11
Conclusion:
Understanding Buguias's Aberrant Development

The central thesis of this work is threefold. First, it demonstrates that a small-scale society can become integrated into the global economic system through small-scale commodity production without necessarily experiencing a breakdown of its communitarian social order. Second, in the circumstances found here, it is not in spite of but precisely because of economic integrations that the underlying ritual system, transformed though it may be, has persisted. Finally, this unusual embrace of indigenous religion and capitalist agriculture imperils the community's ecological foundations, threatening commercial and environmental collapse.

If the environmental problems facing Buguias are painfully familiar, the peculiar linkages between economy and culture that form their social context are not. Having defied the expectations of social theory, Buguias's continued florescence of ritual practice under an essentially capitalist regime challenges us to explain why this community should so diverge from the norm.^[1]

The Commercial History of Buguias

Most small-scale societies are, or were, prior to their incorporation within the global economy, relatively equalitarian. Although often divided by rank, few were stratified by class (Fried 1967). Their economies generally relied not on monetary calculus but on reciprocal exchange, often structured through kinship. Such societies have proved highly vulnerable to the individualizing and economizing pressures inherent in a commercial order.

The villages of the southern Cordillera, by contrast, have long possessed social and economic structures that in many ways anticipated those of state-level formations. Cash-based trade formed a

significant component of their prewar economies, and class stratification was advanced. Elite couples owned the cattle herds and the best lands, and they could pass on at least part of their wealth to their children. Several scholars have argued that imperial machinations rather than autochthonous development produced this elite class of "petty despots" (for example, Voss 1983: 40), but while Spanish and American authorities did bolster the indigenous elite, I would argue that they were able to do so only because a plutocracy already existed. That a baknang class, some of whose members were fabulously wealthy by later standards, predated Spanish rule is quite clear in the historical record (Scott 1974).

The commercialized economy and stratified society of prewar Buguias should not be overemphasized. Some goods were bartered, labor could still be mobilized cooperatively, and the bonds of kinship and community moderated individualizing tendencies. Moreover, the elite did not monopolize power, as most male elders held important places in the tong tongan jury. But such qualifications notwithstanding, the socioeconomic system of prewar Buguias proved in many ways compatible with capitalism.

Elite dominance was underwritten by control of long-distance trade. This was not a unique phenomenon; from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, Southeast Asia's "age of commerce" (Reid 1988), commercial exchange was widespread throughout this part of the globe. In northern Luzon, a trade originating in this period between the gold-producing uplands and ceramics- and iron-bearing Chinese vessels had important ramifications for the Cordilleran hinterland. Supplying hogs to the gold miners allowed highland merchants to accumulate considerable wealth, stimulated the development of an integrated regional economy, and exposed highland traders to the cash-based exchange system of the lowland towns. Buguias's ultimately pivotal position between the consumption centers of the mines and the hog-producing oak-woodland nurtured in the community at large an entrepreneurial ethos. Without the early experience in gold, the southern Cordillera in general and Buguias in particular would have developed along very different lines.

Since a finely stratified society and a highly commercialized economy were firmly in place prior to the Japanese invasion, the major transformations of the postwar period must be located in

other realms of social life. The most fundamental change during this era was the repositioning of the southern Cordillera within the global economy. Whereas Benguet's tenuous economic connection to the prewar international order was through the gold trade, the growth of a chemical-intensive temperate vegetable industry in the postwar era bound the area much more closely to national and international circuits.

The Buguias people entered these wider markets readily. They did not "resist" the new order in any of the common senses of the term. While protesting "alien" (resident Chinese) domination, they embraced the vegetable industry as a whole, including the accompanying extension and intensification of commercial exchange, the final privatization of land, the commoditization of labor, and the institutionalization of usury. Moreover, the community applauded the investment activities of its "progresso" accumulators. Voss (1983), on the basis of work among the nearby Northern Kankanaey of Sagada, argues that despite having adopted certain forms of capitalistic relations, villagers have done so on their own terms and are thus still "resisting capital." In Buguias, such an interpretation is difficult to support. The Buguias people certainly did "accept capital" on their own cultural terms, but their local economy serves the multinational agrochemical companies as well as any.

