FUNCTIONS OF WEALTH 



191 



(2) Fruit trees, a legitimate measure of wealth. 

 A special census of trees has to be made, yields 

 and prices, etc., calculated to determine their 

 value. Fruit is especially valuable because the 

 only labor required is in harvesting and marketing. 

 But when all the data are collected, one knows 

 that it will not upset the wealth scale as based 

 upon land because trees grow on delta land, and 

 the more trees owned the more delta land is apt 

 to be owned. So, knowing this, elaborate calcu- 

 lations are avoided. 



(3) Houses, utensils, furnishings, etc. These 

 diflfer with different households, but a study of a 

 sample of rich, medium, and poor (as measured 

 by wealth in land) shows that the variation is not 

 proportional to wealth. The same can be said 

 of clothing, etc. These items check the land 

 measure; they are too small to measure wealth, 

 and of course they are not wealth producing. 



(4) Nonagricultural occupations. There are 

 artisans and professionals (shamans, etc.) as well 

 as merchants in the community — all only part 

 time. A careful census must be made of all of 

 these, and a variety of information gathered to 

 determine how economically important such occu- 

 pations are. In a few cases they were sufficiently 

 important to require consideration in setting up a 

 wealth scale based on land alone. 



A more significant independent check is found 

 in the impressions of people. Informants who 

 have been tested for carefulness as well as knowl- 

 edge (preferably more than the two in number that 

 were used in Panajachel) are asked to rate every 

 household as to wealth on a scale from one to a 

 hundred. The impressions of informants turn out 

 to compare well enough, and well enough with the 

 ordering according to land controlled. The prob- 

 lem is then to examine the discrepancies to see 

 why the impressions might differ, or differ from 

 what appears to be objective wealth as measured 

 in land. For most flagrant differences between 

 informants' impressions and wealth as measured 

 there turn out to be explanations, and it is con- 

 cluded that the land-controlled measure is a reli- 

 able one to measure wealth differences. 



Using as an important basis of judgment the 

 value of land controlled, the 134 Panajacheleno 

 households could then be put in order of wealth 

 (Appendix 3). The "Foreign" households were 

 placed on the same scale, but in their case occu- 

 pation and other criteria were often more impor- 



tant than land in forming judgments. Then I 

 added to the original numbering of the houses, 

 which had been geographical, their wealth-order- 

 number, and began to bring other data to bear 

 on the following questions. 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WEALTH 

 DIFFERENCES 



In order to test correlations of wealth and 

 poverty, it seemed advisable to subdivide the 132 

 Panajacheleno households into wealth groups. 

 Since 132 is divisible by four, I divided the families 

 into quarters instead of the more usual thirds, the 

 top wealth quarter consisting of numbers 1-33, 

 the second quarter of 34-66, and so on. 



LOCALIZATION OF WEALTH 



When the house numbers become wealth-order 

 numbers as well (map 3), careful examination of 

 the economic positions of the various families as 

 spotted geographically shows that there is a 

 definable pattern of localization. The east part 

 of the delta may be divided into a wealthy and a 

 poor section. One can draw a line running from 

 the river below houses 95 and 125, west about 

 two-thirds of the way to the base of the hill, and 

 then irregulai'ly south so that houses 43, 56, 2, 11, 

 17, 51, and 37 are to the west of it, that will enclose 

 49 households of which 



15 are in the first wealth-quarter, 

 17 are in the second wealth-quarter, 

 12 are in the third wealth-quarter, and 

 5 are in the fourth wealth-quarter. 



Even if the north-south line were smoothed to 

 include houses 73 and 119 in the area, and exclude 

 house 2, the figures would still read 14, 17, 13, 

 and 6 in each of the four quarters of the wealth 

 scale, respectively, so that 31 of 50 families are in 

 the richer half. 



By contrast, in the remainder of the east side, 

 comprising the whole of the north and east areas, 

 of 29 households 



2 are in the first wealth-quarter, 



I is in the second wealth-quarter, 



II are in the third wealth-quarter, and 

 15 are in the fourth wealth-quarter. 



Or, with the line smoothed, the figures are 3, 1, 

 10, 14, respectively, with only 4 out of 28 famihes 

 in the richer half of the population! 



The west side of the delta does not present so 



