In a group of poor farmers, who would be “the foremost”? I suggest that he is the headman or patriarch of a kinship group. If this hypothesis is correct, then the group represents an extended family who have settled a particular area together. This pattern generally fits Mesoamerican society.
This spokesman spells out their problem. He and his fellows have, through their labor, made it possible for the elite to acquire their “costly apparel,” ringlets, and bracelets, yet they are excluded from these benefits. They do not even have a place to worship. They approach Alma for advice.
Significantly, this spokesman is asking a religious question, not a social or economic one about access to buildings or riches. They have relatively stable and contented lives as farmers. What they lack is not access to public office but access to recognized places of worship. They are not unhappy with their economic position but with their religious position.
It seems likely that the Zoramite religion was divided between communal and familial worship as in early Israel. William G. Dever describes numerous small, localized shrines that archaeologists have uncovered in Israel:
To judge from these small shrines and their cultic paraphernalia, what kinds of “holy places” were they? What rituals were being carried out there, and what sorts of religious beliefs are reflected?… First, I suggest that all the above are family shrines, serving either a single nuclear family, or, more likely, a larger extended family compound. These shrines were for private worship, in which there were no regular fixed services, no priestly supervision, no prescribed theology, no need to conform. Various members of the family probably stopped briefly at these convenient shrines daily, singly or in groups, on an ad hoc basis as they felt the need. And here women played a significant role.
He also notes:
Local shrines were accepted matter-of-factly in the settlement period and early in the monarchy. They became anathema only under the late Deuteronomistic reforms, when attempts were made to suppress them and to centralize all worship in Jerusalem. Such attempts were, however, not only doctrinaire but also largely unsuccessful. In the countryside, people worshipped as they always had, and they almost certainly did not regard their practices as “non-Yahwistic.” Theirs was simply an alternative approach, another way of expressing their beliefs and hopes.
The Zoramite poor were able to practice family rites—left virtually undescribed in the Book of Mormon—but they were denied access to the also-important communal rites. Even family worship, however, centered on the cultic shrine, the holy place. Religious observances were as much tied to location as to performance. Because of the social division, these poor farmers literally had “no place” for communal worship.