Buguias Trade in the American Period
Buguias trade patterns in the American period owed much to environmental and cultural variation within the southern Cordillera. Complex topography, vertically banded production zones, monsoonal seasonality, a patchy distribution of mineral resources, and a diversity of cultural groups all contributed to pronounced differences in local production over short distances. Trade linkages cen-
Map 6.
The Buguias Trade Sphere. Only the most important trade routes are indicated on the map.
tered on Buguias integrated multiple environmental zones and several different peoples (see map 6).
The Buguias mercantile system was predicated on a consistent pattern of exchanges carried out between specific centers of production. In the immediate neighborhood each substantial village occupied a unique position in the network. Beyond this local zone, trade involved exchanges across broad cultural and ecological zones; these included both the cloud forest (or kalasan) and the Ifugao culture region to the east, the lower elevation areas of Benguet to the south and west, and the Ilocos Coast along the South China Sea.
Kabayan, 10 kilometers to the south, was a major local partner.
At 1,200 meters, this Ibaloi village is 200 meters lower than Buguias, hence distinctly warmer and drier during the low-sun season. Its steep hillsides, however, offered fewer suitable sites for dry fields. Whereas Buguias umas yielded sweet potatoes abundantly throughout the year, those in Kabayan were barren in the dry months. Rice, by contrast, flourished here and was produced in great abundance. Kabayan's terraces were not only much more extensive than those of Buguias, but they also gave larger and more assured harvests. The residents of the two villages thus found each other natural trade partners, and many Buguias households bartering dried sweet potatoes here for rice. In addition, some Buguias residents purchased Kabayan rice with cash, clothing, or other trade goods, and not a few poorer individuals labored in Kabayan's fields in exchange for harvest shares.
Buguias residents also exchanged foodstuffs with the Kankanaey villages of the upper Agno Valley. Occasional frosts in Lo-o, 8 kilometers north, precluded the cultivation of ginger and other crops. Furthermore, the Lo-o people grew no rice until cold-tolerant strains appeared in the 1920s; earlier they had purchased necessary stores in Kabayan and occasionally in Buguias. In exchange, Lo-o exported, among other goods, meat-horses raised on its extensive bottomland pastures. Residents of the smaller settlements on the slopes above the Agno River also procured rice in both Buguias and Kabayan, usually in exchange for hogs or chickens. Hogs and cattle also flowed from these marginal communities to Buguias as interest payments, as the local system of animal lending bound these small villages tightly to Buguias financiers.
East of Buguias, along the main ridge of the Cordillera and into Ifugao province, lay the extensive cloud forest, dominated by oak and other hardwoods. The Kalanguya-speaking inhabitants of this mossy oak woodland were closely connected, genealogically and commercially, to the Buguias people, and during the American period a good part of the region was an economic hinterland of Buguias. Unlike the Agno Valley, this area was the province of professional traders, men who had learned the art of "buy and sell" and who could profit by their knowledge of the geographic variation of commodity prices.
The cloud forest produced hogs in great abundance. Its thick forests yielded ample mast, fungus, and earthworms, and its perennial humidity allowed year-round sweet-potato harvests while
militating against porcine skin disease. Here Buguias traders could also obtain forest products, such as rattan and various species of bamboo, unavailable at home. Minor cloud-forest specialties included chickens, eggs, mushrooms, honey, and migratory birds (attracted by torchlight and captured with nets on foggy autumn nights along the main ridge).
The Buguias traders brought copper pots, ironware, and textiles (especially funeral blankets) to exchange for these coveted products of the cloud forest. In addition, the local residents were eager to obtain silver pesos and copper coins—scarce items in this remote area but readily obtained by the Buguias people elsewhere in their trading sphere.[1] Buguias merchants would also extend credit, both in cash and in livestock, to cloud-forest dwellers. In fact, the wealthiest Buguias residents managed to accumulate hundreds, and at times thousands, of hogs and cattle throughout this region, and many kalasan dwellers remained perpetually in their debt.