Geographical Patterns

The relationship between religion and economic change varies significantly across the southern Cordillera along three main axes. Foremost is the survival of ritual feasting in areas of commercial agriculture, generally those along the Mountain Trail and in the upper Agno Valley. Further, within those areas, it is the older valley settlements that retain the most elaborate ritual forms. Finally, a third crosscutting areal pattern follows cultural groupings: villages inhabited by the Southern Kankana-ey tend to be both more "progressive" economically and more conservative religiously than their Ibaloi neighbors. Let us take up each of these patterns in turn.

The survival of prestige feasting in commercialized areas is at one level a simple matter of resources. Before the war, low population densities allowed extensive pastoralism, providing abundant

meat for ritual feasts throughout the area. With rapid demographic growth in Benguet during the late prewar and postwar periods, the ratio of stock to humans declined dramatically, with the consequence that sacrificial animals increasingly had to be imported from the lowlands. Only those villages able to parlay cash crops for meat could continue to celebrate lavish feasts after the war.

The eastern cloud-forest villages, however, many of which have yet to recover their prewar populations, were battered by the long-term depression of the highland gold industry. When the miners of Suyoc could no longer afford prodigious quantities of pork, the oak-woodland dwellers lost their main outlet for hogs and hence their essential source of cash. The increasing availability of cheap manufactured goods administered another blow, destroying the copper-ware industry and impoverishing the iron workshops. The final assault on the old economy was the privatization of village hinterlands; this, coupled with the ban on the open pasturage of hogs, made local meat production much more difficult than it had been.

Given, then, that for economic and ecological reasons prestige feasts persisted only in areas of commercial farming, it remains to be explained why the more elaborate forms survived only in the older villages of the Agno Valley—poor cousins, in fact, to the prosperous Mountain Trail vegetable districts. The answer lies in the local configurations of social power. Whereas the latter communities emerged wholly new after the war, social arrangements in the valley towns carried over from prewar times. Entrenched elders, who benefitted most from the traditional system, used their power to lobby for retention of the old ways. Also significant was the fact that Buguias farmlands never became concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy growers. Here dramatic individual changes of fortune have continued to occur, and ascension into the elite, while increasingly difficult, is still possible. This social and economic fluidity has supported the elders' arguments that anyone can prosper through appropriate ritual observances.

Finally, there is a persistent difference in entrepreneurial ethos between the two dominant peoples of the southern Cordillera: the Ibaloi and the Southern Kankana-ey. Although commercial farms dominate several Ibaloi districts, most continue to produce primarily for subsistence.^[2] In Kabayan, an Ibaloi village directly south of Buguias, vegetables have been grown as cash crops for a number

of years, but poor returns during the 1970s and 1980s persuaded many Kabayan residents to abandon market gardening altogether (Wiber 1985:428)—a response unthinkable in Buguias. Even in the commercialized (and traditionalist) Ibaloi community of Trinidad, graded prestige feasts have declined, although curing and death rituals have persisted. Moreover, the wealthiest farmers here have been able to stint on their ceremonial expenditures (Russell 1989b ).

The key to this widespread difference in commercial attitudes appears to lie in the two peoples' strikingly different histories of class formation. As the onetime premier gold producers of the southern Cordillera, the Ibaloi baknangs sustained a rigidly stratified society, closing their ranks to upward mobility. Marriages did not cross the class divide, and commoners had virtually no hope of reaching elite status. This distinct socioeconomic evolution had repercussions for both commercial attitudes and ritual practices. The relative fixity of hereditary status discouraged commercial risk-taking—on the part of aristocrats as well as commoners. This in turn reduced the economic incentive for holding ceremonies, which among the Southern Kankana-ey were often undertaken to ensure business success. The Ibaloi elite of Kabayan had once used the feast system to acquire the rice terraces of their less-wealthy co-villagers, but with the decline of their economic hegemony after the war they began to abandon the prestige feast altogether (Wiber 1989). Yet at the same time, the Buguias elders were reforming their pedit into the centerpiece of a grand conceptual tableau, one encompassing both a modernizing economy and an age-old cosmos and one that explicitly posits a central role for social mobility.

The emergence of Buguias Central as a center of modern Paganism is thus a product both of the community's economic position in past generations and of its recent development. In particular, all three of the criteria that perpetuate redistributive rituals in the postwar era—the development of commercial agriculture, the existence of a long-settled community run by tradition-minded elders, and dominance by Southern Kankana-ey rather than Ibaloi cultural elements—have converged in Buguias Central, boosting this community to prominence as the center of modern Cordilleran Paganism. By the late 1980s, followers of the leading mankotom of Buguias, the community's prophet and premier adviser, could call him simply "the number one Pagan."

The Ideology of Pagan Economics

The outsider may marvel at the persistence of redistribution in this commercialized economy, but Buguias Pagans view the redistributive aspect of feasting as secondary. Major rituals are above all an investment in future productivity, an indispensable step toward well-being in an undivided economic-social-cosmic totality. Understanding the economic logic embodied in these observances is critical for grasping how this community can at once embrace capitalism and retain its indigenous practices.

Buguias Pagans view ritual expenditures and wealth accumulation as positively linked, holding ritual as the bridge to the ancestral spirits who control each individual's fate. A married couple must work hard to earn the money necessary to honor the ancestors of both spouses, the ultimate fonts of their good fortune. Although an observer might predict that financing repeated banquets would counter capital accumulation, believers are convinced that heavenly favor will ratchet the devoted practitioners continually upward.

Pagans thus incorporate a spiritual element into their understanding of the economy. Where Western capitalists posit a two-stage cycle of accumulation and investment, Buguias entrepreneurs believe in three-stage cycle of accumulation, ritual, and investment. Baldly self-interested acts must alternate with feasting, for only by giving back a part of one's earnings to the ancestors (and, hence, to the community) can one hope to incur their good will. This is presented not as a sacred postulate, but as an inductive observation, to be debated on the basis of empirical findings. Of course, the actual evidence is ambiguous; most celebrants do not particularly prosper, and for those who do, other explanations could be invoked. But to date, no Buguias couples who have shirked major rituals altogether have prospered, giving Pagan apologists their most compelling line of evidence.

The manipulation of fortune is an ancient aspect of Cordilleran religion whose importance has only been enhanced with the move to commercial agriculture. In modern vegetable farming, beset as it is by extraordinary price volatility and frequent natural disasters, every couple's success clearly hinges in part on elements beyond their control. The belief that fate may be managed encourages

people to plunge into this risk-fraught environment—to do such things as plant lettuce in the typhoon season or start a new bus line. The greater the risk, the stronger must be the anticipation of success; major business ventures are usually foreshadowed by signs of prosperity (sangbo). Omen interpreters readily counsel risky strategies, an index of their confidence in divining the flow of future luck, since their own fortunes ride with those of their advisees.

Buguias Pagans do not equate luck with windfall profit. Success is offered but not guaranteed; it must be captured through sincere effort. Earnest work may also help unlock ancient promises delivered to one's forebears. Such sangbo are numerous, providing many households with personal motivations to labor arduously. Operating at multiple levels, such beliefs inculcate a work ethic that far surpasses anything held by Buguias Christians.

Contention, Rhetoric, and Power

Pagan ideology is far from a single orthodoxy. Theories of reality and notions of proper conduct vary considerably; continual debate on such questions creates a shared field of discourse more than a unified body of ideas. Since whole groups of individuals have rejected the ideology of their parents for Christianity, that field of discourse has been widened and partially rent in the postwar period.

Inequalities of power color ideological discussions. Wealthy individuals seek to maintain their positions by manipulating the religious order, while less powerful groups try to counter the status quo or at least to effect compromises. In Buguias the elite cling fervently to Paganism. The richest, the chrispa sycretists, espouse Christian doctrine as well, but all seek to perpetuate the feast system.

Even the elite do not comprise an entirely homogeneous group with respect to this issue. The truly wealthy, a cosmopolitan group residing in the provincial capital as often as in Buguias, can finance their required celebrations at little cost to their businesses or to their accustomed levels of consumption. For these fortunate few, Pagan ceremonies are reasonable social and political investments, yet not indispensable ones; if the feast system were to collapse, their positions would not be jeopardized.

The village-bound middle ranks of the elite have more at stake in the system's perpetuation. This group is largely comprised of elders who owe their positions more to lifelong diligence than to dramatic business successes. They live frugally, saving as much as possible to finance their own and their neighbors' observances. By their clothing one might suspect many of them to be among the poorest members of the community. But their role in Paganism brings them considerable power in the council of elders, and if the feast system were to collapse, these individuals would fall with it.

In general, ritual obligations weigh heaviest on those of intermediate wealth. The poorest can simply decline to celebrate without fear of being turned away from their neighbors' feasts. But this option is not open to the less successful members of respectable family lines, individuals who must endure the financial and social pressures of their richer relatives. If such persons announce that they cannot afford the requisite ceremonies, they are virtually cornered into joining a Christian church. Converting will not convince relatives to desist from their hounding, but it does afford an ideological stance from which to resist, as well as an alternative community. Although all Christians do not convert for economic reasons, Christian leaders recognize that initial leanings toward the church often stem from resentment against the expenses of Paganism and the relentless pressures associated with it.

New Christians in Buguias are encouraged to study the scriptures in order to derive a less worldly foundation for their beliefs. In essence, they are taught to reject the premise that material wealth reflects spiritual worth. The fully converted level the charge of materialism against Paganism, accusing traditionalists of debasing the spiritual with the economic. Pagans, who insist that it is precisely through material goods that the linkages between heaven and earth are made manifest, return the accusation, arguing that Christians prefer to squander their wealth on personal luxuries rather than to share it with the community at large.

Max Weber and the Spirit of Capitalism

Precisely because of the prevalence of redistributive mechanisms and ideologies stressing luck or magic, "tribal" religion has often

been regarded as perhaps motivating production but necessarily as restricting accumulation—hence thwarting economic development (e.g., Goode 1951:136). The same view has been promulgated with regard to Cordilleran Paganism. In the 1960s, for example, Tadaoan (1969:247) expressed the concern of the Commission on National Integration that "pagan beliefs and practices . . . were the root-cause that retarded economic and educational projects."

Specific sects of the universalizing religions, by contrast, have long been believed to inculcate the very spirit of capitalist enterprise. Observing the Protestant affiliation of most European leaders of industry at the turn of the century, Max Weber (1904 [1930]) argued that Calvinistic "worldly asceticism" had been the ideological font of capitalism itself. The Protestant businessman, he argued, would rather invest capital than squander it in sinful pleasures, thus confirming his divine election through his pecuniary success.

Weber's followers have since found a similar ethos in the faiths of other entrepreneurial groups, including Jodo and Zen Buddhism in Japan, Santri Islam in Java, and Jainism and Zoroastrianism in India (Bellah 1968:243). Yet such assertions are rarely made for any but the so-called high religions. As Eisenstadt (1968:18) writes:

It has been claimed that the more "magical" or "discrete" a religious system is, the less it is likely to facilitate the development of more continuous secular activities. The multitude of dispersed religious rituals found in most "primitive" religions were shown to inhibit the development of such sustained effort.

Indeed, converts to universalizing religions have often formed entrepreneurial islands within "tribal" societies.^[3] Legitimating their actions by reference to their new ideologies, market-oriented converts can free themselves from onerous social demands. In Kapepa, Zambia, for instance, most successful commercial farmers are Jehovah's Witnesses who use their beliefs "to justify the repudiation of certain social relationships" (Long 1968:239).

In Buguias, the situation is reversed. Here, Jehovah's Witnesses and other Christians are distinctly less entrepreneurial than are traditionalists; in Buguias it is communitarian Paganism that inculcates both a strong business drive and a remarkable work ethic.

And unlike the people of Kabylia, Algeria (Bourdieu 1977), those of Buguias do not disguise or "socially repress" the connection between social actions and economic gains. The linkage of ritual and accumulation is not only recognized but constitutes the subject of frequent debate.

The symbiosis of religion and capitalism is if anything more tightly forged in Buguias Paganism than in radical European Protestantism. Where early modern Calvinists interpreted wealth as a sign of election, riches for Buguias Pagans are the necessary means to obtain spiritual favor. Far from being fatalistic, their belief is interventionist to the last. "Worldly asceticism," however, quickly evaporates in Buguias's rituals, replaced by an otherworldly hedonism that Weber's bourgeois businessman would find utterly sinful. But the Buguias traditionalists revel in such extravagance only so long as it remains in a ritual context—and Weber may have exaggerated the asceticism of the Calvinist burgher in any case (see Schama 1988:334, and Leroi Ladurie and Ranum 1989:113, 114).

Ritual Economics and the Social Order

The success of the Buguias people in retaining their redistributive feasts by no means generates social equality. But neither exploitation nor social stratification is new to Buguias. Both were deeply rooted in the precolonial social order, and both are perpetuated by the long-term functioning of Pagan economics.

