Respectable Lives: Social Standing in Rural New Zealand

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 diff...