I was thinking a lot since Friday about value systems and what input they have on mobility in various societies. We mentioned how in an agricultural society it is very easy to judge someone's social class. Of course, there's the fact that you can see how much land a person owns. There is this physical manifestation of wealth. Beyond that, there are farmers asking to borrow equipment they don't own, and of course certain degrees of performance of social class roles. This got me thinking...
In my Gender in Cross Cultural Perspective class we talked a little about various societal "set ups" and their influence on gender roles. One thing I pulled from that was the influence of a pastoral nomadic societies. In these groups wealth is even more fundamentally visible, and easily quantifiable in the number of heads there are in your herd. More goats means more wealth, and more respect within your small community.
Then I jumped far forward to our modern era. Now, wealth can be measured in anything from amount of collectible cars, number of bonds owned or size of your business. Without truly investigating a person in your community they could exist within any large range of economic stratae. Here's where I think we can pull in another correlation be mentioned earlier, and that is the separation of the public and private sphere. Private space has become increasingly valuable in society. The nomadic herder has little space to "own", so it's hard to consider anything private really. They live an exclusively public life. Agrarians have space to call their own, but it's a wide open space, easily visible and quantifiable with a glance. In the most modern of ages, a large house can hide an overdrawn mortgage, and a small apartment could be home to a quiet entrepreneur. Of course this is a sweeping generalization; home locations can speak a lot to the inhabitant's wealth, and those with greater salaries will find more reason to spend their money. But it is still a flexible system, and the rod is bending more and more as we continue on through time.
Enich, This is exactly on target both in your insights about the change in what functions as a marker of wealth and the ways in which the line between public and private functions in hiding or making that wealth visible. I suspect that there is also another factor at work: the societal ideals that sanction inequality or equality. If the later, then people might be more likely to conceal extreme wealth in private. I've got half a post written in response to a recent David Brooks piece about which sorts of inequalities are allowed in the USA. LDL
ReplyDelete