3
The Batak as They Are Today

Even today, the Batak can be characterized as hunter-gatherers. They still hunt and gather, and unlike those numerous farming folk who hunt and gather to supplement their agricultural activities, the Batak can do it on an exclusive basis for weeks or even months at a time. But the Batak today could just as well be characterized as shifting cultivators who also hunt and gather or as traders of forest products and wage laborers who also happen to forage and farm. We must set aside the legacy of a now-distant past and recognize that today it is difficult to give priority to any one activity in characterizing contemporary Batak subsistence economy. One hundred years of change have left the Batak with a genuinely multidimensional subsistence adaptation, each component of which is interwined with (and in part constrained by) the others.

I would not claim that the Batak's present subsistence adaptation represents an end or steady state; further change is certain. I do not believe, however, that the Batak are traveling an evolutionary trajectory from full-time hunting and gathering to full-time agriculture. Such assumptions are common with respect to Philippine Negrito groups and are apparent in the title of Warren's (1964) monograph on the Batak (“A Culture in Transition”) and Rai's (1982) disser-

tation on the Agta (“From Forest to Field”). My opinion is that the “forager to farmer” assumption is naive, for it fails to recognize either the possible antiquity of part-time Negrito farming (chap. 2) or the possibility of other outcomes besides full-time farming for Negrito groups undergoing subsistence change. A tendency to see Philippine Negritos as being “in transition,” or at least as being more in transition than other kinds of people, is probably more an artifact of anthropological reliance on “pure” models (pure hunter-gatherers, pure agriculturalists) than reflective of any actual tendency for mixed adaptations to be likelier to change over time than pure ones.

This chapter begins with an examination of the evolution of Batak subsistence economy during the last one hundred years. I show how, as new subsistence activities were added or old ones grew in importance after 1880, the complexity of settlement pattern increased rapidly. To develop the rhythm of contemporary economic life, I explore how the kinds and frequency of mobility between various residential locations over the course of a year reflects the characteristic scheduling of the principal Batak subsistence activities. I also relate the evolution of Batak settlement pattern and subsistence activities to wider patterns of sociopolitical change affecting this part of Palawan after 1880.

I do not break new ground in emphasizing the opportunistic, multidimensional nature of contemporary Batak subsistence economy; similar interpretations have been offered by Endicott (1974:32–36) for the Semang and by Griffin (1981:32) for the Agta. But I do depart from what I see as a common but simplistic assumption that a people's subsistence multidimensionality is prima facie evidence of their “adaptability” or “flexibility.” While the Batak engage in a variety of subsistence pursuits, they do not perform any of them very well.

In the second part of the chapter, I support this seemingly ethnocentric assertion by examining separately and in turn Batak hunting-gathering, agriculture, and trade/labor relationships with lowlanders, as these activities are practiced

today. I use data on time allocation and returns to labor to argue that Batak pursuit of each activity is at a comparatively low level of efficiency and remuneration. My wider point is that we have every reason to expect less than optimal economic performance from the Batak. Depopulation and deculturation (taken up in later chapters), together with ecological displacement and partial sedentarization, have helped make Batak subsistence decisions–and even Batak settlement pattern itself–uniquely responsive to the insistent pressures of an outside economic system rather than to the needs and interests of the Batak themselves. While one can argue that the Batak are somehow making the best of a bad situation, it is essential to recognize that the situation is such that the Batak's economic performance may not be adequate to the exigencies of physical and cultural survival.

A Settlement Pattern Approach to Batak Subsistence Economy

It has been shown (chap. 2) that shifting cultivation, trade in forest products, and perhaps even wage labor for lowlanders were all part of Batak subsistence economy by the end of the nineteenth century. But the importance of these activities was sufficiently peripheral that it seemed reasonable to believe that the Batak then still lived as hunters and gatherers, in lean-tos at temporary forest camps inhabited by small numbers of closely related families. As the present economy evolved, however, Batak settlement pattern changed accordingly, with consequent rearrangement of spatial and social relationships among the Batak themselves and between the Batak and lowlanders.

The Evolution of Batak Settlement Pattern, 1880–1980

Two major changes in Batak settlement pattern occurred after contact with lowland peoples and social systems inten-

sified. The first, dating to the closing decades of the nineteenth century, was the emergence of a pattern of seasonal residence in upland rice fields. The second, dating to the early decades of the twentieth century, was the emergence of a pattern of seasonal residence in lowland-style “settlements.” Each change fundamentally reoriented Batak economic affairs and social relationships toward greater participation in lowland Philippine society, even as each change reflected, in part, incremental land alienation and other threats to Batak resources by Filipino settlers.

Only after the arrival of lowland settlers in Palawan, it is said, did Batak involvement with agriculture intensify to the extent that they actually lived in their fields. Before this time, particularly when root crops still dominated Batak agriculture, fields were visited periodically but were not occupied for any extended period. When the Batak first began to live in their agricultural fields, it is said, all the households in the same swidden cluster lived together in the same large dwelling. As many as fifteen households could share a dwelling, which consisted of a large central room surrounded by a series of small apartmentlike rooms. In these smaller rooms, individual households had their own hearths and lived with their infant children; in the central room, older children slept together and were fed jointly by the adult residents. Similar dwellings are found today among some of the remoter groups of Palawano. Only the oldest Batak still remember such dwellings, which soon gave way to smaller swidden field houses more like those of the Batak's Cuyonon and Tagbanua neighbors. In this fashion, a pattern of seasonal residence in agricultural fields was established. During the off-season, however, the Batak presumably continued to live much as they had before, in temporary forest camps.

This settlement pattern had undergone further change by the 1920s. Under a variety of local auspices, lowland settlers and officials began to encourage the Batak to establish permanent settlements. In about 1910, for example, the governor of Palawan asked the Batak inhabiting the Tanabag River region to make way for lowland colonization there by es-

tablishing a settlement of their own on the coastal plain at nearby Sumurod (Warren 1964:30–33). In 1930, five of the “rancherias” thus established were declared by the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes to be reserved for the Batak's exclusive use. Figure 3 shows the historical locations of these five reservations and their relationships with present-day lowland communities and Batak settlements. Despite government encouragement, the Batak never occupied their reservations full-time, although they did build houses and plant some tree crops on them, which was consistent with the government's intent in setting aside the land for their use.

Actually, the government's purpose in establishing the reservations is unclear. The “civilizing” of tribal populations was, of course, everywhere a motive in the American-administered Philippines. One entailment of reservation life still unhappily recalled by the oldest Batak was the official dictum that cooking fires should be outside the house or at least in a separate room, as among lowlanders, rather than inside, adjacent to sleeping areas, as was customary among the Batak. For people unable to afford blankets and long accustomed to keeping warm by the heat of a fire, this bit of “civilization” was a definite hardship. More practically, settling the Batak on the coastal plain would facilitate the provision of education and medical services.

Securing at least some aboriginal Batak territory against encroachment by lowland settlers was also a motive for establishing the reservations. But lands ostensibly set aside were of uncertain legal status and, in any case, would have been inadequate for Batak subsistence under all but the most intensive agricultural regimes. During the 1930s, as many as forty to fifty Batak households were associated with some reservations, but reservation areas were only on the order of 8 to 40 hectares. In these circumstances, foraging trips to the interior remained essential, and a Batak's reservation house became a sort of base for operations during the off-season, much as his field house had already become such a base during the agricultural season.

Figure 3

In any event, lowland colonization proved overwhelming. Table 3 shows the striking population growth that occurred between 1900 and 1980 in Palawan Province. Most of this growth took place on Palawan Island, where the number of inhabitants has increased twenty-five-fold since the turn of the century. Particularly apparent is the large surge in immigration to Palawan Island following World War II. This resulted in the establishment of a string of settler villages along the island's coastal plain (see, e.g., Eder 1982). As these villages were established and the coastal plain filled up in aboriginal Batak territory, other changes inevitably followed. Copal, honey, and rattan concessions were granted to politically influential lowlanders, and collection and exchange of these commodities by the Batak grew in economic importance. Everywhere wage labor grew in importance also, as lowland farmers employed Batak to help clear and plant their homesteads. No road entered Batak territory until after World War II; for years, the highway leading north from Puerto Princesa stopped at the Babuyan River (see fig. 3). But in 1956, the Babuyan River bridge was constructed, and the road was extended to Tarabanan. In 1970, the road was extended to Binduyan and soon after, to Langogan. By 1975, the highway was open all the way to Roxas.

