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Chapter 6 Social Standing, Personal Worth, and the Aspirations of Individuals Lowland Philippine society is saturated with ideas about prestige and rank. Some are Hispanic in origin and others probably indigenous, but lowland Filipinos are in any case intensely aware of the inequalities in property, income, education, and other attributes that relate to these ideas. Even in the most rural of communities, furthermore, people may differ significantly in their living conditions. Since the pioneering studies of Lynch (1959) and Hollnsteiner (1963), efforts to conceptualize such differences have figured prominently in studies of Philippine society. Differences in living conditions and social rank become particularly problematic when these topics themselves are the focus of study. Numerous investigators of Philippine society have struggled with how to take adequate account of indigenous notions about these matters while simultaneously framing their analyses in terms of “status,” “class,” or other concepts recognizable to social scientists (see, for example, Kerkvliet 1990:59–63). My interest in this chapter lies in how local notions of status and prestige may have changed over time, and in concert with wider transformations in Philippine society and the evolution of new household livelihood strategies and organizational forms. How have individual men and women perceived and responded to these various developments in more personal realms? What are the good things in life, and how does one go about achieving them? While households continue to be central to economic affairs and to socialization, I have shown in the previous chapter that individual members may vary considerably in their experiences and aspirations. Now I attend further to such variation, in the belief that it can provide important insights about how culture changes over time at the local level. 122 Some of these matters proved easy to investigate, but others did not. According to Elvin Hatch: 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 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. (1992:1) San Jose residents now theorize about the nature of their social order much as anthropologists might, and local ideas about what kind of life is worth living are perhaps better seen as products of such local theorizing than as being determinant of behavior to the degree that Hatch seems to suggest. Or perhaps cultural notions about what kind of life is worth living and the creative everyday efforts of individuals to achieve a worthwhile life in a practical world are best seen as mutually constituting each other (Durrenberger and Pálsson 1996:3). But such interdependency (and indeterminancy) notwithstanding, local ideas about what kind of person one should be in contemporary San Jose merit close attention. To explore them in circumstances of rapid socioeconomic change, I have found it helpful to disaggregate local notions about achievement in life into two sets: one concerning households and the other concerning individuals. I shall have more to say shortly about the empirical and theoretical basis for this distinction; but, in brief, the first set of notions relates to how households are ranked socially in the community and the cultural criteria said to inform this ranking, while the second set of notions relates to respectability and personhood, or what it means to be a good and worthwhile individual. Throughout the chapter I also continue an effort I began in Chapter 5 to bring individual community residents more clearly into view as they confront the manifold changes going on around them. How best to incorporate the voices and perspectives of individual actors into analyses of all kinds remains a troublesome general issue in anthropological inquiry. With respect to the study of households, past approaches have shied away from including the voices of individual household members. Some analysts have apparently assumed, for example, that the key decisions surrounding such matters as household strategies operate at the subconscious level or cannot usefully be explained by individual actors, an assumption coupled with the belief that such decisions are largely determined by economic or cultural circumstances anyway (Wolf 1991:37–38). My own leanings...

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