Commercialization and Redistributive Feasts

While Buguias's environmental destruction replicates a sadly familiar pattern, its elaboration of communal feasting in conjunction with commercial gardening is unusual. Such rituals need not vanish as a community becomes tied to larger economic circuits; indeed, the most famous redistributive rite, the potlatch of northwest North America, flowered after trade links were established with European merchants (Belshaw 1965:28). Yet a long-standing scholarly tradition holds that such feasts, and communal ties in general, wither away once a society is incorporated into the world economy. Bodley (1975:167), for example, argues as follows:

Integration is not possible unless tribal cultures are made to surrender their autonomy and self reliance. When these are replaced by dependence on . . . the world market economy, a whole series of changes will follow until virtually all of the unique features of tribal cultures have been replaced by their contrasting counterparts in industrial civilization.

A pivotal agent of such change is usually said to be an emergent capitalist class, if not a generalized capitalist mentality, that resists ceremonial and other social outlays. As Grossman (1984:10–11) writes:

Villagers also want to free themselves from traditional social obligations that they believe hinder capital accumulation. Their individualistic behavior is manifested in a variety of realms: the extent of sharing, reciprocity, and cooperation in cash-earning activities is less than in traditional subsistence-oriented endeavors. . . .

And even when ceremonial exchange does persist under expanding market relations, "ritual inflation" (in which wealthy individuals devote ever-larger sums to display while the poor are disenfranchised) may undermine its stability, if not the entire social order (Grossman 1984:23; Volkman 1985:7; Hefner 1983:683). In a simi-

lar argument, James Scott (1976) links the spread of commercial relations with the downfall of a communitarian ethos in mainland Southeast Asia. In the precolonial states of this region, he argues, peasant politics were centered around a "subsistence ethic" that united each community within a "moral economy" and militated against risk-taking and profit-seeking behavior. With colonial rule, however, "the commercialization of the agrarian economy was steadily stripping away most of the traditional forms of social insurance" (Scott 1976:10).

During the heyday of modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s, most scholars applauded the market's ability to displace traditional cultural forms. Religion in general was thought to fetter development (see von der Mehden 1986:5), and many observers predicted that competitive economics would destroy communal institutions, leading eventually to "detribalization" (see de Souza and Porter 1974). Present-day writers tend to view cultural breakdown in the wake of commercialization as ethnocide rather than progress, but they have inherited the assumption of its inevitability. The two schools' analysis of the occasional survival of communal feasting bears this out. What constituted for modernization theorists an irrational stumbling block has become for scholars of the underdevelopment camp a bulwark against capital, the key to cultural persistence, and a core around which to organize political resistance.

Voss (1983) has recently extended the anticommercial version of this thesis to the Cordillera of northern Luzon. He argues that redistributive rites are declining in commercialized areas, but that their survival limits capitalist penetration elsewhere. Specifically, he holds that in Sagada "the maintenance of such non-commercialized relations as redistributive feasting . . . has been instrumental in limiting class differentiation" and in molding market economics into a socially benign form, whereas in the Buguias region, he claims, socially atomized and fully capitalistic producers have reduced their ceremonial expenditures to a minimum (1983:14–15, 225–230).

Voss is probably correct in regard to Sagada, the primary locus of his research, but I would argue that he misrepresents feasting in Buguias. In Buguias not only are public feasts much more common than in Sagada, but more importantly, they are strongly reinforced

by agricultural commercialization. Farmers who successfully accumulate must also feast their neighbors. This should not surprise us. It has long been acknowledged that "redistribution" is usually a misnomer for what happens in prestige feasts; as Wolf (1982:98) writes, "Feasting with the general participation of all can go hand in hand with the privileged accumulation of strategic goods by the elite." Yet conventional academic wisdom has not taken this point to heart. Commercialization does often leave cultural wreckage in its path, but as Buguias shows, such is not invariably the case (for examples other than Buguias, see Parker [1988] and Fisher [1986]).

In Buguias, public and private interests are tightly fused. The celebrants of the community's grandest feasts are its most successful entrepreneurs, individuals who invest in business expansion as well as in communal rites. And with few exceptions, those who have renounced, often on economic grounds, the old religion they call Paganism have been unable to translate their savings into prosperity. Pagan ideology expressly endorses commercial ventures, reserving its highest accolades for the "progressive" individuals who work hard, adopt new technologies, invest in productive enterprises, and lend money for gain—so long as they also honor their ancestors and feast their neighbors.