ON THE MORAL ECONOMY OF COUNTRY LIFE

The role that elite rural women play in the fields of community service and social networking ensures the creation and reproduction of cultural and symbolic capital. Their work, which contributes a necessary 'service' for the functioning of village life, also serves to enact women's positions in these fields. Through these strategies and distributions of capital one can see that the social world is mirrored in a homologous symbolic system which is organised according to a specific logic of differences specific to New Zealand rural communities. This paper focuses on how this moral economy of service structures a North Island hill country farming community.