Even before the highway came, however, the Batak reservations were overrun by settlers. In some cases, Batak were actively intimidated into leaving their land by aggressive Filipinos. Elsewhere, there appears to have been considerable truth to the claim of early settlers that the Batak simply “left,” not wanting, it is said, to mingle with outsiders. Indeed, some lowlanders even paid particular Batak for improvements they had made on reservation land before vacating it. A number of Batak at the Lipsu and Calacuasan settlements can still point to downstream stands of coconuts that they “sold” to lowlanders. The reservation at Mapned (fig. 3) was abandoned by Batak before World War II; the other four were abandoned soon after. During the 1950s, the government acknowledged political reality and revoked

all the reservation decrees, enabling those lowland settlers then occupying the land to file homestead applications. More recent, but similarly unsuccessful, government efforts to reserve land for the Batak are discussed in chapter 6.

However ineffectual the reservations ultimately proved in terms of their intended purpose, their creation and dissolution exerted a lasting influence on Batak settlement pattern. Batak evidently found settlement living congenial, for even before their official reservations had been fully overrun by lowlanders, the Batak had begun to live part-time in more isolated reservationlike settlements of their own. Each local group has, on several occasions, relocated its settlement site farther up its respective river valley, moving just ahead of advancing lowland populations. Thus, the Batak did not embark on a wholesale retreat to the interior after the arrival of lowlanders. Instead, in a stepwise series of movements of only a few kilometers each, they have maintained some degree of isolation while keeping a convenient spatial relationship with both forest resources and the lowlanders.

Figure 4 illustrates the settlement site history of five contemporary Batak local groups, dating the series of movements that occurred as each group moved toward the interior following the postwar abandonment of the three reservations involved. This history is somewhat simplified, for there were some years when certain local groups failed to aggregate in any permanent settlement at all but simply alternated between forest and swidden field residence, as in years past. Also, no account is taken of the complete disruption of Batak settlement pattern caused by the abortive 1969 PANAMIN resettlement attempt (chap. 6). But the overall pattern of Batak retreating to smaller and more fragmented interior settlements is clear.

It is difficult to identify formally the geographic boundaries of Batak territory today. In some senses, it remains the same as their aboriginal territory (described in chap. 2 and shown in fig. 2). The Batak still reside within this territory and retain an extensive knowledge of its features and re-

Figure 4

sources. Two important differences with the past arise, however, because now outsiders also reside in this territory. First, the coastal plain—and, increasingly, portions of foothill and upriver areas—is extensively occupied by lowland Filipinos. Batak now rarely visit these areas. Second, while most of the traditional Batak territory still seems to be open to them, there is a pervasive insecurity about their tenurial status. Legally, the Batak are “indigenous inhabitants” on public forest land not yet officially released for settlement by the Bureau of Forest Development. If this land is released, the Batak face an unequal competition with lowland settlers for private ownership. Batak land has been alienated in the past, and, with considerable justification, they fear that more will be alienated in the future. The most likely outcome over the near term is a continuation of the pattern of the past several decades: each local group is periodically pushed still farther into the interior, losing existing dwellings and agricultural improvements.

The Rhythm of Contemporary Economic Life

To disclose the nature of contemporary Batak economy, it is useful to continue to focus on Batak settlement pattern but with a shift in that focus from long-term evolutionary changes in patterns of residence and mobility to short-term cyclical changes. Foraging trips upriver, visits downstream to lowland patrons and employers, and an annual dispersal to swidden fields are still regular elements of Batak subsistence economy despite the advent of settlement living. These activities take individual Batak households away from their settlements for days or weeks at a time.

Figure 5 shows the residential locations associated with these subsistence activities as well as the intersite distances, population sizes, and durations of occupation for these locations, which are based on observations I made at the Langogan settlement during 1980–81. The settlement site of the Langogan Batak has been fixed in its current location since

Figure 5

1963. The site and its immediate environs consist of scrubby regrowth and a few tree crops, the legacy of nearby swiddening in years past, but the settlement is otherwise surrounded by primary forest. It is a 12-kilometer walk downriver to the coast. By 1981, when more than one hundred lowland families lived along the first 10 kilometers of the river, one encountered isolated lowland homesteads soon after leaving the settlement in the downstream direction. A number of the settler families living more upriver periodically employ Batak to make swiddens, clear undergrowth from trees, pick coffee berries, and so forth. When such work opportunities are more than a few kilometers walk from the settlement, Batak work groups typically travel to them the day before they are scheduled to work and camp in lean-tos along the river, on or near the homestead where work is available. These are the lowland camps shown in figure 5. They may be occupied for up to seven days, or until work opportunities in the area are exhausted. Usually, entire households travel together to such camps. If only the men hire out, the women may fish or gather, much as they would at camps in the forest.

On the upstream side of the Langogan settlement, it is about 24 kilometers, following the main river course, to the river's headwaters, from which point one could descend to the west coast of the island. Since many tributaries flow into the main river, each with headwaters of its own, the Batak have access to extensive forest and riverine resources. Despite the presence of the settler families at the downstream end, the Batak still consider the entire river basin to be their territory. This basin encompasses an area of approximately 240 square kilometers. In any given year, the Batak forage in only a fraction of this territory, occupying the forest camps shown in figure 5. These camps, called daes by the Batak, are also occupied for up to seven days, before the households involved return to their swiddens or the settlement.

Figure 5 identifies two other kinds of more specialized camps: “settlement camps” appear during the height of the dry season, particularly in April, when warm nights and

mosquitoes drive the Batak out of their settlement houses and into cooler, open sleeping areas at the river's edge or short distances inside the forest; “swidden camps” appear during the same period and provide a temporary residence during the slash-and-burn phase of the swidden cycle, until swidden field houses are constructed in May. Altogether, the sixteen Batak households at Langogan probably occupied between them about sixty to seventy different named camps, of all kinds, during 1981. The swiddens were distributed in three clusters. Two clusters were about 3 kilometers apart; the third was about 6 kilometers from the other two. The degree to which the members of any particular local group coalesce or disperse in their swidden-making activities in any one year is highly variable, depending on ecology and on personal preference.

Table 4 shows the percentage of time the sixteen households at Langogan allocated to these various residential locations during 1981, classified by month. The table is constructed from data obtained from nine seven-day periods, during which times I recorded the whereabouts each night of every individual in the group. Data for May, November, and January are estimated. Because these are composite data, they do not tell us how any particular household spent its time during 1981. Thus, a few households spent a lot of time in the settlement, others rarely visited it, and so forth. Nevertheless, much of the rhythm of Batak subsistence life is visible. During the six months from May to October, from rice planting to rice harvesting, the swidden field house is the primary residential location. During the leisurely, postharvest months of November, December, and January, the settlement is the focus of activity. During February, March, and April, the Batak are primarily on the move between encampments of various kinds. Overall, table 4 shows that the Batak spend about 60 percent of their time in settlement or swidden houses and about 40 percent in encampments.

Not immediately apparent in figure 5 or table 4 are some important seasonalities in abundance and scarcity, in labor

and leisure, and in sociality and isolation entailed by the annual Batak subsistence round. A closer look at this annual round helps to reveal these seasonalities as well as the market incentives, social pressures, and scheduling concerns that influence Batak economic behavior.

Let us begin in early February, with the start of a new agricultural season. The December to April dry season that characterizes this part of Palawan is well established, and households that were living in the settlement since the conclusion of the previous agricultural season now gradually drift away to begin work in their new rice fields. From now until swiddens are burned in April, solitary families or groups of families that have chosen to work together reside primarily in swidden camps or langsan, clusters of temporary hillside dwellings near the sites of their future rice fields. Depending on how a particular local group has dispersed for purposes of swidden making, what looked like only one group in January may seem to be several quite independent groups in March. Batak sharing a common langsan (and later, a common swidden cluster) generally have more economic and social interaction with one another for the duration of the agricultural season than they do with Batak in other swidden clusters.

While slashing, felling, and burning orient Batak economic life during langsan residence, these agricultural chores must be coordinated with the labor demands of lowland farmers wanting to employ Batak in their swiddens. Many Batak exhaust their own previous season's rice harvest as early as December, and by January they begin to obtain advances of rice from lowland farmers against the promise of providing such labor when it is needed. Thus, the labor demands of lowland farmers often cannot be ignored. Further, langsan locations are selected with agriculture, not hunting and gathering, in mind. Nearby forest food resources may be limited or soon exhausted, and langsan camp members generally come to alternate periods of langsan residence with foraging trips to the interior to look for food at daes. Wild yams may

be dug at such camps, which would limit the need to purchase or borrow rice in the lowlands. Therefore, while a Batak's home base is at a langsan during February and March, there is considerable residential mobility back and forth between langsan, daes, and lowland work locations.

Sometime in March, when the dry season is at its peak, swidden fields are burned. Some Batak may then return to their settlements to await the arrival of the rainy season. Most can be found in forest camps, enjoying a brief respite from agricultural labor and the heat of the dry season. April brings the rains and rice planting time. First, however, field houses are constructed; here the Batak will primarily reside until the harvest is threshed and stored in late October. April also brings the start of the honey season, and until the first rice is ready for harvest in mid-August, collection and sale of honey will compete with management of maturing rice fields for Batak attention. The pattern of field residence during this period thus is punctuated with forays into the forest to search for honey.

Rice planting begins in late April and continues well into May. Staggered planting along with varietal differences in maturation time extend the Batak harvest over several months. Swiddens are weeded in June. July is dominated by the urgency of the food search. The price of honey falls as the season progresses, and Batak begin to experience difficulty obtaining loans of rice from settlers, many of whom suffer a famine season as well. While women remain behind at field houses, making the baskets, sacks, and mats needed for the upcoming harvest, men frequent the lowlands attempting to remedio begas, “get some rice”. Their attempts are often unsuccessful, and all Batak suffer from hunger at this time of year.

All of this ends abruptly in mid-August with the tarakabot, the ritual first harvest of the earliest maturing varieties of rice. Soon after, the real harvest is in full swing, and until the end of October, Batak eschew further collection of honey and most foraging trips of any kind, remaining in their rice

fields to harvest, thresh, and store the grain. Particularly in September, there are weeks at a time when all Batak are at work harvesting in somebody's rice field—probably the only time of the year they so systematically pursue a single economic activity for such a lengthy period.

Finally, November, December, and January constitute an interlude between the agricultural season just completed and the new season yet to begin. November brings the last heavy rains of the year, and with the watershed unable to absorb additional runoff, rivers are often swollen and impassable. By late October, therefore, most Batak intend to have threshed and secured their rice and to have returned from their fields to their settlements. Here, residentially aggregated until February, the Batak come closest to “sedentary” living, and here, too, they engage in what lowlanders consider some of their most stereotypical behaviors. Newly harvested rice disappears at an alarming rate as, in the lowlander view, the Batak consume excessive quantities themselves and too readily exchange more for dried fish and alcoholic beverages. Extended visits to relatives in other local groups, drinking to excess, and relaxation appear to be the order of the day, confirming the lowlander opinion that the Batak are a people with “no thought of the future.”

There is work to be done, of course. Settlement houses, long unoccupied, are in disrepair, and Batak divide their working time between constructing or repairing houses and earning money. For if the Batak now have adequate rice, they have little else. Their preoccupation with obtaining adequate carbohydrate supplies during the famine season left them without time or resources to obtain other foods, clothing, or drink, and they are now anxious to obtain and enjoy these items as well. The Langogan and Caramay River valleys are suitable for coffee, and at this time of the year, Batak men and women there pick coffee berries on lowland farms. Elsewhere, Batak men earn needed cash by collecting rattan or copal. Nevertheless, the emphasis during this period is on sociability and relaxation—in effect, the Batak's version of the postharvest life-style of their agricultural neighbors.

I have estimated the proportional contribution that hunting and gathering, agriculture, trade, and wage labor made to the total annual subsistence and cash income of Langogan Batak during 1981 (see table 5). The Batak obtained approximately half of their food supply from foraging and farming and purchased the other half with the proceeds of wage labor and the collection and sale of commercially valuable forest products. Variation in local patterns of economic opportunity leads to considerable group-to-group variation in the proportional importance of these various activities. During 1980, for example, farming alone contributed 60 percent of the Tanabag Batak food supply, with foraging and wage labor contributing far less there than at Langogan (Cadeliña 1982:245).

Jack-of-All-Trades, Master of None?

With some overlap, then, each of the Batak's different residential locations provides the base for a characteristic economic activity: hunting and gathering at forest camps, rice cultivation at swidden field houses, and trade and wage

labor near settlement houses. Examination of the actual patterns of time utilization and returns to labor associated with these economic activities, as pursued at their characteristic residential locations, provides further insight into the nature and causes of contemporary Batak economic difficulties. I studied time allocation using a sort of “all-day follow” of the precise subsistence, domestic, and leisure activities pursued by a group of Batak residing at a forest foraging camp or a swidden field house. At the core of this procedure lay a series of coded observations, made at 15-minute intervals for a 24-to 72-hour period, of what each group member was doing at the instant of observation. I employed a series of forty-four basic codes divided into six basic activity categories: subsistence (e.g., hunting, wage labor), domestic (e.g., firewood collection, food processing), tool manufacture and maintenance (e.g., basket weaving, bolo sharpening), leisure (e.g., visiting, sleeping), illness, and child care. Many of my basic codes were further subdivided. Thus, the subsistence code “horticulture” was further divided into codes for planting, weeding, harvesting, and so on.

This procedure, modified from Johnson (1975), was designed to obtain a large amount of information about Batak time allocation patterns during relatively short and purposively chosen study periods at typical work settings. In each work setting, I limited my study to those adult individuals I could normally scan within my field of view, that is, those individuals with whom I was actually living and with whom I thus shared a common lack of privacy. Even then, observation was not complete. At forest camps, for example, where the proximity and openness of leaf shelters normally revealed all but sexual activities, some subsistence activities, such as pig hunting or honey collecting, took individuals outside my field of view for various lengths of time. In such cases, I had to rely on others' statements about where an individual had gone or what he or she was doing; insofar as it was possible, I cross-checked the information when the individual returned. Observations were also problematic because the

Batak may pursue two activities (e.g., conversation and coffee drinking) at once. This was particularly true of child care, which so often occurred in conjunction with other activities that I was more interested in studying (or was shared among several adults simultaneously) that I rarely coded it as a primary activity, and I ultimately completely eliminated child care time from my tabulations.

I recorded observations for all 24 hours of a day (rather than for only daytime hours) since Batak may rise during the night and eat, work, or converse by moonlight or firelight. In tabulating and interpreting the data, I assumed that whatever an individual was observed to be doing at the instant of observation was what he or she had been doing for the previous 15 minutes, and sufficient numbers of observations were assumed to even out sampling errors within study periods. I chose the particular study periods purposively; the time-consuming nature of the procedure and the complexity of Batak subsistence economy made meaningful random sampling impossible.

Hunting and Gathering

At least to the Western eye, the temporarily inhabited foraging camps (described in chap. 2) still found on streams or riverbanks in isolated parts of the forest are the most endearing, or at least the most authentic-looking, aspect of contemporary Batak economic life. Leaf shelters are still the most common form of forest dwelling, although at the height of the dry season, the Batak may dispense with these and sleep along the water in an area cleared of stones and debris. While any nearby resources are fair game for those camped together, such encampments often have a characteristic focus—to stun fish, dig wild yams, collect honey, or gather palm leaves for basket making. Thus, forest destinations are usually selected in advance, in accordance with seasonal subsistence needs and current Batak knowledge about resource availability and distribution.

I visited numerous forest encampments during my year at Langogan, staying for periods ranging from minutes to days. Inevitably, each camp was different, but I found living conditions at them to be uniformly delightful. Heat, mosquitoes, and social tensions can make Batak settlements oppressive, and in the cool, quiet, and beauty of the forest, the Batak seemed to realize a measure of happiness and relaxation that I never knew them to attain in other settings.

Table 6 presents pooled time allocation data for three forest camps. Men and women devoted an average of 4.8 hours per day to “subsistence”—in my coding, activities such as fishing, honey collecting, jigging for eels, and looking for turtles which generally took a Batak away from camp (travel times are therefore included). Men and women devoted an additional 3.6 hours per day to such domestic activities as processing food, cooking and eating, bathing, and collecting firewood. Finally, they devoted one hour per day to manufacturing or repairing various weapons and implements. While these conclusions are based on a total of only seven days of observations, I visited and observed informally numerous other forest camps in the course of my fieldwork, and life at the three camps described here appears to be fairly representative of camp life in general. In any event—and depending, of course, on one's notions about what constitutes “work”—the Batak appear to keep busy while at their forest camps.

It is tempting to assume that Batak forest camps provide some sort of window to the past, a window to a preNeolithic lifeway. That the settings are so pristine and camp life so primitive contributes to an aura of authenticity. Indeed, only a few superfluous manufactured goods hauled to camp—a radio, a gun, or some purchased clothing—may seem to separate the observer from a once-universal way of life. This last leap of faith is readily abetted by the Batak themselves, who often assured me that “this is how we used to live all the time.” But this window to the past is, if not opaque, considerably more refractory than it might ap-

pear. There are substantial differences between the hunting-gathering life observable at contemporary forest camps and the hunting-gathering way of life the Batak apparently enjoyed as recently as one hundred years ago (see chap. 2).

Occupation periods at a given location are considerably shorter today than in the past, being a matter of days rather than weeks (up to three or four weeks, in the memories of older informants). The reason for this is that the Batak have many other important demands in their lives besides hunting and gathering. In particular, individuals must reconcile the demands of foraging with the demands of shifting cultivation and the market economy. A Batak is only in camp a few days before he remembers the fresh batteries he ordered from a lowland settler, the chickens he left behind at his settlement house, or his unguarded swidden. Even more pressing may be the need to deliver some newly found wild honey to an impatient creditor or to locate lowland buyers for some highly marketable (but perishable) wild pig meat. Not only are contemporary forest encampments of limited duration but Batak (with occasional exceptions) leave them to return to their settlements or swidden houses rather than to establish other forest camps.

Similarly, encampments are now much smaller. Today, only 2 to 7 households typically camp together at a particular location. In the past, even as recently as the 1930s, up to 30 or 40 households would camp together. This change has occurred, in part, because of secular demographic processes (i.e., population decline, local group retreat to the interior). Encampments were larger in the past, however, not simply because there were more Batak but because entire local groups often camped together. Indeed, on occasion, two local groups might occupy a single encampment. Today, the two largest local groups still total 24 and 16 households, respectively, but never in recent memory have the members of either one all encamped as a group. Underlying the shift to smaller encampments are some of the same scheduling considerations affecting camp duration. Just as contemporary en-

campments are of relatively short duration, because those camped together have other subsistence activities that require attention, relatively few people camp together, because the scheduling considerations in question are somewhat different for each Batak household; for example, each household's swidden field is in a different location, the timing of each household's agricultural cycle is somewhat different, and each household has a different set of ties and obligations to lowlanders. Not everyone, in effect, can “get away to the forest” at the same time.

The Batak today also utilize a narrower range of forest plant and animal resources. Tables 1 and 2 enumerated the animal and plant resources said to have been utilized traditionally. The number of these resources actually consumed during 1980–81 is considerably less. Indeed, at all residential locations where I observed or obtained reports of diet patterns during my stay (see chap. 5), the Batak only consumed 3 of the 14 mammals, 1 of the 8 tubers, 2 of the 7 rattans, less than one-half of the greens, and only a few of the fruits listed. This apparent narrowing of the Batak diet may be spurious. It may be, for example, that some of these resources have always been uncommon or even rare and were simply not encountered by Langogan Batak during 1980–81. Some, too, while edible, have never been preferred foods; the tuber carindang causes diarrhea, and the otter and wild cats have oily or gamy flesh. If the Batak eschewed such foods during 1980–81, they may have eschewed them in earlier years as well.

At the same time, however, it is likely that wild resource utilization has in fact narrowed, for two reasons. First, wild resources, which are seasonally available, may no longer be utilized if their seasons of availability coincide with a period when hunting and gathering has become of little importance to the Batak. The tuber abagan, for example, once a major carbohydrate source during September, October, and November, is now virtually ignored at Langogan because its period of greatest availability coincides with the rice harvest

(Flannery 1968). Second, and probably more important, a variety of latter-day cultural circumstances and values influence Batak decisions concerning wild resource utilization. The Batak are acutely aware that continued use of many forest foods helps to mark them as “primitives” in the eyes of lowland Filipinos (although a few such foods, like wild pig, honey, and mushrooms, are highly valued by lowlanders). At the same time, the Batak now routinely obtain a variety of lowland foods—coffee, sugar, baked goods—and it is reasonable to assume that access to them has altered Batak preferences for some traditional foods (e.g., wild fruits).

Another difference between present and past forest camps concerns the organization of labor. The traditional group foraging activities (chap. 2) are now difficult or impossible to organize as the necessary numbers of people can rarely be mobilized. I never witnessed, for example, a group pig hunt, although Cadeliña (1982:262) reports that he witnessed three such hunts at Tanabag during 1980, said to be the first to have occurred there in ten years. Similarly, group fish stunning, once practiced on entire rivers when fifty or more individuals could be mobilized at once, is today limited to smaller groups and tributary streams.

There have also been subtle changes in the sexual division of labor. During the swidden-harvest months of August, September, and October, for example, any forest camps tend to be occupied by men only; women stay behind in the rice fields to harvest. Over the entire year, largely because of such divisions of labor among different economic activities, husbands and wives reside separately almost 10 percent of the time—a phenomenon with no apparent aboriginal counterpart.

A case can also be made that today the Batak work longer hours—that is, they devote a greater proportion of their time to productive activities—at forest camps than did the Batak in the past. First, at least some of the foraging effort of men is directed today at the market as well as at subsistence; all households would like to return from a forest camp to the

settlement not only with the night's meal but also with some honey or pig meat to sell. Second, some of the work activities of women at contemporary camps involve weaving such agriculture-related articles as harvesting baskets and rice-drying mats (classified under “tool manufacture and maintenance” in table 6). (By the same token, of course, there may have been certain work activities traditional to the hunting-gathering economy which are no longer pursued at camps today.)

A final and intriguing question is whether, in the face of all these changes, the “returns to labor” for hunting and gathering have increased or decreased in comparison to one hundred years ago. At first glance, it seems that such returns (whether measured in calories or protein) ought to be higher today: fewer people forage at a given location, and they do not stay as long. And yet, the returns may well be lower. The shorter duration of camp occupation makes round-trip travel more costly (i.e., the energetic costs of getting there and back from the settlement must be amortized over several days rather than several weeks). It may be, of course, that the Batak do not locate their camps as far away from the settlement and from one another as they once did, but any energetic advantage here is most likely offset by lower returns as a result of resource depletion in frequently visited areas.

Certainly, in the immediate vicinity of settlements, foraging returns can be very low indeed. Table 7 shows that the per-hour protein returns to selected foraging activities are considerably lower in the vicinity of the Langogan settlement—where much foraging in fact occurs—than are the returns to the same activities at remoter locations. The likelihood that a particular foraging attempt will fail completely is also greater near settlements. I observed numerous efforts to snare eels during my stay at Langogan; most efforts at forest camps were successful, whereas most efforts near the settlement were not. The same was true of efforts to stun fish. The situation was even worse at other settlements. At Lipsu, for example, it was said that there were no univalves

worth collecting left in the river and that the only time eels could be obtained was following a storm, when some might be washed downstream. Declining returns to traditional hunting-gathering activities are both a cause and an effect of subsistence change, for even as the new economic regime encourages settlement living and hence local resource depletion (below), such depletion itself encourages the Batak to seek new ways of making a living.

