasn't always been realized—but there are some very successful large farmers [in New Zealand], tremendously enterprising farmers, with ability to organize themselves and their men.

Another farmer commented that in his immediate vicinity the people do not think in terms of “one-man units,” a term I had used. Rather, they think “more in terms of a place being too big for one joker [i.e., person]. The preference of most people would be to see that farm split up and two self-employed jokers on the same ground. That's the natural feeling in the district. Again, profit motive [plays a role]—jokers work better for themselves. And there's less problem with labor.” In brief, the size of a family's farm and the number of workers they employ are not thought to be reliable indices of wealth.

My initial assumptions about the carrying capacity of a farm—namely, that each property has a specifiable carrying capacity and that its occupant will want to operate at that level—are thus simply wrong. The level of production on a farm is driven by a number of considerations; two farms that are the same size and potentially of equal productivity need not produce the same amount of sheep or income at all. For example, an elderly man without children, who is not ambitious, is no longer burdened with a mortgage, and has never undertaken a vigorous program of farm development, might operate the farm by himself; his financial needs are minor, and he will have very few sheep on the property. He might sell the land to another established landholder whose son wants to farm. The new owner and son, burdened with debt, can immediately increase the number of sheep substantially without running short of feed. With additional short-term improvements—subdividing the paddocks with electric fences for better management, applying fertilizer, and so on—the land will soon carry still more sheep. With a long-term development program extending over a period of years, the property can easily sustain greatly increased production. Once the father retires, however, the son may find it advantageous to cut back on stock numbers and to run the place by himself with only the occasional help of another man. Thus, the same property would be, successively, a one-man, two-man, and one-and-a-half-man unit.

This hypothetical example is based on an actual case, a small run located on the outer edge of the South Downs district. Shortly before my arrival it was owned by a husband and wife who made “quite

a good living” from the land, even though the man had reduced the stock numbers to the point that he had to work only about two months a year. But he eventually sold the property to another man who had an adult son who wanted to farm, and once the land changed hands it was transformed almost overnight into a two-man operation.

The same point was made for me graphically by a farmer who had recently moved into the mature stage of the developmental cycle. The average farm in the district runs about four sheep to the acre, he said, but there is no doubt that the land is capable of carrying at least six and perhaps, with substantial farm development and very good management, as many as eight or even ten. Yet his farm—consisting of 350 acres, owned mortgage free—would provide a perfectly adequate income if he ran only three sheep to the acre. He could expect an average gross margin of about $NZ30 a ewe, which at three sheep to the acre would add up to some $NZ30,000 a year. He could hold his operating expenses at about $NZ15,000 a year, leaving $NZ15,000 to live on—which, he said, he could do “quite comfortably.” By contrast, if he had just bought his farm he would have had to borrow at least $NZ200,000, probably at a rate of about 15 percent. The interest alone would be $NZ30,000, and that would have to be paid before either living or operating expenses. Consequently, his stock numbers would have to be very high if he were to make his mortgage payment and meet his other expenses as well.

In South Downs, then, the landholder's wealth is not assessed in terms of the size of the farm or the number of sheep it carries. This can be seen in the fact that it is not considered rude to ask a farmer about these matters. In South Downs, when an outsider meets a sheep farmer for the first time and they engage in polite conversation, a question about the size of the man's property and how many sheep he has is by no means inappropriate; in the California community, conversely, such a question would be considered highly impolite, because it is tantamount to asking how much money the man has.

A Cultural Definition of Wealth

The farmers in South Downs assume that the hierarchy of wealth in the district is natural, in that it reflects certain objective economic constraints or factors that they all face. In their view, any

rational person who seeks to maximize his or her material interests and who is faced with the same economic factors (including the inheritance and income tax laws, interest rates, margin of profit, and cost of labor) would define wealth exactly as they do. Yet as I have argued elsewhere, the system of assessing wealth in this locality includes a set of cultural assumptions or values that are not reducible to economic facts; it is therefore impossible to predict how the local people will define the local hierarchy of wealth if analysis is restricted to economics alone.^[5] This is not to deny the importance of these to landholders in the district; rather, economic facts are combined with a set of cultural conceptions about what counts as wealth. The California farmers whom I studied operate with a different cultural definition of wealth. Thus, even if the California farmers were to find themselves in the same economic environment as that of South Downs, they would still not define wealth as do the New Zealanders; indeed, they would see a very different hierarchy of wealth in the community.

The essential difference between the definitions of wealth in the two communities is that, in the California case, the amount (and type) of land or property that a person held was key. An acre of rangeland was less lucrative and therefore less valuable than an acre of land planted to dryland grain, which in turn was less valuable than an equal portion of irrigated farmland; but adjusting for these differences, the amount of property itself was the single most important factor in assessing relative wealth. The farmer or rancher who operated a one-and-a-half-man unit was better off than one with a one-man unit, for example. To turn the matter around, in California the level of indebtedness on a piece of land was insignificant as a variable in calculating wealth (unless of course the landholder was so overextended that there was the real prospect of outright failure). Moreover, the landholder made no attempt to get out from under the burden of debt, for the bank loan was useful in the normal farming or ranching operation. The landholder borrowed money against the farm in order to help pay his labor costs, buy fuel and fertilizer, build new farm buildings, upgrade his livestock, and the like; since land was constantly increasing in value, the loan also became progressively larger. The landholder's typical response to a sudden drop in indebtedness, in fact, was to take out another loan—perhaps in order to buy more property if some happened to become available.

In the New Zealand case, by contrast, a farmer who owes a large

sum to the bank is not considered well-to-do. The goal of virtually every landholder is gradually to work his or her way out of debt, and eventually to own the land outright. In South Downs, once the loan is significantly reduced the landholder begins to divert more and more income to farm development and personal needs and pleasures. The family that buys more land is considered less wealthy, not more; the only reason to venture back into debt is to place children on the land, not to climb the ladder of wealth. In sum, the amount of land one has is less significant as a measure of wealth than the manifestation of a relatively high income in the form of farm improvements and personal spending patterns. If you want to know who is wealthier than whom, do not ask who has the most land or hires the most workers, or whose property will bring the highest price if it is sold; rather, ask whose farm is in the best condition and who has the most money to spend.

Several important implications follow from this emphasis on income, as opposed to land values, as the primary criterion of wealth. One is that the hierarchy of wealth among farm families has a comparatively flat profile. A wider range in wealth would result if the California criterion of property value was to prevail, for the value of farms in South Downs varies from less than a third to over a million dollars. By stressing income, however, each young farm family starts out at or near the bottom of the hierarchy and has the opportunity to work its way to the top. Similarly, given a conception of wealth based not on land value but on income, farm families do not stand apart from (or above) the nonlandholding families as prominently as they might.

Weber's discussion of the calling in Protestantism sheds some light on these issues. What made both capitalism and the Protestant ethic in Puritanism distinctive, according to Weber, was not simply the interest in promoting one's own material welfare: such an interest is probably universal, and it certainly antedated the rise of Protestantism in European history. Rather, Puritanism embraced a particular form of asceticism whereby the elect saved for the sake of saving: by forgoing immediate pleasures that one has the resources to enjoy, the capitalist invests those resources and further increases the total volume of capital. The spirit of capitalism more accurately describes the California case than that of South Downs, for in the California community the individual strives to accumulate as much land as possible as an end in itself, or for the purpose of personal achievement.

Differences in standing reflect differences in capital assets. The ethos of South Downs is equally ascetic, but it is oriented toward a some-what different end. The ideology of the worker in early capitalism, Weber says, emphasized excellence at one's work, or performing at as high a level of skill and proficiency as possible. Like that worker, the farmer in South Downs is not interested so much in accumulating wealth (land) as he is in becoming a good worker—or, in this case, a good farmer—and thus acquiring a reputation for hard work, good judgment, and excellent management abilities.^[6]

Naturalizing Wealth

The analysis of this chapter reveals an important principle, that is, the naturalization of the criterion of wealth in local thought. It is assumed that the way wealth is used to sort farm households is utterly natural, that it reflects certain necessary and unalterable facts that confront the farmer, such as the high cost of labor and the income tax system, and that the hierarchy of families could not be different from what it is. Yet local thought is in error, for the criterion of wealth, too, is grounded in cultural conceptions and values, as the relative flatness of the landed wealth curve reflects.

This process of naturalization is important in that it legitimizes the hierarchical pattern that exists in the district. Just as one might rail against the weather while recognizing that nothing can be done about it, so one might rail against the hierarchy of wealth while recognizing that it is rooted in natural facts and is thus inevitable. It is possible to change the income tax system or inheritance laws, say, but given the economic system that prevails, the hierarchy of wealth among farmers in the district—it is believed—could not be other than it is.

Chapter Six
The Criterion of Farming Ability

In the California community that I studied, the local landholders used two primary criteria in deriving a hierarchy of standing. One was farm type: they distinguished among irrigation farmers, dryland grain farmers, and cattle ranchers, the latter enjoying the highest social honor, the former the least. Second, and more important, was wealth. At the bottom of the hierarchy were those with properties so small that the household head needed a part-time job to make ends meet, and at the top were two ranch owners who were described as millionaires. The range of wealth was thought to be great; the question of where different households stood in the hierarchy was of considerable interest; and this was a topic on which most local residents had reasonably clear opinions. Although they sometimes disagreed about a particular household's place in the hierarchy, the differences of opinion were never very great, and the general social significance of wealth was never questioned.

Farming ability was also used in certain contexts to judge social honor. For example, one rancher lost his land because (it was rumored) he made a string of bad business decisions. Another rancher was a city person who had recently moved to the area to manage a large property owned by his elderly aunt, and he was considered not only inexperienced but inept as well. The issue of farming ability was also felt in a more pervasive sense, for most landholders were well aware that others judged them on the overall condition of their properties. For example, the irrigation farmer knew he would be

ridiculed if his rows were not straight, and the dryland grain farmer knew he could expect to be criticized for inattention to his equipment's appearance. But judgments about farming ability were not a significant basis for ordering landholders, in that judgments of this kind came into play only in a negative sense. Typically, what caught people's eye was evidence of poor farming, not the reverse. In any event, differences in farming ability were not a usual topic of conversation when local landholders began to discuss one another informally.

The pattern in the California community underlines the distinctiveness of the system that prevails in South Downs, where it is difficult to get landholders to comment more than cursorily about the relative wealth of other landholding households. Perhaps one reason lies in New Zealand's strong egalitarian values, which make it poor form openly to acknowledge class distinctions. Perhaps, too, the range of differences in wealth (as defined locally) is small enough that it is simply unsuitable as a criterion for sorting farm families. More important, however, is the fact that farming ability carries greater weight than wealth as a measure of social honor. In general, when farmers begin to gossip about one another at the pub, community events, or equipment sales, it is not the issue of wealth that dominates the conversation, but ability—or, more precisely, the quality of farms and livestock.

Evaluating Farming Ability

About halfway through my research, I had an especially telling interview with a local farmer, Richard Wood, and his wife, Helen. I had gotten to know them reasonably well and was determined to get them to relax their usual sense of propriety and to speak frankly about class distinctions. Both played active roles in the community, and Richard was widely considered one of the best farmers in the district. The farm itself was at the mature stage of the developmental cycle, and the family was generally ranked among the well-to-do.

I pointedly asked the farmer if some landholders in the locality were not wealthier than others, and he readily agreed. I then asked him to name those he considered to be among the best off; he men-

tioned several people whom he thought of as “being pretty comfortable.” Yet I sensed a lack of enthusiasm for the topic. At the time I thought the couple felt uncomfortable about the invidious distinctions they were being asked to make about others we all knew, but I now doubt that interpretation, because when the conversation turned to farming ability they showed little reservation about openly criticizing other landholding families. Rather, I suspect that what was bothering them was the feeling that I was guiding them over territory—differences in wealth—that in their view was not very important, and that in doing so I was tacitly assigning it a more prominent place in local life than they were willing to concede. In any event, the topic of wealth did not stimulate discussion about the local social hierarchy—a marked contrast with my experience in the California community. At the time of the interview I felt that this part of the exchange was a virtual waste.

At one point I asked if the farmers that had been mentioned as “being pretty comfortable” were also at the top of the prestige hierarchy; in other words, I asked, “does wealth translate as prestige?” Richard replied: “Not really. It does rear its ugly head sometimes. It does to a certain degree. I think this depends on the person.” Helen then commented: “I don't think people go around picking their friends because of money. Either I like the people or I don't like them, and I don't care what they've got…. I would say the people who are respected in South Downs are those who are successful rather than wealthy. To which Richard added, “That would be true, too.” I asked how they defined “successful.” Helen said: “Well, I don't know. They do what they're doing and do it well, they're more respected than the one who had his farm handed to him on a plate.”* The conversation continued in this vein for a few moments, and then Richard commented: “Yet when it's boiled down, the schoolteachers in South Downs, even the lowest paid schoolteachers, would probably be drawing a bigger salary than a lot of the average farmers. This would be fair comment.” The obvious message of this last remark is that wealth is not a significant

basis for ranking farmers, for the simple reason that it cannot be: the range of differences is too small.

I was unconvinced, though, and pursued the issue by asking if it is not true that some farmers have more money to spend than others. Richard agreed: “Yes, and this comes back to the better farmers, spending it the right way—it's coming in one door, and they're spending it out the other door. But they wouldn't spend so much personally on themselves, but back on the farm. They're turning over more all the time.” This statement tacitly corrected an assumption that underlay my line of questioning, which was that the wealthier farmers can be identified by the relative size and elegance of their homes, the newness of their cars, and the like. The man's comment makes the point, rather, that differences in spending power are a function of farming ability; the well-to-do are the ones with gross incomes large enough (because of their farming ability) that they have been able to transform their holdings into the standard of perfection. Wealth is a contingent factor, and what it is contingent on is not property size but ability. That is the feature to consider in assessing landholding families.

At this point in the conversation I remarked, “You're saying that there isn't a wide range of differences among farmers in social position” (a comment that betrayed the persistence of my assumption that wealth must somehow be at the root of any social hierarchy that exists). Helen replied:

Yes, well, then there are farmers in the district here who Richard won't be friendly with because they're hopeless.

Richard: They just annoy me.

Helen: They've had their farm longer than we have and they've done nothing. They can't be bothered.

Richard: It's a matter of personality. It doesn't matter what they do, they're just bloody hopeless.

Note what happened in this exchange. I said, in effect, that since the range of differences in wealth is so narrow, social distinctions among landholders must not be very marked, whereupon Helen gently corrected me. The thrust of her comment was that there are indeed substantial differences among farmers, but that these are a matter of farming ability.

The conversation turned back to the question of wealth briefly, and I asked Richard to comment on one family (the Joneses, dis-

cussed below) who I knew had a very large amount of land. He replied: “They're well off but they're not good farmers. This is general, common knowledge. Really, if you wanted to farm that place you could double the number of sheep they have, if you really got out and farmed it. But they're quite happy.” The conversation then focused on yet another farmer:

Richard: Phillip Eastbrook doesn't have the ability to manage stock. Some people have got it, some people haven't and never will. It's starting you in the face over there. If you have fat sheep and thin sheep you draft the thin ones out and put them on better feed. The fat ones you can hold a bit tighter. But this doesn't register with Phillip. All the sheep are together and the thin ones die because they can't complete…. The number of dead sheep over there must have cost him thousands.

Helen You should have seen them. Behind every rush in the swamp.

Richard: He picks up a lot of them but there are carcasses that were there last year and the year before. They just don't have the stock sense to sort the ewes out. The thin ones you sort out and let them build up. But no—open the gate and let the lot go through. The weak ones just drop out. So what sorts farmers out? The ability to manage stock.

I asked if he considers farming ability more important than wealth in the community:

Yes, I would, because it ties up. If those sheep were still alive today, he [Phillip Eastbrook] would be that much better off…. The ones that died are the cream of the income…. Thomas Poole—he's got a tidy little unit. It's small. His commitments wouldn't be high, and his expenses wouldn't be high. His sheep are good, and he always has some grass to feed them on. Pretty astute, really. A better farmer than average.

I asked about another farmer, Keith Graham. Richard commented: “Keith's a very good stock man. He's not losing sheep. He'd worry if he saw a sheep die. This is income to him. This is wealth, because his sheep aren't dying.” I asked if Keith Graham had higher standing than Thomas Poole because he had a larger property.

Helen: Not because his farm is larger but because he's a very good stock man.

Richard: At the A&P [the Agricultural and Pastoral Association, an annual fair held in the township] competition for sheep, Keith will always win the prizes.

I asked if Keith Graham is better in this respect than Thomas Poole. Richard said: “Oh, yes, a lot better than Thomas Poole, as far as stock management is concerned.”

This segment of the conversation is important not only because of its explicit point that farming ability is more important than wealth as a basis for sorting landholding families, but also because of its implicit message. A change had come about in the tone of the discussion. When the topic shifted from wealth to ability, both Richard and Helen exhibited far more interest in the conversation, which now was less superficial and more focused on details.

At another point in the interview, the Woods were talking about “hopeless” farmers:

Richard: You ask them a question and they wouldn't have a clue what you're talking about. I'm afraid I just get sick of talking to them. So we just don't talk farming. I'm always nice to them, but other than that, that's about where it finishes….

Helen: I'm sure farmers assess each other on success.

Richard: There are a lot of farmers who are asking questions and trying new things. And there is another section that is quite happy just to float along and puddle along, don't go to a field day [an outdoor seminar conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture] to learn anything, never really ask any advice.

The Woods could not be clearer about the primary basis for sorting local landholders.

A portion of another interview, with a fairly young and very ambitious farmer at an early stage of his career, is revealing as well. I recited to him a list of seven farmers representing a wide range in both property size and farming ability, and I asked: “Would these names be sortable in a way that people would agree more or less on who falls toward the top and who toward the bottom?” He replied:

[Pause] Yeah, probably. [Pause] All the same, I wouldn't like to try to put them in any sort of order because they're individuals and they've got their own system of farming. I tend to look at not how good or bad a joker is, but what he's trying to do, too—what stage of [farm] development is he in, what's his equity situation. All these things decide what he does.

Property size was not what this man had in mind when he expressed reluctance to rank-order these farmers; rather, his discomfort came from the idea of judging their farming ability. He continued: “You might get a situation where a joker's stock performance is very poor,

his place needs a lot of money to bring it up to the mark, he's trying very hard, but his interest bill is such that he doesn't have any money left to do it. Yet he's battling along there, trying to make the grade.”

Here he sought to explain the paradox of a man whose farm and stock are in poor condition but who nevertheless is an excellent farmer—or, stated differently, a man who ranks low on the basis of the appearance of his land and sheep but who would rank high if his true ability were taken into account. The criterion of wealth (or, more accurately, developmental cycle) also entered into this man's analysis, for what keeps this hypothetical landholder's property and stock from being as good as they should be is a lack of money, which in turn reflects the size of his mortgage bill. The speaker was virtually describing his own situation in this comment. He continued: “His neighbor may have his mortgage bill paid off, he might be taking everything off his place and putting it in his pocket, and his farm might be just as bad as the first guy's.” Here again, the speaker combined the two principles of farming ability and position in the developmental cycle: two farmers, living side by side, may have farms that are in equally poor condition, but in the one case it is because the landholder is just starting out, and in the other because he is a mediocre farmer. What distinguishes the two cases is that the one who is at the mature stage of the developmental cycle has more money to spend, whereas the other is just struggling to get by. “And then you get the next guy up the road, and he might be in the same situation as the guy who's well established, but he's putting everything back into his land which is absolutely perfect.” Again the developmental cycle and ability intersect. The new case is that of a person at the mature stage of the cycle who therefore has money to spend; yet he is not spending it on himself and his family, but on farm improvements, which is the sign of a good farmer. “So which of those three guys is the good farmer? Certainly the guy who bleeds his place I haven't got a lot of time for.” This last statement essentially groups together the first and third categories of farmer—those with ability—as estimable and denigrates the second. Because the good farmer who is just starting out is less well off than the two at the mature stage of the developmental cycle, he ranks beneath them; yet he is a very good farmer (though it does not show yet), and on that basis alone he ought to rank above the landholder who “bleeds his place.”A

I asked this farmer if it made sense for me to ask who the wealthiest farmers in the district were, and he replied:

There are two brackets in this. [First is] the middle-aged man who has come up through the hard road whereby he had nothing, and he's got his turnover [stock numbers] up and his costs have disappeared into the background. One that immediately comes to mind there is Michael Robertson. And Richard Wood. They would be some of the better farmers in the district. They're doing very nicely. The other one [category] are probably very wealthy farmers, the likes of our neighbors the Johnsons [who are also at the mature stage of the developmental cycle] who live over in the next gully, who have a lot of land, a lot of sheep, but their performance is disastrous. But they don't spend anything on development. They suck everything they can out of the place. Their biggest bill would be the tax bill. And they would be getting a handsome living out of it, but they're spending nothing back on the place. So which is the best farmer? They [the Johnsons] probably make the most money [in the sense that they have more to spend on themselves because they do not divert much of the farm income to farm improvements], but the likes of Michael Robertson and Richard Wood would be the better farmers.