One thread of the Buguias trade network continued east across the cloud forest to the Ifugao district of Kiangan. An expedition to this region required some ten days, but Kiangan supplied highvalue goods, particularly water buffalo. The Buguias people valued buffalo for rituals and sometimes as work animals, but they resold most of them for profit in other Benguet communities. The Kiangan people did not raise these animals themselves, but rather imported them from the adjacent Magat Valley. Only occasionally would Buguias merchants travel so far to purchase directly from the stock breeders. Human chattel formed another element of the Kiangan trade in the early American period. Kiangan slavers typically trafficked in debtors, convicted thieves, and captives from other Ifugao regions. Buguias residents recall the average Kiangan slave as selling for roughly the same price as a large cow or water buffalo, a value similar to that found by Worcester (1903) for the lowland areas of northern Luzon.[2]
Buguias traders traveled extensively through the northern two-thirds of Benguet, primarily to purchase swine. Benguet hogs, especially ones from the lower, warmer areas, were different animals from those of the cool, moist cloud forest. Never as fat, they were however more easily fattened. According to local theory, Benguet hogs were accustomed to such an impoverished diet (of sweet-potato leaves, rice hulls, garbage, and human waste) that they would readily eat—and even batten on—the raw sweet potatoes
that their spoiled cloud-forest cousins found indigestible. Buguias traders therefore keenly purchased such animals for fattening at home. Cash-hungry Benguet villagers would also sell their aged hogs, prized throughout the Cordillera for their long tusks. Buguias traders sometimes sacrificed tuskers in their own rituals, but more often they sold them to Ifugao and Northern Kankana-ey itinerants who were willing to pay well for this particular form of ostentatious display.
Through their extensive trade network and local production, the Buguias elite had access to a larger supply of hogs than could be consumed at home. Their outlet for this meat supply lay in the gold-mining village of Suyoc (see Lednicky 1916; Marche 1887 [1970]), 12 kilometers to the northwest. Suyoc supplied cash for the entire Buguias trade network and formed its most concentrated consumption point: its miners had both abundant coins (obtained from local traders who sold their gold in the lowlands) and a prodigious appetite for pork. Above all else, the Buguias merchants' profits came from provisioning this mining community.
The steady, high level of demand for pork in Suyoc stemmed from the exclusive concentration of the community on the mines. The miners spared no time for agriculture. Instead they imported their food: rice from the Northern Kankana-ey, sweet potatoes and vegetables from Lo-o, and hogs primarily from Buguias and Lo-o. Although the wealthy among them sometimes owned substantial cattle herds (raised in other communities), the miners could not consume beef in the rainy excavation season: the spirits guarding the ore were believed to find its odor offensive. Pork, however, was a ritual necessity as well as a staple food. Every strike called for a thanksgiving feast, and the miners performed other elaborate rituals as well. One funeral in the late Spanish period reportedly lasted three months, during which time sacrifices continued and the entire community abstained from labor (Scott 1974:286). And pork formed a staple as well, since the miners believed that only a diet of meat would provide them sufficient strength for their arduous work.
Along the coast, the Buguias merchants' main destination was the old commercial center of Naguilian (see Keesing 1962:107). Here the Buguias traders brought coffee, dried legumes, and cash. In return, they primarily purchased cloth, a good generally not produced in Benguet. Lowland Ilocano weavers furnished several
varieties of funeral blankets, loincloths for men, skirts and jackets for women, and plain white fabric. The intricate designs in funerary blankets may have followed patterns designed by the highlanders and originally used in decorating the local bark fabric, and the lowland weavers had to meet the exacting standards of their highland customers. Other notable products of Naguilian included dogs, tobacco, salt, and sugar, all of which could be obtained in Buguias but were cheaper and often of better quality in the lowlands.
Buguias merchants also conducted business in other lowland Ilocano towns. Cervantes, probably the second most important lowland destination, furnished pig iron (used in the Buguias foundries), cotton cloth, cattle, and horses. Buguias merchants occasionally visited the coastal town of Tagudin to buy Chinese porcelains. But most of these lowland trade partners began to be replaced after the first decade of American rule by the new highland city of Baguio, which grew to rival even Naguilian as a commercial center once the American colonialists established their summer capital and hill station there (see Reed 1976). Although well within the mountains, Baguio functioned as an imperial and lowland-Filipino outpost, and it eventually emerged as the preferred source for many lowland products.
As for economic relations with the far north, animosity with the Bontoc people of the central Cordillera prevented Buguias traders from venturing north of Mount Data. Since the Northern Kankanaey (living north of Data but south of the Bontoc) produced goods desired in Buguias and were themselves in need of cash, commerce did occur, but it could only be carried out by the northerners. Northern Kankana-ey men, who visited Buguias primarily for contract work, sometimes traded; northern women came specifically to sell their handicrafts, especially ceramic vessels (neither Buguias nor its neighbors produced pottery). The Northern Kankana-ey also wove and sold funeral blankets and other fabrics, in increasing competition with the Ilocano weavers.