Moreover, regardless of location, the energetic costs of travel to and from forest camps are high because the Batak bring along more baggage than they used to: pots and pans, flashlights, radios, and even radiophonographs are among the items Batak take to camp today. The relatively small number of individuals foraging in the vicinity of contemporary forest camps may in fact be too small for optimal resource exploitation. The more men who are off hunting pigs, for example, the more likely it is that at least one will encounter and kill a pig large enough, perhaps, to feed the entire camp. At contemporary camps, however, only a few adult men are available to hunt pigs. Furthermore, that certain kinds of group foraging strategies are now no longer practiced may well have influenced overall labor productivity—although we cannot say in what direction in the absence of data on the productivity of these now-abandoned strategies.

Finally, the narrowed diet at Batak camps is not necessarily indicative of greater energetic efficiency in foraging. Cultural factors, themselves sensitive to outside influences, help to determine diet choice and thus foraging strategies. The large amount of time that Batak men continue to devote to wild pig hunting, for example, may have less to do with any relative abundance of pigs or any Batak success in obtaining them than with the fact that pig meat is a very tasty and marketable food. Such behavior, furthermore, could conceivably be abetted by the circumstance that the Batak can afford to be less risk aversive in their foraging activities than they may have needed to be in the past, given that a Batak today

can draw on lowland traders and his own agricultural stores for part of his food supply. In the absence of data on encounter rates and search and pursuit times for the animals listed in table 1, we can only speculate on these points.

Trade, Clientage, and Wage Labor.

That the Batak today are more likely to return to their settlements from a forest camp than to move on to another such camp is a measure, as we have seen, of the fact that some of the wild pig or honey obtained in the forest is often intended for delivery to the lowlands to pay a debt or exchange for some needed goods. More than at other Batak residential locations, the settlement is a locus for interaction with lowlanders who have dealings with them. Here, many time and resource allocation decisions are made and scheduling conflicts in the demands of foraging, agriculture, trade, and wage labor are resolved.

We have already seen how trade and wage labor fit generally with the wider rhythm of the annual economic round and in what proportions these activities contribute to total income (table 5). Table 8 presents the actual incomes received during 1981 by a sample of Langogan Batak households from their four major cash income sources: sale of coffee berry shares, sale of honey, sale of rice, and wage labor. I have valued all market-derived income for these households in money terms, although only some of this income was actually received in cash; most of the rest was characteristically received as rice, the Batak's single greatest market want. Other trade goods, such as radios, also figure in Batak income accounting, as when an individual agrees to provide a certain amount of honey or to work a certain number of days in the lowlands in exchange for the desired item. Moreover, considerable income of all kinds is received in advance, on credit, against honey, rice, or labor days to be provided later.

Even by the standards of the rural Philippines, the amounts

of income shown are small; the Batak are perennially short of cash. This shortage arises not because their market wants are excessive but because their opportunities to earn cash are relatively few, seasonal, and unremunerative. This places the Batak at an immediate disadvantage in their rice- and cash-earning efforts: (1) like poor people everywhere, the Batak have virtually no withholding power and are thus the victims of a certain amount of exploitation in their economic dealings with outsiders; (2) some important hidden costs in Batak income-earning activities keep hourly or daily returns to labor even lower than they would appear to be in any simple

input-output calculus, even as the opportunity costs of pursuing these activities limit Batak ability to develop a more independent (and potentially more remunerative) subsistence stance; and (3) the sedentarization necessitated by successful maintenance of trade and labor relations has contributed to resource depletion in the vicinity of Batak settlements, depressing foraging returns for many everyday subsistence foods.

My emphasis on the costs to the Batak of their economic interdependence with their lowland neighbors stands in marked contrast to the interpretation offered by Peterson (1978), another observer of a similar case of Negrito-lowlander economic interdependence involving the Agta of northeastern Luzon and their sedentary agricultural neighbors, the Palanan. She places food exchanges between these two populations in an analytical framework that emphasizes the mutually beneficial nature of that exchange as well as its interdependent nature. In particular, exchanges of Agta non-domestic protein foods (wild pig, deer) for Palanan domestic carbohydrate foods (corn, yams, manioc) allow each population to, in effect, specialize in what it does best. The Agta find it relatively easy to produce a surfeit of protein foods but suffer chronic shortfalls in carbohydrate foods because they plant few crops and, apparently, obtain little in the way of wild starchy foods (ibid.:339). Palanan farmers, in contrast, produce an abundance of carbohydrate foods but either do not or cannot raise enough livestock to supply their animal protein needs (ibid.:338–339). Because it is energetically efficient and therefore makes “good sense” for the parties involved to match their complementary shortfalls and surfeits, the Agta-Palanan exchange relationship is portrayed as voluntary and based on a simple cost-benefit calculus by each party rather than on coercion or any obsessive Agta preference for agricultural foodstuffs (ibid.:337). ^[1]

Peterson is ambiguous about the extent to which she is generalizing, but it is at least implicit that her analysis might apply as well to other cases of Negrito-lowlander exchange in the Philippines. My opinion is that a more realistic view

of such exchange—and certainly of Batak-lowlander exchange—is achieved if we realize that a range of exchanges characteristically occur between the members of these populations, not just exchanges of wild meat for domestic carbohydrates, and that there is a basic asymmetry in all such exchanges which is obscured by any analytical emphasis on voluntarism or complementarity. The asymmetry arises because Negrito populations are usually small, isolated, and unsophisticated, while the lowland populations they trade with carry behind them all the “structural weight” of the legal apparatus and superior cultural capital of lowland Filipino society.

While I may overstate the situation somewhat, I do so to raise the question of whether the exchanges in the case at hand might routinely occur to the advantage of lowlanders and to the disadvantage of the Batak. Exploitation is a thorny issue, and I do not want to imply that the present reduced socioeconomic circumstances of the Batak necessarily arose because they have been exploited—although many observers have commented on the poor economic treatment Philippine Negritos generally have received from outsiders. Indeed, Rai (1982), another observer of the Agta, has aptly described this treatment in the course of specifically addressing and refuting Peterson's (1976:329) claim that Agta/non-Agta exchange is symmetrical and, if anything, biased in favor of the Agta:

I suggest that the symbiosis is biased in favor of the outsiders. This bias arises because the external dependence of the Agta today is crucial to their economic survival. If the neighboring agricultural populations were called upon to make minor adjustments in their animal protein acquisition (and their seasonal labor requirement), they could maintain an independent economic system without their trade relation with the Agta. The Agta, on the other hand, have become virtually dependent on the outside system. Given their shift away from the traditional mode of life, the Agta cannot remain economically self-sufficient…. It is thus an impera-

tive for the Agta to maintain the trade or other economic relationship with outsiders even at the cost of their own economic exploitation and subordination…. The economic exploitation of the Agta by outsiders takes many forms. In Agta trade of forest items to outsiders, the latter control the market…. For example, … three to nine wild pigs (approximate value 600 to 2,000 pesos) must be paid for one secondhand transistor radio (approximate value 200 pesos)…. Most Agta are unfamiliar with the units of exchange and get further cheated. In wage labor, Agta are often paid less than their agricultural counterparts. Whereas an Agta is hired for only thirty pesos for four days of portering, an outside plowman summoned to work in the Agta field may demand as much as half of the production of the field. (Pp. 191–192)

Similar observations may be made about exchange between lowland traders and the Batak. These traders do provide a number of vital services to the Batak: they make available rice and other desired goods, extend credit, and accept payment in a variety of forms (in honey, rice, or labor days). But the cost of these services is high. For example, as their own previous season's rice runs out and as the new agricultural season gets under way, most Batak periodically obtain advances of milled rice from lowland creditors which are to be paid back threefold at harvest time. Thus, in February 1981, a Batak obtained four gantas of polished rice from a trader, agreeing to eventually pay him one cavan of unhusked rice (equivalent to twelve gantas of milled rice). As late as August, another Batak obtained one cavan of milled rice, to be paid for with six cavans of unhusked rice. (The trader bears the cost of milling in these transactions.)

