1. My interviews in Cotabato were conducted primarily in Magindanaon, but also in Tagalog and, occasionally, in English. It was not uncommon for more than one language to be used in the course of a conversation.

2. A very important exception to that general trend is provided by a historian of the Philippines, Reynaldo Ileto, in his work Pasyon and Revolution . Ileto inquires of the Philippine Revolution begun in 1896, "how did the [lower classes] actually perceive, in terms of their own experience, the ideas of

nationalism" enunciated by their elite leaders (1979, 4)? It is the very same question I ask of the contemporary Muslim separatist movement in the Philippines, Ileto and I agree that the meaning of these movements was not the same for rank-and-file adherents and movement elites. There are parallels in this book as well with Ileto's focus on folk narratives, religion, and popular beliefs in preternatural powers. Our answers to the question about the perceptions and motivations of ordinary adherents do differ, Ileto launches his analysis from the position of wanting to know "how the traditional mind operates, particularly in relation to questions of change"(1979, 2). He tends to view the behavior of lower-class participants in the revolution as "attempts to restructure the world in terms of ideal social forms and modes of behavior" (1979, 8). Together with most contemporary anthropologists, I am quite skeptical of the existence of a "traditional mind" (of course, they and I have had the benefit of more than twenty years of hindsight since Ileto's initial writing). I also take a different view of the relationship between culture and collective action. I will argue that the independent perceptions and motivations of rank-and-file adherents of the Muslim separatist movement represent not only imaginative but strategic endeavors. That is to say, Muslim subordinates have exercised their political imaginations to envision a more perfect (though not always more "traditional") world, but also to voice their resistance to the official aims of movement leaders, especially when those goals seemed to contradict other, more local considerations.

3. The term "ordinary Muslims" is a problematic one (see Peletz 1997), and I need to define my particular usage before proceeding further. Throughout this work I use the phrase "ordinary Muslims" in three intermingled senses to reference three (near-perfectly) overlapping categories of persons. "Ordinary Muslims" refers first to those Cotabato Muslims (the great majority) who comprise the subordinate (or "lower") classes—those who occupy similarly disadvantaged positions in the regional system of resource distribution. In respect to relations of production almost all may be classified as peasants, low-skilled wage workers, or petty producers or service providers in the urban informal economy. Second, "ordinary Muslims'' refers to those Cotabato Muslims who are not political elites. By my definition, political elites either occupy commanding positions at the head of a social grouping or are able to exert significant influence on those occupants as the result of their control of political and economic resources. In its third sense, "ordinary Muslims" refers to those Cotabato Muslims who possess neither a strongly self-conscious ethnic identity as Moros (Philippine Muslims), nor a highly objectified Islamic consciousness. The ethnoreligious consciousness of ordinary Muslims in Cotabato is discussed in detail farther on (see especially chapters 5 and 6). It should be assumed that, despite these similarities, significant differences in religious orientation and practice may be found among ordinary Muslims in Cotabato.

4. This notion of multidimensional "social fields of force" is taken from William Roseberry (1994, 357). Roseberry's own use of the metaphor is a reworking and extension of an image originally provided by E. P. Thompson (1978).