This statement indicates that there are two types of well-to-do farmers in the district. What they have in common is that both are at the mature stage of the developmental cycle. But they are distinguished by farming ability—an ability, moreover, that clearly ranks very high in this person's estimation.

Other comments are equally telling, for they reveal the strongly moral quality of people's judgments about farming ability. As one man put it:

There are farmers and there are farmers. There is a farm up the road, Dennis Braithwaite's—he's a gentleman [what I will describe below as a person of refinement], a nice chap—but on any farm he'd be bloody hopeless, and he is on his own. He'll never go ahead because he's not a farmer, or taught to be a farmer. He's only one person, and there's any amount [of them], all through New Zealand. It's bred in families—either they're good and will go ahead, or they'll be no damn good and be wasters.

I spoke to yet another farmer about differences in wealth among landholders; at one point he said:

I feel annoyed when I see land wasted, people who have inherited land that has just so much potential crying out to be used. If it's sitting there idle because he [the farmer] is slack, it makes me just a little bit cross, no matter

what that fellow's income is. He's probably as wealthy as anyone in the place [assuming he is at the mature stage of the developmental cycle], but I certainly don't admire him. That's my own view, and I think a lot of farmers would agree with me.

One farmer, who had recently bought additional land for his sons and who was now precariously in debt, echoed these moral sentiments in a pointed example: “Robert English is sitting on nine hundred acres of beautiful land. He's carrying I think two thousand ewes this year, and he thinks he's really in a big way. He should be carrying four thousand ewes on there, and could be. They just don't realize the potential they've got.” I commented that English had been mentioned to me as one of the best farmers in the district:

You see a bloody farm with land like he's got, being farmed as long as he's been [there], with massive brown-top [a form of grass that develops when stock numbers are low enough that the feed is not closely cropped]—well, it's not hard to make up your mind. It's just bad management. If you look at Michael Robertson's place, it's green year around—no brown-top on it, no rank grass at all…. When they say Robert English is a good farmer, what are they looking at?

I said that it must be his stock, to which this man replied: “Yes, he's got very good stock. He's a good stock man. But he's only got half enough of them. From the country's point of view he's a bloody menace, because he's holding up a place there that anyone else would run twice the number of stock on.”

I spoke to another farmer about Robert English, asking why he did not increase his stock numbers. His response was, “This makes me angry.”^[1] He then indicated that he does not like paying taxes any more than anyone else, but he does not believe that a person should hold back in farming solely to reduce his income taxes. Someone who does so is not working as hard as he could, and as a result the country suffers. New Zealand needs to produce more sheep for export than it does, but people like him are sitting on their backsides instead.

Others Evaluating Oneself

We can appreciate that most farmers display considerable concern about the way others regard their work. I asked one

fairly young landholder what he looked at besides sheep in identifying a good farmer. He said:

You can tell [if a person is a good farmer] by the type of pastures [he's got]. Basically, if he's got good stock his pastures will be good, too. I hope a lot of people are looking at this place and saying I'm a good farmer, but the pastures aren't very good, because I haven't been here long enough. But as long as they can see improvement. You can notice it when you drive around the country. You can see a farm change hands and watch it over a couple of years and see improvements—new fence here and there, better pastures, the stock look healthier, that sort of thing.

In the same vein, another farmer commented:

A few years ago, there were one or two farms that were horribly neglected. They've changed shape very rapidly. One is where Alisdair Mackenzie is—that was a desert, virtually [before Mackenzie took over the farm]. Another is where John Thompson [is]—behind [the aerial top-dresser's] hangar. It wasn't farmed before. I used to wonder why that place looked so poor, and the ones over the road looked so good, and I found out when it changed ownership. It was just lack of ability on the part of the occupier.

This statement not only criticizes the former owners; it also implies that the present ones are doing a better job and tacitly judges them on that basis.

In an interview with a husband and wife in the Midhurst district, I asked if the landholders in their area keep track of one another's farming methods. The man said:

Oh yes. We've all got a fair idea of how good we all are and how good our neighbors are. We all farm our neighbor's farm better than he can. I've got a little spot here [ a low hill] where I can stand up and look around. I always look around and say, “What's so-and-so doing, why's he doing that?” And no doubt everyone's doing the same with my place. So why should I give up [i.e., stop judging others]?

Wife: The trouble with our place is that we have quite a long boundary along [one of the roads], and quite a long boundary along [another road]. And of course everyone can see our mistakes. If George [her husband] drills a paddock anywhere near the roadside and misses some, it's there for everyone to see.

Husband: More people see us here than I see them up the road.

Later the farmer explained to me about the local ewe fair, where farmers from the district sell their excess stock:

The ewe fair [here] isn't much different from the Shipton sale,* except here everyone knows they're your sheep. At Shipton you leave no identification [on the sheep] at all—they're something you want to get rid of and not be associated with. You tear the ear tag off [the sheep] so no one can tell. At the [local] ewe fair everybody's sheep are numbered, their ages are listed, that sort of thing. But down there, Monday morning you get up and say, “I think I'll take those twenty wethers down to Shipton,” put them in a truck and rush down, contact your [stock] agent, and say, “Will you sell these?” He rushes them into a pen and that's it. They're sold by the number on the pen.

The Hierarchy of Ability

We have seen in these comments some disagreement about what constitutes good farming, which raises the issue of how much consensus exists on the matter. The comments about Robert English are illustrative, for while some regard him as one of the best farmers in the district, others argue that he is a “bloody menace” to the country because of his farming methods. Do most people agree on a general ranking of landholders in judging the quality of farms and livestock, and can coherent standards be identified for such assessments? Or do the landholders' evaluations only reveal a pattern of fractiousness and disagreement?

Indeed, there is greater coherence and consensus than the comments about Robert English might suggest. People agree as to the poor farmers in the district, but not the good ones, largely because there are two schools of thought on how a person should farm and, hence, two sets of criteria for assessing the quality of farms, live-stock, and ability. What is more, a majority of farmers occupy positions somewhere in the middle of the hierarchy. Some are at the mature stage of the developmental cycle but do not stand out as either particularly capable or incapable, while others are relatively young farmers whose ability is not yet clear. Some, too, are newcomers who recently sold property elsewhere and purchased land locally; because it takes a number of years for a landholding family to prove itself, their reputations are likewise still uncertain.

I begin with those who are at or near the bottom of the hierarchy. The case of Jack Wagner is illustrative. He and his family (a wife and adult son) are reclusive, and even though they live in a very tight-knit subsection of South Downs, virtually no one there has more than slight contact with them. One farmer who lives nearby said that he is “not quite sure what the story is” on the Wagners—by which he meant what is troubling them and how they survive—because no one really knows them. Wagner's land is also located on an out-of-the-way road; consequently, few people have the opportunity to observe his property firsthand. Yet his name came up repeatedly in the course of my research, and always in the same context. People are fascinated by him, in part because of his family's reclusiveness and in part because he is such a poor farmer; he provides a reference point for the bottom of the scale.

Wagner moved to the district a number of years ago, apparently after experiencing financial or other difficulties on a farm that he owned elsewhere in New Zealand. Several years before my arrival he ran into difficulties on the land he now occupies as well, and in response he sold all of his livestock, used the money to pay his debts, and then did virtually nothing with the land. One of his neighbors told me that Wagner now has about three hundred sheep—this on a property of over two thousand acres of somewhat mixed quality that should carry several thousand ewes if properly farmed. He cuts his own firewood, slaughters a sheep now and then for his family's use, and raises his own vegetables. Because of his life-style he does not need much money, but when he does he simply harvests the grass seed from several of his paddocks for sale to seed buyers. Wagner's case reveals how forgiving the system is in New Zealand, and why the farmers in South Downs place such an emphasis on farming practices in assessing one another. Because a person whose debts are paid does not have to try too hard to survive, the range of differences in farming practices is very wide.

Yet how could a person with so little ability or drive have achieved the mature stage of the developmental cycle? The explanation, surely, is in part that a farmer's interests change during his lifetime; he may thus eventually, once his debts are cleared, choose to reduce the level and quality of his work to leave time for other pursuits. Moreover, the economic pressure on farming can vary. During the early 1950s, the price of wool was fairly high, while land prices were low; the person starting out then was therefore under significantly less pres-

sure than the man starting out in the early 1980s. A mediocre farmer who acquired his land in the early 1950s and fared reasonably well did not, by the 1980s, need to maintain a high level of performance if he had a low level of debt. This is what Helen perhaps had in mind when she commented on those who had their properties “handed to them on a plate.”

The Joneses are another case that was frequently mentioned as a striking example of poor farming practices. In the early 1960s, Oliver Jones began buying farms adjacent to his own in order to have sufficient land to hand over to his five children. By 1981 he had nearly six thousand acres in a single block, and all together his holdings included six houses and four wool sheds. The Joneses run about ten thousand sheep on the land, much of which is very hilly and rough but suitable sheep country nevertheless. They have done little to improve the land (indeed, they have allowed large portions to become covered with gorse), they do little fertilizing, and many of the fences are old and dilapidated. The stock are also thought to be poor: they are relatively lightweight, the wool is not very thick, and little effort is made to improve the mob by selective breeding and culling. The property supports five separate households, including the elder Joneses and four of the married sons and their families.

Relatively early in my research, before I learned about the Joneses' reputation, I interviewed one of their neighbors who is widely considered an exceptionally good farmer. One purpose of the interview was to find out about the families in the immediate area; with the help of a detailed map, my host described for me each property and household in turn. He finished telling me about one farmer who lived nearby, and then turned to the Joneses, saying: “Then we go across the road, and strange things happened, because when I came here in 1959 I was surrounded by nine neighbors. Now Jones, old Mr. Jones, Oliver Jones, owned the place at the bottom of the road, and [he] continued buying [the] neighbors' property until he moved right throughout the whole road.” Because the Jones family acquired so much land, I commented that they must be a local success story; he replied: “Very successful. But basically he bought adjoining farms only on capital gains. It wasn't purchased out of liquid cash, or savings, reserves.”

I suspect that my host's comment that the Joneses were “very successful” was intended to avoid openly contradicting me, because his very next words indicated that this success was not particularly

laudable. It was a result of land inflation, in that the increasing value of farmland made it possible for Jones to borrow against what he already had in order to buy more. The family's “success” was not due to ability, and it did not serve to elevate them in people's estimation. What defined their stature, rather, was the poor quality of their farm and stock, as immediately became clear:

Again, it's steep property, basically sheep, very much lacking in topdressing, management work. It's surprising because when that land was farmed by individual farmers [before Jones purchased it] it produced a lot; now that it's become one big enterprise it's slipped a way back in total production. No topdressing, no [new] fencing, everything being taken off and very little being put back. That's basically what's happened. This one place the Joneses have [he pointed to a spot on the map], if there was a little more effort and money spent back into the place it would double its carrying capacity. It's a fine example of country reverting back to brown-top through lack of management.

Whenever I asked people to list the most well-to-do landholders in the district, the Joneses were never mentioned, and when I asked why I was told it is because of their farming practices. The implication is that if the Joneses spent less money buying land and more on improving their property (which, after all, is what a good farmer would do), they would be considered wealthier people.

One characteristic of both the Wagners and the Joneses is that they are outside the mainstream of community life. Whereas the Wagners are reclusive, the Joneses belong to a fundamentalist religious sect and virtually never participate in secular community organizations or events. While one might assume that poor farming practices are judged more harshly if the family in question stands outside the local social life, this is probably not so, because other farmers who participate quite actively are also thought to exhibit very little farming ability. Dennis Braithwaite is one example. His father was a property-holder in the district since before World War II, and Dennis himself acquired the farm in the 1950s. He has done little to improve the land, his stock are not thought to be very good, he is said not to show very good business judgment, and he does not work very hard. He is, in fact, one of the “bloody hopeless” farmers cited above. Yet he is a likable person, and both he and his wife belong to a number of local organizations.

If a correlation exists between lack of community involvement and judgments about poor farming ability, the reason is more likely

that the families outside the mainstream are less affected by local norms regarding good and bad farming. People like the Wagners and Joneses do not feel the sting of local criticism to the same extent that others do, nor do they seek to achieve local respectability through their farms. For them, the community is not a major reference group.

At the upper end of the scale, as I have mentioned, two competing definitions of the good farmer come into play. There is, of course, agreement on a number of matters, such as the criteria for judging the quality of a farmer's stock, the condition of fences and wool sheds, and the quality of paddocks. Standing on a hillside overlooking the small valley, one can easily see the differences among farms simply by noting the color of the grass: some farms are a rich, vibrant green, while others are a much duller hue with a tinge of brown or rust. Where the disagreements lie is in judgments about the relative importance of these features.

The farmers sometimes refer to the two schools of thought as progressive and conservative farming. In essence, the conservative farmer emphasizes the quality of livestock—he strives to produce better sheep—whereas the progressive farmer stresses quantity—his goal is to produce more of them.

The conservative farmer believes that healthy, robust sheep are more profitable than smaller ones of lower quality. Not only do larger sheep bring in more income when sold for the meat because they weigh more, but they produce more wool as well. Healthy ewes also produce healthier lambs, more of which survive. The conservative farmer is careful not to allow his farm to become overstocked, because if the animals have to compete for feed they do not put on as much weight. Thus he engages in what is called “set stocking,” which means that he distributes the animals more or less evenly over a large portion of the farm, and he does not move them to fresh paddocks very often. The conservative farmer, too, given the somewhat unpredictable weather patterns of South Downs, is wary of both summer drought and severe winters. The most critical periods are late winter, when the pregnant ewes need substantial amounts of fodder, and lambing time in early spring. At these times poor weather can easily have devastating effects on the paddocks. The conservative farmer therefore keeps his stock numbers low enough that he will not run short of feed, even in a year of extreme weather. Another element of the conservative farmer's operation is the raising

of winter feed for his sheep. Every year he cultivates several paddocksful of swedes, which in mid to late winter are uprooted; the sheep are then allowed to forage. The growing of winter crops means that the farmer maintains a certain amount of farm machinery, including a tractor and plow, and during part of the summer he is engaged in tractor work. The conservative farmer is also conscientious (if he is any good at all) about selective breeding and culling, punctilious about providing the sheep with drenches when needed, and so on—issues on which he would find no disagreement from the more progressive farmer.

The progressive theory of sheep farming is called “all-grass wintering” because it rejects the cultivation of swedes for winter feed: the sheep, rather, should be fed on grass year-round, with some supplemental hay if needed. The progressive farmer divides his farm into numerous small paddocks (which means he has to build more fences, or perhaps install electric ones), into which the sheep are rotated every few days and packed in fairly tightly. Hence, the progressive method is sometimes referred to as rotational grazing, to contrast it with the set-stocking method of the conservative farmer. The underlying principle of rotational grazing is that the sheep eat all the grass in a given paddock, literally to the ground, before they are allowed through the gate into the next one; the grass is then left undisturbed to resprout. This system produces a better stand of feed in the long run, and the heavy concentration of sheep droppings has a highly salutary effect on the grass when it grows back. Still, the sheep are forced to compete for food, though the careful farmer does not allow this to jeopardize the animals' health. In the final analysis, then, the progressive farmer strives to produce sheep that are as healthy and as high in quality as the conservative farmer's, but less robust; all-grass wintering enables him to raise greater numbers of sheep, it gives no opportunity for the appearance of brown-top, and it results in more luxuriant paddocks. In evaluating another farmer's ability, therefore, it stands to reason that the progressive farmer pays as much attention to the condition of his paddocks as his sheep.

The method of all-grass wintering was perfected elsewhere in New Zealand and is fairly new to South Downs. The Ministry of Agriculture is one of its principal advocates, regarding it as an important means for increasing New Zealand's sheep and wool production. The farmers who practice the technique in South Downs typically are relative newcomers from other areas, particularly Southland, where

it is already well established, and younger farmers who have no choice but to increase their stock numbers to the fullest. The conservative farmers, in contrast, are typically people who have farmed in the South Downs area for a long time and, now at or near the mature stage of the developmental cycle, can afford to cut back on production. Some of them produce excellent stock and have well-developed farms and so are considered excellent farmers; others, however, are viewed as less successful, some even as “hopeless.”

South Downs has long had a reputation for resisting change, and the progressive farmers see the persistence of conservative farming as a manifestation of this. In their view, the reason these practices continue is that conservative methods are less demanding both physically and intellectually: progressive methods require that the farmer pay greater attention to the condition of each paddock and that he calculate and manage the cycle of sheep rotations with extreme care. As one progressive farmer commented, all-grass wintering “takes more management, work. You move sheep constantly, shifting electric fences. You plan ahead, making sure your grass is going to last. It's harder work. But with reduced stock numbers [i.e., conservative methods] you only have to open the gates and let the sheep take care of themselves. And you can produce good stock this way.”

I noted above that some people feel that the conservative farmers are a “bloody menace” because they help to lower New Zealand's total volume of exports, but such a strongly negative evaluation is not universally voiced by the progressive landholders. The younger progressives in particular tend to be less judgmental. One of them said: “A conservative farmer who is young could be looked down on by his fellow young farmers. A conservative farmer who is fifty-five, sixty, and still farming well, the same way he did twenty years ago, would be quite acceptable.”

The conservative farmers contend that their progressive counter-parts take extraordinary risks by maintaining such high stock numbers. The area has not had a particularly severe winter in recent years, and when it finally comes (they argue), those who practice all-grass wintering will face economic disaster. The conservative farmers are impressed with the quality of the paddocks that the rotational grazers produce, but not with the quality of their sheep or the chances they take. If the more critical progressive farmer thinks the conservative is a bloody menace, the conservative thinks the progressive is

a bloody fool. A stock agent (whose sympathies are with the conservatives) said:

I don't go along with the idea that someone like Robert English could carry more stock. Some people have a different way of running a farm than others. They want it stocked to the hilt, they never have any feed, their stock are not good—they're poor—and then you get the likes of Robert English. He knows what the place will carry…. We're going through a cycle of easy years—plenty of rain and at the right time, and we've had feed in front of us all the way through the year. We can well come to a period of dry years, and you haven't got the same feed…. The Robert English type of bloke, he's always got feed, and his stock are always good as a result….  There's a lot of Robert Englishes about, who have good stock. If he were to put on more sheep he could lower his production from the ones he's got. This is a controversial one, but—you might have heard of all-grass wintering? For one, I'm against that. I'm not in favor of that at all in this area. There's very few probably that will agree with me, but we'll wait and see. I still think the chap that grows the swedes and feeds good hay and has got the numbers of stock such that he's always got a bit of feed in front of him, I think his lambs will be better and his wool weights will be better and his whole income will be better than the guy that's got a whole lot of sheep jammed into a paddock of mud that's been fenced off with a little electric wire, and the first two hundred [sheep] that get in get the nice green pick and eat all that, and the twenty-eight hundred behind them—it's all gone by the time they get in…. I'm not saying [all-grass wintering] is not good in some places, but in my opinion it's not the thing to do in this area…. The [progressive] farmers aren't thinking ahead. They're saying last year was good, and this year was good, so we won't put the crops in [i.e., swedes], we'll just do it the easy way. My experience in life is you don't get things the easy way…. Just looking back at these fellows who are doing things the right way—they're the best in the long run. A bit of hard work doesn't hurt anybody.

I asked one conservative farmer if he was using an all-grass wintering program. He said:

Not really. I believe it's something you've got to be very careful with. It's all right with mild winters. We haven't seen any severe winters for quite a few…. But the day could come again when we do get them…. The worst time is a month before lambing, and this is the time you've got to have turnips or swedes. You could really be caught out if you don't have them. A ewe with a lamb inside her needs plenty of feed, especially to keep warm. You've got to have something [i.e., feed] just at the end of winter. It's essential. Some of these people will be hurt very, very badly one of these years.

A Bounded System.

I mentioned before that the local hierarchy of farmers is a bounded system, with certain people included and others not. This boundedness reflects the fact that the local farmers constitute a reference group: those who are part of the local hierarchy identify with the local group and derive much of their self-identity from it. Thus, it is possible to describe the boundaries of the reference group in terms of several principles of exclusion.

First, a few landholders actively exclude themselves. The Wagners, known for both their reclusiveness and poor farming practices, are a case in point. For them, the local community is not a primary arena of social achievement or an important source of personal identity. Note, however, that their withdrawal is one-sided. They may pay little or no attention to what others think of their farming methods, but the fact is, they are assessed by others and on that basis gain a prominent place within the hierarchy. The Wagners, of course, are an extreme case of self-exclusion. A few other landholding families exhibit the same pattern but in more limited form: they remain outside the mainstream of the community, participating minimally in local events and being ignorant of some of the most basic information (such as differences in the quality of local farms) that is needed to evaluate other landholding families. Yet they, too (like the Wagners), are included in the system by others.

