ABSTRACT
V. I. Lenin has theorized the beginning of class differentiation and capitalist agriculture in prerevolutionary Russian villages. He speculated that its development would break the domination of the capitalist landowner of the Junker type. Land was thus and continues to be at once material and symbolic. Its economic value and cultural significance derives, first, from its status as both concrete product and the sentimental embodiment of an order of meaning and social relations; second, from its capacity to reproduce a social system; and, finally, from the manner in which it links production and distribution. A family's place in the social hierarchy has always been inscribed in choices in marriage partners and other maneuvers associated with "institutional rites" such as the choice of godparents and sponsors for other sacral occasions. These, like immigration and other economic gambits, are also an integral part of the system of strategies of reproduction.
