The Anthropology Of Elites Power Culture And The

Complexities Of Distinction Jon Abbink download

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-anthropology-of-elites-power-
culture-and-the-complexities-of-distinction-jon-abbink-5375498

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.

Elite Configurations At The Apex Of Power International Studies In

Sociology And Social Anthropology Mattei Dogan

https://ebookbell.com/product/elite-configurations-at-the-apex-of-
power-international-studies-in-sociology-and-social-anthropology-
mattei-dogan-2126832

The Anthropology Of Modern Human Teeth Dental Morphology And Its

Variation In Recent And Fossil Homo Sapiens 2nd Edition G Richard
Scott

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-anthropology-of-modern-human-teeth-
dental-morphology-and-its-variation-in-recent-and-fossil-homo-
sapiens-2nd-edition-g-richard-scott-46225462

The Anthropology Of Time Cultural Constructions Of Temporal Maps And

Images 3rd Edition Alfred Gell

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-anthropology-of-time-cultural-
constructions-of-temporal-maps-and-images-3rd-edition-alfred-
gell-46247388

The Anthropology Of Africa Challenges For The 21st Century Paul Nchoji
Nkwi

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-anthropology-of-africa-challenges-
for-the-21st-century-paul-nchoji-nkwi-48746770
The Anthropology Of Climate Change An Integrated Critical Perspective
2nd Edition Hans A Baer

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-anthropology-of-climate-change-an-
integrated-critical-perspective-2nd-edition-hans-a-baer-49039518

The Anthropology Of Argument Cultural Foundations Of Rhetoric And

Reason 1st Edition Christopher W Tindale

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-anthropology-of-argument-cultural-
foundations-of-rhetoric-and-reason-1st-edition-christopher-w-
tindale-50558474

The Anthropology Of Alternative Medicine Anamaria Iosif Ross

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-anthropology-of-alternative-
medicine-anamaria-iosif-ross-50673654

The Anthropology Of Islam Gabriele Marranci

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-anthropology-of-islam-gabriele-
marranci-50676852

The Anthropology Of Ireland Thomas M Wilson Hastings Donnan

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-anthropology-of-ireland-thomas-m-
wilson-hastings-donnan-50676932
The Anthropology of Elites
This page intentionally left blank
The Anthropology of Elites
Power, Culture, and the
Complexities of Distinction

Edited by

Jon Abbink and Tijo Salverda

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF ELITES
Copyright © Jon Abbink and Tijo Salverda, 2013.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-29054-0
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-45060-2 ISBN 978-1-137-29055-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137290557
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The anthropology of elites : power, culture, and the complexities of
distinction / edited by Jon Abbink and Tijo Salverda.
p. cm.

1. Elite (Social sciences) 2. Power (Social sciences) I. Abbink, J. II.

Salverda, Tijo.
HM1263.A59 2012
305.5⬘2—dc23 2012028023
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: January 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 C on ten ts

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: An Anthropological Perspective on

Elite Power and the Cultural Politics of Elites 1
Tijo Salverda and Jon Abbink
1 Researching Elites: Old and New Perspectives 29
Huibert Schijf
2 Land, Historicity, and Lifestyle: Capital and Its
Conversions among the Gentry in Poland 45
Longina Jakubowska
3 Continuity and Change as Two Identifying Principles
amongst Nepalese Nobility 71
Stefanie Lotter
4 Beyond Wealth and Pleasant Posture: Exploring Elite
Competition in the Patronage Democracy of Indonesia 95
Deasy Simandjuntak
5 In Defense: Elite Power 113
Tijo Salverda
6 Pupillage: The Shaping of a Professional Elite 139
Fernanda Pirie and Justine Rogers
7 Becoming Elite: Exclusion, Excellence, and Collective
Identity in Ireland’s Top Fee-Paying Schools 163
Aline Courtois
8 Financial Professionals as a Global Elite 185
Horacio Ortiz
9 Management Consultants at Work with Clients:
Maintenance and Contestation of Elite Status 207
Irene Skovgaard Smith
vi CONTENTS

10 Money Relations, Ideology, and the Formation of a

Cosmopolitan Elite at the Frontier of Transnational
Capitalism: An Ethnographic Study of African
Finance Professionals in Johannesburg 227
France Bourgouin

Notes on Contributors 249

Index 253
 Ack now l ed gmen t s

This book is the product of a collective effort started in 2008 at the

Department of Anthropology at VU University in Amsterdam where
both the editors were then working. We are both fascinated by the
elites and their life styles and cultural patterns and organized together
with our colleague Sandra Evers a conference gathering many inter-
national scholars, both at senior and PhD levels. We were gratified
with the papers presented and the lively debates that followed and
took up the suggestion made by some colleagues to work on a book.
The final product is significantly detached from the original confer-
ence program but is similarly focused on a specifically anthropologi-
cal perspective on elites cross-culturally.
We are grateful to the Faculty of Social Sciences at VU University
for having facilitated the original conference and to the Royal
Netherlands Academy of Sciences in Amsterdam for having provided
a conference grant.
Above all, we owe a debt of gratitude to the contributors to this
book, whose patience was seriously tested but who were cooperative,
enthusiastic, and forthcoming throughout the project despite our
litany of editorial queries and suggestions. We also express our deep-
est thanks to our editors at Palgrave Macmillan, New York (Robyn
Curtis and Desiree Browne), for their excellent advice and support in
this venture.
 Introduction: An Anthropological
Perspective on Elite Power and the
Cultural Politics of Elites

Tijo Salverda and Jon Abbink

Aim and Rationale of the Book

This volume is about the anthropological study of elites and addresses
anew the challenges of research and theoretical interpretation that
this social stratum evokes. On the basis of a fascinating array of case
studies and with reference to previously published work, we explore
the potential of anthropological approaches to elites and aim to
reconfigure their comparative study.
Providing a definition of the concept of “elite”—or “the elect,”
derived from the Latin eligere —is always a challenge, and ours is a
nominal one: an elite is a relatively small group within the societal
hierarchy that claims and/or is accorded power, prestige, or com-
mand over others on the basis of a number of publicly recognized
criteria, and aims to preserve and entrench its status thus acquired.
This definition avoids a moral qualification: the manner in which
elites acquire prestige or power can be violent, coercive, or benevo-
lent, and whatever form they take to assert their position, they are
societal frontrunners and usually the loci of dynamics and change,
because they are emulated and evoke admiration or rivalry and resis-
tance.1 Elites are dominant in some sectors of society on the basis of
certain (im)material characteristics, skills, and achievements, and this
can be in any socially relevant field, from crime to politics and from
military to entertainment. Elites usually form a numerical minority,
but their size can sometimes be very significant.2
Anthropological studies on elites are still relatively scarce com-
pared to those in sociology, history, or political science, which may
2 TIJO SALVERDA AND JON ABBINK

be partly explained by the historically strong focus in social science

on social stratification, political-economic power formations, and
the challenges of inequality in the emerging political systems in the
industrializing West since the mid-nineteenth century, rather than on
stratification and power struggles in non-Western settings. Among
the early sociological theorists regarding Western elites were Pareto
(1991 [1901]),3 Mosca (1923 [1895]), Michels (1911), Weber (1958
[1918]; 1985 [1922]; 1997 [1922]), and Mannheim (1940 [1935]).
As a theorist of stratification and class society, Karl Marx, of course,
also had much to say about the old (feudal) and the new bourgeois
elites in the mid-nineteenth–century Europe as part of his analysis of
class relations, and he inspired numerous studies on emerging elites
and their relation to hierarchy and class structures. Historical studies
on elites, including intellectual and religious elites, in the West and
elsewhere are thus well-developed.4
Among modern elite scholars in sociology and political sci-
ence, some of the most important have been Mills (2000 [1956]),
Dahrendorf (1959), Dahl (1961), Dreitzel (1962), Bottomore (1993
[1965]), Putnam (1976), Domhoff (1978), Etzioni-Halevy (1993),
Lerner, Nagai and Rothman (1996), and Bourdieu (1984 [1979];
1996 [1989]), and the more recent works are by Higley and Burton
(2006), Hartmann, (2007), Engelstad and Gulbrandsen (2007),
and Daloz (2010). Attention has also been grabbed by more popu-
lar, wide-ranging works about Western elites (notably in the United
States), such as Schwartz (1987), Rothkopf (2008), or Wedel (2009),
which stand in the line of C. Wright Mills’s classic The Power Elite
(2000 [1956]).5 These books constitute a popular genre notably in
the United States and are concerned with how the formation of rich
and powerful politico-economic elites may undermine the workings
of political democracy and limit real power to the one percent of
power-holders in society.6 Compared to these political analyses and
insights on Western elites (in democratic societies), it is remarkable
that we still know rather little of the emergence and functioning of
elites in the much more closed societies of China, Africa, and the
Arab/Muslim world, both in the recent past and in the contemporary
globalized era. Especially striking is the absence of recent anthropo-
logical monographs on elites, with most work appearing in journal
papers and book chapters.7
An anthropological approach to elites—in contrast to the more
standard political science and sociological approaches—sets itself
the task of studying and understanding them from within, try-
ing to chart the cultural dynamics and the habitus formation (the
 INTRODUCTION 3

internalized behavioral routines and social ideas of a defined social

group) that perpetuate their rule, dominance, or acceptance. The
claim is often made that anthropological methods can reveal more
about the nature of elites as a sociocultural phenomenon and about
how they operate. Empirical attention is then paid to the internal
workings of elite cultures, to the way they construct, employ, and
perpetuate their power and influence, and to the social perception
and cultural valuation of elites among the larger public. In addition
to the more macro approaches of historians, political scientists, and
sociologists (cf. Dronkers and Schijf 2007), anthropology can make
specific, empirically rich contributions to elite studies in general, due
to its methodological and theoretical focus on the social routines,
cultural repertoires, and on the (self-)representations of elites. Related
to this, but perhaps not just an anthropological interest, is charting
the reactions and the behavioral strategies of nonelite people toward
elites. There are obviously significant methodological challenges,
because elites are seen to be rather closed and impervious to critical
researchers. In addition, the subject demands (self-)reflexivity on the
positioning of field researchers toward elites,8 notably of anthropolo-
gists, who due to the particular history of their discipline were not
particularly attracted to elites as such, but more to subaltern and mar-
ginal groups—they tended to study down rather than up (as Laura
Nader [1972] already noted).
In recent decades the study of elites in anthropology has there-
fore not been very fashionable, although empirical studies of leading
groups in non-Western contexts continue to be made. In previous
generations, anthropologists perhaps did field research mainly on
leaders, big men, religious dignitaries, or chiefs—all elites of a sort,
but they were not much theorized as such. A more self-conscious focus
on elites is a recent thing and therefore still scarce. The interesting
volume edited by De Pina-Cabral and Pedroso de Lima (2000) was
specifically concerned with recruitment, succession, and leadership
among elites. The last important general collection was that of Shore
and Nugent (2002), published a decade ago, an excellent overview
that put the issue of elites and their anthropological study again on
the agenda. In the present collection we pursue its lead and inspira-
tion by looking at new cases and new ways of doing field research and
theorizing on elites, trying to evaluate what we have learned since.
We thereby add to the empirical record by presenting a number of
well-chosen case studies of contemporary elite formations in their rise
or decline. A notable lacuna in the Shore and Nugent volume was the
absence of studies on emerging new economic elites or transnational
4 TIJO SALVERDA AND JON ABBINK

elite groups that have come to prominence in recent years and are
discussed here in three chapters (Horacio Ortiz, France Bourgouin,
and Irene Skovgaard Smith).9
In our view, elite studies should be directed at the processes,
mechanisms, and strategies of the reconfigurations of power in the
current global world (cf. Rothkopf 2008; Seidel 2010), as well as at
the changing symbolism of elite cultures (Daloz 2007; 2010) and at
the implications of transnationalism (Beaverstock 2002; Beaverstock,
Hubbard, and Short 2004; Hay 2013; Graz 2003; Robinson 2010).
Moreover, elites exist in relation to other social groupings, and under-
standing the latter’s role in constructing or confirming elite positions
is equally important. Among the central questions to be discussed
are the following: Why are elites considered inevitable in the social
order? What is the role of elites and of other social groupings in shap-
ing distinction? How do elites recruit and replace themselves? What is
their social and cultural cohesiveness? How do they define their legit-
imacy and manufacture consent, if any? How do they avert decline
and change? Di Lampedusa, in his unsurpassed novel on the declin-
ing Sicilian elite, Il Gattopardo (1958), has his main character say the
famous words: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have
to change.”10 No contemporary elite has stayed the same, and the
perpetual challenge of renewal is incumbent upon them in the face of
shifts of power, mutating global production processes, and popular
challenges from below—at present not in the least via the new media
(blogs, social media). This is even apart from the emergence of new
elites of various kinds—from criminal to financial to entertainment
to sports elites in the postmodern world—and from the new global
dynamics in the developing world that have given rise to the reemer-
gence or adaptation of incumbent political and social elites (cf. Taylor
and Nel [2002] on Africa).
In trying to explain elite reconfigurations and thus reveal more
about the generative societal mechanisms that produce or change
them, a more interactionist perspective is useful, looking at infra-
structural and cognitive-symbolic elements, articulating upon each
other. A political-economy approach—focusing on the material inter-
ests, property relations, class bases, and power structures involved—is
a first prerequisite of analysis and requires basic quantitative and his-
torical research. But it seems to us not sufficient in itself, as it often
does not say enough about the social, cultural, and socio-cognitive
aspects of elite (re)production or about the processes and implications
of habitus formation involved.
 INTRODUCTION 5

In this book, references are made to important previous anthropo-

logical work on elites by, for example, Cohen (1981), Marcus (1983),
De Pina-Cabral and Pedroso de Lima (2000), Shore and Nugent
(2002), Werbner (2004), and Wedel (2009) to chart the development
of elite studies as a distinct field and to emphasize the renewed rel-
evance of anthropological perspectives on elite formation, durability,
and transformation, where economic, political, and cultural factors
play an interlocking role.

On Locating and Defining Elites

We have given a definition of elite above and will substantiate it more
in this section. When the term “elite” is mentioned, most people have
an image of what this represents, even though this often remains con-
ceptually vague. In academic literature the term “elite” is often taken
for granted and barely explained. It seems to be a container concept.
Bert Schijf, in the first chapter, poses the question of who actually are
the elites in the society. He contends that the answer is still far from
easy: elites are often related to positions of power but also to the pro-
cess of social mobility. Moreover, as he shows, different disciplines use
different methods to define and research elites, consequently coming
to different outcomes. In a concise way Schijf thus demonstrates the
values and the limits of the different approaches to elite research.
If we say that an elite is a social group within the societal hier-
archy that claims and/or is accorded power, prestige, or command
over others on the basis of a number of criteria and aims to pre-
serve and entrench its status (see above), this refers to groups of per-
sons possessing certain resources, a fact that grants them a position
of command (cf. Dogan 2003a). Our perspective also implies that
elite members share a variety of interests arising from similarities of
experience, training, public roles or duties, and way of life (Cohen
1981, xvi). According to Scott’s sociological definition (2003), only
those collectivities based in positions of command should be seen as
elites—this, he writes, distinguishes an elite from privileged or advan-
taged groups. In the fullest sense, an elite is a social grouping whose
members occupy similar, advantageous command situations within
the social distribution of authority or social hierarchy and who are
linked to one another through demographic processes of circulation
and interaction (cf. ibid., 156, 157).
Many of these elites tend to control only certain resources that may
be mobilized in the exercise of power, since hegemonies, controlling
6 TIJO SALVERDA AND JON ABBINK

all resources, are very rare. Consequently, most elites are functional
elites, and a distinction can be drawn between, for example, business
elites, ethnic elites, military elites, political elites, religious elites, aca-
demic elites, entertainment/showbiz elites, and bureaucratic elites
(cf. Dogan 2003b, 1; Shore 2002, 4). Even Mills (2000 [1956])
acknowledged the existence of functional elites; yet he argued that
the political, military, and business elite in the United States shared
interests, tying them into a unified “power elite.”11 Needless to say,
such elites are always quite limited in number.
A further distinction is often made regarding the influence that
elites wield, to avoid defining every group with a certain prestige and
specific skills as an elite. Susan Keller (1963) argued that elites such as
sportsmen tend to be significant only to their specific field. Strategic
elites, however, have a much wider influence, as their power, deci-
sions, and control over resources have consequences for many mem-
bers of society. The “1 percent versus the 99 percent” metaphor in
debates in the United States, in this sense, is a striking example of
probing the (unwelcome) influence of a strategic elite. Although the
case studies in this volume are about so-called strategic elites, we want
nevertheless to state that we should be cautious not to be too narrow
in defining elites. How many people have to feel the consequences of
the decisions of an elite? In other words, where do we draw the line of
what is a strategic elite and what not? It would be counterproductive,
from our point of view, to limit our definitions, as new insights may
actually come from empirical research on elites other than the usual
suspects of political and economic elites, consequently increasing the
understanding of elites and elite-related issues more generally.
Also, we claim that an elite should not be narrowed down to a
group in actual possession and exercise of the commanding positions
only. Although an elite is indeed constituted of people in command,
as Scott mentions, linked to one another through, for example,
demographic processes of circulation, those in command are linked
to a wider group that does not only directly exercise command but
also shares a way of life and a variety of interests arising from simi-
larities. Arguably therefore, an elite includes more than just those in
positions of command. For example, and clearly illustrated by the sig-
nificance of education, the younger generation of a specific elite may
have privileged access to commanding positions at a future moment
in time. Widening the elite’s functioning beyond their occupying top
positions, moreover, is necessary because not everyone in the specific
wider social group may exercise command. But these people may nev-
ertheless have influence on the persons who are in those positions
 INTRODUCTION 7

through, for example, the shared way of life or their sociocultural

frame of reference. Partners and families of the elite thus conceived
may impact on the construction and maintenance of this way of life.
It is therefore precisely the combined feature of possessing command-
ing positions and exercising control over particular resources along
with sharing sociocultural characteristics, customs, and modes of
life—in short, a habitus— with a wider group or a social (sub)system
that defines an elite. This, however, should not prevent us from ask-
ing new questions about what constitutes an elite, especially in an
age of increased global mobility. Ortiz’s chapter about professionals
in the financial sector perfectly illustrates this—and research on the
(global) operations of the super-rich is relevant in this respect as well
(Beaverstock, Hubbard, and Short 2004; Hay 2013).
The complexity of the term “elite” also relates to the fact that it
is usually a term of reference rather than of self -reference, as George
Marcus noted (1983, 9)—this is probably because those who look up
often see more homogeneity than the people at the top themselves
(Fennema and Heemskerk 2008, 29). Elite members may not use the
elite label defined according to the above-mentioned characteristics.
But when an elite downplays its leading role this does not automati-
cally deny its occupying the top positions. Identifying the aforemen-
tioned characteristics that define an elite does not need the approval
of the group itself. A critical approach will, therefore, combine the
analysis of the elite’s self-definition and of “probing their intimate
space rather than relying on their formal self-presentations” (Herzfeld
2000, 227).