Second, as I discussed in chapter 3, nonlandholders are excluded not only because they do not have land, but also because they do not know enough about farming to make informed judgments based on the relevant criteria.

A third principle reflects the geographical boundaries of the community: a farm must be within the locality to be included. This geographical principle produces a striking pattern, which is that most farmers know a great deal about local farms, livestock, and ability but comparatively little about farmers situated just over the line in the next community.

Consider the relationship between South Downs and Kennerleigh, which share a common boundary. Unlike Midhurst and the Glassford region, Kennerleigh is not linked to South Downs but is regarded as a separate community altogether. I interviewed one South Downs farmer about community boundaries, using a detailed

map; with his finger he traced one of the little-used roads that run across the community boundary and into the district of Kennerleigh. He said: “Andrew Narwold [a name listed on the map], definitely Kennerleigh. Raymond Tait [the name next to Narwold's], definitely South Downs. That's the line. We know these people [pointing to the South Downs side of the line], but not those people there [pointing to the opposite side of the line].” I queried him about the community boundary along another, equally little-used road. I asked him if the Seawards (whom someone else had told me were over the line in the next community) were part of South Downs. He replied: “No. I know them quite well, but through friends outside of South Downs.”

I engaged in the same exercise with another farmer, who was discussing yet a third little-used road that also extends across the community boundary into Kennerleigh:

The road drops very fast [after Stewart's place], straight into Kennerleigh…. [These] two farmers on the other side before you're on the flat—these I don't know much about because they tend to move toward [the subprovincial city of Jackson, which serves all of these small communities] for shopping and everything. They don't join in with this side of the hill, with South Downs. The community ends basically with these people, Murdoch and Stewart. We may see [the people on the other side of the boundary] at cattle sales and so forth—you may have a conversation with them for ten or fifteen minutes. [You] might talk farming. But we wouldn't pass their gates or they our gates more than maybe once in twelve months. We're not really up with what they're doing because they tend to go to meetings and whatever in another district. They're not part of the South Downs area.

The boundaries between South Downs and its linked communities present a different picture. These boundaries are as precise on the map (and on the ground) as the ones between South Downs and Kennerleigh, but in another sense they are less so, in that the farmers in the three linked communities tend to know something about one another. For example, while the Midhurst farmers do not know the names or ability of every landholder in South Downs, they do know about the best and the worst. I asked one Midhurst landholder if he knows the reputations of all the farmers in his home community. He said: “Yes, yes. And the same for the South Downs area. I know all the better farmers, and the bad ones (in South Downs). Because it comes down the grapevine—through the lamb drafter or someone

like this.” I asked him if he knows every farmer in South Downs, and he said, “No, not every farmer, no way.” I then asked him about Braemar, a subdistrict of Kennerleigh that defines the southern border of Midhurst, the side opposite from South Downs. In strictly physical distance, Braemar is as close to this farmer's property as South Downs, but Midhurst and Braemar are thought to be unrelated. He said:

I'm completely lost in Braemar, completely lost. After the Allan Road [the boundary line between Braemar and Midhurst]. I wouldn't know them [the Braemar farmers] by sight. Whereas in South Downs—we have our lamb fair [stock sale] in South Downs, and this type of thing. We have nothing to do with Braemar as far as sales and that type of thing are concerned. I'd hardly know a half dozen cockies in Braemar.

I asked him how well he knows another district of Kennerleigh, the one that forms the eastern boundary of Midhurst. He said: “The same [as Braemar]. I know one or two [farmers] over there, but not farming abilities or anything like that. It's a completely different world, really.”

These statements contain an implicit explanation of why farmers know the landholders of their own community and of their linked communities better than those of Kennerleigh: because of differences in the frequency of interaction. Farmers who go to the same community events and stock sales, have the same stock agents, shop at the same stores, are more likely to know (or know about) one another than those who do not.

My account of the hierarchy of ability in this chapter suggests another explanation, however, which is that a farmer has a qualitatively different interest in the landholders of his own community than in those of other districts. The farmers in a neighboring, unrelated community are part of a different social hierarchy; consequently, a person pays less attention to them and to the information that is available about their farms and livestock. The boundaries between unrelated communities are, in fact, boundaries between reference groups. This does not deny the importance of such events as stock sales and facilities like grocery stores and schools for bringing people into contact. But these avenues simply facilitate the operation of the status system by allowing the dissemination of information about local farmers in whom community members are vitally interested.

Although the linked communities of Glassford, Midhurst, and South Downs are distinct reference groups, at a higher level they are also conjoined. The reputations of genuinely outstanding and truly poor farmers spread throughout the region encompassed by these communities. The concept of reputation, I suggest, is at the heart of what the linked localities have in common. A farm family draws its identity primarily from its standing in the home district; yet it can have a wider reputation and occupy a position in the broader status system of linked communities as well.

Chapter Seven
The Criterion of Refinement:
The 1920s

The conceptual systems that I have dealt with so far are based on what people do for a living. I turn now to one that refers to life-style, or to the element of refinement in life-style.

The hierarchies of occupation and refinement are alike in that they provide general, as opposed to situational, criteria for assessing people. That is, both of them tacitly inform people's judgments about one another in virtually any context—at football games and school events, in the shops and on the street. In this sense, the two systems contrast with other principles of very limited range, such as the ones used in evaluating a person's ability at lawn bowls: bowling ability is important within the context of the bowling club, but not beyond. The systems of occupation and refinement are also alike in being comprehensive: they apply to everyone in the community, even children. A child is assessed on the basis of what the father does for a living and in terms of the roughness or refinement that is thought to characterize the family.

Because of the generality and comprehensiveness of the principles of occupation and refinement, people assume that they are closely linked—that, for example, a higher occupational standing necessarily means greater refinement. To a degree this assumption is borne out: people who are considered refined tend to hold occupations that rank fairly high, whereas I know of no one in a low-ranking job who is thought of as refined. Yet there are significant discrepancies

as well. For example, some landholders are generally thought to be very good farmers and relatively prosperous, but also very rough; conversely, some very refined landholders are considered very poor farmers and not at all prosperous. No workers are considered refined, but not all are among the truly rough, either; many, certainly, are ranked as less rough than some of the well-regarded farmers.

The defining criteria of roughness and refinement do not produce two discrete bodies of people, of course, for most individuals fall somewhere in between. Thus we find a gradation of people, the poles being occupied by a small number of individuals who best represent the attributes of each category. Local people may also disagree about the placement of a given person, placing different emphasis on the several criteria by which roughness and refinement are defined.

The features marking roughness and refinement constitute a semiotic system that anyone who shares the requisite conceptual framework can read. The actions and qualities of a newcomer in the district are tacitly assessed by these criteria, as are those of the maturing son or daughter of a rough farmer: is the child turning out as rough as the father and mother, or is he or she showing signs of moving toward the middle of the scale?

Norbert Elias remarks that it is difficult to summarize all that Europeans regard as “civilization” because virtually everything can “be done in a ‘civilized’ or an ‘uncivilized’ way.”^[1] The same applies to the distinction between roughness and refinement—the latter being associated historically with the European notion of civilization, as Elias's study shows. Speech patterns are illustrative. The speech of men and women in South Downs who are considered refined sounds somewhat more English than that of other people, whereas a truly rough person speaks with what many consider a coarse New Zealand accent. A refined person exhibits manners that are considered more “cultivated” than those of a rough person: a refined man is more likely to stand and shake hands when being introduced, for example. Refinement is associated with a certain bearing, in that refined men are said to have “presence.” The homes of the refined are usually furnished with inherited antique furniture, and refined families serve dinner on china with silver cutlery, whereas the furniture, dish service, and cutlery of the rough are considered (by the refined, at least) to be common. If a rough family invites guests for dinner on Sunday afternoon, the table might be set with

oven-proof plastic dishes and inexpensive stainless steel cutlery that does not match. Clothing styles differ between the rough and the refined. Although the work clothes of refined landholders may be indistinguishable from those of even the roughest farmers, when the elite men dress for private social occasions or such public events as school ceremonies they wear suits that are identical in style and quality to the suits worn by urban lawyers, doctors, and well-to-do businessmen. By contrast, men at the rough end of the scale do not wear suits very often, and the ones they own tend to be considered (by the refined) as old, out of style, and ill-fitting. Roughness entails distinctive patterns of social intercourse as well. Community members who qualify as rough do not engage easily in what they consider polite small talk, nor do they exhibit the refined person's idea of social graces at public events; thus, they tend to appear awkward or ill-at-ease on these occasions. The behavior of the refined man or woman at the same event seems, to the rough, very “smooth”—in the negative sense of unnatural, affected, or pretentious. Pub behavior is perhaps most frequently mentioned when characterizing someone as rough; rough people are said to go to the pub more often and to drink more heavily than others, and certainly more than those who are considered refined.

The contrast between the rough and the refined is overtly manifested in three contexts in particular. The first is public events, such as local dances or public meetings. Because those at the two ends of the continuum follow different patterns of casual intercourse, they tend not to mix but rather form into separate small groups and talk among themselves. The second context is the pub. The rough community members generally go to the noisier and more boisterous of the two pubs in the township, the bottom pub, whereas the more refined usually go to the lounge bar of the top pub. Similarly, although farmers tend to go to the top pub and working people to the bottom one, farmers who are rough prefer the bottom pub and the company of truck drivers, shearers, council workers, and the like. And the third context is the two historical societies in the community: the one associated with the more refined community members concentrates on “highbrow” matters, such as diaries, old clothes, and photographs, whereas the one in which the rougher people participate focuses on old machinery, and especially farm machinery, which the club members restore.

Hierarchy and Egalitarianism

The conceptual order of the rough and the refined is interwoven with several other systems of thought, and it is important to present this entire complex together. To summarize what follows, social hierarchy was greater before World War II than it is today in South Downs, for the postwar period saw a growing emphasis on egalitarianism. As a result, the ritual forms that traditionally expressed and maintained social distance have been relaxed.

The distancing forms that existed in the past were closely linked with the distinction between the rough and the refined, for people of refinement actively used them to set themselves apart from the rough. In South Downs, and perhaps generally throughout rural Canterbury and Otago, moreover, it is thought that people of English background tend more than the Scots to maintain social distance in this way. In other words, according to local belief, the English are more hierarchical (local people would say more snobbish), whereas the Scots are more egalitarian (or, to local people, more down-to-earth). Because Canterbury was founded by the English and Otago by the Scots, people in South Downs (and, I suspect, elsewhere) generally think of Otago as more egalitarian than Canterbury; and since egalitarianism has become more pronounced in the district since World War II, one can say likewise that South Downs has become progressively more Scottish in form.

I begin my account by examining the hierarchy of wealth in South Downs in about the 1920s.

A Hierarchy of Wealth

The narrowing of social distance has been accompanied by a considerable narrowing of the (apparent) range of differences in wealth as well, a fact manifested by changes in the use of domestic help. The wages of a working person today are high enough that even the most affluent family cannot afford to hire workers for nonproductive purposes. While hiring someone to help with the farm work may make sense if the additional labor pays for itself,

no one can afford to hire servants or gardeners—the only exception being a few landholding families who hire a woman for several hours a week to clean the house. Not only are the wealthiest households no longer as wealthy as they were in the 1920s, but working people are no longer quite as poor or as desperate for work.

By contrast, in the 1920s a number of households in South Downs employed substantial full-time domestic staffs. Most notable was the household of Edward Freshney, which was served by four women inside the house and a crew of three men who maintained the grounds.^[2] In the 1850s Edward Freshney's father was already a prosperous merchant and businessman in Jackson, and by the time he died in the 1890s he was very wealthy. In addition to his urban business interests, he helped finance the purchase of a number of runs in Canterbury, and he himself had a financial stake in several rural properties. Edward, too, was very successful and acquired several estates. In the 1920s Edward, then over sixty years old, lived on a large farm located less than two and a half miles from the South Downs township, or but a few minutes away by automobile.

The three full-time gardeners cared for six acres of formal grounds consisting of broad lawns, a rose garden, two grass tennis courts, a third court surfaced with tarmac, a pond, and a complex of paths winding through tree-covered plantings of azaleas and rhododendrons. The head gardener received his orders each morning, on bended knee, from Mrs. Freshney. The inside staff included a house maid, parlor maid, cook, and scullery maid. They were up by 6:30 A.M. and served breakfast to the family in bed at 9:00, the food being served on copper trays with small lamps to keep the food hot. Lunch was served to the family at 1:00; the food was first set out in the dining room, whereupon the parlor maid went directly to Mrs. Freshney to announce that “Lunch is served, please, madam.” The staff then retired to the kitchen to eat a meal altogether different from what was served to the family. At 7:00 P.M . the parlor maid went to the smoking room to announce dinner; once the family was seated in the dining room she began serving each person individually from silver trays that had been placed on the sideboard. She remained in the dining room, standing, until the last course was served. The inside staff finished their work at about 9:00 P.M . The house maid and parlor maid were responsible for cleaning the house, and whatever spare time they had during the day was spent at such incidental tasks as cleaning windows and silver. The physical space of both

house and grounds served to maintain the separation of family and workers, for the maids were never allowed into the front portion of the house except in their capacity as maids, and a separate road for tradesmen went directly to the back of the house.

Because Edward Freshney was virtually retired in the 1920s, he gave little attention to the farm. He wore coat and tie from morning to night, and his main physical activity during the day was to walk to a nearby spring to collect fresh water for his whiskey. Stiles were built over the fences along the way for his benefit. The farm itself was devoted primarily to sheep, grain crops, and a few dairy cattle. A man who lived on an adjacent property at the time reports that the farm crew comprised about fifteen men: at least six to ten teamsters, several shepherds, and one or two cowboys who tended the milk cows. Many of these men lived in the bunkhouse (as distinct from the “big house,” where the Freshneys lived), and they ate in a cookhouse that was served by a full-time cook (a different one, of course, from the woman who cooked for the family). During at least part of the 1920s a manager was hired to oversee the day-to-day operations of the farm, although at some point in either the 1920s or early 1930s Freshney's son, Hugh, assumed that role. Hugh wore work clothes and spent most of the day on the job, but the people I spoke to unanimously affirmed that he did not engage in manual work. His work clothes, in any case, were “tidy” and did not become soiled by the end of the day. And one person who worked for him in the 1930s, when the family was experiencing financial difficulties, said that at shearing time Hugh might drive the truck carrying the morning or afternoon tea from the cookhouse to the wool shed, but he was not likely to participate directly in the shearing operation. The work of bringing the sheep to the shearing shed or moving them out again once they were shorn was left to the hired men.

It is more difficult to reconstruct the everyday lives of the poor than of the rich, since the patterns and events associated with the well-to-do attracted greater notice. People, however, agree that there were some very poor families in South Downs during the 1920s and that life could be hard for them. The poorest men of the district worked as laborers, a large number of them, periodically at least, for the county council. There were virtually no paved roads in the 1920s, so each year large portions of roadway needed to be reshingled. A dray was driven into the river bed, and a yard or more of shingle was shoveled onto the wagon by hand. Although a screening device

came into use at some point in the 1920s or 1930s, the larger rocks were picked out and discarded manually. The dray then was driven to the section of road where the shingle was needed, and it was shoveled, by hand, from the wagon, after which a horse-drawn grader completed the job. Shingle gangs were on the road throughout the year, but they were busiest during the fall. It was usual for the men to live in horse-drawn huts Monday through Friday nights, since they were too far from home to return to their families each day. The huts, needless to say, were small, cold, and uncomfortable.

Another form of unskilled labor was rabbiting. Rabbits were a scourge on the sheep runs, and so the landholders hired men to travel over their properties by foot killing as many as possible. A person usually did this during winter, when other jobs were scarce. The weather was wet and cold, and typically the rabbiter lived alone in a cramped hut.

Throughout much of the year a farmer could drive into town and find a group of men eager for work cutting gorse hedges, digging drainage ditches, building fences, and the like, but in summer the demand for labor was so high that workers could become scarce. The laborer might work for a while on a chaff cutter, which chopped fodder for horses, or he might join a gang of shearers. Harvesting also required considerable manpower. Then, too, a worker might find employment at the wool scour, which required up to thirty men at peak season. As the newly baled wool arrived at the facility the bales were opened and the wool sorted into lots according to quality. After being cleaned in large vats of hot soapy water, the fleece was rinsed, spun in a large cylinder to remove most of the moisture, and laid out to dry in the sun, whereupon it was rebaled. Most of this work was done by manual labor.

Some men were able to find permanent jobs. Farms always had horses, and many needed at least one hired teamster, who was in the stable at 6:00 in the morning for grooming and did not turn the horses out again until 8:00 that evening. Most farm families also had at least two cows, and many had ten or twelve, whose milk was collected regularly by trucks from creameries in nearby towns; since milking and separating were done by hand, most farmers needed at least one cowboy to do the work. This hired hand also tended the vegetable garden, chopped wood, looked after the chickens, and carried out other odd jobs. Some farm families took on a woman to

cook, and some hired a girl or young woman to take care of the pigs and chickens, and perhaps to milk the cows.

It is difficult to document how these people lived, but clearly many of them were thought to be very poor. One farmer commented:

When I went to school in South Downs [in the 1920s], by Jove there were some poor people. Some really poor people. They did laboring work round about, whatever they could get. One family lived opposite the doctor's, a little wee house. Then they built a new house; Fred Banner lives there—it was his people I'm talking about. When they shifted they borrowed a horse and dray to shift the little furniture they had, and the children were saying, “We're leaving the rabbit hutch at last, we've lived in the rabbit hutch long enough.” There were six children in that family.

Not only the working people were poor in the 1920s; some of the farm families were in nearly as bad a state, particularly those who acquired farms through the government program to place returned servicemen on the land after World War I. These farmers were often undercapitalized, and their properties inadequate. As an index, the blacksmith in South Downs was often paid in kind by certain farmers who were always desperately short of cash.

The Wealthy Landholders

My purpose in discussing the Freshneys on the one hand and the poor on the other is to demonstrate the range of differences in both wealth and material conditions that existed in South Downs during the 1920s. I want now to shift my focus to the network of families at the upper end of the social spectrum, in order to reveal how social distance or hierarchy was expressed symbolically.

The oral history that I collected on this social elite suggests that its members were distinguished on the basis of three criteria: wealth, refinement, and what I call the values of hierarchy. The Freshneys are illustrative, for not only were they perhaps the wealthiest family in the district, but they were also considered the most refined. People thought of them as well educated, for example, and Mrs. Freshney took it upon herself to provide culture for the community at large by offering such events as violin recitals in the public hall in the

township. She was also thought to set the standard for good manners in the region. Finally, the Freshneys placed as great an emphasis on social hierarchy in interpersonal relations as anyone in the district—some would describe them as “snobbish,” not “down-to-earth.” For example, no one but a small circle of personal friends and social equals referred to Edward Freshney as anything other than “Mr. Freshney,” while he referred to his workers and other social inferiors by surname; and no one but people they considered their social equals ate with them in their dining room.

This last point is crucial. The Freshneys exhibited what I call the two-table pattern, by which I mean eating arrangements that expressed social distance by segregating family members from their workers at mealtime. Whereas the family ate in the dining room of the big house, the outside staff ate in the cookhouse and the inside staff in the kitchen. The workers even ate different food from what was served to the family.

This pattern cannot be explained simply as a matter of idiosyncratic snobbery. When Hugh Freshney began managing the property, he and his wife lived in a cottage that was separate from the big house, and they adhered to the two-table pattern as well, hiring both a maid and a cook, both of whom ate in the kitchen, not with the family. Yet Hugh was generally thought of as very kind and considerate—a “very friendly, good person.” Clearly, the two-table pattern of this household did not spring from personal qualities of contemptuousness or disdainfulness.

Two other people came close to the Freshneys in wealth. These were two brothers, Jim and Harry Donaldson, who were still bachelors in the 1920s, both between about twenty-five and forty years of age.^[3] One had served in World War I and had taken charge of his property in South Downs soon after the armistice; the other must have moved onto his property in the community at about the same time. Although the Donaldson brothers had been raised in another district, their father, Davie Donaldson, had owned several runs in the South Downs area for a number of years. The father had come to New Zealand from Scotland in the 1860s to work as a shepherd (he brought two sheep dogs with him on the ship for this purpose) and was hired almost immediately by a large run-holder. It is reasonable to assume that Donaldson had very little money at the time and that he exhibited what his employer would have considered rough, working-class patterns. Yet Davie Donaldson was both lucky

and astute, and before the end of the century he had made a fortune (and considerable fame) as a sheep dealer. He also invested in land, eventually owning or co-owning several very large runs.

