The migrants, whose income is mainly in cash, wear suits, watches and fountain pens; their houses are often better stocked with rugs for the guest room, pressure lamps, gaudy cups and glasses, painted mirrors. Yet they count for much less in the village. In part this is because, however successful, they do not normally have an income comparable to that of the larger village landowners. But it is also because the village regards such wealth as transitory and uncertain, because craftsmen are often away from the village scene for long periods, and because they spend less freely on their neighbours' needs, not readily converting their personally earned cash into the more nebulous commodity of neighbourly obligation.
Plainly all incomes are highly variable. Not only does the crop yield vary with rainfall, but even the sown area varies with the sickness of people and animals, or misjudgements in the time of ploughing. The earnings of the migrant labourers are even more chancy. It would be quite impossible to draw up a list of village households in order of income.
Over longer periods, as I have explained (p. 34),the income of a household head depends largely on the manpower available; and the death of a household head results in considerable redistribution of resources. Striking changes in the ranking oder of the village therefore take place within one generation. One result of these changes is that the recent poverty of the rich, and the recent respectability of the poor, are remembered and affect people's prestige. Haci Ismet's (T) household, the richest in Sakaltutan, was neither the most powerful nor the best thought of; similarly Hayip's (B) one of the more pretentious households in Elbashï, had recently been poor and people thought the less of him for it. Two household heads with