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Chapter 4 Diversification and Differentiation in the Community Economy In the years since its founding, San Jose has not only grown in size and developed economically. The community has also experienced considerable social differentiation, as its residents have entered into more varied and more complex relations with the means of production, as land ownership has declined in importance as a determinant of material well-being, and as local consumption patterns have come to resemble those of urban dwellers. This chapter concerns how these economic and social changes unfolded in San Jose between 1971 and 1995. My aim is to explore the dynamic interactions between the agricultural changes discussed in Chapter 3 and the growth and diversification of nonagricultural employment activities, with a focus on the forms and direction of social differentiation resulting from this interaction. Looking forward to Chapter 5, I will attempt to elucidate the “architecture” of San Jose’s postfrontier social order and hence the local-level opportunity structure within which households make their own varied choices of economic strategy. To realize these goals I employ two competing perspectives on San Jose’s social order, one materialist in orientation and the other more sociological. A good part of the confusion surrounding the study of social differentiation owes to a failure to distinguish clearly between these two perspectives—in particular, to distinguish between differentiation in the first sense, which poses class in terms of the social relations of production, and differentiation in the second sense, which poses “social class” in terms of the stratification of some distributional category, such as income, education, consumption standard, or social prestige, related to Weberian notions of lifestyle and status groups (Bernstein 1979:430). I do not share Bernstein’s hostility toward sociological approaches (which he describes as “part of the project of bour71 geois social theory directed against historical materialism”; 1979:441n); and serious difficulties, mentioned in Chapter 1, confound efforts to apply class analysis to contemporary empirical situations. But I find both approaches, despite their respective limitations, appropriate to my task. The relationships of households to the means of production and the direction of any changes therein provide social scientists with an important comparative window on the life chances of men and women. At the same time, “how much the job pays”—and the lifestyle it will support—is an important consideration in the everyday decision making of San Jose residents. To put the matter somewhat differently, social differentiation must be grasped in relation to a variety of structures of power and influence, and not just in terms of the relations of production, a point nicely demonstrated by Hefner’s analysis of economic change among an agricultural people of the Tengger highlands of Java (1990). Hefner argues that social differentiation is nowhere in the real world directly derivative of class relations in the Marxist sense. Rather, community, lifestyle, and the identities and commitments they entail—matters forcefully theorized by Max Weber—everywhere also shape the social order and, ultimately, the decisions of individual actors about what course of action to embark on and what sort of person to be (Hefner 1990:18–30). For some readers, my use of a local community as a unit to study social differentiation, however understood, may constitute a serious limitation. In this view, while San Jose may indeed have, as argued in Chapter 2, at least some of the attributes of the sorts of communities traditionally studied by anthropologists, the study of social differentiation is more properly undertaken on a broader social landscape. My intent in this volume, however, is not to test a theory about rural social differentiation, an ambitious enterprise for which a broader, regional-level approach would certainly seem more appropriate. Rather, my aim is the more modest ethnographic one, to explore how such social differentiation as is presently occurring in rural Southeast Asia unfolds at the level of one particular community. I make no claims of typicality for this community—although, as discussed earlier, I believe that it is a common enough kind of community—and such claims as I do make for the wider relevance of my findings are couched in terms of these various limitations. I do make several claims of broader significance. Ethnographically, studies of the landed elite and the poor masses, of landlord-tenant relationships, and of patron-client ties dominate the social science literature on agrarian change in the Philippine lowlands. Much of the research falling within the rich tradition of studies and restudies of Philippine communities...

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