The village society is still a closed small-scale society but one with strong links and a growing intimacy with the more impersonal large-scale society of the nation and the cities. For example, the marketing of the main crop is conducted with officials, impersonally and impartially. On the other hand, other relations with town merchants, though they may also be purely economic, are usually more complex. A particular shopkeeper will be known to and trusted by men of a particular village or lineage. This established relation gives the villager more confidence, since the merchant has now something to lose by cheating. A man of this kind may act not only as a retailer but as a postal service, money-lender and general friend and adviser to his clients. The villagers, though often forced into relations with complete strangers, do not like such relations and constantly seek to turn the impersonal single-stranded tie into a multiple personal loyalty.
Membership of a relatively closed society affects economic behaviour in another and even more important way. For most villagers, what primarily concerns them is their place, not in the nation, but in their village. They are concerned with improving or at least maintaining their standing among the neighbours and kin where they were born and grew up. A few leave altogether, accepting a new scale of social importance in a new environment; and a larger minority live in two scales, an urban, migrant worker's world, and the village. But for most, the village is the only social arena that really matters. Hence economic activities are subordinate to this end. So long as the household can fulfil honourably enough its obligations and needs, that is, so long as it can marry off its children decently and house its married sons, then there is no pressing need to accumulate further wealth. Except for some of the very young men, people prefer to stay in the village if no urgent need drives them away. Hence the common phenomenon of the unreliability of migrant workers, and the oft-reported tendency