Davie Donaldson did not marry until the mid 1880s, when he was already fairly successful; his children were thus raised in an environment of wealth. The family lived in a very large home with servants, and Jim and Harry were educated at a nearby boarding school. The boys therefore had a mixed background: although their father had been a poor and rough Scots shepherd, they were at home in the world of New Zealand's elite. These qualities were reflected in the adult lives of the two sons, one of whom was more genteel and placed a greater emphasis on hierarchy than the other.

Jim, Davie's first son, employed eight or nine men on his farm, which was run by a manager; thus he had very little to do with the daily operation of the property himself. He wore coat and tie as everyday wear and traveled overseas often, primarily to Britain. His house was large, surrounded by some five acres of elaborate grounds that were maintained by either three or four full-time gardeners. One person described the grounds as the “showplace” of the district. It was said that Jim Donaldson and the Freshneys competed over the beauty and style of their gardens.

Jim was considered genteel, if not as refined as the Freshneys. One man remarked that “Jim was the gentleman,” implicitly comparing him with his brother, Harry. Another said: “Jim was a more refined type [than his brother]. Harry was a rougher type. Jim was a much more genteel sort of person—he had Strathclyde [the name of his farm] and a beautiful garden.” As yet another put it: “Jim Donaldson was a great friend of mine. He was a more cultured chap—he was fond of music and he loved flowers.” Jim often came back from his overseas trips with new ideas for his gardens, someone else noted; for example, on one occasion he returned with the idea of building flower boxes outside his windows. The implication was that aesthetics—in his case, gardening—occupied a central place in Jim's life.

Jim kept two tables. Even though he lived alone, he had three servants in the house, and after his meal was served to him in the dining room they took theirs in the kitchen. He was also considered rather distant from ordinary people; one working-class woman said, “Mr. Donaldson would drive out in his big car, [and] he wouldn't even look at you as he drove past.” I asked another woman who had

been in service with a well-to-do family in South Downs during the 1920s if Jim Donaldson stressed class distinctions. She replied: “Oh, yes. Not quite as much as Lawton [a very elite man from another district]. He [Donaldson] had his own staff in the house and didn't mix [with them] at all. He had a manager on the farm, and he [the manager] reported to the boss.”

Yet Jim's emphasis on hierarchy was not quite as great as the Freshneys'. I asked one woman whether Jim Donaldson's staff called him by his first name, and she said: “I think he might have been ‘Mr. Donaldson’ to his staff. And yet…he had us down there once. My husband knew him well. Jim Donaldson had asked us down to view the garden.” The woman and her husband were working-class people at the time, and it would have been highly unlikely for them to receive a similar invitation from the Freshneys. A man whose father was a farmer—the family was comfortable financially, though they were not part of the elite—said: “He [Jim Donaldson] ate on his own. They served his meal in the dining room, and the employees ate theirs in the kitchen. But I think with Jim, he was a lonely person—he was too shy to make friends…. Too good a person to be a bachelor.”

Jim's brother, Harry, employed fewer men on his property—apparently he only had two or three teamsters—but his was a very different kind of operation. He raised horses primarily, especially Clydesdales, and he occasionally traveled to Scotland to buy stallions to import. He also spent much time away from the farm delivering his studs for service around New Zealand. But most of his time was spent working on the farm itself, which required labor in caring for the horses, raising feed, and cutting chaff. Harry was directly engaged in much of this work; he wore work clothes and did manual labor when it was called for. One person said: “His place wasn't a showplace like Jim's—his was all work. Big stables and lots of horses. Harry worked hard, he got into it, was working all the time.”

Nor did Harry live in a grand home. One retired working person with whom I spoke remarked, “It wasn't a big house, it was a house something like this [indicating the speaker's own home].” Harry employed one housekeeper and had no full-time gardeners, though perhaps a hired worker spent a portion of his time tending the modest garden. The workers ate in a separate cookhouse, and while Harry sometimes ate apart from them in his own dining room, he also ate with the men in the cookhouse on a regular basis. Consequently he

represented what I call a one-table household: he did not use the eating arrangements on his property as a symbolic marker for distancing himself from working people.

A fourth (and last) household that was included among the wealthiest in the district in the 1920s was that of the McDonalds.^[4] Gordon McDonald, a cousin of Davie Donaldson, the Scots shepherd who had made his fortune dealing in sheep, immigrated to New Zealand in the 1880s. Presumably he, like Davie, had a rural, working-class background, and he also had shepherding experience. He was single when he arrived but soon married a woman who worked as a barmaid in a Jackson pub; she was described to me as “a nice woman” and far from a snob. We may speculate that Davie Donaldson gave Gordon financial help and advice in getting started; yet Gordon did very well on his own, buying and selling both stock and land, and soon he made a fortune. At various times he was full or part owner of some sixteen stations in New Zealand, and he had an interest in several others in Australia as well.

In 1925 Gordon bought Mackenzie Station, located in a rather out-of-the-way place about fifteen miles from the South Downs township, for three of his sons (a fourth son was provided with a different property in a district nearby), all of whom were then in their thirties. While the station was very large, only a portion of it was suitable for crops, and so it was operated as an extensive sheep run devoted chiefly to high-country sheep. The land was purchased at a bad time, however. Property was expensive in the mid 1920s when the lease was purchased, but its value would drop during the Great Depression. Meat and wool would also become progressively less profitable. Thus, the McDonalds were less well-to-do than either the Donaldsons or the Freshneys, though they were still counted among the very wealthy members of the district.

In life-style, too, the McDonalds were not set apart as decisively as their better-off neighbors. Their garden, for example, was neither as large nor as elaborate as Jim Donaldson's or the Freshneys’. A man who worked on the property described the grounds as “very pretty, with a waterfall and all, terraced garden. But nothing like Strathclyde [Jim Donaldson's property].”

Apparently the McDonalds had four full-time employees in the 1920s, with others hired for mustering, shearing, and occasional jobs as needed. The regular staff included a man who combined the roles of cowboy, odd-job man, and gardener; two women who worked in

the house (a cook and a housemaid); and a shepherd. The three McDonald brothers also worked full time on the station: they were working owners, not gentlemen run-holders. Thus the regular, fulltime work force that was devoted to the operation of the station (as distinct from the gardener-cowboy and domestic staff) consisted of four men: the three brothers and one hired shepherd.

Only one of the brothers was married in the 1920s, and this couple lived with the two other brothers in the main house. They also ate together in the dining room, whereas the cook, maid, and gardener-cowboy ate in the kitchen. The shepherd and his wife, who lived in a separate cottage, probably took their meals apart from the others. The station also had a cookhouse, which was used chiefly when gangs of shearers and musterers were on the property.

Despite these arrangements, the McDonalds were a one-table household, for they often ate with the staff. If one of the brothers got back to the house late, for example, he might well eat dinner in the kitchen, not the dining room; and all three brothers shared meals with the workers in the cookhouse during mustering and at shearing time. A retired worker who knew the McDonald family reports that he occasionally graded roads on the station, and when he did so he was invited into the dining room to have lunch with them. Moreover, unlike at the Freshneys', the food that was served in the dining room was apparently the same as what was served in the kitchen. I asked a man who once worked on the station if the McDonalds drew social lines the way some other families did, and he said: “Oh, no. For early breakfast and odd meals they [the McDonald brothers] ate at the cookhouse. There was no differentiation at all between the bosses and the staff. They did the same work, ate the same food.”

This statement underlines an important feature of the McDonalds’ operation: that is, that the McDonald brothers engaged in many of the same tasks as their employees. For example, a hut was located at a distant point on the property, to be used whenever men were working in that area, since it was too far to return home for the night. Because the McDonald brothers participated in mustering, they also spent the night in the hut with the others. What is more, before the musterers finished their breakfast, one of the McDonalds would go out to saddle the horses so they could all get an early start. One person who had worked for them commented: “My father mustered out there [on the McDonalds’ property], and I mustered out

there…. They [the McDonald brothers] came mustering and camped in the hut away out the back, same as everybody else did. They lined up at the hut table and mealed with everybody else. They were good people.”

The McDonalds were also considered down-to-earth, not snobbish. One person compared them with the Freshneys: “They [the McDonalds] were a different taproot, background [from the Freshneys]. Their father was a stock dealer; Freshney's father was a gentleman who had come out to New Zealand and had means before he came out here. The McDonalds' father was a stock dealer, and they were pretty hard, pretty quick on the draw.” I asked a working-class woman if the McDonalds were snobbish. She said:

No. Nothing they liked better than to come in and have a cup of tea and joke. Nothing snobbish about them at all. Natural people—all of the boys and the wife. His wife was just like them…. They shied away a little from these big people like the Parkinsons [whom I describe shortly], who thought they were somebody—they'd keep away from them. They liked the ordinary person.

A woman who had been in service with one of the other households in the district at the time said: “She [Mrs. McDonald] could visit with the nobbies, but could level herself out to be the same as anyone else too. She didn't make class distinctions. The others [i.e., the other well-to-do families] always made you feel you were a little bit lower than them.” One person described the McDonalds as “generous,” another as “straight shooters,” and still another said that “they weren't mean with money, and they weren't snobbish.”

In sum, these four households were singled out by local people as the most affluent in the district in the 1920s. Yet people differentiated among the four on the basis of several criteria. One was wealth: economically speaking, the Freshneys were the most wellto-do, the McDonalds were the least. The second criterion was refinement. The Freshneys and Jim Donaldson (whose garden rivaled or surpassed the Freshneys') were the most cultured, the McDonalds and Harry Donaldson (the breeder of Clydesdales) were the least. This is not to say that the latter two households were considered rough. Their members were well mannered, well dressed, and were reasonably well educated, but they were not noted for their appreciation of such matters as good music or the aesthetics of horticulture. The third standard had to do with social hierarchy. Two of the

four—the McDonalds and Harry Donaldson—were one-table households, and two—the Freshneys and Jim Donaldson—were two-table households.

Middling Two-Table Landholders

I turn now to another set of landholders. By the criterion of wealth these were all middling farmers, and in that sense they ranked distinctly lower than the households considered so far. Yet at the same time, they were all two-table families, and they were thought to be refined. The most notable examples were the three Parkinson households.^[5]

Charles Parkinson, from Dorset, was among the first wave of permanent settlers in New Zealand, arriving there in 1841. He was apparently of middle-class background, for he came with sufficient capital to buy property at the outset. In 1874, he moved to the district of South Downs, which then consisted of a few very large sheep stations, and successfully acquired about five thousand prime acres as freehold from the Crown leasehold of one of these enormous properties. Thus he became one of the first farmers (as distinct from the run-holders) in the district. Although he was not at the same economic level as the large landholders, neither was he a working man struggling to acquire a farm from what he could save in wages.

In the 1920s, three Parkinson families owned property in South Downs, the men of these households being grandsons of the original settler, Charles. In commenting on them, people consistently emphasize two features: they were as snobbish as the Freshneys—they exhibited a similar social style, and they were a part of the Freshneys’ social circle; but they “were not known for having a lot of money.” One person remarked that the “Parkinsons had the culture but not as much money as Freshneys.” Another, commenting on the McDonalds at Mackenzie Station, remarked that they “were wealthy but didn't have the style of Freshneys, Parkinsons, and the others.” Yet another person said: “The Parkinsons were very snobbish. Yet they were nobody compared to the McDonalds at Mackenzie.”

The Parkinsons were working owners, for they did many of the same jobs as their hired men; one can guess, however, that this was not by choice. If they had had the resources they would almost certainly have left their properties in the hands of managers and

engaged in the same leisurely life-style that Edward Freshney and Jim Donaldson enjoyed. At the very least they would have assumed a role similar to that of Hugh Freshney, who oversaw the family property and wore “tidy” work clothes without doing manual work.

One of the three Parkinson households was that of Edward Parkinson. I do not have a description of the working and eating arrangements on his farm in the 1920s, but a man who worked for him just after World War II described the patterns that existed at that time. Edward then employed two men, and although he worked with them every day, both men addressed him as “Mr. Parkinson.” The Parkinsons did not employ help inside the house at that time; yet one of the employees was married and lived in a cottage on the property with his wife, and she cooked for both her husband and the other worker. Thus the Parkinsons ate apart from their employees.

An event occurred in about 1949 which suggests that, in principle, the Parkinsons adhered to the two-table pattern. Since the wife of the married worker was in the hospital, Parkinson's wife prepared the midday meal for the two employees. But while she and her husband ate in the dining room, the two men ate separately in the kitchen. There was no salt or pepper on the kitchen table, so the married worker took the initiative to get some from the cupboard. According to his own account, “Mrs. Parkinson came in and said, ‘Where did you get that from?’ She said, ‘You're not supposed to have pepper and salt—it's hard to get. You shouldn't be using it.’ …[But] it was all right for them to have it.” Mrs. Parkinson clearly assumed that different standards applied at the two tables, and we can imagine that she invited the men in for lunch only as a matter of necessity.

The emphasis on form that characterized this household was manifest in another trait. Edward Parkinson had been an officer in World War I, and on any occasion or holiday that had some military connection, such as ANZAC Day, he dressed in full uniform—whether or not he had plans to go anywhere, and even if he expected to see no one but his wife.

It is likely that in the 1920s the Edward Parkinson family had a full-time cook, who ate in the kitchen and not with the family. They also must have had several hired hands to assist on the farm, who likewise probably ate in the kitchen. One can also assume that the workers were served different food from what the family ate.

The other two Parkinson families adhered to similar patterns

(though one of these, apparently, was less “snobbish” than the other two). One retired farmer remarked: “The girls [hired by the Parkinson families] were never ever allowed to sit at the main table. Their job was to serve the food, and they had their own table.” When I asked one woman if Jim Parkinson (one of Edward's brothers) would have his hired men eat at the table with his family, she said: “Oh, no. They went out in the kitchen—and didn't have very good meals. At the Parkinsons' table they [the workers] had something different [from what the family was served].” I asked if the men called Jim “Mr. Parkinson,” and the woman said, “Oh, yes, it had to be Mr. Parkinson.” The Parkinsons were also said to speak with English accents, which was a signal of high standing: “We used to say she [Mrs. Parkinson] had a plum in her mouth.” Still another woman said, “To put it plainly, the Parkinsons were inclined to be a bit snobbish.”

At least four other landholding families fell into the same category as the Parkinsons: they all kept two tables and were considered refined, yet they were thought of as middling, not wealthy, farmers, and the men of these households worked full time on their properties and engaged in manual labor. In some instances the wives also cooked for the hired men.

One of these households was that of the Crawleys.^[6] William Crawley's grandfather had been a fairly prosperous corn merchant in England, and in 1878 this man's son—William's father—took his patrimony and left for New Zealand. After about a year working as a cadet on a sheep station in the area of South Downs, he bought a medium-sized farm very close to the township. William's father was not very successful at farming, and by the time William took over the property after World War I a portion of it had already been sold for cash. The farm produced no more than a fair income. In the 1920s the Crawleys hired a cowboy and teamster, though William continued to work full time on the property. They did not hire a cook. While William's wife may have cooked for the hired workers at times, I suspect that the teamster's wife prepared most of the meals of both permanent and casual workers, leaving Mrs. Crawley to cook for her own family. Whenever the hired men did eat in the Crawleys' house, it was in the kitchen, apart from the family, for this was a decidedly two-table family.

The Southwoods, too, were a middling, two-table farm family.^[7] Ken Southwood's father-in-law was a relatively successful business-

man in the subprovincial town nearby, and when Ken returned from military service after World War I his wife's parents acquired a farm for him in the South Downs area. The Southwoods hired a cowboy and one teamster during the 1920s, but apparently they were unable to afford help inside the house; consequently, the wife cooked not only for the family but for the permanent hired men and casual workers as well. Moreover, a man who lived on a neighboring farm reports that the hired men ate alone in the kitchen and never with the family. When I asked one woman if the Southwoods would have fed casual workers at the same table as the family, she said: “I don't think so. No. They were rather amusing—struggling, try-to-be-somebodys. They tried to keep up with the ones they thought were somebody.” Another person summarized the Southwoods' position by saying that they “didn't have maids but were in the upper class.”

It seems anomalous that in some two-table households the wife cooked for the workers, for doing so conveyed a message of equality—the exact reverse of the two-table message. This seeming contradiction can be explained, however, by the fact that whenever men worked on the property it was expected that they would be fed a hot meal, and this was true whether they were regular, permanent staff or casual workers employed for the day. Ideally, a full-time cook was hired to feed both the landholding family and the hired men, but if the farm family could not afford that, two solutions were available: the wife of one of the permanent workers might be paid something extra to cook for the workers, or the farmer's wife would have to do the work herself. But whatever the cooking arrangements, in a two-table household the family ate separately. An elderly woman remarked: “If you had someone working on the place cutting gorse hedges or digging drainage ditches, you'd give him a meal. The man, or group of men, may even be camped on the place and taking all their meals on the place. Most people would feed the men inside, with the family—Throwers would, Murphys would, but not the Parkinsons.”

Middling One-Table Landholders

I turn now to the people who were considered middling farmers and who did eat with their workers in the 1920s—that

is, the middling, one-table households. The Throwers are illustrative.^[8] Bill Thrower's father had been a farmer in Scotland but lost his land when foot-and-mouth disease was discovered in his cattle, which were slaughtered, to the last animal, by the authorities. The young family now had no income, and in desperation they left for New Zealand, where the father found a job as a shepherd. Bill was about seven years old at the time. When he was eighteen he left home to work for his brother-in-law, who managed a large sheep station near South Downs; during shearing season he also worked as a shearer on the large sheep stations. Thus Bill started his adult life as a working man with very few resources besides his own labor. In about 1900 he acquired a farm near South Downs, achieving considerable success during the first decades of the century, which was a time of prosperity. By the 1920s (he was now in his sixties) he and his family were very comfortable financially.

A woman who worked as a cook for the Throwers in the 1930s reports that the full-time farm staff then included three hired teamsters plus the son, Adrian Thrower, who was around thirty years old. The father, Bill, now in his seventies, was no longer an active worker. Although the household had two tables, the Throwers were a one-table family inasmuch as they regularly ate with the hired help. For example, the family breakfasted in the kitchen, together with the cook. The hired men and the son ate lunch in the kitchen—still in their work clothes, it would have been unseemly for them to eat in the dining room. The senior Throwers, however, ate both lunch and dinner in the dining room, and when the cook finished laying out the food she sat down and ate with them. The cook also took meals with the family when they had guests. The woman who was reporting these matters to me said: “There were other places where if you were the maid that was that—but not at Throwers'.” A man who knew the family in the 1920s remarked that they mixed with such nobby people as the Parkinsons on certain occasions, but “that's where it finished. Old Bill Thrower and Mrs. Thrower weren't socializers. She'd be out milking the cows and he'd be out stacking the wheat.”

The Ladbrookes were another middling, one-table farm family.^[9] Charles Ladbrooke's father, Reginald, emigrated from Devonshire with his parents and siblings in 1862, when he was seventeen years old. Reginald went to work on a farm almost immediately after their arrival, but within about two years he and a brother began farming

in partnership. Soon, however, the partnership was dissolved, whereupon Reginald acquired land in a district that at the time was several hours' drive from South Downs; shortly thereafter he acquired another farm located near the South Downs township. Reginald was very active politically, serving on the regional road board, hospital board, harbor board, and other public bodies; as a result, his family was widely known and highly respected.

Charles took over his father's property near South Downs in 1890, when he himself was only seventeen years old, and he eventually became politically active like his father. He served as a member of Parliament in the late teens, was chairman of the county council during most of the 1920s, chaired the South Downs District High School Committee during much of this time, served on the regional hospital board, and was church warden and lay reader at the Anglican church in South Downs, among other things.

During the 1920s Ladbrooke spent much of his time away from the farm looking after public affairs, and in his absence the property was looked after by his brother, who lived with the family. The brother had been permanently disabled and could do no physical work, though he could get around the farm on horseback. The Ladbrookes thus hired two teamsters, and Charles himself spent at least some time working on the property. They did not hire a cowboy, however, since members of the family (including the children) did the chores a cowboy would have done.

I have only sketchy details about the eating arrangements on the Ladbrooke property, although everyone I spoke to about the matter assumed that the family regularly ate with the workers. One relative of theirs, who as a youth in the 1920s occasionally visited the farm, was very clear about the two-table pattern at the Crawleys and Parkinsons; yet when I asked if the Ladbrookes kept two tables, he said: “Nope. I used to go up there on school holidays and everyone sat at the one table—big, long table in the dining room.” One person remarked that Ladbrooke “was among the nobby people in a way. Yet he was a good man in the district.” Another commented that even though the “Ladbrookes were Anglican,” they “were not snobbish like Parkinson and Freshney.” This observation was consistent with an important biographical detail, which is that Charles Ladbrooke married the daughter of the local blacksmith—he “married below himself,” as one person remarked. It is difficult to imagine the Parkinsons or Freshneys marrying in similar fashion.

