Prestige is the thing

He asserted that such struggles were always present in that society....The issue boils down to "the possession of wealth and its distribution and consumption to achieve or maintain high social status, prestige and social privilege.... [I]ndividuals and groups manipulated, whenever suitable and to their advantage, a variety of symbols, beliefs, images, and ideologies, some clearly traditional and others European in origin, to advance their interests"

On modernization in an African village (quote from anthropologist Maxwell Owusu's exerpted from [here])