This paper draws on data from a case study of a rural school located in an Amish community to offer a description of and then to theorize about the manifestation of egalitarianism in schools and communities. In particular, it explores two theoretical perspectives on egalitarianism, one primarily cultural in focus and the other primarily structural. The culturalist explanation would locate egalitarianism at the nexus of a community's values and norms of practice. Hofstede (2001), for example, contrasts individualist and collectivist cultures as well as cultures with greater and lesser tendencies to ascribe power differentials to different individuals and groups. In contrast, a structural view would focus on the way economic structures influence social relations, thereby creating practices embedding greater and lesser degrees of equality. In a sense, then, one explanation assumes that ideology broadly informs social and economic relations, whereas the other assumes that economic relations broadly inform social dynamics and the ideologies arising from them.