Prestige Feasts and Social Differentiation

Several benefits accrue to elite celebrants, most immediately the legitimation of their wealth and enhancement of their prestige. Material reward may also follow; the respected baknang can attract clients more readily than could a disparaged noncelebrant. And for a would-be political leader, winning the support of the electorate requires major ritual investments.

But the wealthy receive their most substantial long-range benefits from the feast system through financing the rituals of their poorer neighbors. True, ritual loans carry minimal interest, but

weighty debts put the borrowing class in a perpetually subservient position, allowing the elite essentially to control the community. Higher rates of return might be obtained in the short run by investing elsewhere, but the long-term benefits of maintaining a large and docile clientele are significant.

Redistributive ceremonials have been seen to serve the upper strata in other places and times as well. In the chiefdoms of northwest North America, elite villagers enhanced their positions through the potlatch even as they dispensed with much of their property (Drucker and Heizer 1967). The same was once true in Toraja mortuary rites; according to Volkman (1985:6) "ritual was thought to affirm a person's 'place' as a noble, commoner or slave, distinctions based upon descent ('blood') and, at least ideally, coincident with wealth." And whereas the "cargo" feasts of syncretic Catholicism in Mesoamerica have often been analyzed as regenerating social equality (Cancian 1965:137), Cancian found their effects at least in one Chiapas district to be more ambiguous:

Service in the cargo system legitimizes the wealth differences that do exist and this prevents disruptive envy. There is, in effect, sufficient leveling . . . to satisfy normative prescriptions, but not enough to produce an economically homogeneous community [1965:140].

Cancian's observations hold as well for Buguias. Here, too, prestige feasts function simultaneously to redistribute riches and to reconstitute a hierarchical social order. Celebrants transform material wealth into symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1977), and while their prestige no longer allows elite villagers to mobilize labor directly, it does bolster their power in less direct ways.

For the community at large, the survival of the redistributive complex combines with the vagaries of vegetable farming to make for complex movements across class lines. Over a single generation, certain families in every class grow richer, while others, racked by ceremonial as well as other debts, fall lower in the social order. Shanin's (1972) analysis of Russian peasant household mobility patterns—highlighting the interactions of centrifugal (differentiating), centripetal (leveling), and cyclical mobility, and giving weight to chance events in each household's trajectory—provides an apt analogue.

In contemporary Buguias, chance cannot be overemphasized,

for the incorporation of risk into the deepest level of the ideological system influences all forms of mobility. The same belief in the manipulability of luck that supports entrepreneurialism has also proved devastating on occasion by encouraging untoward gambling. When Buguias residents gamed only among themselves, money remained within the community, the luck of the cards acting as a redistributive mechanism of sorts (cf. Mitchell 1988). But gambling has become a net drain for the community since the opening of a casino in Baguio City. If it is difficult for a habitué of Las Vegas or Monte Carlo to accept the inexorability of a slot machine's take, such notions are resisted even more strongly by Buguias Pagans, long schooled to consider luck the province of the ancestors. Of the four Buguias couples to have reached metropolitan elite status in the 1960s and early 1970s, three are said to have lost their fortunes in the plush rooms of the Baguio Casino (see Finin 1990 on Igorot gambling in general).

Analyzing the Social Formation of Buguias

The resulting social and economic structure of Buguias defies all conventional categories; however, all Cordilleran peoples have long been considered "tribal," based on their indigenous small-scale social organization, successful resistance to imperialism for several hundred years, sociocultural distinctiveness from the Philippine lowlanders, and retention of indigenous religion. This categorization is far from perfect; most Cordilleran groups have long been internally stratified, all were eventually brought under American political hegemony, and a large number have for some time been Christian.

The Benguet vegetable growers exhibit "peasant" characteristics as well, and several scholars refer to them as such (Russell 1983; Solang 1984; Wiber 1985). Powerful outside groups extract a large share of the gardeners' produce; labor-exchange practices coexist with wage work; and production is both for the market and for subsistence (see Wolf 1966; Shanin 1973; Scott 1976). The Benguet people have become subject to surplus extraction by both national elites and metropolitan states—a process that many scholars argue is sufficient to turn tribal peoples into peasants (Howlett 1973; Connell 1979; Howard 1980; Grossman 1984).

But the same vegetable growers have also been termed "petty commodity producers," a category related to, but not identical with, that of the peasantry (Russell 1989a; see Watts 1984:20). Unlike peasants sensu strictu , Benguet's rural (or "simple," or "petty") commodity producers cannot retreat to subsistence cultivation in the event of poor commodity prices. Thoroughly enmeshed in commercial relations, they have little to buffer them from the brutal backwash of commodity price collapses.