Elite Phenomena: Some Behavioral Aspects

In many people’s daily lives contact with elites seems to play a mar-
ginal role. Their interactions are predominantly with people of a
similar (nonelite) background. Elites are usually distant, infrequently
discussed in detail, though ever present in the media and the enter-
tainment discourse that extends globally. Vague notions and popular
beliefs about the power and the influence of elites certainly abound,
but are rarely precise. A recurring theme is the mixture of envy and
respect for elites, notably the political and the economic elites with
tangible power over the lives of others. Elites are almost by definition
the object of contestation and challenge, and despite the deserved or
enforced prerogatives they have they can never be secure in their pos-
session of them. This also shows that elite is an inherently ambiguous
concept.
8 TIJO SALVERDA AND JON ABBINK

Issues of growing inequality in power, wealth, consumptive dis-

play, and prestige symbolism around the globe seem to indicate that
the role of elites at present might be more contested and challenged
than ever. A curious fact is that academic insights about the power,
influence, and behavior of elites have not run parallel with the fact of
their increasing global role and impact. Research on elites in social
science shows some significant lacunae.12 In a clear and concise
manner, Savage and Williams (2008) illuminate these omissions of
research and wonder whether this correlates with an increased focus
on quantitative data gathering in the social sciences. It may be that
due to their small size elites13 are easily underrepresented in quantita-
tive studies.
Anthropology, the study with a qualitative approach par excel-
lence, could have filled the gap; yet it has, generally speaking, con-
tinued to focus on the marginalized and the less powerful. However,
understanding the position of the latter is enhanced by better insights
in the actions and choices of elites. When elites are discussed in stud-
ies about the marginalized and/or other social groups, the analysis
of their choices and practices remains limited, often even simplistic,
framed usually in terms of easy antagonisms. One of the notable
exceptions in the ethnography of elites, Abner Cohen’s The Politics
of Elite Culture (1981) on the Creole elite of Sierra Leone, indicated
that there was much to gain from the combination of in-depth ethno-
graphic data with the theoretical interpretation of elite practices. Yet
this book already dates back three decades, and has few if any succes-
sors. In the earlier mentioned collective volume Elite Cultures (2002),
Shore and Nugent presented a rich array of field-based studies that
showed once more the great relevance of an ethnographic approach to
elites. Since then, however, with a few exceptions—such as Werbner
(2004)—mostly silence has reigned. Due to a number of institutional,
practical, and historical reasons, a field called the “anthropology of
elites” was not developed.14 As noted, this is not to say that many
studies have not dealt with elites and their power; yet they often do
not tend to take forward elite theory as such.
In the current era of growing (global) inequalities, altering geopo-
litical balances, sociocultural contestation,15 and mounting (popular)
resistance to the established political classes in much of the demo-
cratic world, it is timely and topical to (re)interpret elite behavior and
practices and consider them from a cultural point of view. In this vein,
the present volume tries to push forward the study of political, eco-
nomic, and social elites with a number of historical and ethnographic
case studies. They all shed new light on a number of theoretical and
 INTRODUCTION 9

methodological issues, relevant not only to the discipline of anthro-

pology but also to social science more generally. Below, we identify a
number of common themes of relevance in this endeavor.

Elite Power
As we noted above, despite scant attention over the last decades, the
study of elites and elite-related issues has a long tradition in social
science, especially in sociology, history, and political science. In their
quest for understanding the complexities of emerging capitalist soci-
ety, social theorists in the nineteenth and early twentieth century paid
significant attention to the power and influence of elites, mostly as a
part of their wider analysis of class, society, and social stratification.
Mosca’s work in particular has given rise to a tradition of scholarly
theorizing on “democratic elitism,” which runs via Schumpeter to
Habermas (cf. Best & Higley 2010). Especially Pareto’s model of elite
circulation—that is between “foxes,” or cunning elites using manipu-
lation and diplomacy, and “lions,” elites not hesitating to use force—
has been seen as relevant to the understanding of different forms
of elite power (Higley and Pakulski 2007). And Antonio Gramsci’s
well-known work about hegemony has been relevant for understand-
ing the ways in which elites try to dominate the ideological concep-
tions of the order of societies (cf., for example, Fontana [1993]). While
Pareto praised the virtues of elites, on the other side of the spectrum,
Gramsci—as a Marxist—was highly critical of them and found this
reasoning about their virtues not valid as an analysis. According to
his more political than sociological analysis of this specific form of
power, the (ideological) control of the sociopolitical order by the elite
and the concomitant disqualification of dissidents not adhering to
this of course helped rulers to maintain the status quo but did not
by definition validate or confirm the legitimacy of their position. His
famous concept of “hegemony” referred to the social phenomenon
that elites could maintain control also ideologically, by declaring a set
of cultural values as normative or hegemonic so that they appeared as
common sense values of all. This line of reasoning foreshadows some
of Pierre Bourdieu’s work on elites.
In his well-known work of 1974 (2005 edition) on power, political
sociologist Steven Lukes took up key points of the Gramscian view and
argued that there were three views of power. The “one-dimensional”
view, the so-called concrete and actual exercise of power, is the most
striking and consequently first and foremost identified as power
(Lukes 2005 [1974]). His “two-dimensional view of power,” that is,
10 TIJO SALVERDA AND JON ABBINK

power as controlling the political agenda and keeping the potential

issues out of the political process, was based on a preceding analysis
of the political process (Bachrach and Baratz 1962; Dahl 1961). He
made clear that (elite) power is often applied in such way that unfa-
vorable issues are kept out of the discussion before they may lead
to head-on (“one-dimensional”) confrontations. Lukes’s third and
“radical view of power,” which posits that dominant ideologies tend
to work against people’s interests by misleading them, distorting their
judgment, and applying the ruler’s power in such an effective way as
to prevent conflicts from rising up (Lukes 2005 [1974], 13, 27), was
related to Gramsci’s arguments.
These theoretical approaches to (elite) power have been influential
and may still serve us well as a tool to deconstruct elite power in its
constitutive elements and mechanisms. However, Gramsci’s analysis of
hegemony may not always survive the scrutiny of empirical evidence,
because the interaction between elites and other segments of soci-
ety tends to be more diverse and complex than suggested. Dominant
ideologies may certainly serve the elite, but it should be realized that
they may equally believe in these ideologies as the unquestionable
truth. Moreover, dominant ideologies can indeed be very strong, but
are not always static and are adapted and altered under the influence
of social change.
The question of how elite power relates to the distribution of
power in the society more generally also needs to be raised. John
Scott (2008) rightly challenged the notion that elites by definition
are all-powerful and argued that their power must be seen as open
to challenge (see Salverda’s chapter for what this may entail in our
conceptualization of elite power).16 The relationships of elites’ vis-à-
vis counter-elites and/or other groups resisting elite power are two
sides of the same coin: the elite tries to maintain the status quo while
the opposing group pushes for change. Despite the great diversity
in elites, a shared trait among them is their resistance to change. In
their comfortable positions at the top change is suspect because obvi-
ously it may jeopardize status and privilege: “The highest classes, as
everyone knows, are the most conservative . . . No change can bring
them additional power, and every change can give them something
to fear, but nothing to hope for” (Simmel 1957 [1908], 99). At the
same time, however, it is argued that elites create crises (Dogan and
Higley 1998, 23, 24), such as political and economic rivalry, group
conflict, and repression, which often result in change.17 Since change
is part and parcel of human life and of the societal process, some elites
have inevitably disappeared and new ones have arisen (Cohen 1981,
 INTRODUCTION 11

xiii), showing that their positions can never be taken for granted.
Elite formations in themselves are, however, a durable feature of most
societies.

Networks
A number of American political scientists in the mid-1950s stated
that political and economic changes were actually strengthening elite
power and in this vein made notable contributions to elite theory.
C. Wright Mills and his contemporaries G. W. Domhoff and R. Dahl,
who dominated the American academic debate around the study of
politics, elites, and power in the late 1950s and 1960s, emphasized
the importance of existing and emerging networks. In fact, their anal-
ysis of elite power was mostly based on assessing the structure and the
impact of the top-level networks. Mills (2000 [1956]) argued that due
to increased mobility and more centralized government in the United
States from Second World War onward, elites of different origins—
military, business, and political—were becoming interlocked through
the overlapping of top-ranking positions. In effect, he stated, differ-
ent functional and geographical elites were becoming merged into a
single power elite. But this analysis by Mills (and later also Domhoff
[1978]), who posited the existence of a power elite largely organized
with regard to common interests, was not shared by everyone. Dahl in
Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (1961), for
example, put forward the existence of different elite factions, which
did not have enough overlap to actually constitute a unified ruling
elite.18
Their research has nevertheless been very influential in the
rethinking of the influence and power of elites, despite disagree-
ments about the presence of such a unified elite. Mills, Domhoff,
and Dahl’s contributions are clear examples of the need to unravel
the role of elite networks.19 The differences emerging from the
assessments of elite power undertaken by them actually show the
importance—and related difficulties—of assessing elite networks in
terms of how, where, and why elites constitute cohesive groups. The
range of possible networks, after all, is substantial: boardrooms and
educational institutions, ties of friendship, the openings of exhibi-
tions, official events, clubs, hunting parties, families, and so forth—
all these also tending to differ as to the scope and intensity of their
functioning and importance. Networks on the level of elites also can
serve to create culturally validated bonds of trust, which enhances
solidarity and commonality of interest (cf. Tilly 2005), which further
12 TIJO SALVERDA AND JON ABBINK

illustrates the usefulness of an anthropological approach, including

participant observation and qualitative methods.20 Considering the
variety of networks, critical comments often address the overreli-
ance on publicly available information about (formal) positions, such
as the positions on the boards of directors of business companies,
the guest list of the annual debutante ball, and so on. This often
proves insufficient and Savage and Williams argue that elites cannot
be understood adequately by only looking at, for example, interlock-
ing directorates (2008, 3). It seems likely that many scholars who
predominantly focus on these formal networks with a high degree of
visibility fail to spot the importance of informal networks and other
sources of interconnecting (Camp 2003, 149). Cohen, for instance,
has argued that in liberal societies adhering to the principle of equal-
ity of opportunity (usually upheld by their constitutions) the net-
working serving the particular interests of elites is often performed
secretly (1981, xvi).
Mills, despite his strong focus on formal networks, was not oblivi-
ous to informal networks and acknowledged that to understand the
group cohesion of an elite a whole series of smaller face-to-face milieus
needed to be examined. According to him, the most obvious histori-
cal case is the upper-class family (see also Schijf’s chapter for an analy-
sis of the elite family), although the analysis had to be extended to
secondary schools and metropolitan clubs as well (Mills 2000 [1956],
15, 61). That family and power are indeed in close connection in elite
circles, especially in businesses due to, for example, succession issues, is
clearly illustrated in the book Elites: Choice, Leadership and Succession
(De Pina-Cabral and Pedroso de Lima 2000). The old French (busi-
ness) elite families also show a strong focus on the family’s patrimony
and the family members’ role in transferring the patrimony to future
generations (Pinçon and Pinçon-Charlot 1998, 327–379). Similarly,
the long history of the Russian nomenklatura created a strong drive,
even a tradition, to reproduce itself across generations—a pattern of
reproduction that seems to be continuing in the postcommunist era
(Szelényi and Szelényi 1995, 631).
The fall of the statist communist regimes in Eastern Europe is
telling with respect to elite networks anyway, as many of the elites
could just swap functions, enabling them to maintain their elite posi-
tions. For example, in the Russian transition to postcommunism,
enduring networks facilitated elite maintenance (Dogan and Higley
1998, 132). Top Communist party people helped their family mem-
bers to launch successful private enterprises; even after they had lost
their commanding positions, informal ties were still able to facilitate
 INTRODUCTION 13

special access to people and information (Böröcz and Róna-Tas 1995,

761; cf. Wedel 2010).
Resilience of informal ties, also other than family and kinship ties,
appears often to relate to a shared past, as elite members often share
similar educational backgrounds and attend the same schools and
universities. Networks may sometimes more or less originate in edu-
cational institutions: “The formative years are crucial in laying the
foundations for a network and concomitant social capital that lasts
one’s entire life” (Heemskerk 2007, 110). Consequently, schools and
universities are important for the education, training, and recruitment
of younger elite generations, as elaborately illustrated by Bourdieu.

“Capital”
In The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power Bourdieu (1996
[1989]) addressed the importance of education in the reproduction of
elites. His rich, empirically based analysis of the influence of school-
ing on elite careers and of the reproduction of the elites as they pre-
pare their children by sending them to the same schools, has received
widespread recognition. Despite a predominance of data about the
French educational system, making certain of his findings difficult to
transpose, Bourdieu’s analysis has a general appeal for those research-
ing the socially reproductive role of education in advanced societies
(see for a comparative perspective Hartmann [2007], 61–88).
Bourdieu’s theoretical contribution to the understanding of elites
goes beyond recognizing the role of education, however. Especially
his analysis about distinction and different forms of capital has influ-
enced many scholars. The privileged, according to Bourdieu, not
only maintain their power by means of economic capital, but also
through cultural capital (for example, prestigious academic titles),
symbolic capital (for example, noble titles and membership to the
most exclusive clubs), and social capital (either inherited directly from
their family or acquired through marriage, or service on the board of
directors of a top-ranked company) (1996, 331). By means of these
different forms of capital the privileged have access to and construct
influential networks and contacts not accessible to the majority of
people (Westwood 2002, 49). Moreover, capital relates to maintain-
ing an elite position by dominating the cognitive map and the social
discourse: “Indicators of prestige and dominant taste originating at
the top become a hegemonic norm with regard to those tastes of
other classes—subject to ‘symbolic violence’—which can thus only
be interpreted negatively” (Daloz 2010, 35). In this context, Shore
14 TIJO SALVERDA AND JON ABBINK

argued that it is important to “analyse the language and practice

through which elites represent themselves and the techniques they
use to legitimise their position” (2002, 13).
Bourdieu’s approach with respect to the role of symbolic, cultural,
and social aspects of elite formations has been very influential in social
science; even though for anthropology analytically addressing such
aspects was certainly not new. Cohen’s The Politics of Elite Culture
(1981), which did not make a reference to Bourdieu’s work (and vice
versa), strongly emphasized the importance of rituals, symbols, and
mystique in the maintenance of elite power and as such is the culmi-
nation of a longer tradition of ethnographic research in non-Western
settings on the cultural aspects of power and hegemony. Symbolism,
then, tends to reinforce the elite position, especially because reference
to symbolic aspects may grant the elite (potentially) more power and
legitimacy than would be assumed on the basis of the resources it
controls. In France, for example, it is “the cultural elite [i.e. televi-
sion personalities, journalists, writers, etc.], which does not hold a
position of power, but which exercises indirectly a great influence on
those invested with power, and which is very visible, occupying an
enormous place in the media and in the mind of the masses” (Dogan
2003c, 64).

