Introduction

This introductory chapter explains the evolution of current historical thinking about the ‘middle sort of people’. It charts a shift in historical definitions away from the application of prescriptive economic or social categories, towards those involving status terms with which contemporaries identified. The discussion acknowledges current emphasis on the formative power of culture and language in shaping social identity, but eschews linguistic determinism. Instead, it utilizes recent sociological theory to demonstrate how simultaneous processes of external ‘classification’ (division and naming) and internal ‘identification’ (identifying and grouping) operated to forge social identity in this period. The introduction emphasizes the importance of the civil parish in structuring and containing these formative processes, and suggests that ‘middling’ identity remained tied to and fragmented by parochial loyalties and social perspectives.

Aesthetics · Determinism · Epistemology · Formative assessment · Identification (biology) · Identity (music) · Linguistics · Pedagogy · Political science · Power (physics) · Social group · Social identity theory · Social science · Sociology · Structuring · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History, Culture, and Diplomacy · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy