The Tiruray

The Tiruray are non-Muslim^[10] upland horticulturalists who inhabit the northern portion of the Tiruray Highlands. In 1980, the Tiruray were estimated to number about 30,000 persons (Schlegel 1977). The Tiruray have made their living as shifting cultivators in the densely forested mountains and valleys of the highlands, growing rice, corn, tobacco, and other crops in upland fields and foraging in the surrounding forests.

For centuries the Tiruray have maintained significant trade relationships with Magindanaon communities in the lowlands. Similar to the pattern found throughout Southeast Asia, this upland-lowland trade involved exchanges of forest and swidden products for iron tools, cloth, and salt, and took place within unequal and often coercive clientage arrangements. Since the beginning of the American occupation at

the turn of the century, the Tiruray have been experiencing rapid social change. Today they are divided approximately in half between those more accessible communities that have been drawn into plow agriculture and all its attendant sociocultural transformations, and those communities of still-traditional people in the remote forests of the Tiruray Highlands (Schlegel 1979). As a result of the extensive and detailed ethnographic fieldwork of Stuart Schlegel, more is known about traditional Tiruray subsistence and social life than about any of the other indigenous populations of Cotabato (see, e.g., Schlegel 1970, 1972, 1979).