Preface

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the Batak of the Philippines were a physically and culturally distinct population of about six hundred individuals inhabiting the mountains and river valleys of central Palawan Island. Isolated by land from other indigenous tribal populations on Palawan and by the Sulu Sea from all but sporadic contact with Filipino and Muslim peoples elsewhere in the Philippine archipelago, the Batak had evolved an elaborate tropical forest foraging adaptation. Like their presumed distant relatives, the Andaman Islanders, the Semang of the Malay Peninsula, and the various Negrito groups on Luzon, they lived in small, mobile, family groups and hunted or gathered a variety of forest, riverine, and coastal foods. Whether or not they enjoyed a state of “primitive affluence,” the Batak must have achieved at least a modicum of success in meeting their subsistence needs and in resisting whatever perturbations penetrated their realm from the outside world, for they had survived for centuries.

By the closing decades of the twentieth century, however, the Batak were in disarray. No longer were they isolated from surrounding populations; everywhere were the homesteads and villages of Filipino farmers who had come to

Palawan in search of land and a better way of life. And no longer did the Batak appear to be an economically, culturally, or evolutionarily successful people. They still survived, as did a part of their former hunting-gathering lifeway. But even as they had also adopted portions of the lifeways of surrounding peoples, they found themselves in much reduced circumstances. Undernourished as individuals, decimated as a population, and virtually moribund as a distinct ethnolinguistic group, the Batak appeared destined for extinction sometime early in the twenty-first century.

The story of the Batak is one that has been repeated throughout the contemporary tribal world: a society that has seemingly thrived for centuries suddenly falters and passes out of the human record. In some cases, the causes of tribal disappearance are tragically obvious. In the centuries following the era of European expansion, the ravages of epidemic disease and wholesale alienation of land and other tribal resources obliterated hundreds of tribal populations. Many escaped these catastrophes only to fall victim to less visible but equally powerful forces—the ecological changes, social stresses, and cultural disruptions set in motion by incorporation into wider socioeconomic systems. Such a people are the Batak.

This work is a detailed account of the Batak's encounter with, and apparent defeat by, the “outside world.” To be sure, it is not the first book of its kind. Charles Wagley's Welcome of Tears, an eloquent account of the demographic and cultural demise of the Tapirapé Indians of Brazil, is probably closest in subject and intent. Colin Turnbull's controversial The Mountain People, a case study of the Ik of Uganda, centered needed attention on the potentially grim consequences of culture loss and social dysfunction (regardless of any ethical questions it may have raised). At a more regional level but of the same genre are Shelton Davis's Victims of the Miracle and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf's Tribes of India: The Struggle to Survive. And beyond these recent and most closely related works, there is a long and important tradition in

Western anthropology of documenting the impact of modernization and development on indigenous peoples.

This volume differs from previous work on the subject in two important respects. The first is the breadth and depth of my data, which span a period of fifteen years—from 1966, when I first encountered the Batak while a Peace Corps volunteer assigned to teach high school in Palawan, until 1980–81, when I studied them for sixteen months while supported by a sabbatical leave from Arizona State University and a Wenner-Gren Foundation Grant-in-Aid. In between, I made a series of shorter visits to the Batak. I visited them periodically during 1968, at which time I was still in the Peace Corps but teaching adult Tagalog literacy in a Tagbanua community close to the Batak's home. I lived with the Batak for four months during 1972, following twenty months of dissertation fieldwork in a Cuyonon farming community elsewhere on Palawan, while supported by a National Institutes of Mental Health Predoctoral Research Fellowship. I visited them again for two months during 1975, then supported by an Arizona State University Faculty Grant-in-Aid.

Repeated field visits to the Batak over an extended period allowed me to come to know the entire population rather than just a sample of it. By 1981, I had visited all local Batak groups numerous times, and there were almost no adults and few children whom I had not met personally. Moreover, return visits revealed to me, as a single visit could not, the rapid and profound changes that had overtaken the Batak, making it possible for me to adjust my methodological approach as my thinking on their plight evolved. During my earlier visits I employed Cuyonon, the local contact language, but I later learned to speak Batak and to employ it in my fieldwork. Eventually, I was able to complete two thorough censuses, eight years apart, of the entire population; assemble an extensive array of quantitative data on how Batak utilize their time and what they receive from their various subsistence pursuits; measure the height, weight, and skinfold thickness of a sample of adults and children; identify

the principal cultural beliefs and institutions that have been lost since World War II; record a detailed, week-by-week account of the settlement pattern of one entire local group over the course of a year; and collect a variety of more qualitative information about traditional and present-day Batak economy, society, and culture. I obtained, in short, a uniquely comprehensive set of data to work with.