A majority of farm households in South Downs in the 1920s were one-table families. A farmer's son, who in 1981 was a retired farmer himself, described the pattern in the household of his youth by saying that “a single man working with the family always ate with the family.” A woman who had been a young girl in the 1920s remarked: “My father was a farmer, and in no way would he consider himself on the same level as the Parkinsons.” The hired men on her family's farm ate in the kitchen apart from the family, but as a matter of convenience, not as a means by which the family distanced itself from working people. “My mother had a girl helping in the house,” the woman said, and “she always ate with us.”

Hierarchy of Work Force Arrangements

It is important to distinguish between the one- and two-table patterns, on the one hand, and what I call the hierarchy of work force arrangements, on the other. The two were independent of each other; that is, both one- and two-table households were distributed along the entire continuum of work force arrangements. Here I depart from the perspective of the people; they would recognize what I am about to present, but the following is written from my own point of view, not theirs.

At the top of this continuum, the wealthiest households had a work force of sufficient size that three tables were set at mealtime: one in the dining room for the family, one in the kitchen for the domestic staff, and one in the cookhouse for the farm workers. These households hired two full-time cooks, one for the two tables in the main house, the other for the cookhouse. Lower on the scale were holdings that required a somewhat smaller work force; these households had two tables, one in the dining room and another in the kitchen, and a full-time cook prepared meals for both. Slightly lower still were farm households that, rather than hiring a full-time cook, paid the wife of a hired man to feed the workers; in these cases the farmer's wife cooked, but only for her own family. Finally, at the bottom of the scale, the farmer's wife cooked both for her own family and for the hired men.

One might expect that the households at the top of the scale

would maintain a two-table pattern while those at the bottom would adhere to the one-table pattern, yet this was not necessarily the case. For example, even if a property had three tables, it was in fact a one-table household if the landholders commonly ate with the hired workers when circumstances required it. Similarly, some households toward the bottom of the scale adhered to the two-table pattern: although the farmer's wife cooked for the hired men, the workers were fed in the kitchen, apart from the family.

Nonetheless, the hierarchy of work force arrangements and the one- and two-table patterns were connected. A farm family with very limited resources could keep two tables, but the man still had to work in the paddocks along with the hired help, while the woman had to cook for whomever was on the property at mealtime. Surely these inevitabilities had leveling implications: a two-table family near the bottom of the continuum of work force arrangements was less distant from working people than one at the top would be. Yet virtue may have been made of necessity in these cases, for the man and woman may have justified their physical labor as meritorious in its own right; in doing so they borrowed from what I will describe shortly as the one-table theory of social hierarchy, a conceptual system that dignified physical labor.

The Local Elites.

I now shift back to the perspective of the people, to explore their conception of elite standing in the district.

A woman who had been in service in the 1920s described the local social hierarchy as she perceived it then. It was divided into three levels, she said. At the top “were the toffs, or nobby ones,” which included such families as the Freshneys and Parkinsons. Note that these two families were alike in being refined and in keeping two tables, but that the Parkinsons were middling, not wealthy, farmers. Next were the “middle ones,” she continued, “who were a wee bit lower”—farm families, such as the Throwers, who “could associate with the nobby ones, but by their nature could be equal to lower-class ones.” These “middle ones” consisted of what I called middling, one-table households. Education played a critical role in distinguishing the nobby and middle levels: “A lot has to do with

education—if you're educated, have gone to boarding school, it's easier to associate with the nobbies. The lower-class people weren't as well educated, didn't know how to do things correctly.” The toffs, of course, were privately educated at expensive schools, whereas the “middle ones” generally were not. Finally there was a third level, which she referred to as her own people, “who were lower still—who had to go out to service,” for example. Whereas “the middle group had property” or were landholders, the lower group, she said, “were working people. Some were poor; others, like the truck driver, had a good job but was still a working person.”

The main principles of this summary of the hierarchical pattern of the 1920s were reflected in the accounts given to me by other people as well. A crucial feature is that the refined two-table middling families, such as the Parkinsons, were placed in the uppermost category, along with the Freshneys. Wealth, then, was not the main criterion for defining a family's position in the hierarchical order; equally important was refinement, which conferred a significant degree of distinction, elevating those who achieved it.

Consider the case of the Throwers, who were more prosperous than the Parkinsons in the 1920s but were classified with the middle group. Bill Thrower was not privately educated, and whereas his son went to the local public school, the Parkinsons sent their sons to Christ's College in Christchurch, one of the most prestigious boarding schools on South Island. Nor did the Throwers adhere to the two-table pattern. The Throwers were fully respectable, but they were not refined in the sense that the Parkinsons and the Crawleys were.

The McDonalds also were not included in the uppermost category, even though they were among the wealthiest families in the community. For while they were too wealthy to fit in the middle group on economic terms alone, neither could they be bracketed with the nobbies. The ambiguity of their position was implicit in the description (quoted earlier) of Mrs. McDonald as someone who “could visit with the nobbies, but could level herself out to be the same as anyone else.” One did not say that the Parkinsons “could visit with the nobbies”; they were nobbies. The McDonalds represented a failure of the system of social classification, for they did not fall clearly into either the uppermost or the middle stratum. Harry Donaldson (the breeder of Clydesdales) was another similar anomaly.

The distinctiveness of the topmost or nobby stratum was marked

by a relatively exclusive social life—one, moreover, not restricted to local families, for elites from nearby districts were included as well. For example, the Freshneys occasionally organized picnics at the foot of a nearby glacier, and they held an annual afternoon flower-viewing party in the spring (after the guests had had a chance to walk through the garden they were served tea on the lawn); at both events the participants included a number of high-prestige landholding families from beyond the local community. The Freshneys and other members of the upper stratum of South Downs also attended similar social affairs in nearby localities. Events with a more strictly local focus were held as well, such as springtime Sunday-afternoon tennis parties, with tea served after the play had finished.

One notable feature of the local elite's social life was golf. The first golf club was formed in South Downs in 1906, when a ninehole course was laid out on the corner of a farm located very close to the township. The property was loaned to the club by a middling two-table family, who were also among the players; the links, a sheep paddock for most of the year, were transformed for play just before the golf season began. The grounds were shifted several times during the next few decades, and in the 1920s they were located on a corner of the property of one of the Parkinsons. Throughout most of this decade Bill and Adrian Thrower (from a one-table middling household) donated a week of their time each year to open the course, which included preparing the green and scything the rough. The links were busy with players every Saturday for the rest of the season.

Club membership was not restricted to elites, for the early members included the blacksmith (whose daughter married Charles Ladbrooke), the town librarian, and several farmers that no one thought of as toffs. Nevertheless, the two-table families dominated the club, and the game had very strong elite associations. As Adrian Thrower remarked, “My family always played golf, but they were almost on the outside looking in.” In an interview with a retired working man I made a comment about the rich people that used to live in the district, to which he replied: “And I can remember the day when the Parkinsons and all those used to go play golf. And the general run, no. And now everyone plays golf—there's no class distinction at all. It was said that the working class—I was a member of the working class—didn't play golf.” An elderly woman remarked that “at one time not a working person played golf—they all had their plus fours on.” A retired farmer said: “There was only a select few that used to

play golf—the golf course used to be on the Parkinsons' property, part on the Freshneys' bottom paddock. Not everybody played golf. It was sort of something to belong to the golf club. You more or less had to be invited.”

This social life helped to define the elite in South Downs, and it is significant that the Freshneys and the Parkinsons, together with the Crawleys, Southwoods, and other middling two-table families, played a more central role in this circle of people than either Harry Donaldson or the McDonalds. Several one-table middling farmers were also included to an extent; for example, the Throwers were visible figures in the golf club, and the Ladbrookes attended such events as the garden parties at the Freshneys'. Nevertheless, the core of this social circle consisted of refined two-table farm families, both middling and wealthy.

Local Theories of Social Hierarchy

Underlying the principle of refinement is an implicit cultural or folk theory, which I refer to as the two-table theory of social hierarchy. By this conceptual system, a sharp distinction was drawn between the role of landholder and worker, in that ideally the property-holder managed or oversaw the farm operation and directed the labor of the workers, whereas the hired hand engaged in manual or physical labor. This theory is represented most clearly by Edward Freshney and Jim Donaldson, who wore coat and tie as everyday wear and led lives of relative leisure. Because both employed managers to make most of the day-to-day decisions on the property and to take direct charge of the workers, they were distanced somewhat even from the duties of oversight. The directive role was also exhibited by Mrs. Freshney, who selected the menu for the family meals but did not cook, and who gave the gardeners their daily instructions but did not garden. When the Freshneys' son, Hugh, eventually took charge of the property, he presented a variation on the same theme: he dispensed with the manager and himself assumed that role, but he did not engage in physical labor as part of his job.

While the Parkinsons and other middling two-table farmers did perform physical labor on their properties, this was surely a matter of necessity; if they had had the financial resources to do so, they

too would likely have restricted their activities to management and oversight. Similarly, their wives, who ideally would have supervised a cook, might have had to prepare the meals themselves out of necessity.

The two-table theory included a crucial set of ideas about work itself, for since in theory the landholder's job of oversight did not entail physical labor and thus was less demanding than the work of the hired man, the landholder was afforded greater leisure. This in turn allowed the landholding family to cultivate refinement. Such families as the Southwoods did not enjoy this freedom, but they cultivated refinement nonetheless—the “struggling, try-to-be-somebodys”—largely by means of a boarding school education: “They'll educate their family regardless of economic circumstances, even if they have to borrow money. That's part of the heritage, sending the boys to Christ's College.”

It is also possible to infer a one-table theory of social hierarchy. When such households as the McDonalds, Ladbrookes, and Throwers adhered to one-table patterns, they were not acting merely in the absence of a cultural point of view; rather, they were actively expressing a theory of social hierarchy that had a force of its own, although in the 1920s it enjoyed less authority than the other. What distinguished the one-table theory was that it dignified physical labor. Not only did the McDonald brothers work alongside their employees, but they were considered highly capable and hardworking as well. Similarly, Bill Thrower and his son were looked upon as industrious Scotsmen whose success was explained largely by their ability and devotion to work. In this theory, then, physical labor was not simply a matter of necessity; it was a means of achievement. The sense of identity among these people in fact came from their role as working landholders, not refined managers. The farmer might have relegated the more tedious and uninteresting tasks to the hired help, but he worked beside his men willingly.

The value placed on refinement in the two-table theory of hierarchy was analogous to the value placed on work in the one-table theory. Both sets of values provided ends that guided the individual's striving for achievement, criteria for defining self-identity, and measures for judging the intrinsic worth and standing of others. But the values of refinement and physical work were contradictory: because they offered different definitions of achievement, self-identity, and standing, they could not help but be tacit points of contention in

the community. If I adhered to the two-table theory, I would seek to further the corresponding definition of social hierarchy—and the same goes for the one-table theory. We know that the two-table theory was ascendant during the 1920s, because its principles—refinement and the two-table pattern—were central to the definition of the uppermost stratum of the community. But this was soon to change.

The one- and two-table theories of social hierarchy, of course, produced very different hierarchies of standing. On the one hand, the two-table theory served to distance the landholding elite from working people. In the most fully developed case, that of the Freshneys, household members did not participate in the same workaday world as their staff and other working people: they did not even have to get out of bed to have breakfast, which was both prepared and cleared away by someone else. The less affluent two-table families, although not as far removed from working people, achieved social distance through various ritual patterns—by having social inferiors address them as “Mr.” and “Mrs.,” for example, and eating apart from their employees.

On the other hand, the one-table theory left the distinction between landholder and worker unmarked, thus shortening the social distance between them. The farmer had the power to hire and fire the workers and he paid their salaries, but they called him by his first name, labored alongside him in the paddocks, and ate with him at the dinner table. The one-table patterns, then, were just as symbolic as the two-table ones, for they carried a message of egalitarianism. While no one thought the landholders and workers to be truly equal, the distance between them was explicitly, ritually, de-emphasized.

Chapter Eight
The Criterion of Refinement:
After World War II

The social hierarchy in South Downs has changed significantly since the 1920s. One crucial development is that people in the community now conceive of the locality as much more egalitarian than before. In short, the one-table pattern has become the norm.

In local thought, at least, an important facet of these changes is that differences in wealth have narrowed substantially: the poor are no longer as poor, nor are the wealthy nearly as rich. It is difficult to know if this narrowing has actually occurred; indeed, scholars are seriously divided as to the nature of the economic hierarchy of postwar New Zealand.^[1] Yet it is certainly worth asking why the people themselves believe the gap has narrowed. What experiences stimulated the general perception that a process of economic leveling was under way?

An adequate answer to this question would have to include developments at the national level, because the same egalitarian ideas that became so strong in South Downs after the war were felt throughout the country at that time. I have already mentioned some of these factors, such as changes in the income tax system, which began taking a much larger bite out of the earnings of the well-to-do. At the same time, working people saw their wages increase, and the growth of the welfare state resulted in health care, pensions, and other benefits that greatly improved the material conditions of the less affluent. This was, moreover, a period of prosperity, at least until

the late 1960s; most working people thus enjoyed a respectable standard of living, and upward mobility was within reach.

A number of strictly local factors helped to influence the perception of economic leveling as well. For one thing, the wealthiest households of the 1920s have all moved from the region (the last of them, the McDonalds, sold their land in 1964), and their properties were broken up into smaller holdings. In the postwar period, then, the district came to consist strictly of middling family farms on which the landholders are active labor units. The days of Edward Freshney and Jim Donaldson clearly have passed.

In addition, there have been various changes in life-style. For example, no one hires full-time gardeners or maids today, regardless of financial standing. Until 1969 full employment prevailed in New Zealand, which meant that few people were willing to accept these jobs, and those who were demanded relatively high wages. Similarly, working people could now afford to buy a respectable house, a washing machine, and eventually even an automobile. Whereas in the 1920s only the very wealthy owned cars, in the 1950s most established (middling) landholders had one, and by the 1980s virtually every household did so.

A third factor indicative of economic leveling is that the hierarchy of work force arrangements has narrowed considerably, largely because of technological changes that have significantly reduced farm labor needs. A farm that required four or five men in the 1920s needed only one or two by the 1950s. The Thrower farm is a case in point. Sometime in 1939, their teamster quit to take a job on a public works program, and when Thrower telephoned to hire a replacement he was told that the demand for workers was so great that he was twenty-eighth on the list. The family therefore decided to sell their horses and buy a tractor, and at the same time to reduce their five-man work force to three. Because it no longer made sense to set two separate tables (recall that earlier in the 1930s Bill Thrower and his wife ate with the cook in the dining room, while their son and the hired men ate in the kitchen), they soon dispensed with the cook as well. The wife now cooked the meals for both family and workers, and everyone ate together in the kitchen. Production on the farm is now three or four times what it was in 1939 (though profits have not increased in commensurate fashion, for production costs and farm prices changed in the interim), yet the work force consists of only the son, Adrian Thrower, who is semiretired, and one other

man. (Adrian Thrower's children are grown and are becoming established on their own properties elsewhere.)

At war's end a few large sheep stations in the nearby high country still had sufficient labor needs that they kept cookhouses, but no landholders in the South Downs district proper did; thus hired cooks had disappeared as well. Today, the farms at the top of the hierarchy of work force arrangements hire one or at most two full-time men; and unless the men live with their wives in cottages on the property, they are fed by the farmers' wives.

Postwar Egalitarianism

When people discuss the leveling process that was under way after the war they are likely to focus not only on the narrowing of differences in wealth, but also on an increasing egalitarianism in interpersonal relations: most people believe unequivocally that hierarchical distinctions are no longer very pronounced in South Downs. For example, one farmer remarked on the absence of a significant social gap between working people and landholders:

In fact, four or five years ago I was on the golf course in South Downs, working [at a work bee] with a friend, and we were discussing this same thing. We felt that there wasn't very much chance in South Downs of getting a swelled head. There is I believe a good relationship with the people in the township, perhaps the people on wages. Everyone has their circle of friends, naturally, but I think everyone can say good day to each other.

The wife of a retired farmer commented that as recently as thirty years ago “you could see people choosing friends according to social status,” but “that's not here so much today.” Her husband agreed:

Oh yes, it's almost disappeared. There were certain families that were in a different bracket from me before I went away to the war, they were higher…. Now I look on them as the same as myself, the same level. My family never went without, my dad had a good job until the slump…. Looking back, there's not the social hierarchy now that there was when I was a young fellow, say, 1936, when I was sixteen.

A woman who is married to a truck driver remarked that there seems to be less snobbery in the community now than when she first moved to the district in 1963. This was evident, she said, in the local service

clubs, such as the Lions Club and Jaycees, inasmuch as people “from all walks of life” now belong. “That's just one example,” she said; “All [people] mix in together, go to the same social functions together. We would be unlikely to be asked to one of the social functions on one of the up-country stations, but we always speak [to the run-holders] on the street. I just think that our society has become much freer.” A working-class man pointed out that a farmer now would be likely to buy a house in the South Downs township for retirement, whereas in the past he would have moved to the subprovincial city instead. “That's snobbery, status symbol involved there—there were levels who didn't used to want to live in South Downs [because of its lower-middle- and working-class associations]. But now they're mixing in—farmers' daughters are marrying town boys, and vice versa.” An upwardly mobile farmer who began his career as a wage earner remarked that a few years ago “it was very important which [boarding] school you went to,” but, he said, “I don't think it matters so much today”:

At one time if I'd been to Christ's College I'd have had all those blokes flocking around me, they would have been my mates. If I hadn't been at Christ's College I wouldn't have seen them. I'd have been termed sort of lower class. It [a private education] doesn't seem to have the same standing today…. At one time it was only the extremely wealthy people who could afford to send their children to these types of schools. Today they haven't got that type of wealth and their children aren't able to go. Today they're the same as your kids, my kids, anybody's kids.

The social leveling that has taken place is overtly manifest in several ways, one being that South Downs has become a respectable place for farmers and their wives to retire, as mentioned. Changes in the golf club are another. The membership list is still dominated by landholders, but the organization is no longer considered quite so exclusive an institution as it was in the past. An elderly woman remarked:

We've often laughed, thought that if some of those old Parkinsons or Freshneys came and saw the people playing golf here today—everybody playing, all as one—oh, they would get an awful shock. That's one of the biggest changes that's happened here, I think…. The men on the council [i.e., county council employees], the men sweeping the street—anyone and everyone can go there and play golf. If Prince Charles came, they'd all play golf together.

Another expression of the social leveling — and clearly the most important—is the virtual disappearance of the two-table pattern. No one in South Downs today feeds their hired help separately; any worker on the property at either tea- or mealtime eats with the family. On one occasion I interviewed a farming couple who are at the top of the local hierarchy of standing and are considered perhaps the most refined people in the district. They employ a man full time to help on the farm, a middle-aged bachelor who lives alone in the township. I arrived at 1:00 to find the three of them still in the dining room eating lunch, which the woman herself had prepared (the children were away at boarding school). The farmer and his wife invited me to sit down with them while they finished their tea; when they had done so, the worker left to go back to work, the woman cleared the table, and then we proceeded with the interview in the living room. At about 3:30 the worker returned for afternoon tea, walking into the house without knocking. The woman invited him to sit with us and handed him an empty cup. He waited for her to serve him, which she did matter-of-factly. When I later asked her about these matters, she said that she cooks for anyone who is working on the farm, including casual laborers. A man hired to shingle the roads on the property, for example, will be invited for lunch, and he will eat in the dining room with the rest of the family.

On another occasion I interviewed a different farmer of very high standing, though his household is not considered to be as refined as the other. He does not have permanent help on the farm, but he had hired a mason to repair the fireplace on the day of my visit. I arrived in time for morning tea—tea and biscuits, which the farmer's wife brought into the living room on a tray. Although the repairman was in another part of the house, the woman invited him to join us, which he did, whereupon she began pouring tea. When we had finished, the artisan went back to work, the wife returned to the kitchen, and the farmer and I went into a separate room to talk.

The reason for the disappearance of the two-table pattern in South Downs is clear. I mentioned to a retired farmer that one former two-table family no longer feeds the hired help in the kitchen, and he asked: “Do you know why? No one would work for them if they did.” Because of the labor shortage during World War II and the pattern of full employment that held for more than twenty years afterward, working people could refuse to submit to what they considered demeaning working conditions. A farmer who had been

raised in a refined, two-table household told me how the two tables had disappeared from his own farm, well before he acquired the property from his parents. At one time, he said, “the maid and the teamster and the cowboy ate in the back, in what we used to call the man's kitchen.” Shortly after the war, when my host was still in his youth, his father hired a temporary worker to help with the sheep.

