Lagging Emulation in Post‐Peasant Society1

Abstract

THIS paper has two purposes: one is to suggest that a particular process of social and cultural change occurs commonly enough and has important enough consequences to be worthy of being identified and given a distinctive name; and the second is to illustrate, using contemporary Greek data, the possible value of the concept for studies of change in rural populations emerging from the status of peasantry. I call this concept lagging emulation. The emulation in question is the process whereby social groups of lower prestige, upon the acquisition of new wealth or other forms of opportunity, imitate and often successfully acquire what they conceive to be the behavior of those with greater prestige; the emulation lags in that the behavior imitated is that which reached its acme as a prestige symbol for the higher social group at an earlier period in its history, and is now obsolescent. Lagging emulation occurs, then, under conditions in which the groups which constitute the traditional elites or which are otherwise considered worthy of emulation are themselves acquiring new ways at the same time that the traditionally less advantaged groups are enabled to alter their previous patterns of life. The concept and its phrasing are of course influenced both by the ideas of Thorstein Veblen and also by Charles Erasmus' recent extension of some of them for his discussion of the acceptance or rejection of change in underdeveloped countries (Erasmus 1961:13 and passim). The concept of lagging emulation is based on the assumptions that the desire for prestige, or social status, or achievement is a basic motive in all cultures and societies; that to some extent this motive enters into the conscious awareness of the participants in a society-it becomes a felt need, in Erasmus' terms (Erasmus 1961: 12-13, 309); and that a frequently occurring means for satisfying the need is to emulate the behavior of those strata of society to which prestige is already firmly attached (cf. Foster 1962: 147-150). Examples of the phenomenon, without a special term for it to be sure, have appeared in the literature, and some of these may clarify the idea. Many writers on caste in India have noted that as village lower castes develop some wealth or power, they assume some of the obsolescent customs of higher castes. The lower caste may imitatively start to increaSe the authority of the father and husband and to tighten the restrictions on wives at just about the time that higher castes are beginning, as a means of increasing their prestige in a newly developing international community, to loosen the traditional authority and restrictions (Cohn 1955:67-68). Srinivas, in his discussions of religiously inspired traits in India, characterizes as an ... interesting contradiction of modern Hindu social life [the fact] that while Brahmins are becoming more and