Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Respectable Lives: Social Standing in Rural New Zealand

Respectable Lives: Social Standing in Rural New Zealand

Hatch, Elvin

Paperback

AnthropologyGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 0520074734
ISBN13: 9780520074736
Publisher: Univ Of California Pr
Published: Feb 17 1994
Pages: 221
Weight: 0.76
Height: 0.53 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Where do we get our notions of social hierarchy and personal worth? What underlies our beliefs about the goals worth aiming for, the persons we hope to become? Elvin Hatch addresses these questions in his ethnography of a small New Zealand farming community, articulating the cultural system beneath the social hierarchy.

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

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

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