Overview

This work comprises two intertwined allegories. The first concerns the persistence of a society and the continued florescence of a culture, the inverse of a long dominant theme. The second tells a more familiar and more tragic tale: while this culture has so far abided the engulfing global economy, its very foundation is at risk. Buguias's commercial gambit may simply prove to be a brilliant disaster.

The story opens with a view of the landscape of Buguias as it appeared in the time of American rule. The initial chapter outlines subsistence production, an environmentally benign agricultural system that nevertheless radically transformed the landscape of Buguias. The following chapter explores the contours of social life, which were marked by distinct class stratification but tempered by frequent interclass mobility. A look at the ritual system, in which consumption climaxed, rounds out the picture of prewar Buguias as a self-contained community. The discussion then broadens out to consider the wider networks within which the Buguias people operated. Chapter 5 maps first the geography of trade, and then the penetration of imperial power. This completes Part I, a largely synchronic cut at prewar life.

World War II constituted a radical discontinuity in Buguias history, and with an interstitial discussion chronicling the war's devastation, the narrative takes a more diachronic turn. The story of the postwar era in Part II opens with the drama of reconstruction. The first two chapters of this second part cover the vegetable boom years from 1946 to 1973; the remainder of the work focuses on the era of stagnation and turmoil beginning in 1973 and continuing to the late 1980s. Topically, the discussion thus progresses from the successful rise of the new agroecological and economic order to its darker underside, the social tensions and environmental traumas that are increasingly revealed. The work concludes with an analysis of religion, the focal point of current ideological, economic, and political contention.