Once the new harvest has begun, some of the new rice not already promised to lowlanders is exchanged for food and other goods. The Batak fare badly in such exchanges. In 1981, a measure of unhusked rice worth 10 pesos in the lowlands could purchase a measure of sugar worth 3 pesos, a measure of rice worth 15 pesos could purchase some dried fish or a bottle of gin worth 4 pesos, and so on. (The trader

bears the cost of transport.) Having done without for so long, the Batak find such “purchases” difficult to resist, and the knowledge that the goods are overpriced does not seem to bother them. “So what if the goods are expensive, as long as we can buy them” was a commonly expressed sentiment. A similar attitude underlies a Batak's willingness to contract with a lowlander to complete a certain project—for example, clearing and burning a half-hectare upland rice field—in return for a highly desired consumer durable, such as a radio or kerosene pressure lantern. In such cases, the Batak are not oblivious to whether the value of the item preferred is appropriate to the amount of labor required to complete the project in question. But they also realize that a way has been found to obtain a desired good they would otherwise probably be unable to obtain at all. (The Mbuti Pygmy similarly rationalize their participation in commercial meat trading, despite the exploitative tactics of traders; see Hart 1978:345. Like Philippine Negritos, African Pygmies in general are far more dependent on their settled, agricultural neighbors than the latter peoples are on them; see Bailey and Peacock n.d.)

There is a sense in which the issue of “exploitation” should not be overemphasized. For example, it can be argued that if an item bought for 15 pesos from a Negrito forager brings 50 pesos someplace else, that is merely characteristic of a capitalist society such as the Philippines. Further, that Negritos are often exploited does not itself necessarily undermine Peterson's (1978) analysis. But what has more serious consequences for the Batak is the fact that the exchanges they engage in with outsiders entail a variety of hidden costs and opportunity costs that simply make them less remunerative and less “efficient” than they appear at first glance. For analyses that only compare production times for the goods to be exchanged (e.g., search, pursuit, and kill times for wild game; in-field agricultural labor costs) ignore a variety of ancillary activities and scheduling considerations necessary to the maintenance of exchange relationships.

A striking aspect of Batak behavior is the pervasive in-

fluence that exchange relationships—and concern about maintaining those relationships—have on all aspects of Batak economic life. Thus, Batak take time out from whatever they are doing to talk with or entertain their trading partners whenever they visit a Batak settlement. Scheduling of other Batak subsistence activities is often subordinated to meeting the needs and demands of traders, who are also, not incidentally, often creditors. I often heard a Batak say that he was unable to forage for food because he had “too much work to do,” that is, work to be done for a lowlander. Travel alone is a significant element in the successful maintenance of trade and labor relationships. Batak frequently travel to the lowlands to deliver goods previously promised, to collect payment for goods previously delivered, to obtain an advance against goods yet to be delivered, to inquire about future work or exchange possibilities, and so on. Such travel may take from several hours to a full day, since Batak, once in the lowlands, are often dilatory about returning. While the actual “returns” to particular episodes of travel may be difficult to identify, such travel is “all part of a day's work,” and any accounting of the comparative cost-effectiveness of meeting subsistence needs through exchange relationships must take account of it.

Indeed, after some episodes of travel, the Batak had nothing to show—the lowlander was not at home, or he had not yet been to town, or he had forgotten to buy the radio batteries as he had previously promised. A considerable amount of Batak time is thus spent simply finding out about trade and labor matters. In May, a Batak neighbor of mine spent most of a day traveling round trip to the lowland community of Langogan to borrow rice. A settler, he said, had previously promised him such a loan against a future payment of wild honey. He returned empty-handed, however, because the settler was unwilling to loan rice after all. In July, another Batak carried three gallons of honey to his lowlander trading partner to exchange for rice, as previously agreed. But the trader's order of rice had not yet arrived from

town, and the Batak returned empty-handed to the settlement after a laborious eight-hour trip. An additional, six-hour trip was necessary two days later to collect the rice. In March, a Batak husband and wife left the settlement on a Sunday at 4:30 P.M ., bound for a lowland farm that was a distance of about one and one-half hours' walk where they had been promised a day of work on Monday. But it turned out that the farmer did not want to employ them until Tuesday, so the couple stayed there for another day, engaging in some minor subsistence pursuits. They did work on Tuesday but were too tired, they said, to return immediately to the settlement. They remained there to rest Wednesday morning and finally returned home Wednesday noon. Thus, they completed their day's work in the lowlands but tied up almost three days in the process.

The opportunity costs associated with trade relationships are particularly visible in July, just before the harvest, when Batak efforts to secure loans of rice intensify as larger and larger amounts of time become necessary to locate smaller and smaller quantities of borrowable rice. This effort often comes at the expense of forest foraging or such vital agricultural chores as guarding maturing rice fields against the depredations of monkeys and wild pigs. In August, a Batak went to a lowland patron's house and secured one ganta of unhusked rice against his promise to deliver a load of split bamboo several weeks hence. After pounding, the rice thus obtained was scarcely sufficient for two meals for this man and his wife. Meanwhile, the loan had taken a full half-day just to arrange, and the promised work, which would effectively occupy a whole day, was yet to be done.

Travel and opportunity costs aside, there are intrinsic energetic inefficiencies in some of the exchanges that Batak work out with lowlanders. In some areas, Batak are accustomed to collecting and selling Manila copal and using the proceeds to purchase milled rice. At least during some months of the year, such Batak would obtain about 50 percent more food calories per hour of work expended if they

instead simply dug and processed the most common species of wild yam (see Eder 1978). Similarly, as the honey season progresses and the amount of trade rice and a gallon of honey can command falls, a Batak exchanging honey for rice gets back fewer food calories than he parts with. (To be sure, the Batak wish to eat rice in lieu of wild yams or honey, which is an issue I return to in chap. 6.)

Finally, Batak involvement with exchange and labor relationships with outsiders has been a major cause of the depletion in local food resources (discussed above). Batak desire to obtain lowland foods and other goods and thus to have access to the lowland traders who can provide these goods leads them to locate their settlements within reasonable walking distance of lowland communities. Not surprisingly, such traditionally important riverine foods as fish and mollusks are badly depleted in the vicinity of Batak settlements (see table 7), and such important game as wild pig, jungle fowl, and gliding squirrels can scarcely be found there. Batak speak nostalgically about the relative abundance of fish and game in the interior, away from their fields and settlements, but their involvement with exchange relationships prevents them from foraging in the remoter parts of their territory to the extent they otherwise might. Because food purchases or added foraging effort during periods of settlement residence do not compensate for the reduced availability of forest and riverine foods, diet is visibly poorer at such times than at interior forest camps (see chap. 5).

Agriculture

Batak affinities with the forest may be stronger, but one of my most enduring images of the Batak concerns their life as guardians of rice fields, high on isolated mountainsides with commanding views of the jungle and the ocean. There is some intercropping in such fields; corn and sweet potatoes are usually planted, and yams, taros, and bananas may occasionally be found as well. In years past, Batak have also

planted coconuts and other fruit trees in their fallow swiddens. More recently, some have begun to plant coffee. But tree crops are few in number and inadequately cared for, and nowhere are they a significant source of cash income. Finally, Batak own virtually no pigs and few chickens. Thus, rice cultivation is by far the most important agricultural enterprise, and it provides an alternative both to hunting-gathering and to trade and wage labor as a source of subsistence as well as cash income.

Rice fields may be near or far from settlements, in isolated clearings or in large clusters, in low or high fallow second growth, or, if the Batak are so inclined and think they can escape detection by the government, in virgin forest. While comparatively simple in technology and ritual, Batak shifting cultivation otherwise resembles a type widespread in the Philippines and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Local variants of this type have already been abundantly described (e.g., Freeman 1955; Conklin 1957; and numerous studies inspired by these early works), and I will devote little additional attention here to technological matters.

My most detailed picture of Batak time allocation patterns under agricultural conditions comes, again, from a series of time allocation studies. This time my subjects were the adult members of the household or group of households domiciled together in a single swidden field house. As in the case of forest camps, I visited numerous such field houses during the course of my stay with the Batak. On occasion, I remained for 24 to 48 hours of detailed observation. Table 9 presents pooled time allocation data for four such observation periods at field houses, each period during a different stage in the cycle of rice cultivation. These data, while limited, suggest that in the field, agricultural workdays are on the order of 3.5 to 4.0 hours per working adult—approximately one hour less per day than Batak dwelling in forest camps devote to hunting and gathering (table 6). Other observations support this estimate. In July, I observed a group of women to spend 2.5 hours in the morning and 1.5 hours in the afternoon

weeding a rice field. In October, I observed the members of several households to work together at late harvest labor for approximately 2.5 hours in the morning and 2.0 hours in the afternoon.