The Case Studies: The Culture of Elites

as Anthropological Focus
When elaborating on the contribution of anthropology to the study
of elites, the first thing that comes to mind is often elite culture. Few
concepts are linked as strongly to the anthropological discipline as
culture. Cohen’s work (1981) most notably showed the relevance of
observing the cultural patterns of elite strata. In 1983 Marcus wrote:
“The schematics of elite organization and its place in larger system
frameworks have been much more commonly addressed than its inter-
nal culture and practices” (1983, 10). Twenty years after Cohen’s pio-
neering work and Marcus’s comments, elite culture still has received
relatively little attention, Shore noted (2002, 10), but the case stud-
ies presented in this volume directly and indirectly help to better
determine the influence of the distinguishing cultural characteristics
of elites. They also raise issues of cross-cultural comparison. With
respect to the maintenance of elite positions, moreover, an anthro-
pological perspective may allow us to better see how and why certain
cultural patterns are transmitted whereas others are not. Educational
preferences, specific styles of self-presentation, and networks play an
 INTRODUCTION 15

obvious role here. As Aline Courtois shows in her chapter on the Irish
elite, the construction of a collective elite identity begins at a young
age: with the recruitment process at elite schools. With a preference
for a very specific socially and culturally homogeneous clientele, and
restricted access maintained by, for example, high fees and admission
policies, the entrance of unwanted, exogenous elements is severely
limited. This subsequently contributes, as Courtois illustrates, to fos-
tering a collective sense of eliteness, leading to acquiring skills, con-
fidence, and rich social capital, beneficial to obtaining positions of
power later in life.
Cohen showed how cultural patterns and ritual expressions and
manners, function in the making of elite distinction, influencing the
complexity of interactions with other social groups. Being decidedly
different, an attitude emphasized through symbols of superiority and
distinction as theorized by Bourdieu (1984) and as meticulously ana-
lyzed by Jean-Pascal Daloz (2010), is important for elites. Stefanie
Lotter, in her chapter based on the Rana clan in Nepal, shows how
ways of distinction differ between cultures but can be transferred and
introduced cross-culturally. She illustrates how the emerging Rana
used unfamiliar ways of distinction as strategic tools to gain a status
otherwise unattainable. Introducing foreign ways of distinction does,
however, not come without complications. Customs have to be modi-
fied, the rules of religious obligations bent, and first-rate performance
is necessary to convince locals and foreigners that a new social hierar-
chy has been established.
Following up on more than a century of theoretical explanations of
elite power, behavior, status, and so forth, what more besides a focus
on elite cultures has an anthropology of elites to offer? Ethnographies
of elites offer the opportunity to illustrate the lives of elites more
richly and holistically, especially due to anthropology’s methodologi-
cal approach of deep hanging out. Ethnographic probing can help to
grasp the multidimensionality of elite culture, its internal relations and
power formations, its social history, and the elite’s relationships (histor-
ical and contemporary) with other social groups or classes. Apart from
its often more varied methodological strategies, this perspective differs
from sociological and political science perspectives in the sense that it
focuses more strongly on the sociocultural patterns and practices, the
symbolic aspects, the cultural play and display, the construction of
meaning, and the experiences of the actors (i.e., elite members) them-
selves. A greater sensitivity for grasping ambiguous and contradictory
behavior, not only of elites but also of other social groupings vis-à-vis
elites, moreover helps to unravel the complexities of distinction.
16 TIJO SALVERDA AND JON ABBINK

The case studies assembled in this volume show the dynam-

ics and mutations of elites rule and the (self)conceptions of elites,
as well as their specific behavior and their strategies. This will help
to push forward the understanding of elites on a number of fronts.
Ethnographies of elites clarify how differences between elites and
other social groups are constructed, marked, changed, and perceived,
integrating the analysis of political-economic factors (power, wealth,
control) with those of collective behavior and cultural patterning as
emergent properties.

The Other
An important contribution of anthropology indeed lies in making
sense of the relationship of an elite with other social groups, as the
other is part and parcel of elite positioning. Elites only exist vis-à-vis
other social groups—be they the marginalized, dependents, support-
ers, or the counter-elites. Addressing the relations between elites and
nonelites, then, is necessary because elites do not exist in a vacuum.
Elites and other social groups are commonly mutually dependent on
one another, and other social groups are the ones to challenge the
elite power. An anthropological perspective, in this respect, can help
to understand the complexity of this interdependency, for instance,
due to a strong focus on what Shore indicated, in a Malinowskian
vein, as “to understand the way social reality is constructed by actors
themselves; to grasp their conception of the world and the way they
related to it as self-conscious agents” (Shore 2002, 5). Even though
research on elites in other disciplines focuses less on perceptions,
or their conceptions, this approach is not exclusively anthropologi-
cal. Reis and Moore’s edited volume Elite Perceptions of Poverty and
Inequality (2005), for example, shows the relevance of grasping elite
perceptions of poverty in developing counties, and not just those of
the poor themselves. The editors note that elites usually control gov-
ernments and policies aiming at reducing poverty, and only by tracing
their perceptions and behavior vis-à-vis the poor, related to the emer-
gence of forms of social consciousness, we will enhance our under-
standing of the persistence of inequality and the chances of success of
countervailing policies.
As Cohen (1981) has cogently illustrated, the complexity of rela-
tionships between elites and other social groups emerges from ten-
sions between an elite’s universalistic functions, such as services to the
public, and organizing itself particularistically, that is keeping itself in
existence through distinctive traits (ibid., xiii). A relevant question
 INTRODUCTION 17

regarding this balance is that of the potential differences among the

functional elites. The universalistic functions of business elites are of
a different order than those of political elites (in democratic states).
One could argue that business elites do not represent anyone’s inter-
ests other than their own and are therefore less dependent on the
support of other groups. There are, of course, still relationships with
other social groups, since the latter tend to be the customers, clients,
and employees of this elite. Business elites can obtain universalistic
functions for example through charitable work and by financially sup-
porting community and/or social work. Alliances with political elites
can also be used as a strategy to establish some sort of vertical loyal-
ties and universalistic aspirations. Such alliances can be shaped by
means of donations to political parties, lobby groups, and also direct
corruption. In this kind of scenario, politicians back the interests of
the business elites. An awareness of these aspects also gives insights
into how and why an elite position is maintained or lost.
As Irene Skovgaard Smith, in her chapter on management con-
sultants, shows, the relevance of an anthropological approach comes
also from recognizing the role that nonelites actually have in shap-
ing elite status and positions. Following them in action as they work
with clients, she shows how management consultants form a secre-
tive and closed profession, that few researchers have had access to.
This “opaqueness” is, as Shore (2002, 10) noted, part of what often
characterizes elites. In her observations of the consultants and their
clients, Skovgaard Smith observes a theoretically interesting pattern.
The status of consultants and their associated abilities are to a large
extent attributed to them by other actors in the context of the client
organization. This indicates that the elites’ position is also attributed
to them and constructed by way of differentiation in relation to other
social actors.

Change
The elites’ relationships with other social groups and their legitimacy
are not self-evident but must constantly be validated and are prone
to change. Considering the difficulties of maintaining the balance
between universalistic functions and organizing itself particularisti-
cally, elites cannot take their positions for granted. Elites have inevita-
bly disappeared and new ones have arisen. Anthropology can make a
strong contribution here by in-depth and close-up study of how elite
members face and/or cause change, and how they subsequently resist
or adapt to maintain their elite position. Fernanda Pirie and Justine
18 TIJO SALVERDA AND JON ABBINK

Rogers, in their chapter, investigate how the Bar of England and

Wales, one of the longest established professions in the UK, adapts to
changes, such as commercial forces and managerialism. With a focus
on trainee barristers, their rich ethnographic research gives interest-
ing insights into how an elite in twenty-first–century Britain tries
to bridge the particularism-universalism dilemma. They demonstrate
that while adapting to external controls, barristers are still effectively
fostering a remarkable sense of exclusivity and status among their new
recruits.
Since the universalistic tendencies of ‘functional’ elites and their
needs tend to differ, their functions are relevant also when it comes to
change. As Dogan noted: “In the case of abrupt regime changes, an
analogy has been noticed across countries: the economic and admin-
istrative elites resist better the upheaval than the political and mili-
tary elites” (2003b, 13). In this respect, the fall of the Communist
regimes in Eastern Europe is telling, as here the political elites were
most prone to change: “The revolutions of 1989 were political revo-
lutions, aimed directly at changing the institutional character of the
political sphere and removing the old political leadership” (Böröcz
and Róna-Tas 1995, 777). As illustrated above, many of the old
elites tended, however, to swap functions. Longina Jakubowska’s
chapter on the Polish gentry, which reemerged after the collapse of
Communism, offers a fascinating account of the process. The gentry,
in a way, experienced a double change: they lost their elite position
due to the Communist revolution and despite decades of erosion were
resurrected again when Communism collapsed. Or was it mainly the
elite’s identity that was changing? Jakubowska shows how the gentry
were quick to adapt to a new political order and honed the art of con-
version of capital—land, money, and skills, as well as lifestyle—into
a relevant resource in each era. After 1989, the gentry as a class used
history as a form of capital in such a way that they became guardians
of what it meant to understand and practice Polish ethnicity. Her case
helps our understanding of the processes by which a group maintains
its identity through time, not just as one identity among others, but
as dominant and dominating. The story is relevant, moreover, for
recognizing the techniques that elites use to legitimize their posi-
tion (Shore 2002, 13), for example, through altering their dominant
ideologies.
Relationships between elites and nonelites are often redefined
as a consequence of (intended and nonintended) change. Deasy
Simandjuntak, in her chapter on Indonesian decentralization, illustrates
 INTRODUCTION 19

how new (political) power configurations were shaped after the sys-
tem was implemented in 1997. District governments could now choose
their own leaders, leading to new forms of relationships between
(newly emerging and local) elites and their constituencies. Reinforced
ethno-religious identities were a consequence of new patron-client
linkages that developed in the decentralized system. Simandjuntak,
however, shows that the clients were not mere passive followers. They
have the capacity to choose which patron is suitable for them, influenc-
ing what kind of elite characteristics are deemed attractive and relevant.
The clients, then, importantly contribute to how elites constantly shape
and (re)define their social capital.
Change in the lives of elites, obviously, relates to general social
developments affecting elites as well as other groups. General social
trends, for example, seem to influence the position of the Bar in the
UK. Political actors, however, also instigate change, of which the
Communist revolution is a perfect example. The position of elites thus
relates to how their behavior affects other social groups and the (poten-
tial) actions the latter undertake in response to this behavior. Hence,
as Scott rightly argues, the assumption that elites are all-powerful
is a false one, and he notes that “resistance is integral to power and
must figure in any comprehensive research agenda” (2008, 40). Tijo
Salverda, in his chapter on the Franco-Mauritians, the white former
colonial elite of the island of Mauritius, claims that for a better theo-
retical understanding of elite power we have to take into consideration
that elites often do not initiate power struggles but apply their power
defensively. In the case of the Franco-Mauritians, using their power
defensively has been effective in facing challenges and political changes
(especially the transition from the colonial period to the present) and
has contributed to the relative success of sustaining their (social and
economic) elite position in postcolonial Mauritius. Close observa-
tion of what really happens on the ground helps to understand the
multidimensionality of power relations between the elite and other
social groups. Moreover, the Franco-Mauritian case indicates that an
anthropological perspective with a focus on how social realities are
constructed or represented by actors themselves tends to enhance
knowledge about the exercise of power, potentially leading to new
theoretical insights (cf. also Salverda [2010]). Closely studying how
elites perceive and use their various kinds of power and are influ-
enced by other social groups and structures allows us to get a better
grasp of the relevant power configurations within a society and of
the counterforces it may evoke.
20 TIJO SALVERDA AND JON ABBINK

A Globalizing World
The value of an anthropological approach also shows in researching
the realities of globalization, especially the impact of global move-
ments, connections, and exchanges on the local, and vice versa. To
understand the operations of elites in relation to globalization, for
example, we have to raise questions on whether an elite is primarily
locally/nationally situated or whether it is more embedded in trans-
national elite settings, as well as what constitutes an elite. In this
book there are a number of studies on the phenomenon of new elites:
the emerging financial professionals and transnational consultants.
Such groups were not addressed yet, for instance, in the Shore and
Nugent volume (2002). Janine Wedel (2009) has referred to the new
top power brokers in the United States rather than to the classical
elite, the latter being slowly overtaken by the former, as a new supra-
national elite. Ortiz’s chapter below is based on fieldwork with stock
brokers, fund managers, and hedge fund consultants in New York,
Paris, and London. He shows that these professionals—given their
social networks, their specific skills acquired through formal educa-
tion and setting high barriers to entry in the group, and their funda-
mental role within the bureaucracies that carry out the distribution of
resources worldwide through financial flows—produce and reproduce
global social hierarchies defined by the access to credit and exchange.
Financial professionals’ organization in global commercial networks,
Ortiz argues, poses fundamental questions also as to the utility of the
concept of elite, in particular in what refers to a supposed unity of the
group and to its self-perception as homogenous.
Describing a case geographically far away from the Western finan-
cial centers yet involved in similar global economic networks, France
Bourgouin’s chapter deals with a transnational business elite of young
African businessmen and women living in Johannesburg. Through
an anthropological analysis of the activities, personal histories, and
professional ambitions of these businessmen and woman, Bourgouin
forges a new understanding of the processes of social reproduction
in a transnational space, on the one hand, and in the local setting of
Johannesburg, on the other.
Ethnographies of elites in developed, modern-industrial societies,
we argue, can enhance knowledge about how they operate between
the global and the local in general, and how globalization influences
elite behavior, in particular, because an elite might focus more on
the world beyond the local boundaries and thus neglect its relation-
ship with other local actors. A fundamental question in this respect
 INTRODUCTION 21

is how far universalistic tendencies can be stretched, and/or whether

these change or become defunct in new global settings. Moreover,
globalization may have an impact on the nature and cohesion of elite
networks, which can also lead to new forms of eliteness, for example
as shown in Ortiz’s case. Global and regional developments should
therefore be taken into consideration from the start, because they
may be significant preconditions or variables for the maintenance of
an elite position or even play a decisive role in generating elite change
itself. In this respect, these multiple global influences could in due
course override any strategy of adaptation or transformation that an
elite, as a collectivity with a subculture of shared customs, traits, and
solidarity, may mobilize against them.
As to the traditional research settings of anthropology—non-
Western or nonindustrial societies and subcultures—there is also
plenty of room for studying elites in those contexts. Development and
globalization in the contemporary era are leading to the emergence
of new local elite strata among the so-called marginal, tribal, or pas-
toral societies, whose function as contact points or brokers in larger
networks and interest groups, connecting to state authorities, trans-
local power centers, or civic organizations like (foreign) NGOs or
international organizations should be the issue of research. Only an
ethnography of elites can get at the dynamics of change from within.
In conclusion, we would contend that anthropological approaches to
the study of elites are as relevant as ever (Schijf, in his chapter below,
highlights the growing rapprochement of sociology and anthropology
in elite studies) and can be reinvigorated by a sustained concentra-
tion on new global elite formations. The various financial, devel-
opmental, and even conservationist networks across the world link
the local and the global (via the national), and—as we have seen in
2007–2008 and 2011—are also highly influential in creating certain
conjunctures of crises that impact significantly on nonelite people.
As among other political power elites, the new global economic-fi-
nancial elites (cf. Rothkopf 2008) tend to develop a network culture
and a managerial lifestyle that floats above national societies and laws
and may subvert accountability pressures. This necessitates critical
scrutiny from the public media and from social science, including
anthropology. The methodological and personal-ethical challenges of
such anthropological research projects are great, because they would
demand some significant reschooling of anthropologists in the world
of finance, business management, etcetera for them to be taken seri-
ously (cf. the Skovgaard Smith, Bourgouin, and Ortiz chapters). But
this may be a profitable investment in a new genre of social research
22 TIJO SALVERDA AND JON ABBINK

with great social relevance. We hope that this volume will advance the
comparative anthropological study of elites and redress the relative
neglect that the subject has suffered in the past few decades.

