Fieldwork in the commune of Plaisance in 1937 anchors this account of how a sharply divided society holds together. Simpson counts an elite of under three percent, split by wealth, faction and clique rather than united, and he lists the occupations that make up a village elite and a middle class of tailors, bakers, teachers and non-commissioned officers too small to matter nationally. Standing rests on birth, education and bearing far more than on income; a prosperous peasant remains a peasant, and marriage almost never crosses the line. Peasant family incomes near two hundred dollars a year sit against elite incomes many times larger, and language, schooling, concubinage, religion and medical practice all track the same division. What keeps the mutual antagonism from breaking open, he argues, is inherited habits of deference, a division of labour in which peasants grow the heavily taxed coffee, and a shared Catholic worship that the two strata do not experience alike.