On the surface, given that the Batak must also devote some effort each day to domestic activities, this seems like a reasonable amount of effort to devote to agricultural labor. But what do Batak get in return? A complete answer to this question should address the cost of mobilizing field labor, the productivity of that labor once mobilized, and actual farm yields—topics about which I have only fragmentary data. I am convinced, nevertheless, that the returns to land and labor in Batak swiddens are much lower than local lowland swidden farmers realize in the same environment—perhaps as much as 50 percent lower. In the Batak fields I observed at Tanabag during 1971 and 1975, for example, returns to land were on the order of 750 to 1,250 kilograms per hectare. Headland (1986:352), who similarly believes that the Agta are ineffective agriculturalists, reports that yields in the 43 Agta fields he studied in the Casiguran area in 1983 averaged only about 900 kilograms per hectare. Rice yields of this magnitude are low by the standards of most farming peoples in upland Southeast Asia. Spencer (1966:21–22) estimates that upland rice yields in the region as a whole, for “first year cropping of mature forest lands in good years,” range from 1,100 to 2,800 kilograms per hectare. Similar estimates have been made by Freeman (850–2,100 kilograms per hectare [1955:96–99]) and by Conelly (1,600 kilograms per hectare [1983:175]). The returns to labor in Batak rice fields are also comparatively low. Taking account of all labor inputs from field preparation to threshing and storing (but excluding milling), the Batak receive only 2 to 3 kilograms of husked rice per day of labor. By contrast, Cuyonon settlers in the same area receive 4 to 5 kilograms per labor day.

The proximate causes of the desultory state of Batak agriculture are found in an array of poor management practices, scheduling conflicts, social pressures, and cultural values

that not only depress swidden yields and labor productivity but result in a surprising number of cases of out-and-out farming failure. With respect to yields, for example, the Batak tend to make small fields to begin with. Their technological knowledge of upland agriculture is relatively unsophisticated. They plant few rice varieties and engage in little or no intercropping. Such discretionary activities as secondary burning, weeding, and guarding may be ignored or haphazardly pursued; every year monkeys and wild pigs take a heavy toll in Batak rice fields. Even basic activities such as planting and harvesting may be ill-timed or postponed to the extent that the rice crop suffers in consequence.

Inadequate or poorly scheduled labor inputs in Batak agriculture in part simply reflect the exigencies of poverty and the competing demands of a multidimensional subsistence economy. A hungry Batak family may have to leave its maturing rice field untended in July to seek food in the forest, and they may have to leave it unharvested in September while they help a lowland creditor harvest his field. Following a storm at harvest time, when the mature grain is vulnerable to lodging, I have known Batak thus summoned to the lowlands to return to find much of the rice in their own fields blown over or soaking wet.

Other difficulties with labor mobilization extend beyond the economic circumstances of individual households and involve some distinctively Batak customary practices. Consider the reciprocal agricultural labor work parties that many Batak mobilize at planting time. These arrangements are ubiquitous in Southeast Asia; the Batak probably acquired the custom from the Cuyonon at the same time they acquired upland rice farming. Undoubtedly, such work parties are never models of efficiency; people turn to them, in part, precisely because they often are unhurried, socially pleasurable occasions. But according to my observation and in comparison with reciprocal labor groups on neighboring Cuyonon farms, Batak labor groups are particularly unproductive even as the Batak find them quite costly to mobilize.

The cost stems from the fact that Batak reciprocal labor groups are also reciprocal eating groups; both husband and wife typically appear for the noon meal, even though only one may actually be exchanging a labor day. Nonworking spouses help with gathering firewood or cooking, but their numbers are often excessive for these chores. Further, any lowland passersby may also invite themselves to the noon meal. It is not uncommon to learn of a Batak who postponed a previously scheduled field planting because he was unable to borrow the rice necessary to feed those who would attend.

A reciprocal labor party I observed in late February was fairly typical. Seven men, including the man whose field was being planted that day, were involved in the actual exchange of labor days. They departed from the field owner's settlement house at 8:30 A.M. and returned at 11:15 A.M. for the noon meal; they left again at 3:00 P.M. , returning at 5:45 P.M. Since it took them about 15 minutes on foot to reach the field, the labor group spent a total of approximately 4.5 hours actually working, which is consistent with the data reported in table 9. Thirteen adults and two children attended the noon meal, which consisted of rice and boiled greens. In addition, the field owner provided some puffed rice candy and three bottles of gin. Two bottles were consumed after lunch, and the third was taken to the field in the afternoon “so that the work would go faster.” (A lowland settler with a comparably distant field would have his noon meal brought there, both to minimize travel time and to reduce the temptation of his exchange laborers to dally during the midday break.)

Other customary practices that dampen yields and labor productivity become visible at harvest time. For a lowland settler, the crucial measure of farming success is how much rice ends up in his own granary for his family's future use. This is the effective return to his season of agricultural labor, and a good farmer makes every effort to minimize the amount of newly harvested rice that is used to buy goods,

pay debts or laborers, and so on. Among the Batak, such demands dissipate an alarming amount of rice, and what appears to be an abundant harvest in September can result in surprisingly few sacks of stored rice in November. First, as we saw above, there are famine season debts to be paid and goods to be purchased. Second, during the tarakabot, or ritual first harvest, as many as ten individuals may enter a Batak's rice field and harvest for a day, keeping all of the proceeds for themselves. Even after the tarakabot, when any harvesting in another's field is nominally done on a share basis, neighbors and kin expect concessions from the more successful farmers. In ten Batak fields I monitored at Tanabag in 1971, these various harvest time rice allocations accounted for 35 percent of the total harvest and on a number of fields, exceeded 50 percent.

Ironically, even as Batak rice production suffers from inadequate labor inputs during some phases of cultivation, at other times, excessive labor is invested in farming with only limited marginal returns. An illustration of how the exigencies of poverty may lead a farmer to expend extra effort without adding to total output is seen in the Batak practice of tianek making. Tianek is made in July and August, when near-ripe grain not yet ready for harvesting, threshing, and pounding in the normal manner is nevertheless harvested, laboriously threshed using a shell scraper, and then roasted and dried over a fire before it can be pounded and consumed. Rice thus prepared has a delightful nutty flavor and is much favored. But Batak make tianek not because it is tasty but because they are hungry and cannot wait until their grain has fully ripened. One episode of tianek making I observed in early August ultimately yielded about 2 kilograms of husked, ready-to-cook rice. The episode began in the late morning, when two women harvested some near-ripe grain, and continued as other women assisted with the tasks of threshing, roasting, drying, pounding, and winnowing. Excluding mat drying, which took four hours but needed only occasional attention, seven hours of adult labor were necessary for these

tasks. It was almost 8:00 P.M. when the rice was ready to be eaten.

On occasion, the kinds of attitudes, practices, and circumstances that keep rice field returns to land and labor relatively low also result in outright farming failure. Of the twenty-five Batak households who made rice fields at Tanabag during 1975, for example, four ultimately harvested little or no rice. One cleared and planted a field but essentially abandoned it after the husband was summoned to another local group by his mother, whose chronic illness was said to have worsened. She was actually in reasonably good health but prevailed on her son to stay. In a second case, an old man living alone prevailed on his nephew to clear, and on his niece to plant, an isolated field for him. He was to guard the field himself, but most of his time was spent visiting kin in another local group. Very little rice survived to be harvested. Another couple made a field, but, after planting, the wife decided to return to the local group of her birth to be near her brothers. Forced to choose between his field and his wife, the husband chose the latter. A final case of field abandonment occurred as a result of sheer laziness. A man burned and planted his field a month late because, it was said, “he went fishing when others were working [in their fields].” He and his wife planted the field together, but she subsequently refused to cooperate in weeding or guarding, instead spending most of her time at an uncle's house. She was still lonely, it was said, from the death of her father two years before.