The second respect in which this book differs from others on the subject concerns my analytical orientation and theoretical intent. While this book is fundamentally a case study, I have made a systematic effort to use this case to address some wider issues having to do with human adaptation in general. I am concerned, in particular, with the vital but poorly understood role played by human motivation and with the importance of ethnic identity in fostering that motivation.

In overview, my argument is that something has gone wrong for the Batak, as evidenced by carefully collected data on demography and nutritional anthropometry. These data show that, as a population, they are failing to reproduce at a replacement level and, as individuals, they are in generally poor health. I attribute this circumstance to adaptive disorder in the following manner. The proximate cause of Batak adaptive difficulties, I argue, is a complex of dysfunctional economic and social behavior of the Batak themselves: disinterest in work, poor diet selection, inadequate infant care, and the like. Such behavior may not differ very much from how the Batak have always behaved, but it no longer measures up to the demands of physical and cultural survival. The ultimate cause, I argue, is growing articulation with the outside world—or, more particularly, the precise nature of that articulation.

Connecting my ultimate cause, articulation with wider Philippine society, and my proximate cause, dysfunctional individual behavior, which occupies much of my analysis, is the notion of social stress. I argue that the manner in which the Batak have been incorporated into lowland Philippine

social and economic life has severely stressed many of their social roles and relationships. Simultaneously, many traditional cultural beliefs and institutions have been eroded or have even disappeared, thereby undermining individual and cultural capacity to cope with social stress. In consequence, in this admittedly functionalist view of culture, individual Batak are so debilitated as to be unable to adequately meet the physiological, psychological, and social stresses—that is, the adaptive demands—of everyday life.

A crucial point is that while the adaptive demands presently confronting the Batak may appear heavy, they are not impossibly so. I believe there are genuine and unexploited opportunities for the Batak to “do better”—yet they do not appear to strive to do better. Were the Batak fat and happy, this matter would be, at least for an anthropologist, a non-issue. But it becomes a critical issue in the present situation wherein individual and tribal well-being is at stake. I hasten to add that I do not attribute the Batak's failure to do better to any intrinsic shortcomings. While I am extremely interested in the interplay of economic behavior and the cognitive and noncognitive attributes of individuals, I see these attributes as largely derivative of a particular sociocultural system. The Batak's problem is that their own sociocultural system is malfunctioning. For fifteen years I was strategically placed to observe a massive failure in one society's capacity to equip and motivate men and women to cope adequately with the problems they face and to otherwise survive physically and culturally as a distinct ethnic group. This work represents my desire to describe and analyze that failure and learn from it.

The manuscript was completed in the Philippines during 1984–85, when I was a Visiting Research Associate at the Institute of Philippine Culture of Ateneo de Manila University and while I was supported by an ASEAN Fulbright Research Award to undertake some comparative research on the adaptive difficulties of other Philippine Negrito groups. I would like to thank these and the previously mentioned

institutions and agencies for their generous support of my research. I also acknowledge permission from Mankind and American Anthropologist to use previously published material. In addition, many individuals helped make this book a reality. I owe special debts of gratitude to George Appell, Nelson Asebuque, Pons Bennagen, Sheila Berg, Apolinario Buñag, Eduardo Cacal, David Cleveland, Thomas Conelly, Carlos Femandez, Rafaelita Fernandez, Raul Fernandez, Brian Foster, Robert Fox, Raymond Hames, Thomas Headland, Barry Hewlett, Connie Kloecker, Edward Liebow, Emilio Moran, Keiichi Omoto, Pedro Nalica, Roman Palay, Ben Pagayona, Steve Pruett, Andrew del Rosario, Marsha Schweitzer, Thayer Scudder, Rudy Tirador, Ernesto Torres, Pedro Vargas, John Vickery, Reed Wadley, Charles Warren, and Felix and Amelita Yara. Most of all, I want to express my deep gratitude to the Batak, a warm and gentle people who deserve far better than their present lot in life.