Notes
1. Elites are probably a human universal and are also present in non-
industrial, acephalous societies, such as, the !Kung San in Southern
Africa, where spirit mediums formed an elite, having prestige
although not being rewarded for it in a political or material sense.
And in the society of the Suri agro-pastoralists in Southwest Ethiopia
(cf. Abbink 2000) two hereditary clans retained a position of ritual
(not executive) power and prestige, functioning as a descent elite in
an otherwise strongly egalitarian society.
2. Christopher Lasch, in his posthumous book The Revolt of the Elites
(1995), estimated that about one-fifth of the American population
belonged to the elite, or rather to a variety of elites or privileged classes.
3. Who offered a concise definition of elite as “a class of the people who
have the highest indices in their branch of activity.”
4. Some examples are: Durand-Guédy (2010), Roth and Beachy (2007),
Toru and Phillips (2000), and Henshall (2010).
5. For an interesting reconsideration of this book, see Alan Wolfe,
“The power elite now,” American Prospect 9, May 1, 1999 (http://
prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_power_elite_now) [Accessed
September 24, 2011]. Dahrendorf (1959) criticized Mills’ approach
as exaggerating the cohesiveness and unity of the power elite. He
countered that although elites have a measure of sociopolitical and
economic autonomy and exercise influence, they rarely form a sol-
idary group advancing common interests.
6. Cf. also former World Bank economist Stiglitz’s comment (2011). For
France, see Genieys (2010); for Europe in general, see Seidel (2010);
for China, see Pieke (2009). Theoretically important is also Mizruchi
(2004) on US corporate rule. Wedel’s (2009) study also breaks new
ground on this minority.
7. A popular subject for the anthropological study of elite groups has
been the European Union bureaucracy: see Bellier (2000), Abélès
(2005), or Shore (2007).
8. Fumanti (2004) has reflected on the issue of agency of anthropologi-
cal fieldworkers among elites.
9. There was one chapter on this subject in De Pina-Cabral and Pedroso
de Lima’s book (2000) on elite choice, leadership, and succession—
that of Pedroso de Lima on contemporary Lisbon financial elites. But
here the idiom of kinship and family in the control and transmission
of elite resources was the main concern, not the functioning of these
elites as a new socio-economic formation.
 INTRODUCTION 23

10. “Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga com’è, bisogna che tutto cambi.” (Di
Lampedusa 1958, 43).
11. Members from one kind of elite can move into another, e.g., religious
leaders into the political elite, such as in contemporary theocratic Iran,
where mullahs rule, or entertainment stars/actors moving into poli-
tics, such as Ronald Reagan and more recently Arnold Schwarzenegger
as ex-Hollywood actors moving on to become US President and
California State Governor, respectively. Schwarzenegger also married
into the American political elite. In other examples, media personali-
ties or businessmen often move into politics and famous pop sing-
ers (e.g., Geldof and Bono) become self-appointed global activists in
humanitarian or development aid ventures.
12. Cf. also “Anthropology of elites” (http://pagerankstudio.com./
Blog/2010/11/anthropology-of-elites) [Accessed August 10, 2011].
13. Rothkopf (2008, xiv), an elite insider, estimates the size of the really
important global political-financial elite as just over six thousand
persons only.
14. “Anthropology of elites”.
15. A recent collection of essays under the auspices of David Lane (2011)
illustrates the significant role of political elites (in postsocialist states)
in processes of identity formation.
16. For closed, theocratic societies, however, it might be tenuous (cf.
Saudi Arabia, Iran). Also for North Korea, as the society is almost
totally controlled (no free information flow or media access by citi-
zens) by an ideology-driven political-economic elite.
17. The 2007/2008 financial crisis was largely caused by (financial) elites
as well. This has certainly had an impact on their position, although
the verdict is still out as to what extent it will eventually affect their
power.
18. See also Wolfe, “The power elite now.”
19. Current discussions about the revolving doors between Wall Street’s
financial sector, on the one hand, and government and regulators
in Washington, on the other, illustrate the continuous relevance of
unraveling the workings of elite networks, notwithstanding whether
they are between functional elites or whether there is a power elite
indeed.
20. They have gained more influence in sociology as well; see, e.g.,
Undheim (2003); Rhodes, Hart, and Noordegraaf (2007), 3–4.

References
Abbink, J. 2000. “Restoring the balance: violence and culture among the
Suri of Southern Ethiopia. In Meanings of Violence: a Cross-Cultural
Perspective, edited by Göran Aijmer and Jon Abbink, 77–100. Oxford:
Berg.
24 TIJO SALVERDA AND JON ABBINK

Abélès, Marc. 2005. “Identity and Borders: An Anthropological Approach

to EU Institutions.” University of Wisconsin, on-line working papers
from the center for 21st century studies (www4.uwm.edu/c21/pdfs
/workingpapers/abeles.pdf) [Accessed September 21, 2011].
Bachrach, Peter, and Morton S. Baratz. 1962. “Two faces of power.”
American Political Science Review 56 (4): 947–952.
Beaverstock, Jon V. 2002. “Transnational elites in global cities: British expatri-
ates in Singapore’s financial district.” Geoforum 33 (4): 525–538.
Beaverstock, Jon V., Phil Hubbard, and John R. Short. 2004. “Getting
away with it? Exposing the geographies of the super-rich.” Geoforum 35:
401–407.
Bellier, Irene. 2000. “A Europeanized elite? An anthropology of European
Commission officials.” Yearbook of European Studies 14: 135–156.
Best , Heinrich, and John Higley, eds. 2010. Democratic Elitism: New
Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Böröcz, Jószef, and Ákos Róna-Tas. 1995. “Small leap forward: Emergence
of new economic elites.” Theory and Society 24 (5): 751–781.
Bottomore, Tom B. 1993 [1965]. Elites and Society. London: Routledge.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984 [1979]. Distinction, A Social Critique of the Judgement
of Taste. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
———. 1996 [1989]. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Camp, Roderic A. 2003. “Informal and formal networking among elite
Mexican capitalists and politicians.” Comparative Sociology 2 (1):
135–154.
Cohen, Abner. 1981. The Politics of Elite Culture: Explorations in the
Dramaturgy of Power in a Modern African Society. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Dahl, Robert. 1961. Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American
City. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Dahrendorf, Ralf. 1959. Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Daloz, Jean-Pascal. 2007. “Elite distinction: Grand theory and comparative
perspectives.” Comparative Sociology 6 (1–2): 27–74.
———. 2010. The Sociology of Elite Distinction: From Theoretical to Comparative
Perspectives. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Di Lampedusa, Giuseppe T. 1958. Il Gattopardo. Milan: Feltrinelli
Editore.
Dogan, Mattei, ed. 2003a. Elite Configurations at the Apex of Power. Leiden
and- Boston: Brill Academic Publishers.
———. 2003b. “Introduction: Diversity of elite configurations and clusters
of power.” Comparative Sociology 2 (1): 1–15.
———. 2003c. “Is there a ruling class in France?” Comparative Sociology 2
(1): 17–89.
Dogan, Mattei, and John Higley. 1998. Elites, Crises, and the Origins of
Regimes. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
 INTRODUCTION 25

Domhoff, G. William. 1978. Who Really Rules?: New Haven and Community
Power Re-examined. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.
Dreitzel, Hans P. 1962. Elitebegriff und Sozialstruktur. Eine soziologische
Begriffsanalyse. Stuttgart: Enke.
Dronkers, Jaap, and Huibert Schijf. 2007. “Elites.” In The Blackwell
Encyclopedia of Sociology, edited by George Ritzer, 1362 –1364. Oxford
and Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Durand-Guédy, David. 2010. Iranian Elites and Turkish Rulers: A History of
Isfahān in the Saljūq Period. London and New York: Routledge.
Engelstad, Fredrik, and Trygve J. Gulbrandsen, eds. 2007. Comparative
Studies of Social and Political Elites. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Etzioni-Halevy, Eva. 1993. The Elite Connection: Problems and Potential of
Western Democracy. Cambridge: Polity.
Fennema, Meindert, and Eelke M. Heemskerk. 2008. Nieuwe Netwerken: De
Elite en de Ondergang van de NV Nederland. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker.
Fontana, Benedetto. 1993. Hegemony and Power: On the Relations between
Gramsci and Machiavelli. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Fumanti, Mattia. 2004. “The making of the fieldworker: Debating agency in
elites research.” Anthropology Matters 6 (2): 1–9.
Genieys, William. 2010. The New Custodians of the State: Programmatic
Elites in French Society. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Graz, Jean-Christophe. 2003. “How powerful are transnational elite clubs?
The social myth of the World Economic Forum.” New Political Economy
8 (3): 321–340.
Hartmann, Michael. 2007. The Sociology of Elites. London and New York:
Routledge.
Hay, Iain, ed. 2013 (forthcoming). Geographies of the Super-Rich. London:
Edward Elgar.
Heemskerk, Eelke M. 2007. Decline of the Corporate Community: Network
Dynamics of the Dutch Business Elite. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press.
Henshall, Nicholas. 2010. The Zenith of European Monarchy and Its Elites:
The Politics of Culture, 1650–1750. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Herzfeld, Michael. 2000. “Uncanny success: Some closing remarks.” In De
Pina-Cabral and Pedroso de Lima, Elites, 227–237.
Higley, John, and Michael Burton. 2006. Elite Foundations of Liberal
Democracy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Higley, John, and Jan Pakulski. 2007. “Elite and leadership change in liberal
democracies.” Comparative Sociology 6 (1–2): 6–26.
Keller, Susan. 1963. Beyond the Ruling Class: Strategic Elites in Modern
Society. New York: Random House.
Lane, David. 2011. “Identity formation and political elites in the post-socialist
states.” Europe-Asia Studies 63 (6): 925–934.
Lasch, Christopher. 1995. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of
Democracy. New York: W.W. Norton and Co.
26 TIJO SALVERDA AND JON ABBINK

Lerner, Robert, Althea K. Nagai, and Stanley Rothman. 1996. American

Elites. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Lukes, Steven. 2005 [1974] Power: A Radical View. Basingstoke and New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mannheim, Karl. 1940 [1935]. Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction:
Studies in Modern Social Structure. New York: Harcourt.
Marcus, George E. 1983. Elites: Ethnographic Issues. Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press.
Michels, Robert. 1911. Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen
Demokratie: Untersuchungen über die oligarchischen Tendenzen des
Gruppenlebens. Leipzig: Klinkhardt.
Mills, Charles Wright. 2000 [1956]. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Mizruchi, Mark S. 2004. “Berle and Means revisited: The governance and
power of large US corporations.” Theory and Society 33: 579–617.
Mosca, Gaetano. 1923 [1895]. The Ruling Class. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Nader, Laura. 1972. “Up the anthropologist—perspectives gained from study-
ing up.” In Reinventing Anthropology, edited by Dell Hymes, 284–311.
New York: Random House.
Pareto, Vilfredo. 1991 [1901]. The Rise and Fall of Elites: An Application of
Theoretical Sociology. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.
Pedroso de Lima, Antónia. 2000. “‘How did I become a leader in my family
firm?’ Assets for succession in contemporary Lisbon financial elites.” In
De Pina-Cabral and Pedroso de Lima, Elites, 31–52.
Pieke, Frank N. 2009. The Good Communist: Elite Training and State
Building in Today’s China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
De Pina-Cabral, João, and Antónia Pedroso de Lima, eds. 2000. Elites:
Choice, Leadership and Succession. Oxford: Berg.
Pinçon, Michel, and Monique Pinçon-Charlot. 1998. Grandes Fortunes:
Dynasties Familiales et Formes de Richesse en France. Paris: Éditions Payot
& Rivages.
Putnam, Robert D. 1976. The Comparative Study of Political Elites. New
Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Reis, Elisa, and Mick Moore, eds. 2005. Elite Perceptions of Poverty and
Inequality. London and Cape Town: Zed Books.
Rhodes, Rod A. W., Paul ‘t Hart, and Mirko Noordegraaf, eds. 2007.
Observing Government Elites. Up Close and Personal. Basingstoke and
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Robinson, William I. 2010. Global Capitalism Theory and the Emergence of
Transnational Elites. Tokyo: UN University, WIDER (Working paper
2010/2).
Roth, Ralf, and Robert Beachy, eds. 2007. Who Ran the Cities?: City Elites
and Urban Power Structures in Europe and North America, 1750–1940.
Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Rothkopf, David. 2008. Superclass. The Global Power Elite and the World
They Are Making. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
 INTRODUCTION 27

Salverda, Tijo. 2010. Sugar, Sea and Power. How Franco-Mauritians Balance
Continuity and Creeping Decline of Their Elite Position. Amsterdam: VU
University (PhD thesis).
Savage, Mike, and Karel Williams. 2008. “Elites: Remembered in capitalism
and forgotten by social sciences.” Sociological Review 56 (special issue):
1–24.
Schwartz, Michael, ed. 1987. The Structure of Power in America: The
Corporate Elite as a Ruling Class. New York and London: Holmes &
Meier.
Scott, John. 2003. “Transformations in the British economic elite.”
Comparative Sociology 2 (1): 155–173.
———. 2008. “Modes of power and the re-conceptualization of elites.”
Sociological Review 56 (special issue): 27–43.
Seidel, Katja. 2010. The Process of Politics in Europe: The Rise of European
Elites and Supranational Institutions. London: I.B. Tauris.
Shore, Cris. 2002. “Introduction: Towards and anthropology of elites.”
In Elite Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives, edited by Cris Shore and
Stephen Nugent, 1–21. London and New York: Routledge.
———. 2007. “European integration in anthropological perspective: Studying
the ‘culture’ of the EU Civil Service.” In Observing Government Elites. Up
Close and Personal, edited by Rod A. W. Rhodes, Paul ‘t Hart, and Mirko
Noordegraaf, 180–205. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Shore, Cris, and Stephen Nugent, eds. 2002. Elite Cultures: Anthropological
Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge.
Simmel, Georg. 1957 [1908]. “Fashion.” American Journal of Sociology 67
(6): 541–558.
Stiglitz, Joseph L. 2011. “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.” Vanity
Fair 75 (3) (http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05
/top-one-percent-201105) [Accessed May 2, 2012].
Szelényi, Ivan, and Szonja Szelényi. 1995. “Circulation or reproduction
of elites during the postcommunist transformation of Eastern Europe:
Introduction.” Theory and Society 24 (5): 615–638.
Taylor, Ian, and Philip Nel. 2002. “‘New Africa,’ globalisation and the con-
fines of elite reformism: ‘Getting the rhetoric right,’ getting the strategy
wrong.” Third World Quarterly 23 (1): 163–180.
Tilly, Charles. 2005. Trust and Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Toru, Miora, and John E. Philips, eds. 2000. Slave Elites in the Middle East
and Africa: A Comparative Study. London: Kegan Paul International.
Undheim, Trond A. 2003. “Getting connected: How sociologists can access
the high tech elite.” The Qualitative Report 8 (1): 104–128.
Weber, Max. 1958 [1918]. “Politics as a vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays
in Sociology, edited by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 77–128. New
York: Oxford University Press.
———. 1985 [1922]. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der Verstehenden
Soziologie. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck).
28 TIJO SALVERDA AND JON ABBINK

Weber, Max. 1997 [1922]. “Democracy and the countervailing powers of

bureaucracy, charisma, and parliament.” In Classes and Elites in Democracy
and Democratization, edited by Eva Etzioni-Halévy, 62–70. New York:
Garland.
Wedel, Janine. 2009. Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers
Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market. New York:
Basic Books.
———. 2010. “Shadow elite. How the study of post-Communist societies
illuminates US power structures.” Anthropology News February 27.
Werbner, Richard P. 2004. Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana:
The Public Anthropology of Kalanga Elites. Bloomington and London:
Indiana University Press.
Westwood, Sallie. 2002. Power and the Social. London and New York:
Routledge.
 CH A P T ER 1

Researching Elites:
Old and New Perspectives

Huibert Schijf

Defining Elites
The phenomenon of elites is ancient but the concept is relatively recent
and originally meant something else: “The term ‘elite’ was introduced
in the seventeenth century to describe commodities of an exceptional
standard and the usage was later extended to designate social groups
at the apex of societies” (Daloz 2010a, 1). Over the years the use of
the term has been extended. Reviewing literature on elites, the British
sociologist John Scott concludes that “at the height of its popularity
almost any powerful, advantaged, qualified, privileged, or superior
group or category might be described as elite . . . It was applied to such
diverse groups as politicians, bishops, intelligent people, aristocrats,
lawyers and successful criminals” (2008, 27). Scott certainly has a
point, but following his critique would make research on elites very
restrictive, as we shall see. Who then are elites in modern society? The
answer will turn out to be far from easy, as elites are often related to
positions of power and prestige but also to social mobility and com-
plex procedures of inclusion and exclusion. Needless to say that pres-
tige, power, and influence are relational concepts, as is indicated by
Salverda and Abbink (see the Introduction, this volume). Elites will
use a variety of resources to exert and maintain their positions.
Therefore, if resources and influence are the key concepts, the cru-
cial question is how they interact. Researchers on elites have spent
much time addressing the questions how certain resources can wield
this influence and how elites came into possession of these resources.
30 HUIBERT SCHIJF

The question that follows is how they are able to transfer them to
the next generation eventually. Particularly forms of reproduction,
such as education, have often been the topic of research by sociolo-
gists. Far less attention is paid to hereditary reproduction, both in a
biological and a social sense, because not even in largely meritocratic
societies where people are judged by their individual achievements
is everybody able to reach a top position without the proper social
background and helpful networks. In most societies people still gain
resources by benefiting from the resources of their parents, who in
their turn might have benefited from their parents’ resources. This
observation can be linked to the well-known sociological dichotomy
of ascription and achievement. Hence, an important research ques-
tion is how are people able to reach these highest strata, to maintain
positions, and to handover these positions to the next generation?
The nobility is a well-researched group, and lineages are described in
many biographies, where at least some qualities are ascribed, as they
are gained by birth (cf. also Jakubowska’s chapter, this volume).