He [the worker] came up [to the house] for lunch. We came here [into the dining room, where the farmer and I now sat] to eat, and he was given his [meal] in the kitchen. I can see him now, walking past the window—he walked off [the property]. That was a very big lesson my parents learned. That was the first time that had come home to them. So [now] we all meal together and wouldn't think otherwise.

Another man related a similar story. His father-in-law owned a fairly prosperous business in South Downs, and a few years after the war was over, presumably in the early 1950s, an up-country run-holder (whose family was considered both refined and snobbish) hired the firm to do some work on the property. At lunchtime the father-in-law was invited into the dining room to eat with the family, “but when he got there he looked around, didn't see his workmate, and asked where he was. He was in the kitchen. He said that if the kitchen was good enough for his worker, it was good enough for him—so he went to eat in the kitchen too.”

The two-table pattern did not disappear simply because of the apparent narrowing of differences in wealth, or because people were not interested in maintaining it any longer. It disappeared because it was forced out: the post—World War II era was marked by strong egalitarian pressures that led to the abandonment of many of the overt symbols by which people of refinement distanced themselves from those below. An elderly woman remarked: “The Parkinsons and Freshneys and some of the others spoke with English accents. You don't hear this so much today—children make fun of others who speak with an English accent nowadays. But we wouldn't have made fun of them then.” A farmer commented that today “people aren't afraid to say, ‘Stuck-up bugger, what the hell's wrong with you?’ You'll say that openly, where you wouldn't say it thirty years ago [1951]. You'd get bloody crucified.”

Even the most refined families now regard the two-table pattern as scandalous—a complete reversal from the viewpoint of their forebears. Surely the two-table families in the 1920s believed that their treatment of working people, and their workers' deferential behavior

toward them, were both reasonable and legitimate. Workers were coarse, after all (in the view of the refined); and besides, an employer could not easily gain the respect of employees if he or she became too familiar with them.

It would be a mistake to think that the pressure against the twotable patterns came solely from working people, however, for the one-table landholding families had a vested interest in the postwar changes as well. The two-table pattern not only distanced the landholders from workers, but it also affirmed the ideal of refinement, whereby achievement was defined in terms of such features as a boarding school education, a “proper” upbringing, and a “good” family background. Whereas a one-table family might have been satisfied with its own conception of virtue and had no desire for the kind of refinement that the Parkinsons, Freshneys, and others valued so highly, it could not help but bridle at the two-table ideals, which gave the highest distinction in the community to other people and tacitly defined the one-table standard as empty. The one- and two-table patterns represented competing cultural definitions of personal worth.

We have seen how important the criterion of farming ability is in the contemporary community: a main topic of gossip among farmers and a key basis for the judgments they make about one another is the quality of sheep, paddocks, and farms in general. The contemporary importance of farming ability is directly linked with the emergence of one-table patterns, for the one-table theory of hierarchy dignifies work in a way that the two-table theory did not. As the two-table pattern was swept aside, farming ability became increasingly important as an avenue of personal achievement and a measure of social standing.

But surely the one-table landholders did not seek a flat social order after the war, or no distance from working people. Only landholders, after all, can play the game of farming ability; workers can be acute observers, but they do not have what it takes to compete in this sphere: namely, property. The one-table pattern thus suppresses open expression of social distance on one hand while implicitly confirming it on the other.

This point needs emphasis: hierarchy still exists in the community, even despite the one-table patterns and the ethos of egalitarianism. The current egalitarian forms are egalitarian only at certain levels or in certain respects, for they contain their own elements of hierarchy. Put briefly, although the symbolic markers of social difference have

been suppressed in the sphere of interpersonal relations—it is no longer acceptable for the farm family to eat apart from the hired men, for a farmer to ignore a working-class acquaintance at the pub, or for the golf club to exclude working-class applicants—social hierarchy is still very definite in other respects. For example, farm ownership itself is a powerful social marker; what is more, we have seen that many landholders feel that working people are generally less industrious and have less business sense than farmers. And while a farmer may well stop and have a beer with a truck driver he runs into at the pub, more likely they will drink at different hotels and so not run into each other at all. It is also rare for working people to join the golf club, which is dominated by farmers and their social equals.

Be that as it may, clearly South Downs is more egalitarian (according to local standards) today than it was in the 1920s, a fact that needs to be viewed within the larger sweep of New Zealand history. We have seen that both egalitarian and hierarchical tendencies have been evident from the time of earliest permanent settlement by Europeans. For example, in nineteenth-century New Zealand, workers were less subservient to their masters than was true in England; yet in the same period of time there were strong tendencies toward hierarchy, for the elegant life-style of the elite landholders distanced them from their inferiors. These two tendencies have coexisted in a state of tension from the start, varying only in relative strength at different times and in different parts of the country. For example, hierarchy seems to have increased in New Zealand through the 1880s, whereas egalitarianism enjoyed a resurgence in the 1890s with the election of the first Liberal government. The conditions were favorable for egalitarianism once again after World War II, when the one-table patterns managed to achieve dominance over the two-table conception of hierarchy. Yet conditions could easily change, with greater hierarchy reemerging.

Cultural Conceptions Behind Egalitarianism

Underlying the postwar egalitarianism is a distinctive cultural idiom of thought. This complex of ideas is also a central

feature of the district's self-image, for people often cite egalitarianism as a distinguishing characteristic of the community. Moreover, the crux of this body of cultural ideas, and of the view that people have of the district, consists in certain contrasts between two forms of interpersonal relations.

First is the contrast between the pattern whereby people “treat everyone the same” and another in which they do not. The former is thought to prevail now in South Downs. A stock agent remarked:

There are one or two fellows around the town here who are simple. They go into the pub, and you say good day to them. They come over and you talk to them, just like they're anybody else. You wouldn't want to be yarning with him all day, but you have a yarn to him, and that makes him happy. Some areas you go to, a lot of fellows wouldn't do that. But they do around here. That's one of the reasons why I like staying here.

People who “treat everyone the same” behave toward those below them on the social scale just as they do toward anyone else. A landholder and a working person meeting on the street, for example, will exchange greetings as equals, and if they happen to meet in the pub they will have a beer together. This conception of interpersonal relations contrasts with the pattern that prevailed in the 1920s, when the two-table families did not treat everyone alike by any means, though the one-table families were described as doing so.

A second contrast is between “down-to-earth” people and those who “put on airs.” The two-table patterns of the past exemplify the latter, for in contemporary thought they displayed affectation: they were artificial or unnatural—witness the pretentious clothes and accents, the ostentatious houses, and the insistence that working people address high-standing people as “Mr.” and “Mrs.” Such traits were for show, intended to give the appearance that the landholders were better than other people. One farmer (who, it happens, is very refined, and whose parents were among the elite in the 1920s) remarked that some of the high-prestige families in the past considered themselves better than others; he cited Mrs. Freshney as an example: “Old Mrs. Freshney put on an act. She'd ring for a handkerchief, and the parlor maid would have to bring it on a silver service.” To “put on an act” is to behave unnaturally, whereas the one-table patterns are “down-to-earth” in that they represent the “normal” way for people to behave.

A third contrast is between English and Scottish traditions, the

former being associated with the tendency to treat people differently and to “put on airs,” the latter with the inclination to “treat everyone the same” and a “down-to-earth” style. One elderly woman commented:

Yes, the English could put the dog on, even today…. The English people, there's just something, I don't know what—they've brought it from England and can't break it. It seems to be handed down in their blood stream. And the Scotch… have made their money and don't seem to put on the airs. You do find it with the English people, they are like that.

As another woman put it, “The English are used to their class structure, whereas the Scottish—perhaps apart from the laird—the rest of them are all pretty much of a bunch.” A middle-aged man remarked that “there is a different attitude” among the Scottish families from that among the English: the “Scottish people,” he said, “are more independent in their attitudes.” Another man, discussing the “elite” families in South Downs's past, commented: “There is still an offshoot of this today, of students who went to Christ's College [an Anglican school]. They count themselves as a cut above the rest. This could be a bit harsh, because a lot of my friends are Christ's College old boys. I couldn't say that any of my friends are like that [i.e., snobbish], but there are many that are.” On another occasion a resident of the Midhurst district explained to me about the highprestige families there: “All that group are Anglican families. In [this community] we have a mixture of Scottish and Anglican descendants, and the Scottish descendants have never considered themselves upper class. Perhaps the English descendants have.” An elderly woman commented that the Scots “didn't think they were so importan—more the Anglican ones perhaps thought that. But the Scottish were more down to earth. And a lot of them didn't have servants. They started off as shepherds, a lot of them, and worked their way up.”

I have mentioned that Canterbury was originally an Anglican settlement, while Otago and Southland were founded by Scots Presbyterians; thus the people in South Downs regard Canterbury as more hierarchical and both Otago and Southland as more egalitarian. A man who had recently moved to South Downs from Southland remarked:

There isn't the snobby attitudes amongst the people in Southland [as there are in Canterbury]. They're much more down to earth—Scottish back-

ground, where the whole place revolves around the Protestant work ethic. A man is judged by how hard he works rather than who he is. What he does, how he performs, are important…. Whereas people are much more status-conscious the farther you go north.

A woman who was originally from Central Otago commented that that area had been “founded by Scotsmen, crofters, mostly. These were working people, so you don't find the same business of highstatus families—which are associated with Canterbury.” And a farmer observed: “Christchurch was an Anglican settlement. The English immigrants to Christchurch were the gentry and they brought out their servants and staff. Dunedin [in Otago] was a Scottish settlement. In England now—there is a difference between England and Scotland still.”

Canterbury itself is not homogeneous, according to local thought; the communities of North Canterbury in particular represent the epitome of the Canterbury—strongly hierarchical—pattern. (Very similar, local people believe, are the rural sections of Hawke's Bay.) One person commented that North Canterbury has a greater “built-in respect for families” (that is, high-prestige families) than is true in South Downs. Another person, who had lived for some time in both Marlborough and North Canterbury, said: “Marlborough and North Canterbury are very different from here. There is a system of elites there, Christ College types. It makes a lot of difference there where you went to school.” An elderly woman commented that “in North Canterbury class comes in more than it does here.” I replied that I had heard that this changes as one travels south into Otago and Southland, and she said: “This is true. The farther down you go the less of this you get.”

These ideas about the differences between the English and the Scots constitute a historical explanation of why the communities of Canterbury, on the one hand, and Otago and Southland, on the other, are different. People in Canterbury traditionally placed a greater emphasis on social hierarchy because the region was settled by the English, whereas Otago and Southland have been more egalitarian because they were settled by the Scots. Similarly, South Downs exhibited such strong hierarchical patterns in the 1920s because of the strength of the English traditions at the time; no toffy, two-table elite would have arisen if so many Englishmen had not lived in the community.

I cannot assess the validity of these ideas, nor is it important that

I do so: what matters, rather, is the strength of local opinion on these issues. Still, it is relevant that nineteenth-century Scotland and Ireland were even more highly stratified than England. Indeed, one historian has suggested that many Scots and Irishmen left the home country explicitly because of the rigid social order there. As a consequence, he suggests, “Scots and Irish immigrants [in New Zealand] were generally more fiercely egalitarian than their English counterparts and set out to ensure that New Zealand followed the fluid social pattern typical of other New World countries.”^[2] If this thesis is correct, then local ideas on these matters are partly vindicated. While English values may not be any more hierarchical than Scottish values, the Scots immigrants may have been more radicalized (hence, more egalitarian) than their English counterparts.

Genteel Standing

People still identify a small coterie of farm families in South Downs as constituting the present-day equivalent of the old two-table social stratum, the criteria being primarily family background and education. I will refer to them as “genteel families” (since one can no longer speak of them as two-table households). Local people typically use such terms as “toffs,” “toffy-nosed,” “squirocracy,” “squatocracy,” and the “top ten,” although they accept the term genteel when I use it.

To elicit comments from local people about this facet of the local status system I mentioned an anthropological study of a rural district in Hawke's Bay that compared two areas, one of which contained a number of high-prestige families, the other of which did not.^[3] I was trying to think if South Downs had any families to which this term applied, I said, and I offered the name of one household, the Lawtons, as a possibility. The Lawtons live not in South Downs but close by; a very wealthy and highly visible two-table household in the past, they continue to enjoy high standing. The response to my line of questioning was clear: the Lawtons truly are a high-prestige family—they are toffs, without question—as are several other families in neighboring areas. But no one in South Downs measures up to that level of standing. Although South Downs does have a number of toffy families—people who would be “accepted in polite society

anywhere in the country,” as one person remarked—none are as prestigious as the Lawtons. To explain the concept of genteel families in South Downs, then, and the role of refinement in the local social order, I need to discuss the notion of genteel families in general.

An important attribute of genteel standing is family background, and this in turn entails a complex of ideas that are deeply rooted in New Zealand history. Central is the notion of the “first four ships,” a figure of speech recognized throughout New Zealand. To be of a genteel family background, one's ancestors should have been among the earliest passengers to New Zealand—not literally on one of the first four ships, necessarily, but from the early period of settlement. They should also have been well-to-do “colonists,” not “emigrants”; certainly they would have been above the level of the working classes. Ideally, too, they should have become established as large landholders during the era of extensive sheep runs in the nineteenth century, when land was still in its native state, eventually building a large home on the property and employing a large staff. Moreover, the family should have been both English and Anglican, and either the sons were sent to England to be educated or they boarded at Christ's College. The British class system provides an underlying frame of reference for this set of ideas; in local thought, a genteel family would be at home in “polite society” in Britain today.

These same high-prestige, genteel families occupy a prominent place in the genre of books dealing with the early sheep runs.^[4] These works describe how the runs were initially established and give a chronological account of the significant events relating to them, such as the sale of major blocks of land and anecdotes about both disasters and good fortune. The history of genteel, high-prestige families is very closely intertwined with the history of the runs. In fact, one person suggested that I could arrive at a list of the prestigious names of the South Downs region simply by scanning the index of the volumes that describe the runs of the area, an idea not without merit. It even seems possible that the prominence of this genre of local history (the books are found on many people's bookshelves and in every local library) reflects the social importance of gentility. The books interest people because the material they report expresses key principles of the regional social order, including inside information about the local gentry and the land that helped to establish their credentials. In an interesting symbolic turn, these books also reflect the tide of postwar egalitarianism, for they report information that

at one time was chiefly the province of New Zealand's rural elite. Whereas formerly a person had to be a member of a run-holding family, or have close ties with run-holders, to know the inside story on these matters, now virtually anyone can become an expert.

Historical reality is of course more complex than the cultural theory of family background that I have described; thus, a variety of local families whose forebears were not run-holders, or even early settlers, are included among those with a “genteel” background. For example, in the nineteenth century young, middle-class Englishmen occasionally came to New Zealand in search of positions as cadets on the large estates. Some of them eventually moved up, perhaps becoming farm managers and marrying into an estate-holder's family—a niece, say. The descendants of such a couple would today be classified among the genteel families. In other cases middle-class families with only medium-sized holdings—that is, cockies—exhibited both the two-table pattern and the refinement and education that characterized the elite; they, too, were considered moderately toffy by nonelites. Moreover, some of the most prestigious families have suffered downward mobility, perhaps having lost their property during the Great Depression, so the name is still locally prominent even though the grand house and the property now have different owners.

The criterion of genteel family background is therefore flexible. In its narrowest sense, the term refers to a mere handful of households throughout New Zealand—the families that have been associated with the large estates for generations and that still live on the family holdings. These are the highest of the high-prestige families. The small communities in the vicinity of South Downs do not include anyone fitting this description; but if we use the widest meaning of the term, which takes in even the lowest of the genteel families, then all of the local communities have at least a few qualifying households.

The defining feature for this most inclusive usage of the term is a boarding school education. As far as South Downs is concerned, the four most important boarding schools are all in Christchurch: two, Christ's College for boys and St. Margaret's College for girls, are Anglican, and the other two, St. Andrew's College for boys, and Rangi-Ruru Girls' School, are Presbyterian. A number of other schools in nearby regions are considered at least moderately toffy and so suffice to establish credentials of gentility.

The importance of education in defining the high-prestige cate-

gory is patent. One working-class member of the community, a man whose family has lived in the district since the late nineteenth century, remarked: “One thing that hasn't changed. If one of the toffs get married, ninety-nine times out of a hundred it's to another toff. That just doesn't seem to change.” I commented that a person can spot the toffs by the schools they attended, and he replied: “Yes, dead right you can. We've [presumably he and his wife] gone into this very thoroughly, lots and lots and lots of times. A lot of them can't afford to send their children away, but they'll go to the extent of borrowing money to send them. For the contacts they make while they're there.” A number of people made a similar comment—that some families would go so far as to borrow money to send their children to boarding schools. A farmer said:

You wouldn't repeat this within the area. Nigel actually borrowed money from a friend to send his boy to Christ's. He considers it important enough. I wouldn't do that—if I couldn't afford to pay [for] my children to go to a particular school, well, they'd have to go to something just ordinary. But it depends on what your priorities are. Your education at Christ's would be better than at the South Downs High School, but it wouldn't be a great deal better than, say [here he mentioned another, less expensive boarding school in a nearby town]. But the prestige attached to going to Christ's would be far greater.

Both the boarding school education and genteel family background are associated in local thought with a refined life-style. The toffs set the table with “proper” silver and china, for example, and they appreciate classical music. Ideally, they also have a refined manner. One genteel woman commented that more important than the amount of land a family owns in defining their social position is “the kind of education” they had. She continued:

You may be [no more than] the manager of Darby Station and you may not have actually owned any land [at all]. [But] you could have been to Christ's College or one of the better boarding schools, and you might speak well, and have a gentlemanly bearing…. And then [on the other hand] you get somebody who owns a large amount of land, possibly could be a good farmer, but possibly isn't particularly well educated because that isn't always the beginning and end of a good farmer. He probably doesn't have any presence…. It might not even be your school—it might be your parents' background…. Often people don't know what to do—like someone who never introduces anyone, it never occurs to them that they should.

The significance of a genteel background is seen in the attitudes expressed by those who are not included among the toffs. The com-

ments of a farmer's wife with whom I spoke are illustrative. Both she and her husband are respectable people, but they are not considered refined and did not attend boarding schools. I asked her how she would rank several local farmers, mentioning (among others) Timothy Nesbitt, one of the high-prestige farmers mentioned above. The woman's response betrayed a striking deference toward the Nesbitts:

For me it's a problem. I can't see why. I suppose I could go and talk to Mary Nesbitt [Timothy's wife], in fact our children are the same age and we used to mix at birthday parties, no problem at all. [But] if I see Mary Nesbitt now I wouldn't go over and talk to her, for no particular reason. And the same with Timothy Nesbitt. I don't do it. But that's my fault that I don't…. We could mix, there's no reason why we couldn't. But I don't make the effort.

I asked her what distinguishes Timothy Nesbitt from another farmer, Kenneth O'Reilly, who, though respectable, is not considered refined. She replied:

This is the thing that strikes me, too. I can't see the division [i.e., it is hard for her to articulate the distinction between the two farmers] because they're no different [presumably in wealth or other matters]. In fact, Timothy Nesbitt, one night when he was half [-drunk?], came up to me and said something really personal, and I was quite embarrassed about it. But I laughed and said, “Why, you're no different from anyone else when you've had a couple of drinks—you've no more manners and say silly things just like anyone else.” I feel [that Mary Nesbitt] is a lady who's been brought up very correctly, in Christchurch, went to an all-girl's school, I think. But she's quite a lady and very sweet.

On another occasion, Mary and Timothy Nesbitt were discussing the hierarchy among farmers in the district, when Mary described something that Kenneth O'Reilly had said to her at a dance:

He asked me to dance with him. I was quite newly married. He said he felt that we felt—that is, the Nesbitts—that we were better than he was. I couldn't get over someone actually saying that to me…. Kenneth obviously did feel that we thought we were better than he was. I told Timothy's sister, and she said mum and dad would be like that because they're very English. And she said they probably do think they're better, too.

The assumption that refined people are different from others does not go unchallenged, however, as an exchange I witnessed at a party illustrates. Allison Palmer, who has a toffy background and was now the wife of a run-holder, was telling me how as a girl she helped

pack the horses for the musterers on her parents' sheep station. She turned to Alisdair Mackenzie—a third party in the conversation and a man of working-class background who had become a farmer—and asked him if he remembered that sort of thing. Mackenzie said, sarcastically: “Allison, I was only a down-country shearer at the time. I wouldn't know about those kinds of things. It's nice to have ladies like you around, you're becoming a dying breed.” Mackenzie then turned and walked away. It is significant that although he achieved considerable upward mobility, he has neither the family background nor the education ever to be fully comfortable among the toffs.

