This paper situates hill sheep farming within the context of the encompassing British state and the E.E.C. and thus within a cultural world dominated by a technological ontology. Through an analysis of co‐operative work activities, it is shown how the use of modern equipment for increased production inflects the class experience of farmers and shepherds as a hermeneutic relation between whole and part. This provides an understanding of the cultural processes—complementing the historical and economic factors— of class domination by locating it in the experiential linkage of farmers with the encompassing E.E.C. Accordingly, this paper develops an analytic perspective for class relations based on an encompassing‐encompassed model, derived from the work of Dumont.