ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is to set out a sociological framework for investigating how the pre-land reform institutional arrangements of agricultural land tenure in Egypt have determined identifiable social classes among the rural population, constituting 68.6 per cent of the total population according to the results of 1947 population census. The main theme of the paper is that land tenure has been associated with a pattern of stratification based on characteristics that are defined and empirically verified by recent data on land holdings and estimates of farm income distribution by size of holdings. What is meant by institution and institutional arrangements is the sets of
working rules and regulations that govern the socio-economic activities in the daily lives of the rural population. These rules and regulations include property rights, status and power or command, formal and non-formal contracts, and law enforcement.1 These institutional features suggest diverse interests and uses in sociology, economics and political sciences. Although our approach in this paper is sociological, we recognize the multidisciplinary nature of institutional arrangements and their effects on the socio-economic and political structure of rural Egypt. Accordingly, certain variables will be used as criteria for stratification in an attempt to categorize identifiable classes among rural people. It is generally accepted among sociologists that social stratification refers to the relative ordering of members of a society among some hierarchical scale of values. The boundaries of class depend on the criteria selected for class placement which are adaptable to the conditions in rural Egypt.
Considerable difficulties are met in determining, ordering and delineating the boundaries of classes associated with the land-tenure institution. The difficulties arise because of the shortcomings in the social theory which cannot provide us with a single objective tool to measure the hierarchical values by which every individual can be uniquely placed in his class. Furthermore, the ‘methods’ so far proposed in theory for delineating classes in the community
have not been demonstrated rigorously to yield a unique solution to the problems of setting the boundaries between classes.2 Pfautz describes some of the methodological difficulties involved in stratification by saying, ‘It is crucial that distinctions be made between the task of delineating the class structure of a community and that of placing individuals within it, between the determinants of class status, and, finally between class structures and assignments which are a function of the individual’s self conception, the researcher’s analytic device, and the community’s judgement’.3 Moreover, the approaches to the study of class structure vary with the specific disciplinary interests of the different social scientists as ethnologists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists and political scientists who are engaged in class structure research. Consequently, there is a wide diversity of possible bases of stratification; many have been used and no one has been conclusively demonstrated as being superior for all purposes to others. In the following discussion, the classification of the suggested measures for
class delineation in rural Egypt are those employed by Pfautz in his systematic review of the literature on social stratification. After presenting the various definitions of the structural characteristics of status and class, especially the dichotomy of social and economic, he grouped the possible criteria under two categories, objective and subjective. Objective criteria are divided into external and internal. The former means simply that individuals are assigned to classes according to attributes selected primarily from the analyst’s point of view, which, in turn, involve single and multiple criteria. The latter employ the ranking device based on standards derived from the real life in the community, in which an individual is placed in the class to which the members of the community agree that he belongs.