In discussing the concept of genteel or high-prestige families with one farmer whose family did not quite qualify, I noted that this was “a very subtle social stratum.” He replied:

Well, I wouldn't say it's so subtle. No, I wouldn't say it's subtle at all. It's quite definite in my opinion. If you belong to one of those families, everyone—a lot of people—consider you a wee bit better than the average…. If you've been to Christ's College or St. Andrew's the door would be open to you anywhere in the country. That would stand you in pretty good stead…. They say if you attended Christ's College and apply for a job, and if there were fifteen or twenty applicants, all things being equal, you'd get the job every time.

The genteel families (defined in the widest sense of having a boarding school education) of Canterbury, Otago, and Southland seem to be part of a common network. To an extent this is because some of them knew one another at boarding school, and through the school nexus the families became personally acquainted. But the connectivity is also due in part to the fact that rural New Zealand has a sufficiently small population that family reputations spread widely. Certain Southland family names, for example, are “well know” (as one person explained to me) in Canterbury. The higher the prestige of a genteel family, the more widely it is known; indeed, a few family names at the top of the scale would be recognized throughout New Zealand—at least among other rural, genteel families.

Elite Families

The genteel households in the district of South Downs constitute a relatively distinctive network within the community. It

is not cohesive, to be sure, for a number of families who by background and education are qualified to belong do not. The East-brooks, for example, are fundamentalist Anglicans who have become estranged from many of their former friends because of their very strong religious views. Similarly, Peter Dixon went to Christ's College, but “he thought it was the worst thing that ever happened to him,” and so he avoids the local circle of toffs. Nevertheless, genteel families do interact with one another to a significant degree: at the annual show of the Agricultural and Pastoral Association, at rugby games, farm equipment sales, and so on, these people tend to drift together for conversation; they also invite one another to their homes for private parties and other informal gatherings. Little wonder that typically others consider them as somewhat cliquish.

The people in South Downs generally recognize a cluster of seven to twelve families as the local elite (the count varies depending on how one defines the topmost group of households). These families are all at the mature stage of the developmental cycle; landholders who are still struggling to pay the mortgage bill are not included. Nor, interestingly, are households in which the husband and wife are retired: all of the elite households are headed by active, middle-aged men and women. What is more, the elite households engage in a common social life of parties and informal visiting. This is not just a conceptual stratum; it is a social network at the level of action as well.

This upper category consists of a mixture of genteel and nongenteel families, for gentility and farming ability appear to be alternative grounds for inclusion. The families of men who are considered among the best farmers in the district are part of the network even if neither they nor their wives went to boarding schools and even if they are not sending their children there either—though of course they cannot be counted among the district's rough members, for their life-style must be compatible with that of the toffs. By the same token, genteel households rank at this upper level only as long as the man's farming ability is at least reasonable. A household of a very mediocre farmer of genteel background may be included in the social network of parties and visiting, but because his deficiencies as a farmer are an embarrassment, he sits distinctly lower in people's estimation than another man who has never been to boarding school but whose farming is outstanding. The importance of farming ability and social gentility in combination can be seen in the fact that the

households of highest standing—that is, the uppermost portion of the uppermost stratum—not only are genteel, but they also are headed by men who are thought to be among the best farmers in the district. The importance of farming ability is also manifest in the fact that people drop out of the local elite when they retire: to be included, a man must have a current reputation as a good farmer.

A Genteel Conception of Person

These genteel households of South Downs—the modern equivalent of the two-table families of the 1920s—are not set apart from working people by symbolic markers as their predecessors were in the past. They do not keep two tables, the wives cook the workers' meals as a matter of course, and they are referred to by workers and social equals alike by their first names. Everyone—even the most genteel—treats everyone the same, and receives like treatment in turn. The refined families in South Downs, in other words, have accommodated to a strongly egalitarian social milieu.

The genteel families are not set apart by virtue of their wealth, either. In a sense this was also true of the two-table families in the 1920s, when, as we have seen, a number of toffy households were struggling, middling farmers, and of the four wealthiest families in the district at the time, only two were two-table households. Thus, even then, one-and two-table patterns were not a good index of the amount of money a family had. Nevertheless, in the 1920s wealth was more closely associated with refinement than it is today, if only because it took considerable financial resources for the full expression of two-table patterns, including a large home with servants, both the wherewithal and leisure to entertain properly, and a farm staff of sufficient size that the landholder did not have to work alongside his employees. Most two-table families could not live up to this ideal, but they aspired to it nonetheless. Today, genteel families require money to send their children to boarding school, to be sure, and they need to maintain certain relatively expensive standards of taste: they own sterling silver cutlery, for example, and what is considered good furniture; and perhaps they feel more driven than most to journey to Britain as soon as finances permit. These expenses, how-

ever, are well within the means of many local farm families who are at the mature stage of the developmental cycle.

Yet the genteel are still set apart: they are not quite “like everyone else.” Their family background and boarding school education bracket them as a distinct type of person, or as having a distinct form of inner being. They exhibit the rare qualities of cultivation—they are “better educated,” have “presence,” display refined manners, and speak properly. They are set apart in this way not only from the rough, whose manners and life-style are conceived as contrasting starkly with their own, but also from the vast majority of people, the “average people in the district, including other highly respectable landholders. While the respectable, nongenteel landholders are not considered rough by any means, and their style of living is thought to be compatible with that of the toffs, still they are thought to be different in inner character from the genteel.

The idea that social elites exhibit personal qualities that are different from others' has been sketched historically by Norbert Elias, who states that the modern concept of civilization developed in eighteenth-century French courtly society as a means for distancing people of very high standing from those below. This emerging notion of civilization, however, amounted to something more than changes in formal rules, such as table manners and standards of politeness. According to Elias, the courtly individual was a different kind of person, exhibiting greater self-restraint and delicacy of feeling. For example, courtly people displayed more sensitivity in the sphere of natural body functions, such as excretion and nose blowing, and they asserted greater self-control over natural impulses, such as the desire to scratch themselves at the table and to take a drink when the mouth was full of food. Emotions such as violent outbursts were also restrained.^[5] The behavior of the new, civilized, courtly individual revealed a profound molding or shaping of the person, and, like topiary or formal landscaping, it resulted in what was considered an improvement over nature.

Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of modern French taste runs parallel to that of Elias. According to Bourdieu, the tastes of the dominant classes are more restrained and self-controlled, exemplifying greater propriety and ceremony, than those of the working classes. This difference is not simply in outer style, but in habitus, or a person's inner dispositions. The working classes live in a milieu of economic necessity and physical labor; consequently, a degree of hedonism

pervades their lives. Thus the working-class men eat in a way that is robustly masculine—they do not nibble and pick at their food, which is a style that “befits a woman,” but they consume their food “with whole-hearted male gulps and mouthfuls.” By contrast, the bourgeois environment is one of luxury, in which the individual is able to cultivate form and decorum. In the bourgeois household one waits to eat until the last person is served, takes modest helpings, and does not appear to be overeager in eating. Dishes are not served all at once, as they are in the working-class household, but in a definite sequence: “for example, before the dessert is served, everything left on the table, even the salt-cellar, is removed, and the crumbs are swept up.” This restraint entails an “extension of rigorous rules into everyday life.”^[6]

Not everyone admires the toffy conception of person: genteel patterns are disparaged by the rough especially, who see the toffs in general as artificial and status-conscious, and toffy men as effeminate. Yet everyone, including the rough, assumes that the genteel man or woman, owing to family background and education, is a different kind of person, has a different inner character. In that sense, the idea of gentility is as alive today as it was in the 1920s.

But there is a significant difference between the contemporary pattern and that of the past. A person may cultivate genteel patterns as assiduously as before, and the qualities of gentility may be recognized as readily as ever; but toffy standing does not confer the distinction that it did in the 1920s.

Chapter Nine
Conclusion.

Systems of social standing, or prestige structures, and the concept of person are rooted in the same body of cultural ideas. The moral notions by which the individual identifies what is significant about others and so orders them into hierarchies of standing also form the conceptual scheme by which the individual defines, measures, and shapes his or her own self-identity. What is more, the cultural conception of person is a key to human agency, for it defines the individual's basic orientation toward life: it defines what is worth doing and sacrificing for. The pursuit of wealth, say, or religious purity and devotion may, by these notions, be defined with equal validity as the very basis of a meaningful, honorable, and fulfilling existence.

An important theme in the anthropological literature is that conceptions of person vary widely among cultures. For example, Clifford Geertz describes the Balinese pattern as fundamentally different from our own, in that, from the Western perspective, the Balinese depersonalize the individual: they define the person not in terms of individual qualities, but in terms of such features as the social statuses and titles that a man or woman holds.^[1] Another example can be found in the emergence of modern, inworldly individualism (which Louis Dumont contends is a very distinctive conception of person) from the outworldly individualism of the early Christians.^[2]

Some hold that conceptions of the person do not vary among cultures as much as writers like Geertz and Dumont contend, and

herein lies one of the most important issues of contemporary anthropology: to what extent are the lives of other peoples different from our own, and what is the nature of human differences? The concept of person is not the only topic of debate. Another is time: some argue that cultural notions about time vary widely and that the temporal order is experienced differently by different peoples.^[3] Still others have focused on linguistic relativity, the cultural construction of emotions, gender, and kinship, and the relativity of rationality, knowledge, or beliefs about the world.^[4]

One critic, Roger Keesing, reproves the cultural constructionists for “inventing” what he calls radical alterity.^[5] He contends that the relativistic anthropologists have an interest in seeing radical differences where none exist, or that they make too much of the differences that do exist. Some would carry Keesing's criticism even further by rejecting the principle that cultural systems of meaning play a significant role at all in human institutions or in people's orientations toward the world. This position is implicit in Treiman's theory of occupational prestige. According to Treiman, because occupational prestige systems are rooted in people's “natural” tendency to look up to jobs that entail power and privilege, they operate independently of patterns of cultural meaning, at least for the most part. In principle, then, an observer should be able to grasp the occupational system of any society from his or her own perspective without entering into the cultural world of the people themselves.

In response to these criticisms, it is important to stress the danger of confusing our own conceptions (of person, time, gender, kinship, rationality, and the like) with universal forms, and therefore of imposing our own cultural perspective onto others. This is the problem of mistaking the cultural for the natural. For example, if we fail to appreciate the differences in the concept of person among—and within—societies, we will mistakenly “see” others as being moved by the same ideas that move us.

The constitutive role of cultural meanings can be seen in the important part that occupation plays in the personal identity of men in South Downs; that is, if we are to understand the man's sense of self, we must understand something about Western society's moral beliefs concerning work. Roy Wagner makes a similar point when he argues that Americans and Melanesians have different notions about what is important, worthwhile, or fulfilling in life.^[6] Whereas Melanesians value personal relationships, Americans value produc-

tive work. The American anthropologist in the field concentrates on acquiring a large body of information—that is, doing productive work; Melanesians, in contrast, focus primarily on fostering interpersonal relations—and so they do not fully grasp what drives the anthropologist who lives among them. For the American—and the New Zealander—work that counts as productive is primarily that which falls within the economic sphere, or within the domain of one's occupation or job.

My inquiry into the cultural ideas underlying occupation in South Downs has concentrated on two hierarchical orders: first, the total occupational system of the community, or the pattern that emerges when all the jobs of the district are considered as a whole; and second (in fact, this is a subset of the first), the occupational system of local farmers. The analysis in both cases is similar in form. On the one hand, I describe a set of cultural standards for ordering occupations hierarchically, or for judging relative worth. The main standards behind the total occupational system are wealth, occupational importance, and the asymmetry of interpersonal relations; and for the landholders, wealth, farming ability, and refinement. On the other hand, all but one of these criteria—asymmetry—rest on beliefs or assumptions that help to define the standards and to give them justification and intellectual depth. For example, the use of wealth to sort occupations is based in large part on the belief that people who are better off than others lead more comfortable and secure lives. Similarly, the principle of occupational importance reflects an assumption that since economic well-being is so basic to human existence, a job's importance is measured in terms of its significance for the economic order. The principle of farming ability, too, is grounded on explicit and complex theories about how best to produce sheep and wool, while that of refinement is rooted in a set of ideas about the “first four ships,” the differences between Scots and English, and the like.

Modern rural communities differ in the conceptual orders that underlie their occupational hierarchies: perhaps they employ different criteria for sorting occupations, or they define those criteria differently. Consequently, the occupational systems of any two communities may be different even though the same jobs are represented. South Downs and the California community that I studied earlier are illustrative, for in considering overall structure, people in California seemed to assign the criterion of wealth greater weight than

people in South Downs. For example, in South Downs the principle of asymmetry is emphasized enough that the position of stock agent is elevated to a level equal to that of farmer, even despite the disparity in wealth between them. There is no occupation equivalent to stock agent in the California community, but if there were I do not believe it would rank up with the landholders, simply because wealth appears to trump the other features of the system.

Consider also the shape of the landholder hierarchies in the two places. In the New Zealand case, it is relatively flat and formless, for most of the farm households occupy a position in the fairly sizable and undefined middle, and the distance from top to bottom is not perceived by local people as being very great. In California, by contrast, the hierarchy was more definitely vertical in profile, and the levels were more clearly defined; indeed, every landholding family in the community could be placed with reasonable ease and fair consensus somewhere on the scale between the genuinely wealthy and the only moderately well-to-do.

These differences in the shape of the two hierarchies are due in part to the fact that the California properties ranged more widely in size and value, so differences in people's holdings could play a greater role in sorting farm families. But they may also be due to different cultural definitions of wealth. In the California community, property size was a highly important standard. In South Downs, however, size of holdings is not considered a reliable measure of well-being, largely because a person with a good deal of land may be heavily in debt, which is not the mark of the well-to-do. Rather, emphasis is placed on evidence of income, including farm improvements and personal spending patterns. Thus, even if the range of differences among properties in South Downs were greater than it in fact is, the hierarchy of wealth among landholders would still be relatively flat.

It also seems that wealth, however defined, was weighted more heavily among landholders in the California community, in that people there attended more resolutely to material differences among property-holding households in assessing their relative standing. The Californians gave little emphasis at all to farming ability, nor did refinement play as great a role as it does in South Downs.^[7] It is true that the wealthiest landholders in the California community had a style that is associated with “old money,” whereas most of the landholding families enjoyed what may be described as a respectable,

middle-class life-style. Yet all in all, refinement and life-style occupied a decidedly secondary position relative to wealth in the hierarchical ordering scheme.

The greater flatness and shapelessness of the hierarchy among landholders in South Downs, then, results in part from the fact that landholding households are ranked not according to a single dominant criterion, but according to three—wealth, farming ability, and refinement-each of which produces a somewhat different sorting. The few landholding families at the highest standing rank relatively high on all three scales: they are at the mature stage of the developmental cycle, excellent farmers, and, if not refined, at least have a life—style compatible with those who are. The opposite is of course true for the handful of families at the bottom of the scale. But a large majority of families rank very differently on each of the three criteria, so that a high level of refinement might cancel out poor farming ability, resulting in a middle standing overall.

Yet another feature of the cultural system contributes to the relative flatness of the landholder hierarchy in South Downs, and that is the lack of consensus on two of the three sets of criteria. For farming ability, there are two competing theories about what it takes to be a good farmer. Thus, while a man may be regarded as outstanding by one set of criteria, he would be considered no more than fair (or perhaps foolish) by the other. Similarly, the virtues of refinement are regarded very differently by different people—perhaps as something worth striving for, but perhaps as merely specious and ostentatious.

The lack of unanimity on these two criteria has an important implication. A community member who denigrates the patterns of the refined tacitly minimizes the importance of refinement as a criterion for social esteem. Similarly, a highly refined farmer who is rather inept at farming and not very well-to-do may place greater emphasis on refinement than his comparatively rough neighbor who is better off financially and an able farmer. And to hold to one theory of farming over another also validates a particular hierarchy of esteem. In sum, a pattern emerges whereby community members advance claims and counterclaims regarding the allocation of esteem in the community, thus further confusing the issue of hierarchy.

The social hierarchy rests on systems of meaning that are contested, not consensual. This fact was patent in the 1920s, when the dominance of the principle of refinement and the two-table patterns challenged the landholders whose self-identity was achieved through

work. As long as the two-table patterns prevailed, the personal worth of the one-table families was cheapened. The growing importance of the one-table patterns (or of the criterion of farming ability) after World War II has altered this situation considerably: among those whose identity is defined in terms of refinement, qualification as a genteel household is still very important, but it is no longer necessary for an outstanding farmer in South Downs to have attended boarding school in order to rank among the local elite. Nor does he need to feel that his own identity is threatened by the other system of meaning. The values of work are now secure. Nevertheless, the two conceptions of person and theories of hierarchy are still contested in subtle ways, and it seems that a set of social forms very like the two-table patterns of the past could reemerge given the proper social and economic climate. But for the moment at least, even the most genteel landholder must be a good farmer if he is to enjoy the reputation and self-identity of a truly meritorious person in the district.

The contestedness of the system of meanings that I have described is manifest in other ways as well. An important instance is the case of the Joneses, the fundamentalist landholders who slowly acquired substantial property by buying up their neighbors' land. These people are looked upon collectively as some of the worst farmers in the district. Yet their personal identity is likely achieved not by reference to the ideal of work or refinement primarily, and probably they do not identify strongly with the community as a reference group. Their sense of self and their major reference group, rather, are defined largely in terms of their religious beliefs.

The Joneses raise a crucial point about the contestedness of the systems of meaning behind the local social order. These people are not just extraordinarily poor farmers, in local opinion; they are unrepentantly so. Consequently, they are a tacit threat to the system that prevails: their very existence unwittingly challenges the cultural system of personhood and social hierarchy with which most other landholders identify.

Conceptions of Person

I have said that productive work in the economic sphere is the cornerstone not only of the social hierarchy of South Downs but also of the concept of person, at least among men. The

same may be true of women who have jobs outside the home; yet conceptions of self among men and women are linked in different ways to occupation. It is not only a man's general sense of personhood that is rooted in his work, but his gender identity as well, or his sense of himself as a man, whereas a woman's identity of herself as a woman is rooted in other conceptions altogether. We may say that occupation has somewhat different meanings for men and women, although having a job may be equally important to them both.

Louis Dumont's account of the differences between the concepts of person in traditional India and modern Western societies sheds light on the male notions of personhood in South Downs.^[8] In Dumont's analysis, the primary measure of value or importance in the traditional Indian system is the group, whereas in modern society it is the individual. According to the moral beliefs of traditional India, for example, the private interests and ambitions of the individual should be subordinated to, say, the honor of the subcaste or its perpetuation as an entity. By contrast, in modern Western societies the standard of good is the individual; indeed, the interests of the whole tend to be conceived in terms of what is good for the greatest number of people—individuals—in the group.^[9]

The emphasis on occupation in the social hierarchy and the male concept of person in South Downs are important expressions of the individualism to which Dumont refers. A meaningful life for the male household head in the community is defined chiefly in terms of his activities as a “free” agent in the occupational sphere, and above all in business. Both wealth and a good job are desirable not strictly for the material benefits they provide, but as a sign of the personal, moral worth of the individual.^[10]

Dumont's analysis is parallel to Max Weber's account of Protestantism and capitalism.^[11] According to Weber, a new concept of self and a new kind of personality emerged during the Reformation, mainly as a function of the Calvinist notion of calling, whereby worldly success through the accumulation of wealth was conceived as a sign of grace. Wealth was no longer viewed as a means for satisfying material wants, but as an end in itself: the individual felt compelled to make more and more money to signify religious worth. Because these beliefs required submission of the “natural” self to a higher purpose, the individual had to master and transcend the “natural” inclinations. The result was an ascetic form of self, for it re-

quired discipline and self-denial. According to Weber, then, Calvinism expressed an ethos in which worldly affairs—work or business—were the focus of one's strivings. The shaping or transformation of self was achieved in the pursuit of economic goals.

We can see a secularized version of this concept of person in South Downs. For example, the landholders tend to express the view (mistaken though it may be) that wage earners are less competent, ambitious, conscientious, and industrious in business affairs than farmers and run-holders. Implicit in this notion is that self-discipline in the economic sphere and dedication to work are primary standards for judging people; the landholders' criticism of workers thus betrays a distinctive and fundamental worldview.

The accumulation of wealth is a moral goal in South Downs—witness the importance of farm ownership for the farmer's sense of who he is. In this respect the California and New Zealand communities are similar. Yet there is also a crucial difference between them, one that reveals the patterns in South Downs more clearly. The California farmers I studied earlier were more resolute than their New Zealand counterparts in the use of wealth as a defining criterion of the local hierarchy, whereas the New Zealand farmers give relatively greater weight to farming ability. This suggests a difference in the concept of person among the landholders in the two places, a distinction that is also reflected in Weber's analysis of early capitalism. Weber distinguished between two ascetic styles of living in Calvinism, one pertaining to the entrepreneurs and businessmen, the other to the workers.^[12] In the former—on which Weber focused his own attention—the goal was to accumulate capital, and the individual demonstrated his grace through wealth. In the other, the laborer's calling was his work, which he pursued with the same ascetic diligence, the same self-control and sense of mission, as the capitalist pursued money.