Researching Elites
Political scientists and sociologists tend to define elites as the incum-
bents of top positions in decision-making institutions in both the
public and the private sectors. Scott (2008, 28) strongly argues “that
the word elite should be used only in relation to those groups that
have a degree of power.” The focus of their research is on individual
characteristics, such as gender, religion, level of education, or past
career. By doing so, many researchers use the implicit assumption that
people with the same social background will share the same opinions
and policies, which is not necessarily true as their behavior in parlia-
ments testify. Still, it can be argued that the majority of British politi-
cians who went to Cambridge or Oxford, all belonged to ‘our kind of
people’, whatever the political differences might be as can be said of
many French politicians.
However, as a consequence of defining elites as members of power-
ful institutions the problem who to select for investigation is trans-
ferred to the selection of particular institutions. Apart from obvious
political institutions such as Parliament and the cabinet or economic
institutions such as large corporations, what kind of institution is wor-
thy to be selected for further investigation of its incumbents? First, it
might be that traditional centers of decision-making, such as national
parliaments, have become marginal in the developing global world,
where new international organizations or multinational corporations
 RESEARCHING ELITES 31

have perhaps gained more influence. Although in the nineteenth

century local elites were of much importance, national elites became
dominant in the twentieth century. Will global elites play such a role
in the twenty-first century?
Second, one might argue that families, that sometimes develop
into industrial or financial dynasties, are also institutions worth
researching, because as families they have influence and wealth. In
the above-mentioned definition by political scientists, characteristics
of families and kinship relations are not ignored but are included as
individual characteristics of the incumbents, whereas families as insti-
tutions do not form the subject for detailed research. Such an approach
with genealogical descriptions and marriage patterns between fami-
lies is familiar in historical research (e.g., Farrell 1993), but far less so
among social scientists. This chapter contends that there much is to
learn from how historians do research on elites.
Third, given the political definition of elites, would it be possible to
select orchestras with a reputation worldwide and to study their musi-
cians as incumbents? Or can only the incumbents of decision-making
positions in cultural organizations be called elite, whereas the per-
forming artists themselves are not, although they are universally rec-
ognized as top musicians? These comments are meant to show that
the method often used by political scientists and sociologists to define
and research elites has its limitations. Moreover, it also differs strongly
from the daily use of the term “elite,” often applied to a wide range
of people, such as a sports elite or an intellectual elite. Interestingly,
the Italian economist V. Pareto, who introduced the concept of elite
into the social sciences (1968), defined elites as those who are most
capable in any area of activity, although he did not explain how to
establish these qualities and how to compare them. His definition is
close to the original meaning of elite as Daloz indicates (2010a).
Theoreticians like Pareto and his compatriot Gaetano Mosca
emphasized the circulation or alternation of elites imbedded as they
are in society. They also hold strong opinions on how elites should act
and how their positions can be justified. The Italian society in which
Mosca and Pareto lived was politically very unstable, which makes
Pareto’s phrase that “history is a graveyard of aristocracies” under-
standable. However, Pareto and Mosca underestimated the possibili-
ties of members of elite families with a variety of resources at their
disposal to reach and maintain high positions, even in Italy at the
turn of the twentieth century. Today, it rarely happens that political
dynasties can hold such high positions for long as democratic rules
and voters’ whimsical political attitudes make a prolonged political
32 HUIBERT SCHIJF

career unlikely, let alone last for several generations. Therefore, it is

more plausible that elite families prefer careers elsewhere, such as in
business or law.
There are cogent arguments why political scientists prefer such
a focus on decision-makers, especially when it is used in compara-
tive research for several nations (e.g., Best and Cotta [2000] on
lawmakers), because many scholars of social science are interested
in changes of social mobility and stratification over time, whereas
political scientists are more interested in the workings of democra-
cies and political systems in general.

Sociological Perspectives
For many sociologists studying elites (or any other social group)
as a separate subject of research is very often beyond their interest,
because their research questions mainly are about the openness of
modern meritocratic societies. For them the focus is social mobil-
ity. Two types of social mobility should be distinguished: structural
and circular. The former indicates that in modern advanced societies
more positions are available at the top than in the past and this offers
more opportunities to men and women to gain a high-ranking posi-
tion. Multinational corporations with regional heads and sectional
managers offer more top positions than local ones run by just one
family. However, according to sociologists, it is circular mobility, that
is, the possibilities of people from lower strata of society reaching
positions in a higher strata, that matters as far as openness of a society
is concerned.
Many members of the elite follow a lifelong career by switching
from one sector to another, acting as universalists—a process known
as pantouflage in French political life (Charle 1987, 1115). It is also
known in other countries where, for instance, ministers of finance
might become bankers or vice versa, or a trade unionist becomes a
prime minister. The process indicates horizontal integration of the
governing elites; we can assume that at least they have some values
and ideologies in common, although it does not necessarily mean
that the governing class forms a closed entity. Research on vertical
integration of elites however focuses on questions such as, how repre-
sentative are these elites or how open are they toward newcomers.
In modern economic life some managers have a tendency to switch
from one corporation to another, regardless of their knowledge of a
branch of industry. Others become specialists and follow a career in
just one sector, or even one company. Many members of the economic
 RESEARCHING ELITES 33

elite do not necessarily operate in their native country. The focus of

much research on elites is not only on the individual characteristics of
elites but also on the extent to which the characteristics correlate, or
the chance that people with certain characteristics are able to obtain
such an elite position. Defining power elites as incumbents of top
positions in three sectors, C. Wright Mills (1956) shows that govern-
mental, military, and business elites—all male, white, and Christian
in the United States in the 1950s—were highly interconnected. This
finding inspired many subsequent researchers to investigate over-
lapping networks of elites. The German political scientist Wilhelm
Bürklin (1997) and his coresearchers did something different when
they studied the elites in Germany, based on long interviews with
incumbents in various sectors, such as political, economic, religious,
and labor. They were not especially interested in the overlapping of
these elites, but whether elites from East Germany had started to
integrate with the local and the national elites from West Germany
since 1989.
On the border line between studies of corporate networks based
on linkages between corporations created through multiple func-
tions of members of the boards of executives and elite studies is the
exploration by the German sociologist Paul Windolf (2002). His area
of research was interlocking directorates, on which much research
has been done already (Fennema and Schijf 1979). Windolf is one
of the few who contributed a new element to this network research
by also investigating the ‘qualities’ of the persons who created the
network of interlocking directorates. At least in one way Mills’s semi-
nal study (1956) is outdated: over the following decades, women,
Afro-Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans entered the American
power elite. Not always in large numbers, but the newcomers have
given a new diversity to the power elite and with it their cooperative
networks changed it (Zweigenhaft and Domhoff 1998).
Belonging to the tradition of research on social mobility is the
study by Hartmann (2002) who looked at the social backgrounds of
engineers, lawyers, and economists who defended their dissertation
in 1955, 1965, 1975, and 1985. Since German dissertations require a
brief curriculum vitae, it was easy to gather information on the social
background of the students. Using large-scale datasets and advanced
statistical methods, Hartmann then examined who had reached an
elite position later in life. As a sociologist he was interested in the mea-
sure of openness of German society. His concluded that although the
openness of the German educational system has increased, this is not
true for the chance of obtaining an elite position, which still depends
34 HUIBERT SCHIJF

much on an appropriate social background. Schijf, Dronkers, and Van

den Broeke-George (2004) offered another example of this type of
research where they focused on noble and patrician families in the
Netherlands. They compared the noble families with patrician fami-
lies as a kind of control group. Again, advanced statistical methods
were used to estimate the chance of noble daughters and sons to reach
an elite position not only in comparison to their parents’ chances but
also compared to their patrician peers. One remarkable finding was
that a noble mother is an important predictor to the chance to reach
an elite position, because of her role in inculcating specific noble sym-
bolic and cultural capital in her children. In contrast to the accepted
open and meritocratic character of modern Dutch society, Schijf,
Dronkers, and Van den Broeke-George demonstrated that the abil-
ity to obtain an elite position among the Dutch nobility, an ascrip-
tive elite based on birth, has hardly declined during the twentieth
century, although in Dutch public discourse nobility is often seen
as a relic from the past. Easily available printed sources were used to
process a large dataset for the purpose of this research.
Monique de Saint Martin (1993) elaborated the concept of “sym-
bolic capital” in her in-depth study on the French nobility. Although
a noble title no longer has a formal significance in modern France,
she argues that its symbolic value should not be underestimated.
Noble titles still offer symbolic capital as credit, supplementing or
even dominating the social and cultural capital of noble families.
Symbolic capital also represents a system of values sometimes sum-
marized as “noblesse oblige” (ibid., 25–27). Other forms of symbolic
capital, such as being well-connected with the art world or charity
organizations, or owning a Gulfstream jet or a huge country house,
also help.
Cults around kings and rulers also strengthen the symbolic capi-
tal of the person involved. Irene Stengs (2003) offers an interesting
case study in her work of the Thai royal family—how the family uses
symbolic power to justify and maintain its position vis-à-vis the popu-
lation as a whole. More in general, symbolic superiority and ostenta-
tious consumption among elite families are topics worth pursuing.
Families also tend to strengthen their present and future position “by
monumentalizing the past” (Herzfeld 2000, 234), by emphasizing
how old the family is or by showing a thorough knowledge of the
family tree. As Schijf, Dronkers, and Van den Broeke-George (2004)
show in their research, official sources establishing the pedigree of
Dutch noble and patrician families can be fruitfully used for advanced
statistical analyses.
 RESEARCHING ELITES 35

Instead of defining elites as incumbents of positions of power and

influence, there are other ways of looking at them. For instance, we
can use concepts introduced by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
(1980; see also Portes [1998] on social capital) and argue that elites
might differ from other people in terms of financial, cultural, social,
or symbolic capital, although that does not imply that differences
are defined by dichotomies. Moreover, Bourdieu’s concepts offer a
multidimensional way of determining elite positions, as it might be
more than likely these days that men and women scoring high on cul-
tural capital are not necessarily the wealthiest people in a society. This
approach to the definition of elites offers many more topics worth-
while to research than defining them simply as incumbents of top
positions. With this approach the word “elite” would almost be abol-
ished and we would just be speaking of the upper class with respect
to several types of capital. More would be brought into view than in
the research confined to the two mentioned paramount elements of
society, namely openness and the reproduction of the various forms
of capital. However, Daloz (2010b) argues convincingly that these
concepts cannot be seen as universalistic as is sometimes suggested,
because they are imbedded in a particular time and society—France
in the seventies and eighties in the last century—which makes them
less useful as a theoretical framework to apply to historical research in
non-Western societies.

Anthropological Perspectives
In their introduction to Elite Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives
(2002) Chris Shore and Stephen Nugent give the impression that
there is a wide scientific gap between sociological and anthropologi-
cal perspectives on elites. But is there? The edited volumes by De
Pina-Cabral and Pedroso de Lima (2000) and Shore and Nugent
(2002) offer many fine examples of anthropological research on
elites. Their authors present a variety of topics and elites from several
regions in the world. However, unlike some research done by soci-
ologists, they rarely employ systematic sampling methods let alone
that a statistical analysis is performed. However, anthropologists with
their detailed, contextualized descriptions show often more sensitiv-
ity to changing circumstances than most sociologists, who are mostly
dependent on large surveys, which frame a particular moment in
time.
For many anthropologists, intensive fieldwork is the character-
istic research method. There is no need to discuss the advantages
36 HUIBERT SCHIJF

and disadvantages of this method, but it is important to see to what

extent elites are accessible for such long and intensive fieldwork.
Several researchers have reported that exactly because of their lack
of status they were allowed to observe the affairs of particular elites
(see Pedroso de Lima 2000). Herzfeld elaborates on this experience
by pointing out that the status of the anthropologist is a kind of lit-
mus test of the wealth of his interviewees: “The genuinely powerful
new international business elite condescends . . . to admit the ethnog-
rapher, whose prying is just so much scratching on the granite rock
face of its empires” (2000, 229). The anthropologist as court jester is
not a role many researchers will have in mind, but playing it helps as
long as scholarly integrity is not at risk. However, “elites whose only
remaining capital is the symbolic capital of past glories are diagnosti-
cally defensive” (ibid.). Perhaps accessibility is not the main problem
for doing research among elites, but the interest of many anthropolo-
gists themselves.
Anthropologists, with their traditional focus on or concern for
the poor, have shown little interest in powerful people, which might
explain why anthropological research on elites is still relatively scarce.
It might also be the case that many anthropologists, and sociolo-
gists, find it easier to study down than studying up. But as Herzfeld
(2000, 230) points out: “Here the crucial methodological cau-
tion seems to be the importance of insisting that elites form parts
of encompassing cultures.” A holistic approach therefore would be
of great help to widen one’s interest in elites (cf. the Introduction,
above). Another point of comment is that sociologists will use pub-
licly available sources, or try to conduct a survey, as do journalists and
historians, and will try to supplement those data with interviewing
key informants. However, if fieldwork is successful, anthropologists
can offer more insights in the mechanisms of how elites benefit from
their resources and how they justify their positions.
According to Shore, what is important from an anthropological
perspective is the degree of self-recognition and consciousness that
exists among elites. “In order to constitute themselves as a group
rather just a category, an elite must develop a common culture that
is recognisable to its members . . . Understanding how that conscious-
ness is created and maintained lies at the heart of the project for an
anthropology of elites” (Shore and Nugent 2002, 3). No need to
argue with that. Without doubt this is an important question to
ask about elites. But is this a typical anthropological perspective?
The consciousness of elites and the way elites are interconnected, is
already exactly Mills’s central theme in his The Power Elite, as well
 RESEARCHING ELITES 37

as in many other publications on elite networks or the reproduction

of elites.
The seminal research by two French sociologists (Pinçon and
Pinçon-Charlot 2006 and 2007) on the Paris bourgeoisie (among
French social scientists, this word is preferred over elite) shows how
insightful the results of this research can be. These two scholars used
quantitative and qualitative data; they not only paid attention to both
power and culture but also wrote about lifestyle and distinction. Their
method of selecting informants did not differ much from the way
anthropologists would proceed, that is, they used a subtle method of
snowball sampling. But they also had advantages not every researcher
possesses, namely the right qualifications and knowing some people
already. Pedroso de Lima (2000) reports that the families researched
in her study were quite curious about the results of the inquiries.
Moreover, those families were also severe judges of these results. For
this reason Pinçon and Pinçon-Charlot always took pains to write
carefully, fully aware that they even could ruin their future research
possibilities by misrepresenting the findings.
Although elites rightfully have the reputation of being reluctant in
providing information about themselves, this does not mean that their
way of life and operations are completely unknown, or that there is no
available information about them in easy accessible sources. Therefore,
to answer the point made by Shore above, the question in what ways
does anthropology differ from other social sciences can be answered
by saying that apart from its methods and attention to small groups, it
hardly does. Of course, one can notice a division of academic special-
ties, especially as far as regions are concerned, but the disciplines are
not exclusive in their empirical and theoretical approaches.

Families
During the first decades of the twentieth century, the economist
Joseph A. Schumpeter developed a general theory of social classes.
He formulated an interesting starting point: “The individual belongs
to a given class neither by choice, nor by any other action, nor by
innate qualities—in sum, his class membership is not individual at
all. It stems from his membership in a given clan or lineage. The fam-
ily not the physical person is the true unit of class and class theory”
(1955, 113). This general phrase can be made more specific by point-
ing out that the same is true for an elite family. Historians with their
sensitivity for changing contexts always worked that way. In histori-
cal research elite families are a popular subject and anthropologists
38 HUIBERT SCHIJF

and sociologists can benefit from the historical perspective, as a few

examples will show.
In his study on bankers in London, the French historian Youssef
Cassis (1994) has shown the importance of kinship relations among
Jewish bankers and among Quaker bankers in London in the nine-
teenth century. The American historian Betty G. Farrell (1993) points
out that the strength of family connections and marriages helps greatly
to explain why bourgeois families were able to remain in prominent
political, commercial, or cultural positions in nineteenth-century
Boston, because in that way capital remained within the family. Their
kinship networks represented large common interests and enabled
them to adapt to new circumstances and opportunities. The American
historian David Landes, in his Dynasties: Fortunes and Misfortunes
of the World’s Great Family Business, offers narratives of economic
dynasties in banking, automobiles, and oil companies. Well-known
families in these sectors are Ford and Rockefeller. In Landes’s defi-
nition dynasties are lines of blood relationship, often reinforced by
marriage ties and adoption (2006, 290).
Another example is Gary W. McDonough’s Good Families of
Barcelona: A Social History of Power in the Industrial Era (1986; see
also 1991). The study is not just another social history of a city, but an
excellent example of how historical anthropology should be carried
out. The author shows how an emergent industrial elite—after they
acquired the proper structure of consciousness, cultural values, and
symbolic power—subsequently coalesced with aristocratic rentiers in
Barcelona. Related to the idea of dynasties is the French concept of
grandes familles, as can be found in the work of Laurence Américi and
Xavier Daumalin (2010) on the fortunes of a group of families who
derived their economic elite positions from their trading companies,
which had a prominent position in running Marseille’s economic life
as a port city. They used their economic resources to gain political
influence as well. The families, however, never formed a monolithic
bloc, as competition was intrinsic to business as well as social life.
All these studies have various elements in common, such as a focus
on the lifestyle of the rich, how to keep capital within families, the
intermarriage between families, using kinship networks to gain trust
for doing international business, and creating a business dynasty. Not
all families were successful all the time, as misfortunes can happen,
but the general impression was that these families were amazingly
strong in their continuity. The power of families can usually be found
at the local or regional level, as the titles of many studies on elite
families testify. Still, we should not ignore the fact that in the past
 RESEARCHING ELITES 39

there already existed families that operated as bankers or merchants

at an international level. Good examples are the international Jewish
banking dynasties, such as the still well-known Rothschilds and the
forgotten Bischoffsheims (both German migrants), that held influen-
tial positions in the European financial world in the nineteenth cen-
tury. They had family members in financial capitals as Amsterdam,
Berlin, London, Paris, and Vienna; they were highly intermarried
and through their kinship networks created trust with trading part-
ners abroad (Schijf 2005). In the Rothschild family, the percentage of
marriages among first cousins was high. But it seems likely that the
Rothschilds were the only banking family who had such an explicit
strategy of endogamy and these marriages always followed the male
line of the descendants and hence the continuation of the separate
banking houses was guaranteed (Ferguson 1998; Kuper 2001). The
Jewish banking families might be a thing of the past, but their strate-
gies might not. In the present burgeoning global world, far-rang-
ing kinship networks of migrants living in diasporas are of growing
importance.

