Stigma and separation: parian status and community persistence in a scottish fishing village
This paper addresses the problem of how and why a small, dependent, and stigmatized occupational community may maintain its social identity long after the material basis for its existence has disappeared. It examines the life history of Ferryden, an east coast Scottish "fishing village" which does not fish. It will argue that the ideology ofthe fisherfolk, who have historically been marked as a distinct and low-prestige occupational, residential, and kin-based group, has been used to redefine and preserve village unity in the face of drastic ecological change. It argues further that this means of cultural adaptation contains the seeds of its own destruction and will, in the long run, prove fatal for community identity. Studies of occupational communities in complex societies suggest a strong link between work, residence, and social image (Horobin 1957; Dennis, Henriques et al. 1969; Lummis 1977). The example of Ferryden suggests the possibility ofa consider? able lag between the ecological and the symbolic transformation ofa community's status. The dynamics of boundary-making between fisherfolk and nonfisherfolk will be placed within a context of economic and political dominance and dependency in eastern Scotland. The discussion is based upon data collected during a year of fieldwork and archival research in Ferryden and Montrose in 1975 and 1976. Villages may now have surpassed tribes as archetypal anthropological units of study. They have become our preserve in the sociological wilderness of complex societies. There is even some concern that villages, like tribal societies, might be endangered (Mead 1980). However, the term "village" suffers from very nearly the same epistemological ambiguity as "tribe" (Fried 1975). That is, everyone uses it, and few bother to define it. Villages may be large or small, isolated or enmeshed in an urban matrix. Villages may house semi-autonomous rural cultivators or industrial wage-slaves. They may be found in tribal, capitalist, or socialist economies (Halpern 1967:122-123). Often, however, it is assumed that villages share a crucial attribute which is often considered to be lacking in the urban setting: a sense of community, of emotional as well as interactional boundedness. Cohen (1982) stresses this affective component in the introduction to his edited volume on rural British communities, which he aptly titles Belonging. However, the literature on British communities also informs us that not all who live in villages "belong" (Fleming 1979; Strathern 1981; Elias and Scotson 1965; Jenkins et al. 1960). As Strathern (1982:249) points out, "an unwarranted
Race, Caste, and Other Invidious Distinctions in Social Stratification
GERALD D. BERREMAN is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. This article was written while the author was a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. A society is socially stratified when its members are divided into categories which are differentially powerful, esteemed, and rewarded. Such systems of collective social ranking vary widely in the ideologies which support them, in the distinctiveness, number, and size of the ranked categories, in the criteria by which inclusion in the categories is conferred and changed, in the symbols by which such inclusion is displayed and recognized, in the degree to which there is consensus upon or even awareness of the ranking system, its rationale, and the particular ranks assigned, in the rigidity of rank, in the disparity in rewards of rank, and in the mechanisms
The Use of Qualitative Information in Macro-Economic Policy Analysis
The majority of macro-economic policy models takes for granted that conflicts among objectives can be assessed by means of a tradeoff analysis. Such tradeoffs imply that sacrifices and benefits of various impacts of decisions can be measured on a cardinal scale, so that a conventional macro-economic utility or welfare analysis can be applied.