The historical reason for this difference between the two communities is beside the point. What is significant, rather, is the distinctiveness of the New Zealand pattern, whereby manual labor is as important as the pursuit of wealth for a man's sense of moral worth. Put simply, work means different things in the two communities.

Notes

Chapter One Introduction

Chapter Two The Historical Pattern

Chapter Three The Occupational System

Chapter Four The Conceptual Basis of Occupational Standing

Chapter Five The Criterion of Wealth Among Farmers

Chapter Six The Criterion of Farming Ability

Chapter Seven The Criterion of Refinement: The 1920s

Chapter Eight The Criterion of Refinement: After World War II

Chapter Nine Conclusion.

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Index

A

Agricultural ladder, 93 , 102

Agricultural recovery after 1896, 31

Agriculture: productivity of, in New Zealand, 38

All-grass wintering, 125 -26, 127

American ranchers: compared with run-holders, 25

Anglican church, 15 , 17 , 168 , 172

Assisted immigration, 18

Asymmetry: compared with other criteria, 85 -86;

contrasted with criterion of importance, 76 ;

as criterion of standing, 76 -81, 82 -85, 85 -86, 182 , 183 ;

defined, 76

Auckland, 37

Australians, 17 , 18

B

Balinese, 180

Ballot system, 97

Barber, Bernard, 9 , 75

Boarding schools, 32 , 33 , 40 , 50 , 53 , 67 , 176 , 185 ;

changing importance of, 162 ;

role of, in defining genteel standing, 154 , 165 , 172 -73, 175 , 177 , 178 ;

and South Downs families in 1920s, 141 , 154

Boundaries, community. See South Downs, boundedness of

Bourdieu, Pierre, 7 , 178

Business owners, 63 -64, 72 , 82 , 83 , 89 , 98 ;

hierarchy of, 64 , 85

C.

California community: contrasted with New Zealand, 9 , 14 , 70 -72, 81 , 86 , 107 -9, 110 -11, 112 , 182 -84, 187 ;

description of, 2 ;

sense of identity in, 2 ;

size of farms in, 94 ;

social hierarchy in, 110 ;

study of, 2 , 93 ;

and wealth, 9

Calvinism, 186

Cambridge University, 23

Canterbury, 2 , 23 , 24 , 26 , 27 , 135 , 175 ;

description of, 3 -4;

and hierarchy, 168 -70;

settlement of, 15 , 25 ;

University of, 2

Canterbury Association, 16

Canterbury Plains, 3 , 18

Capitalism, spirit of, 108 -9

Cartage firms, 55 , 84

Cattle, 48

Chemists, 67 , 81 , 83

Christchurch, 3 , 6 , 15 , 20 , 24 , 27

Christmas Eve, 84

Christ's College, 157 , 168 , 169 , 175 , 176 ;

described, 154 , 172

Civilization, 133 , 178

Class consciousness: after World War II, 36

Classification struggle, 7

Class lines: hardening of, 25 , 33 ;

softening of, 42

Class relations: in 19th century, 25 -27;

in 20th century, 40

Cockatoo: defined, 22

Colonists, 16 , 171

Community-mindedness: as criterion of standing, 88 -89, 90

Conservative farming, 124 -27

Contract work, 41 , 42 , 82

Cook, 41 , 140 , 144 , 147 , 150 , 152 , 160 , 161 ;

farmer's wife as, 147 , 148 , 152 -53, 160 , 163 , 177

Cookhouse, 50 , 140 , 142 , 144 , 152 , 161

Correspondence courses, 50

County clerk, 75 , 77 -79, 85 , 98

County council, 5 , 79 ;

workers, 56 , 65 , 80 , 89 ;

workers' incomes, 60

Cowboy, 138

Cultural capital, 7

D

Dairying, 27 , 28 , 41 , 51

Depression of 1879-96, 19 , 21 , 22 , 26

Developmental cycle, 95 -102, 115 -17, 121 , 178 ;

and local elites, 176

Doctors, 67

Dominy, Michèle, 13

Downlands, 4

“Down-to-earth,” 135 , 140 , 145 , 167 -68

Drinking, 58 , 59 , 134

Dumont, Louis, 180 , 186

Dunedin, 15

E

Economic capital, 7

Economic elite: in urban New Zealand, 37

Egalitarianism: cultural conceptions behind, 166 -70;

in New Zealand in 19th century, 16 , 25 , 166 ;

in New Zealand after World War II, 35 -36, 42 , 43 , 111 , 135 , 159 , 171 -72;

in New Zealand in 1981, 43 , 177 ;

in South Downs, 57 -63, 73 , 88 , 90 , 135 , 161 -70, 177 ;

in South Downs in 1920s, 158 , 166

Eldred-Grigg, Stevan, 31 , 33

Election of 1890, 30

Elias, Norbert, 133 , 178

Elites: in 1920s, 153 -56, 169 ;

in 1981, 168 , 175 -77

Emigrants. See Colonists

Emotions: cultural construction of, 181

English: as hierarchical, 135 , 167 -70. See also Scots, and English

English public schools, 23 , 24 , 32 , 171

Estates, 53 -54, 86 , 171 , 172 ;

breakup of, 30 -31, 32 , 54

F

Family background: cultural theory of, 171 -72

Family farms, 2 , 28 , 31 , 43 , 160

Family labor, 18 , 31 , 42 , 48 , 49 , 82 , 160 ;

and developmental cycle, 95 ;

in late 19th century, 31 ;

in 1920s, 146 -51

Farm development, 100 , 105 , 106

Farmers: and run-holders in 1890s—1921, 32 , 33 ;

and run-holders in 1981, 51 -54, 86 ;

and run-holders in 19th century, 24 , 25 , 29 -30. See also Landholders

Farm improvements, 97 , 105 -6, 116 , 122 . See also Farm development

Farming ability: in California community, 110 -11, 183 ;

and community involvement, 123 -24;

as criterion of standing, 14 , 102 , 108 -9, 110 -31, 165 , 182 ;

and elite standing, 176 -77;

hierarchy of, 120 ;

importance of, compared with wealth, 111 -18, 123 , 187

Farm managers, 71 , 84 -85, 142 , 146 , 156

Farm workers: and landholders, 25 , 33 , 40 , 41 , 43 , 165 -66;

19th-century, 16 , 18 , 19 , 22 , 24 , 26 , 27 ;

as occupational category, 54 -55;

rarity of, in South Downs, 55 , 103 -5

Farms: carrying capacity of, 93 -94, 105 -6;

effects of refrigeration on, 28 ;

financing of, 65 , 97 ;

intensive, defined, 47 -48;

productivity of, 100 , 105 -6, 160 ;

in settlement period, 16 , 18 ;

size of, 48 , 106 ;

types of, in California, 110 ;

types of, in South Downs, 48 . See also Land, acquisition of

Fat-lamb buyers, 65 , 84

Feminine identity. See Person, concept of, feminine

Fencing contractor, 82 , 84

“First four ships,” 171

Foreign exchange, 34 , 35 , 38 , 39 , 62

Foreign trade policies, 37

Freezing works, 27 , 65

French society, 7

French taste, 178

Functional importance: as criterion of standing, 9 , 75

G

Gardens: on large estates, 23 , 40 ;

in South Downs after World War II, 160 ;

in South Downs in 1920s, 136 , 141 , 142 , 143

Geertz, Clifford, 180

Gender: cultural variations in, 181 ;

and occupation, 10 -13, 21 , 69 , 185 -86, 186

Genteel households, 170 -79;

as artificial, 179 ;

and wealth, 177

“Gentry,” 23 , 30 , 33 , 43 , 171

Glassford, 6 , 49 , 50 , 131 ;

description of, 4 -5;

and South Downs, 5 , 52 -54

Gold rushes, 18

Golf, 155 -56, 162 , 166

H

Hawke's Bay, 169 , 170

Headmasters, 67 , 81 , 98

Hierarchy, values of, 139 -40

High-prestige families, 155 , 170 -75

High school, 5

Historical societies, 134

Hunting societies, 8

I

Identity. See Self-identity

Importance: and county clerk's standing, 78 ;

as criterion of standing, 74 -76, 85 -86, 182 ;

and landholders' standing, 81 -82;

and skilled workers' standing, 80

Incomes, 60 -61, 98 -100, 106

Income tax, 36 , 107 , 117 , 159 ;

advantages of, to landholders, 59 -60, 61 , 73 ;

and developmental cycle, 98 -101, 103 ;

and farm productivity, 100 -101, 103 , 104

India, 186

Inflation, 36 , 97 , 123

Inheritance, 95 , 96 , 107

Insurance companies, 37

Intensive sheep farming: development of, 27 -30, See also Farms, intensive, defined

Ireland, 170

J

Jackson, description of, 6

Johnsonville, 36

K.

Keesing, Roger, 181

Kinship, 181

Kurow, 41 -43

L

Labor: cost of, 103 -5, 107 ;

and one-table theory of hierarchy, 153 , 157 -58, 165

Labor needs: reduction of, on farms, 34 , 41 , 55 , 160 -61

Labor shortage: after World War II, 42

Labour government, 35

Land, acquisition of: in 1981, 95 -97, 103 ;

in 19th century, 16 , 19 , 20 -21, 27 -28;

in 20th century, 33 ;

after World War II, 40 , 121 -22

Landholders: assessment of, by non-farmers, 45 -46;

assessment of, by one another, 46 , 91 , 118 -20, 128 , 165 ;

assessment of nonfarmers by, 46 -47;

importance of, in New Zealand society, 32 , 34 , 37 -39;

and local businesses, 82 -85;

moral qualities of, 58 -59;

political importance of, 30 ;

prominence of, in South Downs, 45 -47, 76 , 81 -85, 91 ;

as reference point, 53 , 63 , 71 , 81 ;

and wealth, 59 -63. See also Workers, and landholders

Land policies, 19th century, 26 , 30 -31

Leveling: economic, 159 -61;

social, 161 -66

Liberal government, 30

Linguistic relativity, 181

Linked communities, 129 -31

Longbeach estate, 18

M

Manufacturing, 34 , 35 ;

concentration of, 37

Maritime Strike of 1890, 25

Marketing boards, 39

Marlborough, 169

Married couples, 103 -4;

defined, 55 ;

income of, 60

Masculine identity.See   Person, concept of, masculine

Melanesians, 181

Middle class, transformation of, 35

Middling one-table landholders, 149 -52, 153

Middling two-table landholders, 146 -49, 154 , 156

Midhurst, 5 , 6 , 129 -31;

description of, 4

Ministry of Agriculture, 2 , 125

Mobility: in settlement period, 16 -18;

in 19th century, 19 , 20 , 23 , 25 , 26 , 27 ;

in 1896-1921, 28 , 32 , 33 ;

in 20th century, 33 ;

during Great Depression, 172 ;

after World War II, 40 -41, 160 ;

in 1981, 43 , 96

Mortgages, 95 , 97 , 98 , 103 , 105 , 106 , 108 , 116

Murphy, Robert, 8

N

National party: and farmers, 38

Naturalization of economic standard, 73 -74, 75 -76, 106 -7, 109

“No-hopers,” 68 -69

North Canterbury, 33 , 169

O

Occupational prestige, theories of, 7 -9, 75 , 181

Occupational system, 69 , 70 ;

cultural ideas underlying, 75 -76, 182 -84;

Occupational system (continued )

defined, 13 , 44 ;

place of, in social hierarchy, 87 -90

One-table pattern, 144 , 146 , 149 -53, 177 , 185 ;

defined, 143 ;

prominence of, 159 , 163 -66;

and social distance, 165 -66

One-table theory of hierarchy, 153 , 157 -58, 165

Otago, 20 , 27 , 135 , 175 ;

and egalitarianism, 168 -70;

gold rush in, 18 ;

settlement of, 15 , 17 , 26

Oxford University, 23

P

Pastoralism: Australian, 16 , 17 ;

in settlement period, 16 -18, 171 . See also Run-holders; Runs

Person, concept of, 185 -87;

contestedness of, 1 , 179 , 185 ;

cultural differences in, 180 -81;

feminine, 10 , 12 -13;

genteel, 177 -79;

in India, 186 ;

and life orientation, 1 , 180 ;

masculine, 10 , 12 -13, 186 ;

and models for behavior, 14 ;

and systems of standing, 180 . See also Self-identity

“Personality”: as criterion of standing, 87 , 88 , 90

Pharmacists. See Chemists

Poor people: in 1920s, 139

Postal and telephone services: workers in, 56 , 65 , 80 , 89

Postmaster, 77 , 78 , 79

Power and privilege: as universal values, 7 -8, 181

Presbyterian church, 15 , 17 , 168 , 172

Prestige, 8 , 73

Prestige structure. See Status system

Price of land: in 19th century, 16 , 19 , 21 , 31 ;

in 20th century, 31 , 33 ;

after World War II, 40 , 41 , 121 ;

in 1981, 43 , 96

Productivity: as American value, 181 -82

Professions, 67

Progressive farming, 124 -27

Prosperity: in 1870s, 19 ;

in 1896-1921, 28 , 31 , 32 , 150 ;

after World War II, 35 , 36 , 39 , 42 , 64 , 121 , 159 -60

Protestant ethic, 108 -9

Protestantism, 186

Pseudonyms, 2

Pubs, 58 , 59 , 134 , 166

“Putting on airs,” 167 -68

R

Rabbiting, 138

Rangi-Ruru Girls' School, 172

Rationality, 181

Reference group, 2 , 3 , 124 , 128 , 130 , 131

Refinement, 153 , 154 , 157 -58, 171 , 173 ;

in 19th century, 23 , 24 ;

after World War II, 164 -66;

in 1981, 40 , 67 , 87 ;

in California community, 183 ;

as criterion of standing, 14 , 132 -79, 182 , 183 -84;

explained, 133 -34;

and farmers, 133 ;

hierarchy of, 133 ;

and occupation, 132 -33;

and roughness, 133 -34, 135 , 141 , 145 ;

and wealth, 177 ;

and workers, 133

Reformation, 186

Refrigeration, 27 -30, 32 ;

effects of, on run-holding, 29

Relativistic anthropologists, 181

Retirement, 42 -43, 162 , 176 , 177

Roads, shingling of, 137 -38

Rotational grazing, 125

Run-holders: anger toward, in 19th century, 25 -27;

in settlement period, 17 . See also Farmers

Runs: books about, 53 -54, 171 -72;

continuum of, 50 ;

contrasted with farms, 4 , 5 , 28 , 47 -49, 51 -54;

defined, 47 -48;

“ideal” or “pure,” 48 -50;

size of, 16 , 29 , 49 , 50

Russell, Captain, 23

S

St. Andrew's College, 172 , 175

St. Margaret's College, 172

Salaried employees, 65

School board (California), 67 -68, 86

School committee, 67 , 81

Schoolteachers, 67 , 71 , 81 , 86 , 98 ;

in California community, 67 , 81 , 86 ;

income of, 60 -61, 112 ;

and refinement, 67

Scots: egalitarianism of, 135 , 167 -70;

and English, 15 , 17

Self-identity, 2 ;

and community, 128 , 131 , 185 ;

and occupation, 12 -13, 181 -82;

and refinement, 157 , 185 ;

and work, 157 , 184 , 185

Servants, 23 , 25 , 32 ;

disappearance of, 40 , 41 , 136 ;

in South Downs in 1920s, 136 -37, 139 -46, 152 -53

Service sector, 34 -35

Set stocking, 124

Settlement of New Zealand, 15 -18

Shearers, 22 , 56 -57, 138

Shearing gangs, 82 , 84 , 138

Sheep: breeds of, 17 , 22 , 28 , 48 , 49 ;

merino, 17 , 22 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 49

Sheep sales, 45

Shop assistants, 66

Single man, 55

“Snobbish”: in 1920s, 140 , 143 , 145 , 146 , 148 , 151 ;

after World War II, 161 , 162 ;

explained, 135

Sociability: as criterion of standing, 88 -89, 90

Social distinction, markers of, 25 , 43 , 61 -63. See also Social standing, signs of

Social hierarchy: in late 19th century, 21 -24;

in 1890s—1920s, 33 -34;

and boundedness of community, 5 -6, 91 , 128 ;

in California community, 2 , 110 ;

contestedness of, 1 , 10 , 120 , 124 -27, 157 , 165 -66, 179 , 184 -85;

and criterion of wealth, 91 -109, 106 -9;

cultural theory of, 1 , 13 -14, 182 ;

gender bias of, 12 ;

and moral qualities, 58 -59;

objectivity of, 1 , 8 -9, 74 ;

and occupation, 87 -90, 132 ;

perception of, 1 , 8 -10, 181 ;

and systems of meaning, 8 ;

and women, 11 -12. See also Occupational system

Social standing, signs of, 8 , 9 , 10 , 46 -47, 74 , 91 , 133 . See also Social distinction, markers of

South Downs: boundedness of, 3 , 5 , 6 , 91 , 128 -31;

county of, 4 , 5 ;

district of, 4 , 5 ;

farm workers employed in, 82 ;

selection of, for research, 2 ;

social hierarchy of, 5

Southern Alps, 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

Southland, 125 , 175

Squatters, 22

Standard of living, 95 , 98 , 101

Station, 50 , 61

Status system, 1 ;

naturalization of, 7 -8, 181 ;

and systems of meaning, 7

Stock agents, 66 , 71 , 76 -77, 80 , 84 , 85 , 98 , 183

Stock firms, 65 , 84 ;

managers of, 66

Stock numbers, 100

Structural-functional theory, 75

Subprovincial section, 6

Subsidies, agricultural, 39

Swedes, 29 , 48 , 125 , 127

Symbolic domination, 74

T.

Teachers. See Schoolteachers

Teamsters, 138

Telephone system, 5 , 56

Tennis, 24 , 136 , 155

Timaru, 25

Time, conceptions of, 181

Towns: in 19th century, 24 ;

in 20th century, 42 -43, 65

“Treating everyone the same,” 57 , 72 -73, 88 , 167 -68

Treiman, Donald, 7 -8, 9 , 181

Trobriand society, 6 -7

Truck drivers, 55

Turner, Jonathan, 8

Two-table pattern, 140 -49, 152 -53, 177 ;

defined, 140 ;

disappearance of, 163 -66, 170 ;

as “pretentious,” 167

Two-table theory of hierarchy, 156 -58

U

Unemployment: during 1879-96 depression, 22 ;

after World War II, 36

Unions, 38

University education, 67

Urban sector, 34 -37;

growing importance of, 37 -38, 39

V

Veterinarians, 67 , 83 , 84

W

Wagner, Roy, 181

Wealth: as criterion of standing, 14 , 71 -74, 85 -86, 91 -109, 111 -18, 139 , 145 , 182 -84;

cultural definition of, 9 , 106 -9, 182 -83;

distribution of, in New Zealand, 36 , 42 , 43 ;

distribution of, in South Downs in 1920s, 135 -39;

distribution of, in South Downs in 1981, 59 -63, 71 , 95 -106, 111 , 112 -13;

distribution of, in South Downs, changes in, 159 -61;

folk theory of, 73 , 75 ;

and landholders, 81 , 91 -109, 111 -18;

and material well-being, 73 -74, 79 , 108 ;

as sign of grace, 186 -87;

and size of holdings, 94 , 102 -6;

and skilled workers, 79 ;

and stock agents, 76 ;

as symbol of standing, 61 -63, 74 , 100 , 113 , 153 -54

Wealth hierarchy, misapprehension of, 92 -95

Weber, Max, 108 -9, 186

Welfare system, 35 , 42 , 159 ;

and improvement in material well-being, 159

Wellington, 37

West Coast, 4 , 18

Wheat farming, 18 -19, 29

Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 83

Women: economic role of, 10 -11 See also Person, concept of, feminine;

Social hierarchy, and women.

Wool scour, 138

Work: as sign of grace, 187

Workers: and landholders, 40 -41, 42 ,

Workers (continued )

43 , 57 -63, 72 , 74 , 82 -85, 90 , 96 , 97 -98, 164 -65;

moral qualities of, 58 -59, 89 -90;

as occupational category, 54 -57;

as reference point, 43 , 54 , 63 ;

skilled, 56 -57, 65 , 79 ;

unskilled, 56 , 79

Work force arrangements, hierarchy of, 152 -53, 160 -61

Work performance: as criterion of standing, 89 -90

World War II: effects of, 35

Preferred Citation: Hatch, Elvin. Respectable Lives: Social Standing in Rural New Zealand. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1992 1992. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2v19n804/