Global Elites
According to the strong statement of the journalist Chrysta Freeland
we can see “the emergence of a global plutocracy—the hyper-educated,
internationally minded meritocrats who have been the chief benefi-
ciaries of globalization and the technological revolution” (Financial
Times, January 2/3, 2010). In the same vein David Rothkopf in his
journalistic book Superclass portrays an internationally mobile and
cosmopolitan power elite based on the new global world of finance
and information (2008, 221–254). However, so far the evidence
of a new global elite is inconclusive. Hartmann’s research (1999)
on the international orientation of top managers does not support
Rothkopf’s thesis. On the contrary, the majority of managers has fol-
lowed an education at national institutions, and operates and lives at
the national level. But because of the globalization they certainly have
no parochial disposition.
Based on formal analyses of networks created by interlocking
directorates William Carroll and Meindert Fennema concluded in
2002 that “there has been no massive shift in corporate interlock-
ing from a predominantly national to a predominantly transnational
pattern” (414). However, they show that there exists a small group
of corporations with many transnational ties. In contrast to national
networks that are organized around financial institutions, industrial
40 HUIBERT SCHIJF

corporations predominate at the center of the transnational networks.

This suggests that the transnational network is a kind of superstruc-
ture that rests upon rather resilient national bases.
Another topic would be how and in what way elites distinguish
themselves from local or lower people. They might fortify their power
through various symbolic domains, such as a different live-style or
by using a different language. David Brooks’s journalistic Bobos in
Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000) on
the lifestyle of the new upper class that lives in gated communities
should be an inspiring example of how to pursue this particular field
of research in a more scholarly way.
Little is known how important, prestigious international business
schools contribute to the formation of a global elite. This is also true
about international institutions founded to form a new international
academic elite. The European University Institute was set up by the
EU (European Union) to create “a European-minded or ‘transna-
tional’ academic elite, oriented not just to their own EU member
state” (Dronkers and Garib 2002, 3). Although their results are very
tentative, their main conclusion is that the majority of the graduate
students go back to their country of origin (ibid.). But it is unknown
whether the returning students will use their acquired international
networks at the national level.

Conclusion
Reading the literature on elites one might come to the conclusion that
there is no leading principle in doing research on elites, except perhaps
the difference between high and low. Would that be a sufficient reason
to abolish the concept once and for all? Or should research on elites
be restricted to themes like choice, leadership, and succession as sug-
gested by De Pina-Cabral and Pedroso de Lima (2000)? In an accepted
division of research projects between disciplines would that mean that
we leave elites in the narrow sense of incumbents of positions of power
and influence, as suggested by Scott (2008), to political scientists,
with their focus on decision-making institutions? In his analysis of the
changing nature of modern Indonesian elites, C. W. Watson (2002)
warned us not to give up the term “elite” too soon. But qualifiers to
the concept of elite, such as business elite, can be misleading in situ-
ations where “global shifts in international politics have such imme-
diate and dramatic consequences that it seems impossible to observe
continuities” (ibid., 122). To generalize from his specific Indonesian
context, Watson’s remark can be seen as a sensible warning against
 RESEARCHING ELITES 41

ignoring changes at the local, regional, national, and international

levels. Elites have a great ability to adapt to new circumstances, and
switching from one sector in society to another is a common practice
among them. It is exactly the mutual influencing at various levels that
should be included when we study specific elites in an identifiable, but
constantly changing context.
For many sociologists and anthropologists Scott’s political science
position might be less appealing, or rather they would prefer a wider
range of topics to study elites. Would therefore a concept such as upper
class or, following French practice, bourgeoisie, offer more oppor-
tunities? Perhaps we should simply stop bickering about the mean-
ing of words and do the research we are interested in. Sociologists
and political scientists tend to restrict their research on elites in still
another way. Their research method is to collect individual charac-
teristics of incumbents and correlate these to find general patterns.
This methodological individualism has its own use and respectability
in academia. However, elites do not exist in isolation but in relation
to other people, and they cannot exist or be analyzed outside specific
historical, cultural, and societal contexts. Their spatial contexts might
be local, regional, national, or transnational. Elites can therefore be
seen as “a group of intermediaries whose power rests on being able to
forge connections and bridge gaps” (Savage and Williams 2008, 4).
This approach encourages a view of elites as existing within net-
works, webs, or constellations of relations that generate positions for
people as elites. As intermediaries, elites are not restricted to their,
for instance, local or national level; they also perform this function
between each of the various network levels. These different networks
alone already offer many ways to study elites.
Figure 1.1 tries to summarize perspectives in research on elites at
four levels. The cells on the diagonal summarize elite studies discussed
in this chapter at specific levels—local elite, regional elite, national
elite, and, finally, global elite. All other cells offer interaction among
the elites at two or more levels. Perhaps still much neglected are the
networks of elites interacting among several levels. The question that
might be posed is what the consequences of decisions made at the global
level are for the positions of the local elites. To give just one example:
Sarah Green (2008) offers an exciting glimpse of how decision-makers
at the top of the EU decide to fund programs aimed at encouraging
the sustainable development of a remote Greek region called Epirus.
The elite she describes would hardly see themselves as elite, they are
small-town lawyers, village presidents, civil servants, and similar people,
who take a leading role in applying and then managing a EU funded
42 HUIBERT SCHIJF

Elites

Local Regional National Global

Local Strict Local Interaction Interaction Interaction

Elites

Regional Strict Regional Interaction Interaction

Elites

National Strict National Interaction

Elites

Global Strict Global Elites

Figure 1.1 Networks at four levels

development project (ibid., 260). Their new role as intermediaries also

created new patronage networks and thereby more influence than they
ever had before.
Today, questions concerning the openness or the closeness of cer-
tain institutions or societies and the chance that a person with par-
ticular characteristics will occupy an elite position are high on both
the agenda of sociological and anthropological elite research. In
addition, the rise, preservation, and fall of elites will continue to be
interesting subjects of research. It can be argued that people at the
top offer multiple themes to investigate, as long as researchers real-
ize that elites, as everybody else, interact and are embedded in wider
societies with constant changing structures at the local, national,
and global levels.

References
Américi, Laurence, and Xavier Daumalin. 2010. Les Dynasties Marseillaises
de la Révolution à Nos Jours. Paris: Perrin.
Best, Heinrich, and Maurizio Cotta, eds. 2000. Parliamentary Representatives
in Europe, 1848–2000: Legislative Recruitment and Careers in Eleven
European Countries. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1980. “Le capital social. Notes provisoires.” Actes de la
Recherche en Sciences Sociales 31: 2–3.
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
 XVIII
The Old Year, so far as my notes show it, had run to its close without
event for Bettesworth, just as the New Year was to do, excepting for
one big trouble. Yet he was not quite the man at the opening of
1903 that he had been at the opening of 1902. The twelve
uneventful months had, in fact, been leaving their marks upon him—
marks almost imperceptible as each occurred, yet progressive,
cumulative in their effect. On this day or on that, none could have
pointed to a change in the old man, or alleged that he was not so
the day before; but as the seasons swung round it was impossible
not to perceive how he was aging. It is well, therefore, to pause and
see what he had become by this time before we enter upon another
year of his life.
There was one silent witness to the increasing decay of his powers
that could not be overlooked. The garden gave him away. People
coming to visit me and it were embarrassed to know what to say, or
they even hinted that it would be an economy to allow Bettesworth
a small pension and hire a younger man, who would do as much
work, and do it better, in half the time. As if I needed to be told that!
But then they were not witnesses, with me, of the pluck—better
worth preserving than any garden—with which Bettesworth sought
to make amends for his vanished youth. His tenacity deepened my
regard for him, even while its poor results almost wore out my
patience. He who had once moved with such vigour was getting
slow; and the time was coming, if it had not come, when I had to
wait and dawdle while he dragged along behind me from one part of
the garden to another. A more serious matter was that with greater
effort on his part the garden ground was less well worked. I don't
believe he knew that. He used a favourite old spade, worn down like
himself, and never realized that "two spits deep" with this tool were
little better than one spit with a proper one; and he could not make
out why the carrots forked, and the peas failed early.
But the worst trial of all was due to another and more pitiful cause. I
could reconcile myself to indifferent crops—after all, I had enough—
but exasperation was daily renewed by the little daily failures in
routine work, owing to his defective sight, which grew worse and
worse. There were the garden paths. With what care the old man
drew his broom along them, working by faith and not sight, blindly
feeling for the rubbish he could not see, and getting it all save from
some corner or other of which his theories had forgotten to take
account! Little nests of disorder collected in this way, to-day here,
to-morrow somewhere else, surprising, offensive to the eye. Again,
at the lawn-mowing, never man worked harder than Bettesworth, or
more conscientiously; but he could not see the track of his machine,
and seams of uncut grass often disfigured the smoothness of the
turf even after he had gone twice over it to make sure of perfection.
It was alarming to see him go near a flower border. He would avoid
treading on any plant of whose existence he knew, by an act of
memory; but he could not know all, and I had to limit his labours
strictly to that part of the garden he planted or tended himself.
What made the situation so difficult to deal with was that his
intentions were so good. He was himself hardly aware that he failed,
and I rather sought to keep him in ignorance of the fact than
otherwise. I felt instinctively that, once it was admitted, all would be
over for Bettesworth; because he was incapable of mending, and
open complaints from me must in the end have led to his dismissal.
For that I was not prepared. He would never get another
employment; to cut him off from this would be like saying that the
world had no more use for him and he might as well die out of the
way. But I had no courage to condemn him to death because my
lawn was ill cut. With one exception, when I sent him to an oculist to
see if spectacles would help him (the oculist reported to me that
there was "practically no sight left"), we kept up the fiction that he
could see to do his work. And his patient, silent struggles to do well
were not without an element of greatness.
But though the drawbacks to employing the old man were many,
and such as to set me oftentimes wondering how long I should be
able to endure them, it must not be thought that he was altogether
useless. If he was slow, he was still strong; if he was half blind, he
was wholly efficient at heavy straightforward work. During this
winter, in making some radical changes which involved a good deal
of excavating work, Bettesworth was like a first-rate navvy, and
eagerly put all his experience at my disposal. There was a trench to
be opened for laying a water-pipe. With a young man to help him,
he dug it out and filled it in again, in about half the time that the job
would have taken if it had been entrusted to a contractor. In one
place a little pocket of bright red gravel was found. This, of his own
initiative, he put aside for use on the paths which he was too blind
to sweep clean. But, in truth, a sort of sympathy with my desires
and a keen eye to my interests frequently inspired him to do the
right thing in this kind of way. He had identified himself with the
place; was proud of it; boasted to his friends of "our" successes; and
like a miser over his hoard, never spared himself where the good of
the garden was concerned, but with aching limbs—his ankle where
he had once broken it pained him cruelly at times—went slaving on
for his own satisfaction, when I would have suggested to him to take
things easily.
I have said that there were those who considered him too expensive
a protégé for me. There were others, I am sure, to whom he
appeared no better than a tedious old man, opinionated, gossiping,
not over clean. Pretty often—especially in bad weather, when there
was not much he could be doing—he went on errands for me to the
town, to fetch home groceries and take vegetables to my friends,
and all that sort of thing. At my friends' he liked calling; they owed
to him rather than to me not a few cookings of cabbage and sticks
of celery, for which they would reward him with praise, and perhaps
a glass of beer or the price of it. Afterwards I would hear lamentings
from them how long he had stayed talking. Once or twice—hardly
oftener in all these years—I had to speak to him in sharp reprimand
for being such a prodigious long time gone; for the glass of beer and
the gossip where he delivered his cabbages did not always satisfy his
cravings for society and comfort: he would turn into a public-house
—"Dan Vickery's" for choice—and come back too late and too
talkative. It was a fault, if you like; but the wonder to me is, not that
he sometimes drank two glasses where one was enough, but that,
with his wit and delight in good company, he did not oftener fall
from grace. Those two or three occasions when he earned my sharp
reproofs, and for half a day afterwards lost his sense of comfort in
me as a friend, were probably times when his home had grown too
dreary, his outlook too hopeless, even for his fortitude. Some
readers, no doubt, will be offended by his taste for beer. I hope
there will be some to give him credit for the months and years in
which, with these few exceptions, he controlled the appetite.
Remember, he had no religious convictions, nor did the peasant
traditions by which he lived afford him much guidance. Alone, of his
own inborn instinct for being a decent man, he strove through all his
life, not to be rich, but to live upright and unashamed. Fumbling,
tiresome, garrulous, unprofitable, lean and grim and dirty in outward
appearance, the grey old life was full of fight for its idea of being a
man; full of fight and patience and stubborn resolve not to give in to
anything which it had learnt to regard as weakness. I remember
looking down, after I had upbraided a failure, at the old limbs
bending over the soil in such humility, and I could hardly bear the
thought that very likely they were tired and aching. This enfeebled
body—dead now and mouldering in the churchyard—was alive in
those days, and felt pain. Do but think of that, and then think of the
patient, resolute spirit in it, which almost never indulged its
weaknesses, but had its self-respect, its half-savage instincts toward
righteousness, its smothered tastes, its untold affections and its
tenderness. That was the old man, gaunt-limbed, but good-
tempered, partially blind and fumbling, but experienced, whom we
have to imagine now indomitably facing yet another year of his life,
and a prospect in which there is little for him to hope for. Nay, there
was much for him to dread, had he known. A separate chapter,
however, must be given to the severe trouble which, as already
hinted, overtook him in the early weeks of 1903.
 XIX
While the advance of time was affecting Bettesworth himself,
another influence had begun to play havoc with his environment. A
glance in retrospect at this nook of our parish during this same
winter of 1902-3 shows the advent of new circumstances, of a kind
full of menace to men like him. Things and persons of the twentieth
century had begun to invade our valley, where men and women so
far had lived as if the nineteenth were not half through.
The coming of the new influence was perhaps too subtle for
Bettesworth to be conscious of it. Perhaps he marked only the
normal crumbling away of the old-fashioned life, by death or
departure of his former associates, and failed to notice that these
were no longer being replaced, as they would have been in former
times, by others like them. Of our old friends close around us four or
five were by this time dead, and others had moved farther afield. We
missed especially old Mrs. Skinner. Since her husband's death in
1901 her domestic arrangements had not been happy, and in the
autumn just past she had disposed of her little property, and was
gone to live across the valley. But note the circumstances. Only
some ten years previously her husband had bought this property—
the cottage and nearly an acre of ground—for about £70. He may
have subsequently added £50 to its value. Now, however, his widow
was able to sell it for something like £220. The increase shows what
a significant change was overtaking us.
I shall revert to this presently. For the moment I stop to gather up
some stray sentences of Bettesworth's which, perhaps, indicate how
unlikely he was to accommodate himself to new circumstances.
The purchaser of Mrs. Skinner's cottage was a man named Kelway—
a curious, nondescript person, as to whose "derivings" we
speculated in vain. What had he been before he came here? No one
ever discovered that, but his behaviour was that of an artisan from
near London—a plasterer or a builder's carpenter—who had come
into a little money. I remember his telling me jauntily on one
occasion that he should not feel settled until he had brought home
his American organ (I was heartily glad that it never came!), and on
another that he had made "hundreds of wheelbarrows" in his time,
which I thought unlikely; and I cannot forget—for there are signs of
it to this day—how ruthlessly he destroyed the natural contours of
his garden with ill-devised "improvements." He pulled out the
interior partitions of the cottage, too, wearing while at the work the
correct garb of a plasterer; and it was in this costume that he
annoyed Bettesworth by his patronizing familiarity. "He says to me"
(thus Bettesworth), "'I suppose you don't know who I am in my dirty
dishabille?' 'No,' I says, 'and if I tells the truth, I don't care nuther.'
He's dirty dishabille!... He got too much old buck for me!" Shortly
afterwards he asked Bettesworth to direct him to a good plumber. "'I
can do everything else,' he says, 'but plumbing is a thing I never had
any knowledge of.' So I says, 'If I was you I should sleep with a
plumber two or three nights.'"

