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).