And finally, Buguias cultivators may even be called "capitalist farmers" inasmuch as they depend on wage labor (at least for portaging vegetables) and exhibit a (modified) capitalist economic logic. This latter attribute may be appreciated by substituting "the Buguias vegetable garden" for "the capitalist farm" in Wolf's (1966:2) classical definition of that economic form, yielding the accurate statement that "[the Buguias vegetable garden] is primarily a business enterprise, combining factors of production purchased in the market to obtain a profit by selling advantageously in a products market."

In short, Buguias vegetable growers can reasonably be classified as tribal cultivators, as peasants, as petty commodity producers, or as capitalist farmers. Each label points to important features of the community; none fully captures its present social and economic complexity. One must thus be careful in using and in interpreting such terms, for the mere act of labeling can create a fundamentally distorted picture.

Materialism and Idealism

The analysis presented above accords primacy neither to ideology nor to economics. The insistence on considering equally both religious belief and social structure springs from the conviction that both the ideal and the material have irreducible roles in human history. Few benefits are to be gained from jumping on either side of this hoary divide, a leap that recent social theory shows an increasing reluctance to make. For Marcus and Fischer (1986:85), "any materialist-idealist distinction between political economy and interpretive approaches is simply not supportable"; for Mann (1986: 19), the long-standing debate between the two has become a "ritual without hope and an end" (see also Errington 1989:296). As Stephen Toulmin (1990) so brilliantly shows, the current task is

precisely to rejoin such dichotomized oppositions sundered by Descartes and maintained in separation by over three hundred years of stultifying, modernist thought.

At present, most scholars interested in economic transformations on the margins of the world economy still rally to the banner of materialism. Here, at least, the heirs of Marx and Comte stand together. Even those who most insightfully probe the interactions of structures and ideas usually vow fidelity to the materialist cause, as no charge appears to be more deadly than that of idealism.^[4]

But I would argue that we would be better off not merely suspending this debate, but rejecting the notion that the two terms can be separated at all. Even when confining oneself strictly to economics one must confront the ineffable and purely ideal premises and trust upon which the entire modern financial edifice rests.

So too in Buguias: ideology and economy, faith and work, discourse and production—these are terms that cannot be disentangled and assigned relative priority. To expend our energies on such futile gestures is indeed to perpetuate a ritual without hope or an end.

Ritual Survival, Ecological Devastation

Of numerous attempts to explain the ecological dimension of ritual, Rappaport's (1967) materialist interpretation of swine sacrifice among the Maring of New Guinea probably is the best known. For Rappaport, the periodic kaiko ceremony, marked by mass immolation of hogs, is a mechanism for regulating the balance between human and animal species. This socioeconomic mode of "ritual regulation" is said to contrast sharply with that of the often ecologically destructive resource allocation mechanisms of the market (Rappaport 1979: 73, 148).

Such a model has no currency in contemporary Buguias.^[5] Although its economy has come to be regulated almost entirely by market forces in the past generation, its ritual regime has not significantly changed since prewar days. One would be hard-pressed to find any "adaptive" qualities in Buguias Paganism, which if anything has predisposed its believers to enmesh themselves in a commercial order that Rappaport deems maladaptive. While retaining

its ritual forms, Buguias has served the global economic system handsomely. The profits earned by a handful of local entrepreneurs pale next to those garnered annually by the chemical and seed companies. How well it has served its own environment is another matter.

Environmental Threats

Contemporary Buguias illustrates the diverse array of causal patterns that converge in any particular instance of environmental deterioration. Within the Philippines, the village occupies a peripheral locale, long neglected and at times actively victimized by the state. Given demographic expansion, poor growers have little option but to clear new gardens on steep slopes, accelerating soil loss in a pattern common to many tropical and subtropical uplands. To this extent, the community conforms to the expectations of political-ecological theory, which emphasizes the marginalization of impoverished growers as the primary cause of ecological despoliation in the Third World (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). Buguias's most blatant degradation, however, is directly attributable to the elite, particularly to those individuals who use bulldozers to clear carelessly new gardens in the cloud-forest highlands.