January 27, 1903.—Again, in the end of January, Bettesworth

reported: "That man down here ast me about peas—what sort we
gets, an' so on." (Remember that he had nearly an acre of ground.)
"So I told 'n, and he says, 'What do they run to for price?' 'Oh, about
a shillin' a quart,' I says; and that's what they do run to. 'I must
have half a pint,' he says. I bust out laughin' at 'n. An' he says he
must have a load o' manure, too! He must mind he don't overdo it! I
was obliged to laugh at 'n."
Of course, such a neighbour would in no circumstances have pleased
Bettesworth. I believe the man had many estimable qualities, but
they were dwarfed beside his own appreciation of them; and his
subsequent disappointments, which ultimately led to his withdrawal
from the neighbourhood, were not of the kind to engage
Bettesworth's sympathy. Indeed, he had no chance of approval in
that quarter, coming in the place of old Mrs. Skinner, with her
peasant lore and her pigs.
But if this egregious man was personally offensive to Bettesworth,
he was not intrinsically more strange to the old man than those who
followed him or than others who were settling in the parish. There
were to be no more Mrs. Skinners. Wherever one of the old country
sort of people dropped out from our midst, people of urban habits
took their place. These were of two classes: either wealthy people of
leisure, seeking residences, and bringing their own gardeners who
wanted homes, or else mechanics from the neighbouring town,
ready to pay high rents for the cottages whose value was so swiftly
rising. The stealthiness of the process blinded us, however, to what
was happening. When Bettesworth began, as he did now, to feel the
pressure of civilization pushing him out, neither he nor I understood
the situation.
Right and left, property was changing hands. A big house in the next
hollow, but with its grounds overpeering this, had been bought by a
wealthy resident, and was under repair, already let to some friends
of his. There went with it in the same estate the hill-side opposite
this garden, with two or three cottages visible from here; and
everybody rejoiced when the disreputable tenants of one of these
cottages had notice to quit. It was hoped that the new owner was
sensible of the duties as well as the rights attaching to property.
Meanwhile, Bettesworth's hovel, too, was in the market, the landlord
of it being lately dead; and in the market it remained, while
Bettesworth clamoured in vain for repairs. At last he gave up hope.
By the beginning of 1903 he had resolved to quit his old cottage as
soon as he could find another to go into.
He waited still some weeks, however—property was valuable,
cottages were eagerly sought after—and then what seemed a golden
opportunity arose. The cottage with the disreputable tenants has
been mentioned, adjoining the grounds of the big house. It must
have been early in February when the whisper that it was to be
vacant reached Bettesworth, who forthwith announced to me his
intention of applying for it. Too big, perhaps too good, for him and
his wife I may have thought the place; but there was no other in the
neighbourhood to be heard of, and it was not only for its
pleasantness that the old man coveted it. With his wife there he
would be able to keep watch over her while he was at work here,
and there would be almost an end to those anxieties about her fits,
which often made him half afraid to go home. I remember the
secrecy of his talk. He wanted no one to forestall him. The thing was
urgent; and I had no hesitation in writing a recommendation of him
as a desirable tenant, which he forthwith took to the owner. Why,
indeed, should I have hesitated? Between Bettesworth's
punctiliousness on such matters and my own intention of helping
him if need be, there was no fear as to the payment of the rent. And
the improvements he had made to that place down by the stream
argued well for the care he would take of this better cottage.
My recommendation did its work. Bettesworth was duly accepted as
tenant; he gave notice to leave the other place, and began
preparations for moving; and then, too late, it dawned upon me that
perhaps I had made a mistake. I had forgotten old Mrs. Bettesworth.
I had not set eyes on her for months; for much longer I had not
been inside her dwelling, to see the state it was in. I only knew that
outside the walls were whitewashed, the garden and paths orderly.
The first doubts visited me when I saw that repairs to the new
abode were being done on a scale too extravagant to fit the
Bettesworths. The next resulted from an inspection I made of the
cottage at Bettesworth's desire. He was beyond measure proud to
have a place into which he could invite me without shame; and he
took me all over it, and described to me his plans for improving the
garden, without suspicion of anything amiss. Probably his eyes were
too dim to see what I saw. Some of his furniture, already heaped on
the floor in one of the clean new-papered rooms, had a sooty,
cobwebby look that filled me with forebodings of trouble. However, it
was too late to withdraw. There was no going back to that
abandoned place down in the valley. There was nothing to do but
hope for the best.
Hope seemed justified for a week or two, while Bettesworth's new
garden, heretofore a wilderness, assumed a new order. He had
sowed early peas—probably other things too—having actually paid a
neighbour to help him get the ground dug; and he was extremely
happy, until a day came when he said, cautiously and bitterly, "I
thinks I got a enemy." He went on to explain that some one, he
suspected, wanted his cottage, and was trying to get him out of it. I
have forgotten what raised his suspicions. He did not even then
realize that himself, or rather his wife, was the only enemy he had to
fear.
That was the miserable truth, however. Down in that other place,
secluded from the neighbours, the old woman had grown utterly
squalid, though Bettesworth had not seen it. And now the owner of
the new cottage, perhaps from the grounds of the large residence
destined for his friends, had caught sight of old Lucy Bettesworth,
and had been, as anyone else would have been, horrified at her
filthy appearance. But he did not act on that single impression: it
was not until kindly means had been taken to ascertain the truth of
it that he first expostulated, and then told Bettesworth that he could
not be permitted to stay. Nay, I was allowed to try first if persuasion
of mine could remedy the evil.
Unfortunately, remedies were not in Bettesworth's power, or he
would by now have employed them, being alarmed as well as
indignant. He listened to my hints that his wife was intolerably dirty,
but (I write from memory) "What can I do, sir?" he said. "I knows
she en't like other women, with her bad hand and all." (She had
broken her wrist some years before, and never regained its
strength.) "But I can't afford to dress her like a lady. I told 'n so to
his head: 'I can't keep a dressed-up doll,' I says." Neither could he,
being so nearly blind, see that his wife was going about unwashed,
grimy, like a dreadful apparition of poverty from the Middle Ages. To
her it would have been useless to speak. Her epilepsy had impaired
her intellect, and any suggestion of reform, even from her own
husband, seemed to her a piece of persecution to be obstinately
resented.
So there was nothing to be done. The prospective tenants of the big
house near by could not be expected to endure such a neighbour;
the cottage itself, which had cost £20 for repairs, the owner told me,
was no place for such a tenant. The Bettesworths therefore must go.
They received formal notice to quit; then, as nothing appeared to be
happening, a more peremptory notice was sent limiting their time to
three weeks, yet promising a sovereign as compensation for the
work done and the crops planted in the garden. In the meantime
they had probably done more than a sovereign's worth of damage to
the cottage interior, with its new paper and paint.
But though nothing appeared to be happening, the two old people
were secretly in a state near to distraction. The reader will
remember the peculiar topography of this parish, with the tenements
dotted about for a mile or more on the northern slope of the valley.
All up and down this district, and then on the other side, where he
was less at home, Bettesworth hunted in vain for an available
cottage within possible reach of his work: there was not one to be
found. And now he realized his physical feebleness. Years ago, miles
would not have mattered; he could have shifted to another village
and defied the demands of our new-come town civilization; but now
a walk of a mile would be a consideration. His legs were too old and
stiff for a long walk as well as a day's work.
For several days—and days are money, especially to a working-man
—he searched up and down, his despair increasing, his dismay
deepening, at every fresh disappointment. I began to fear he would
break down. He could not sleep, nor yet could his wife. She had
been crying half the night—so he told me after the misery had
endured the best part of the week. "She kep' on, 'Whatever will
become of us, Fred? Wherever shall we go?'" and he, trying to
reassure her that they would "find somewhere to creep into,"
seemed to be face to face with the workhouse as his only prospect.
So they spent their night, and rose to a hopeless morning.
It was time, evidently, for me to take the matter up. Besides, the old
people's trouble was getting on my nerves. Across the valley there
was an empty cottage—one of a pair—which the owner had refused
to let on the strange plea that the tenants who had just left had
been so troublesome and destructive that he was resolved against
taking any others. Such a dry, whimsical old man was this landlord
that the story was not incredible. A retired bricklayer, and a widower,
he lived by himself on next to nothing, not from miserliness but from
choice, and his chief object in life seemed to be to avoid trouble. He
had, however, worked with Bettesworth in years gone by, and was,
in fact, a sort of chum of his, so that it seemed worth while to try
what persuasion would do to shake his resolution of keeping an
empty cottage. And where Bettesworth had failed, I might succeed.
So, one fine morning—it was near the middle of March by now—I
hunted up this old man—a man as genial and kindly as I wish to see
—and made him a proposal. He showed some reluctance to
entertain it. Why? The truth came out at last: he did not want the
Bettesworths for tenants; he knew the indescribable state of the old
woman; it was to her that he objected; and it was to spare his old
chum's feelings that he had invented that story about being
unwilling to let the cottage at all.
But the case was desperate. How I pleaded it I no longer remember,
nor is it of any importance. I think there were two interviews. In the
end the cottage was let, not direct to Bettesworth, but to me with
permission to sublet it to him; and two, or at most three days
afterwards, Bettesworth was in possession, and the other cottage
once more stood empty.
So the squalid episode was over. After such a narrow escape from
the workhouse, it was as it were with a gasp of relief that the old
couple settled down in their new abode, safe at last. The place,
though, was not one which Bettesworth would have chosen, had
there been a choice. Down there by the meadow where he had
come from, though the cottage might be crazy, the outlook had been
fair. He had been peacefully alone there; in summer evenings he had
heard the men mowing; on winter nights there was the wind in the
withies and the sound of the stream. But from this time onwards we
have to think of him as living in one of a mean group of tenements
which exhibit their stuccoed ugliness nakedly on a bleak slope above
the meadow. As to the neighbours—some of them resented his
coming, for of course the scandal of his wife's condition was public
property by now. With a certain defiant shame, therefore, he crept in
amongst them. Fortunately, the people in the next-door cottage—an
unmarried labourer and his mother—knew Bettesworth's record, and
regarded him as a veteran to be cared for; and not many weeks
passed before the old man felt himself established in their good-will,
and was trying to persuade himself that all was for the best.
Of course, he was only partially successful in that endeavour.
Occasional bitter remarks showed that he still harboured a
resentment against the owner of the cottage from which he had
been turned out, and, in fact, there were circumstances which would
have made it difficult for him quite to forget the affair. Perched on
one of the steepest of the bluffs, high above the stream, the cottage
in which he was not good enough to live stood beside the path he
now had to travel to and from his work every day. Often, as his legs
grew weary and his breath short with ascending the footpath, he
must have felt tempted to curse the place. Often it must have
seemed to taunt him with his unfitness. Even when he was at work,
there it was full in sight. In bad weather, and as he grew feebler, it
stood there on its uplifted brow, not sheltering the wife to whom he
wanted to go at dinner-time, but like an obstacle in his way. Instead
of being his home, it cut him off from his home; and he took to
bringing his dinner with him, wrapped in a handkerchief; poor cold
food which he frequently left untasted, preferring a pipe.
Yet it was not his nature to be embittered. When the peas he had
sown came up, though for another man's benefit, he looked across
at them from this garden and admired them. They were a fine crop
and remarkably early. If, however, they made him a little envious, he
was generous enough to be pleased too. Perhaps the sight
comforted him, proving that he would have done well there, at least
with the garden, if they had let him stay. And certainly he was
flattered when the new tenant, wholly grateful, asked him what sort
of peas these were. "Earliest of All," he replied, giving the name by
which he had really bought them. And by-and-by a joke arose out of
the answer, because the other man would not believe that the peas
were really so called, but thought Bettesworth was "kiddin' of 'n"
with a name invented by himself. The old man had many a chuckle
over this piece of incredulity. "I tells 'n right enough," he laughed;
"but he won't have it."
 XX
As may be imagined, the troubles through which Bettesworth had
thus come did nothing to rejuvenate him. On the contrary, they
openly convicted him of old age, and made it patent that he was no
longer very well able to take care of himself. In fact, the man's
instinctive pride in himself had been shaken, and though I do not
think he consciously slackened his efforts to do well, his
unconscious, spontaneous activity was certainly impaired. It was as
though the inner stimulus to his muscles was gone. He forgot to
move as fast as he was able. Sometimes he would, as it were, wake
up, and spur himself back into something like good labouring form;
but after a little time he would relapse, and go dreamily humming
about his work like a very old man. In these days, my own interest
in him reached its lowest ebb. I found myself burdened with a
dependent I could not in honour shake off; but there was little
pleasure to be had in thinking of Bettesworth. Only now and again,
when he dropped into reminiscence, did he seem worth attention;
only now and again, in my note-books of the period, does he re-
emerge, telling chiefly of things the present generations have
forgotten.
To the earliest notice of him for the year an irony attaches, since it
begins by recording with extreme satisfaction the first of those
summer rains which were to make 1903 so memorable and
disastrous. How little did we guess, on that June 10, what was in
store for us! My note describes, almost gloatingly, "one of those
gloomy summer evenings that we get with thundery rain. There is
scarcely any wind; grey cloud, well-nigh motionless, hangs over all
the sky; the distant hills are a stronger grey; the garden is all wet
greenness—deep beyond deep of sombre green, turning black under
the denser branches of the trees. Now and again rain shatters down
into the rich leafage—a solemn noise; and thrushes are vocal; but
these sounds do not disturb the impressive quietness."
So the entry proceeds, noting how stiff and strong the grass was
already looking after a threat of drought; how the hedgerows were
odorous with the pungent scent of nettles; how the lustrous opaque
white of horse-daisies starred certain grassy banks; and at last, how
all my neighbours who have gardens were as well pleased as myself
with the weather.
And so the note comes round to Bettesworth. He too, with his head
full of recollections of past summer rains, and of hopes of rich crops
to result from this present one, was glorying in the gloom of the day.
As the old wise toads crept out from hole and wall-cranny and
waddled solemn and moist-skinned across the lawn about their
affairs, so Bettesworth about his, not much regarding a wet coat. He
had theories as to hilling potatoes, or rather as to not hilling them
until the ground could be drawn round the haulm wet. And here was
his chance. In the afternoon he took it, joyfully, and the earth turned
up rich and dark under his beck.[2]
The tool set him talking. For hilling potatoes he reckoned, a beck is
much better than a hoe: "leaves such a nice crumb on the ground."
He was resolved to have his "five-grained spud" or garden fork
turned into a beck—the next time he went to the town, perhaps,
"'cause it wouldn't take 'em long, jest to turn the neck, and then
draw the rivets an' take the tree out an' put in a handle. 'T'd make a
good tool then—so sharp!
"This old beck I'm usin'," he went on happily, "I warrant he's a
hunderd year old. He belonged to my wife's gran'father afore I had
'n; and I've had 'n this thirty year or more.... He's a reg'lar hand-
made one—and a good tool still. That's who he belonged to—my old
gal's gran'father.
"He" (the grandfather) "had this place over here o' Warner's—'twas
him as built that, you know." The property mentioned is a large
cottage and garden, adjoining that from which Bettesworth and his
wife had so lately been turned out. "And he was the one as fust
planted Brook's Field. He had Nott's, down here, and Mavin's, and
Brook's Field—and a purty bit that was, too! He was the fust one as
planted it. Dessay he had a hunderd acres. Used to keep a little
team, and a waggon shed—up the lane here, an' come down this
lane an' right in there...."
But we need not follow Bettesworth into these topographical details.
Returning, in a moment, to the prosperity of his wife's grandfather,
he hinted at the basis of it. The man was a peasant-farmer,
producing for his own needs first, and enjoying certain valuable
rights of common.
"He used to keep two or three cows," said Bettesworth. "Well, moost
people used to keep a cow then, what was anybody at all. Ye see,
the commons was all open, and the boys what looked after the cows
used to git so much for every one; so the more (cows) they could git
the better their week's wages was for lookin' after 'em.
"They was some boys too, some of 'em—when there got two or
three of 'em up there in the Forest together, 'long o' the cows!" The
old man chuckled grimly. "I rec'lect one time me an' Sonny Mander
and his brother went after one o' the forest ponies. There was
hunderds o' ponies then. Deer, too. And as soon as we caught 'n, I
was up on his back. I didn't care after I got upon 'n. I clung on to
his mane—his mane was down to the ground—and off he went with
me, all down towards Rocknest and"—well, and more topography.
"He tore through everything, an' scratched my face, and I was afraid
to get off for fear he should gallop over me.... And they hollerin'
after 'n only made 'n worse. He run till he was beat, afore I got off.
"Purty tannin' I got, when I got 'ome! 'Cause me clothes was tore,
and me cap was gone.... Oh, I had beltinker! They had the news
afore I got 'ome, 'cause so many cowboys see me."
Smiling, Bettesworth resumed work with his ancient beck, by
dexterous twist now right and now left turning the dark wet earth in
to the potato haulm.

It was about this time that, our talk working round somehow to the
subject of donkeys, Bettesworth remarked, as if it were a part of the
natural history of those interesting animals, and indeed one of their
specific habits, "Moost donkeys goes after dirty clothes o' Monday
mornin's." I suppose that is true of the donkeys kept by the
numerous cottage laundresses in this parish.
From this he launched off into a long rambling narrative, which I did
not understand in all its details, of his "old mother-in-law's donkey,"
named Jane, whom he once drove down into Sussex for the
harvesting. "She drinked seven pints o' beer 'tween this an'
Chichester. Some policemen give her one pint when we drove down
into Singleton. There was three or four policemen outside the public
there," Goodwood races being on at the time; and these policemen
treated Jane, while Bettesworth went within to refresh himself. "That
an' some bread was all she wanted. I'd took a peck o' corn for her,
but she didn't sim to care about it; and I give a feller thruppence
what 'd got some clover-grass on a cart, but she only had about a
mouthful o' that." In short, Jane preferred bread and beer. "Jest
break a loaf o' bread in half an' put it in a bowl an' pour about a pint
o' beer over 't.... But she'd put her lips into a glass or a cup and
soop it out. Reg'lar coster's donkey, she was, and they'd learnt her.
Not much bigger 'n a good-sized dog—but trot!"
How she trotted, and won a wager, against another donkey on the
same road, was told so confusedly that I could not follow the tale.
In Sussex, Jane was the delight of the farmer's children. "'May I
have a ride on your donkey?' they'd say, twenty times a day. 'Yes,'
I'd say, 'if you can catch her.' And she'd let 'em go up to her, but as
soon as ever they got on her back they was off again. 'You give her
a bit o' bread,' I'd say; 'p'raps she'll let ye ride then.' And they used
to give her bread," but she would never suffer them to ride her.
People on the road admired the donkey—nay, the whole equipage.
"Comin' home, down Fernhurst Hill, I got up—'cause I rode down 'ills
—I walked all the rest—and says, 'Now, Jane, there's a pint o' beer
for ye at the bottom of the hill.' So we come down" to the inn there,
named by Bettesworth but forgotten by me, "and three or four
farmers there says, 'Here comes the man wi' the little donkey!' And I
called out for a pint, and she thought she was goin' to have it; but I
says, 'No, this is for me. You wait till you got your wind back.'"
We spoke afterwards of other donkeys, and particularly of one—a
lady's of the neighbourhood—which, as Bettesworth had been told,
was "groomed and put into the stable with a cloth over him, jest like
the other horses.... Law! if donkeys was looked after, they'd kill all
the ponies (by outworking them), but they don't get no chance."