What more general explanation can be offered for why the Batak do not farm more successfully? Forest resource depletion and the Batak's own evolving life-style lend some urgency to understanding this failure, for it would seem that even modest improvements in Batak agricultural yields or labor productivity would considerably improve their lives. A frequent explanation is that Negrito peoples such as the Batak do not like to farm. According to this reasoning, Negritos simply prefer to obtain most of the goods they need from the outside world through trade and wage labor rather

than through resorting to such sedentary occupations as farming, and they behave accordingly.

Writing of the Batek, K. M. Endicott (1979a) has argued persuasively along these lines. His argument has considerable intuitive appeal, and versions of it have been applied to Philippine Negrito groups as well (e.g., Headland 1985). Most (Malaysian) Negritos, he says,

intensely dislike agricultural work and will do it only when it is impossible to earn a living any other way. They much prefer collecting and selling rattan to agriculture because it permits them to live in the cool forest, to move around whenever they like, to hunt and fish, and to collect their reward in cash, which they vastly prefer to a yield of food alone…. This preference is widespread among Negritos and is a serious impediment everywhere to attempts to settle them. (P. 184)

According to Endicott, not only do Negritos dislike agricultural work —because of “their preference for the coolness of the forest to the heat of the clearings,” their “intense dislike of … living in one place for an extended period,” and their “avoidance rules between kin which severely limit who may live with whom”—but they also find the house layout and domestic arrangements of Malay-style agricultural villages “almost the exact opposite” of what “they look for in a living place” (ibid.: 184–187). (Similar cultural preferences have been attributed to African Pygmies; see, e.g., Turnbull 1965.)

Applied to the failure of Batak farming, this would be the charitable explanation of the anthropologist. Lowland Filipinos have a less charitable explanation: Batak are lazy. Indeed, Batak are widely portrayed as lazy by lowland Filipinos precisely because of their failure to farm more effectively—that is, they are perceived first and foremost as lazy farmers. My view is that both explanations miss the point. By looking, relativistically or ethnocentrically, at factors presumed intrinsic to the Batak themselves (or Negritos in general), such explanations divert attention from a vital, broader pat-

tern of social and economic relationships. I do not deny that Negritos in general (or the Batak) talk and behave as if they do not like farming work and the farming life-style. But I do question whether these facts are adequately accounted for by the claim that agriculture, as a subsistence adaptation, is simply a “poor fit” with traditional Negrito social organization, culture, or personality. To fully appreciate the motivational patterns in question, we must again look at the wider social and economic context in which the failure to farm effectively occurs. If we are to invoke that context to explain why the Batak and other Negritos have become such inveterate collectors of commercially valuable forest products, surely we must consider it as well in accounting for their failure to move into full-time farming. I believe that the “terms of incorporation” of Batak society into lowland Filipino society do not simply select for trade; they also select against farming.

First, it is important to recognize that specialization and success in one activity precludes, to some degree, success and specialization in another activity. I argued earlier that Peterson (1978) ignored some significant opportunity costs associated with developing and maintaining exchange relationships. Some of these same opportunity costs also figure in Batak farming failure. In particular, the ongoing concern of an individual Batak to stay in the good graces of his lowland patron/creditor/exchange partner leads him, among other things, to accept offers of employment in his patron's swidden field, performing such tasks as clearing or weeding—the same tasks that are extremely important in his own swidden. The fact that during the swidden season Batak may be seen busily laboring in the fields of others while their own fields (or would-be fields) lie unattended is commonly cited by lowlanders as indicative of the kinds of personality shortcomings that explain why the Batak have been unable to improve economically. In fact, however, many Batak are obliged to work in this fashion because they had previously obtained food or another item from their employers which

was to be paid for either in forest products or in agricultural labor. In short, involvement in exchange and labor relationships seriously inhibits the Batak's ability to become more successful farmers, whatever their inclinations may be. Writing of the Tagbanua, Conelly (1985) similarly emphasizes how some of the time spent collecting and selling forest products might alternatively be devoted to clearing larger fields and to more careful maintenance.

More than the opportunity costs of exchange relationships with lowlanders keep Batak from moving into full-time farming, however. I do not think it is unreasonable to argue that lowlanders do not want Batak to move into full-time farming. Conscious motivations along these lines may not exist, but it is important to recognize that particular lowland Filipinos—and the wider socioeconomic system—benefit economically from the present subsistence orientation of many Philippine Negrito groups. Consider that any significant movement by Negritos into full-time farming would (1) increase competition for agricultural land in certain Philippine frontier areas already filled with land-hungry settlers and (2) decrease the number of marginalized individuals available to hire out as agricultural wage laborers or to collect and sell forest products.

Two aspects of the Batak case are relevant here. First, on numerous occasions I have observed lowland settlers, usually those with exchange relationships with Batak, attempt to intimidate the Batak about their allegedly illegal swidden making on forested mountainsides. For example, stories may be told about how a certain government forester, having spotted illegal Batak swiddens from his helicopter, is on his way to make arrests. I have known such efforts to be successful, with the Batak abandoning their swiddens and retreating to the forest for a time. Such behavior, which may occur during any phase of the swidden cycle, obviously undermines agricultural productivity as much as any aversion to working in the heat of the sun. (Ironically, the Bureau of Forest Development is more concerned with the illegal swid-

dens of lowlanders than with those of the Batak.) A similar kind of intimidation was reported by change agents working with the Batak. Employees of World Vision, for example, found that their efforts to assist Batak at Tanabag and Buayan to become more self-sufficient were resented or even actively opposed by local lowlanders who had commercial dealings with them.

Second, from a historical perspective, arriving Filipino settlers did not simply displace the Batak from part of their aboriginal territory and then use that land for agriculture; they preempted land on which the Batak had already made agricultural improvements. The five Batak reservations established in 1930 were all partially planted in bananas and coconuts by the time they were overrun by lowlanders. Batak remember this experience bitterly. A similar pattern continues today. At Caramay, for example, Batak complain that forestland they clear for agriculture purposes is subsequently encroached on by lowlanders, who plant tree crops, declare the land their own, and pay the necessary taxes to the Bureau of Lands. In my opinion, the fear that unimproved or improved land could similarly be taken in the future together with continued uncertainty about their land tenure status generally are major factors explaining why the Batak have made only tentative efforts to develop their agricultural economy by planting such high value and easily transportable tree crops as coffee and cashews.

In short, there is more to the story of desultory Batak farming than “Batak don't like to farm.” The pressures and opportunities of an external social system have a powerful influence on all aspects of Batak behavior. Just as Batak do collect and sell certain forest resources because an external economy needs them to do so, they do not become full-time farmers because that same economy does not need them to—indeed, it does not want them to. Success in trade and failure in farming are two sides of the same coin—not that of the likes and dislikes of Negritos but that of the pressures and requirements of a wider social system. In such circum-

stances, it should not be surprising that people like the Batak might attempt to make the best of their difficult situation by surrounding their inability to farm effectively with talk of how they do not like farming anyway.

I have argued here that the Batak's seemingly “flexible” subsistence system is uniquely responsive to the pressures and demands of outside peoples and social systems rather than to their own needs. In particular, the constraints posed by land insecurity and a considerable degree of clientage lead to significant inefficiencies in the practice of hunting-gathering, trade, and agriculture, making the typical Batak the peripatetic jack of all trades, master of none.

I fear that a new romanticism has come to influence analyses of hunting-gathering populations: the old romanticism about “pure hunter-gatherers” has given way to a new but equally naive glorification of “generalized foraging,” “exchange,” and “multidimensional subsistence strategies” as those activities which comprise the life of the sensible and well-adjusted modern hunter-gatherer. It certainly seems odd that anthropologists who work with agricultural peoples continually emphasize the importance of greater attention to subsistence production and the nutritional, socioeconomic, and other dangers of cash cropping (i.e., specialized production for exchange), yet anthropologists who work with hunting-gathering populations, at least in Southeast Asia, have not voiced a similar concern. We should be more attuned to the possibility that what a particular foraging people may be doing at the moment may not in fact be in their own best interests, however difficult it may be to define those interests. In the next two chapters, I attempt such a definition for the Batak.