As in many other Southern European communities, land forms the basis of social differentiation in Fontelas. While the system of hierarchy within the hamlet involves a multiplicity of economic and social factors granting higher positions to some households and lower ones to others, the fundamental criterion of this differentiation in villagers' eyes is still the ownership of land. All households are directly engaged in agricultural or pastoral production to some extent – this is a thoroughly rural community in all senses of the term. Only 8 adults of the hamlet's total population of 187 derive regular incomes from non-agricultural occupations: these are the two shopkeepers, two schoolteachers, the priest, a stone-mason, a Border Guard (guarda-fiscal), and a Forest Guard (guarda-florestal). All of these specialists nevertheless also engage in some form of agriculture, however minimal. Despite this universal dependence on farming, neither direct ownership nor indirect access to land are in any way equally distributed within the hamlet. These ‘crude material differences in wealth’ (Davis 1977:81–9) are the subject of this chapter.

Although inequalities in the size and structure of landholdings form the core of a much broader field of ranked social groups, I do not wish to maintain that such inequalities constitute totally determinant forces. As Pierre Bourdieu has noted for the villages of Béam in South-west France: ‘An ‘important’ family was recognized not only by the extent of its landholdings but also by a whole set of signs, among them the external appearance of its house …’ (1976:123). It is this whole set of signs which forms the overall pattern of the social hierarchy within the peasantry in Fontelas.