The harvesting expeditions into Sussex, and the keeping of cows on

the common, were parts of an antique peasant economy now quite
obsolete. In August of this year a further glimpse of it was obtained,
in a conversation which, I grieve to say, I neglected to set down in
Bettesworth's own words.

August 21, 1903.—There was a time shortly after his marriage, and,
as I guess, between forty and fifty years ago, when he rented a
cottage and garden quite close to this house. The price of wheat
being then two shillings the gallon, he used to grow wheat in his
garden; and his average crop was at the rate of fourteen or fifteen
sacks to the acre, or nearly twice as much as local farmers now
succeed in growing.
In making this use of his garden he was by no means singular. Many
of his neighbours at that date grew their own corn; and it was Mrs.
Bettesworth's brother (a man still living, and now working a
threshing engine) who dibbed it for them. The dibber ("dessay he
got it now") was described by Bettesworth—a double implement,
made for dibbing two rows at a time. It had two "trees," like spade
handles, set side by side, each of which was socketed into an iron
bent forwards like a letter L. On the under-side of each iron, four
excrescences made four shallow holes in the ground, "about like a
egg"; and a rod connecting the two irons kept the double tool rigid.
Walking backwards, the man using this implement could press into
the ground two rows of egg-shaped holes at a time, as fast as the
women could follow with the seed. For it seems that two women
followed the dibber, carrying their seed-corn in basins and dropping
one or two grains into each hole. The ground was afterwards rolled
with a home-made wooden roller; and as soon as the corn came up
the hoe was kept going, the rows being about eight inches asunder,
until the crop was knee high.
Is it wrong to give so much space to these haphazard recollections?
They interrupt the narrative of Bettesworth's slow and weary decline
—that must be admitted. Yet, following as they do so close upon his
wretched experiences in contact with more modern life, they help to
explain why he and modernity were so much at odds. He had been a
labourer, a soldier, all sorts of things; but he had been first and last
by taste a peasant, with ideas and interests proper to another
England than that in which we are living now.
In course of time, but not yet, a good deal more was to be gleaned
from him about this former kind of country existence. I shall take it
as it comes, and, while Bettesworth is losing grip of life, let the
contrast between him dying and the modern world eagerly living
make its own effect. As now this detail, and now that, is added to
the mass, perhaps a little of the atmosphere may be restored in
which his mind still had its being, and through which he saw our
time, yet not as we see it.

Meanwhile, there is one reminiscence which stands by itself and

throws light on little or nothing, but is too queer to be omitted.
Having no place of its own, it is given here because it comes next in
my note-book.

October 24, 1903.—It was the weather that started our talk.
Bettesworth could not remember anything like this year 1903 for
rain. But there! he supposed we should get some fine weather again
"somewhen?"
Now, I had just been reading some history, and was able to answer
with some confidence, "Oh yes. There have been wet years before
this." And I mentioned the year after the Battle of Waterloo.
Then Bettesworth, "Let's see. Battle of Waterloo? That was in '47,
wa'n't it?"
I chanced to be able to give him the correct date, which he accepted
easily, as if he had known all the time. "Oh ah," he said. "But there
was something in eighteen hunderd and forty-seven—some great
affair or other?... I dunno what 'twas, though, now.... Forty-seven?
H'm!"
What could it have been? No, not the Mutiny. "That come after the
Crimea. 'Twa'n't that. But there was something, I know."
I could not imagine what it could have been; but Bettesworth still
pondered, and at last an idea struck him. "June, '47.... H'm!... Oh, I
knows. Old Waterloo Day, that's what 'twas! There used to be a lot
of 'em" (he was hurrying on, and I could only surmise that he meant
Waterloo veterans) "at Chatham. I see one of 'em there myself, what
had cut one of his hamstrings out o' cowardice, so's he shouldn't
have to go into the battle. So then they cut the other, too, an' kep' 'n
there" (at Chatham) "for a peep-show. He wa'n't never to be buried,
but put in a glass case when he died.
"He laid up there in his bed, and anybody as mind could go up an'
see 'n. They used to flog 'n every Waterloo Day—in the last years
'twas a bunch o' black ribbons he was flogged with. He had a
wooden ball tied to a bit o' string; and you go up, and ast 'n about
the 71st (?), and see what you'd git! 'Cause one of the soldiers o'
the 71st went up there once, an' called 'n all manner o' things. O'
course, when he'd throwed this ball he could always draw 'n back
again, 'cause o' the string.... And every mornin' he was ast what
he'd have to drink. They said he was worth a lot, and 't'd all go to a
sergeant-major's daughter when he died, what looked after 'n.
"He was worth a lot o' money. Lots used to go up to see 'n—I did,
and so did a many more, 'cause he was kep' there for show, and
everybody as went up he'd ast 'm for something. He'd git half a
crown, or ten shillin's, or a sovereign sometimes. But lots o' soldiers
used to go an' let 'n have it.
"Ye see, he couldn't git up. He cut his own hamstring for cowardice,
so's he shouldn't go into battle, and then they cut the other. 'Twas
the Dook o' Wellington, they says, ordered it to be done, for a
punishment. And, o' course, he never was able to walk again. That
done him. There he laid on the bed, with waddin' wrapped all round
to prevent sores. And in one part o' the room was the glass case
ready for when he died, for 'n to be embarmed an' kep'—'cause he
was never to be buried. Fifty year he laid there! I shouldn't much
like his bit, should you?"
 XXI
November 4, 1903.—One morning—it was the 4th of November—
Bettesworth said, "I got a invitation out to a grand dinner to-night,
down in the town. Veterans of the Crimea. But I shan't go. I'd
sooner be at home and have a bit o' supper an' get to bed early....
No; it don't cost ye nothin'—an' plenty of everything; spirits, good
food, a very good dinner. Still, you can't go to these sort o' things
without spendin' a shillin'. And then be about half the night. I don't
care about it. If I was to go, 't'd upset me to-morrer."
All this bewildered me. For one thing, it was plain that the fact of
Bettesworth's having been a soldier was no secret after all. As he
now went on to tell me, he had actually attended two previous
dinners. Who were they, then, who knew his record, and got him his
invitation? Who, indeed, was giving the dinner? Rumours of some
such annual celebration, it is true, had reached me; but it was no
public function. Even by name the promoters were unknown to me;
and yet somehow they had known for several years before I did that
my man had been a soldier in the Crimea.
At the moment, however, it was Bettesworth's refusal of the
invitation that most surprised me, although his alleged reasons were
very good. He so loved good cheer, and he had so few opportunities
of enjoying it—the Oddfellows' dinner was the only other chance he
ever had in any year—that I immediately suspected him of having
been swayed in this instance by something else besides prudence.
He sounded over-virtuous. And presently it struck me that there
might have been something offensive to him in the way the
invitation was given.
It had been received on the previous evening. He had just got round
to the public-house, "'long of old White," when "a feller come in,"
inquiring for him. Bettesworth did not know the man; it was
"somebody in a grey suit." "Stood me a glass of hot whisky-and-
water, he did, and old White too." And, referring to Bettesworth's
military service, "'What was ye?' he says. 'A man,' I says. He laughed
and says, 'What are ye drinkin'?' 'Only a glass o' cold fo'penny,' I
says." And Bettesworth seems to have said it in a very meek voice,
subtly insinuating that "the feller" might stand something better.
I inferred, further, that Bettesworth's conscience was now pricking
him for some incivility he had shown in declining the invitation. At
any rate, he made a lame attempt, not otherwise called for, to prove
that a self-respecting man would not humble himself to anyone upon
whom he was not dependent. He had evidently been the reverse of
humble; and possibly the invitation was patronizing, and raised his
ire.
"Or else," he concluded, "I be purty near the only veteran left about
here. There used to be Tom Willett and"—another whose name I
have forgotten—"in the town, but they be gone, and I dunno who
else there is. And I knows there's ne'er another in this parish.
Dessay they'll get a few kiddies from Aldershot. 'Cause there's any
amount o' drink...."
Well, Bettesworth did not go to the dinner, and I never quite
understood why. Possibly he really felt too old for dissipation, even
of a decorous kind: still more likely, he dreaded being at once under-
valued and patronized, among the "kiddies" from Aldershot. He
certainly did well to avoid their company. Long afterwards, when for
other reasons I was making inquiries about this dinner, I learnt that
the behaviour of some of the guests had been scandalous. Some
had been carried away, drunk. Others had taken with them, hidden
in their pockets, the means of getting drunk at home. So I was told;
but not by the promoters, who had shortly afterwards left the
neighbourhood.
On this same date (4th November, 1903) Bettesworth informed me
of another circumstance which affected him seriously. It was that he
had lately been superannuated from his club, which he had joined in
July, 1866. At that distant time, when he was still a young man, and
a strong one, how should he look forward to the year 1903? By what
then seemed a profitable arrangement, he paid his subscription on a
lower scale, on the understanding that he would receive no financial
help in time of sickness after he was sixty-five years old. He had now
passed that age. Henceforth, for a payment of threepence a month,
he was to have medical attendance free, and on his death the club
would pay for his funeral.
He was mighty philosophical over this. For my part, it was impossible
to look forward without apprehension to the position he would be in
during the approaching winter. A year previously he had shown
symptoms of bronchitis. But what was to become of him now, if he
should be ill, and have no "sick-pay" upon which to fall back?
 XXII
I think it must have been during the winter we have reached that
the village policeman stopped me in the road one night to talk about
old Mrs. Bettesworth. He told me, what I vaguely knew, that she
was increasingly ill. Once, if not oftener (I write from memory), he
had helped get her home out of the road, where she had fallen in a
fit; and a fear was upon him that she would come to some tragical
end. Then there would be an inquest; Bettesworth might be blamed
for omitting necessary precautions; at any rate, trouble and scandal
must ensue. The policeman proposed that it would be well if a
doctor could see the old woman occasionally, and suggested that
through my influence with Bettesworth it might be arranged.
Although I promised to see what could be done to carry out so
thoughtful a suggestion, and meant to keep my promise, as a matter
of fact no steps towards its performance were ever taken; and the
thing is mentioned here only as a piece of evidence as to the
conditions in which Bettesworth passed the winter. In the
background of his mind, there stood always the circumstances which
had inspired apprehension in the policeman. I never noted down his
dread, because it was too constant a thing; and for a like reason, he
seldom spoke of it; but there it always was, immovable. The
policeman's talk merely shows that the reasons for it were gathering
in force.
Save for one or two other equally vague memories, that winter is
lost, so far as Bettesworth is concerned. We had some cold though
not really severe weather—nothing so terrible as an odd calculation
of his would have made it out to be. "For," said he, "we be gettin' it!
The Vicar's gardener says there was six degrees o' frost this
mornin'.... And five yesterday; an' seven the mornin' before. That
makes eighteen degrees!" So he added up the thermometer
readings; and, associated with his words, there comes back to me a
winter afternoon in which the air had grown tense and still. Under
an apple-tree, where the ground, covered with thin snow, was too
hard frozen for a tool to penetrate, the emptyings of an ash-bin from
the kitchen lay in a little heap; and a dozen or so of starlings were
quarrelling over this refuse, flying up to spar at one another, and
uttering sharp querulous cries. A white fog hung in the trees. It was
real winter, and I laughed to myself, to think what a record
Bettesworth might make of it by the following morning.
Seeing that every winter now he was troubled with a cough, I may
as well give here some undated sentences I have preserved, in
which he described how he caught cold on one occasion. "If I'd ha'
put on my wrop as soon 's I left off work," he said, "I should ha' bin
aw-right. 'Stead o' that, I went scrawneckin' off 'ome jest's I was, an'
that's how I copt it." The word scrawnecking, whatever he meant by
it, conjures up a picture of him boring blindly ahead with skinny
throat uncovered. He took little care of himself; and considering how
ill-fed he went now that his wife was so helpless, it was small
wonder that he suffered from colds. They did not improve his
appetite. They spoilt many a night's rest for him, too. At such times,
the account he used to give of his coughing was imitative. "Cough
cough cough, all night long." A strong accent on the first and fourth
syllables, and a "dying fall" for the others, gives the cadence.
Beyond these memories nothing else is left of Bettesworth's
experiences during those three months—December, 1903, and
January and February, 1904. Coming to March, I might repeat some
interesting remarks of his upon an affair then agitating the village;
but after all they do not much concern his history, and there are
strong reasons for withholding them. And suppressing these, I find
no further account of him until the middle of May.
The interval, however, between the 3rd of March and the 16th of
May, was sadly eventful for Bettesworth. I cannot say much about it.
As once before when his circumstances grew too tragical, so on this
occasion a vague sense of decency forbade me to sit down and
record in cold blood his sufferings, perhaps for future publication.
What happened was briefly this: that some time in March one of the
colds which had distressed him all the winter settled upon his chest
and rapidly turned to bronchitis. If his wife's condition is taken into
account, the seriousness of the situation will be appreciated. At his
time of life bronchitis would have been bad enough, even with good
nursing; but poor old Lucy Bettesworth was far past devoting to her
husband any attention of that sort. Even in her best state she was
past it, and she was by no means at her best just now. She needed
care herself; had a heavy cold; was at times beyond question slightly
crazy; and, to aggravate the trouble, she was insulting even to the
two or three neighbours who might have conquered their reluctance
to enter the filthy cottage and help the old man. For perhaps a
week, therefore, he lay uncared for, and none realized how ill he
was. Only the next-door neighbour spoke of hearing him coughing
all night long.
The old woman received me downstairs when I went to make
inquiries. She sat with her hand at her chest, dishevelled and
unspeakably dirty. And she coughed; tried to attract my sympathy to
herself; assured me "I be as bad as he is"; looked indeed ill, and
half-witted. "You can go up and see 'n," she said. I stumbled up the
stairs and found Bettesworth in bed, with burning cheeks and eyes
feverishly bright. The bedding was disgusting; so were the remains
of a bloater left on the table beside him, so much as to give me a
feeling of nausea. As for nursing, he had had none. He had got out
of bed the previous night and found a packet of mustard, of which
he had shaken some into his hand, and rubbed that into his chest,
dry; and that was the only remedy that had been used for his
bronchitis, unless—yes, I think there was a bottle of medicine on the
mantelpiece; for he was still entitled to the services of the club
doctor, who had been sent for. But in such a case, what could a
doctor do?
The next day the old man was worse, at times wandering in his
mind. And, as there was no one else to take the initiative, and as he
looked like dying and involving us all in disgrace, I interviewed the
doctor and—but the story grows wearisome.
To finish, then: the workhouse infirmary was decided upon, as the
only place where Bettesworth could get the nursing without which
he would probably die. Fortunately, he received the proposal
reasonably; he was ready to go anywhere to get well, as he felt that
he never would at home. He merely stipulated that his wife must not
be left. A walk to find the relieving officer and get the necessary
orders from him was to me the only pleasant part of the episode. It
took me, on a brilliant spring evening, some three miles farther into
the country, where I saw the first primroses I had seen outside my
garden that year. It also enabled me to see how parish relief looks
from the side of the poor who have to ask for it, but that was not so
pleasant. However, the officer was civil enough; he gave me the
necessary orders; we made all the arrangements, and on the
following day the two old Bettesworths were driven off miserably in
a cab to the workhouse.
How fervently everybody hoped, then, that Bettesworth would leave
his wife behind, if he ever came out of the institution himself alive!
And yet, though it's true he was dependent on me for the
wherewithal to keep his home together, how much nobler was his
own behaviour than that we would have commended! Once in the
infirmary, he recovered quickly; and in ten days, to my amazement
(and annoyance at the time), word came that the old couple were
out again. They had toddled feebly home—a two-mile journey; they
two together, not to be separated; each of them the sole person in
the world left to the other. The old woman, people told me, was
amazingly clean. Her hair, which had been cut, proved white beyond
expectation; her face was almost comely now that it was washed.
Had I not seen her? What a pity it was, wasn't it, the old man
wouldn't leave her up there to be took care of, and after all the
trouble it had been, too, to get 'em there!
I believe it was on the day before Good Friday (1904) that they
returned home. When Bettesworth got to work again is more than
my memory tells me. I suppose, though, that I must have paid him
a visit first—probably during the following week; for I remember
hoping to see the old woman's white hair and clean face, and being
disappointed to find her as grimy as ever—her visage almost as
black as her hands, and her hair an ashy grey.
Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.

More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge

connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and

personal growth every day!

ebookbell.com