To put it most succinctly, the specific forms of environmental degradation evident in Buguias derive from the actions of a stratified, demographically dynamic community with a highly entrepreneurial ethos, engaging in chemical-intensive commercial vegetable production in typhoon-prone tropical upland with a deeply weathered bedrock mantle. Truck crops simply cannot be grown profitably here without large chemical doses, owing to the vigor of insect pests and fungal growths in the moist and mild climate. Massive soil loss is similarly inevitable where root crops are grown in the wet season, when fields must be steeply sloped to allow drainage. And expansion into the eastern cloud forest, while affording entrepreneurs rich fields and cheap labor, not only aggravates local erosion and deforestation but also creates increasingly serious water shortages at lower elevations.

The Philippine state has contributed to the problem, but its actions have been contradictory and confused. Outright government hostility has occasionally threatened the livelihood of farmers, forc-

ing them at times to deforest their own lands. And even the state's well-intentioned environmental safeguards have proved ineffectual, as competing interests have successfully lobbied for contradictory policies. Overall, the state has influenced the vegetable economy most directly through road construction, the consequences of which have been decidedly ambiguous. Roads offer gardeners profound benefits, yet by permitting continual expansion they also further watershed denudation. And even their beneficial attributes are often the unintended byproducts of policies designed primarily to enhance central control; the major roads east of Buguias, for example, were constructed to help the Philippine military combat the New People's Army.

Similar mixed consequences accrue to local land investments. As Blaikie and Brookfield show (1987:9), cultivators can forestall—and sometimes even reverse—land degradation by building walls, terraces, and irrigation facilities. Such works are ubiquitous in Buguias, forming an essential foundation for the vegetable economy. Yet it is precisely the newest and largest of such investments, the megaterraces now being leveled by bulldozers, that cause the worst losses of soil.

The commercialization of agriculture in Buguias has greatly accelerated the pace of degradation, but we should by no means assume that the prewar environment was in any sense pristine. Over the course of several centuries, the Buguias people remolded their landscape to anthropogenic contours. Many Benguet districts were extensively deforested well before the colonial era, and the entire Agno Valley has long been cleared of a number of animal species. More importantly, prewar population growth in Buguias was generating increasing environmental strains, and while it is possible that adaptive solutions could have been devised, it is unlikely that the transition would have been entirely forgiving of the landscape.

In any case, the question is now moot; the Buguias people will not, and cannot, return to subsistence cropping. Nor can they revive old land-management techniques to make their commercial farming more sustainable; the current crop complex lies entirely outside the realm of traditional horticultural methods. More feasible would be the adoption of new, less environmentally taxing forms of commercial agriculture, such as some have suggested might be found in citrus or other fruit crops. Arboriculture would

demand considerable local restructuring, as well as state (and international) assistance, but it may yet prove a way out of the dilemma.

Prospects

As distressing as forest loss, soil erosion, biocide poisoning, and wildlife extinctions are, Buguias's agricultural system is in no danger of immediate collapse. To pronounce commercial farming hopelessly unsustainable here would be premature; the present system could conceivably limp along for years, as farmers devise makeshift solutions for each new ecological impasse. But we must wonder whether they will manage to sustain their living standards while doing so, and how much trauma their lands will suffer as a result.

For the nonce, at least, it would be difficult to substantiate the view that vegetable farmers are worse off for having abandoned subsistence cultivation. Successful engagement in a commercial economy has given Benguet's highlanders a degree of power vis-à-vis the Philippine government uncommon in small-scale indigenous societies, and the Buguias people themselves voice overwhelming approval of the changes they have undergone since the war. But the Benguet vegetable industry confronts an imperiled future. Already the economy is deteriorating, and absent an unforseen miracle, it will continue to do so for some time. Encouraged by their belief in the manipulability of fate to continue pushing back the vegetable frontier, the people of Buguias are indeed wagering the land against high odds.

As a counterexample to received wisdom in much of contemporary ethnography and development studies, the story of Buguias is instructive. But the particularity of the place and time—the uniqueness of Buguias's historical geography—cannot be overemphasized. It is essential to the argument presented throughout this work, as to the theoretical framework in which it has been couched, that generalized conclusions not be extrapolated from this one case. Moreover, the situation described is transitory, a fleeting moment in a historical process that defies prognostication. Schumpeter (1942) insisted that destructiveness was at the heart of capitalism's creativity. Destruction is amply evident in Buguias; whether the process could ultimately prove creative is a question for later years.