The Commercial History of Buguias

Most small-scale societies are, or were, prior to their incorporation within the global economy, relatively equalitarian. Although often divided by rank, few were stratified by class (Fried 1967). Their economies generally relied not on monetary calculus but on reciprocal exchange, often structured through kinship. Such societies have proved highly vulnerable to the individualizing and economizing pressures inherent in a commercial order.

The villages of the southern Cordillera, by contrast, have long possessed social and economic structures that in many ways anticipated those of state-level formations. Cash-based trade formed a

significant component of their prewar economies, and class stratification was advanced. Elite couples owned the cattle herds and the best lands, and they could pass on at least part of their wealth to their children. Several scholars have argued that imperial machinations rather than autochthonous development produced this elite class of "petty despots" (for example, Voss 1983: 40), but while Spanish and American authorities did bolster the indigenous elite, I would argue that they were able to do so only because a plutocracy already existed. That a baknang class, some of whose members were fabulously wealthy by later standards, predated Spanish rule is quite clear in the historical record (Scott 1974).

The commercialized economy and stratified society of prewar Buguias should not be overemphasized. Some goods were bartered, labor could still be mobilized cooperatively, and the bonds of kinship and community moderated individualizing tendencies. Moreover, the elite did not monopolize power, as most male elders held important places in the tong tongan jury. But such qualifications notwithstanding, the socioeconomic system of prewar Buguias proved in many ways compatible with capitalism.

Elite dominance was underwritten by control of long-distance trade. This was not a unique phenomenon; from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, Southeast Asia's "age of commerce" (Reid 1988), commercial exchange was widespread throughout this part of the globe. In northern Luzon, a trade originating in this period between the gold-producing uplands and ceramics- and iron-bearing Chinese vessels had important ramifications for the Cordilleran hinterland. Supplying hogs to the gold miners allowed highland merchants to accumulate considerable wealth, stimulated the development of an integrated regional economy, and exposed highland traders to the cash-based exchange system of the lowland towns. Buguias's ultimately pivotal position between the consumption centers of the mines and the hog-producing oak-woodland nurtured in the community at large an entrepreneurial ethos. Without the early experience in gold, the southern Cordillera in general and Buguias in particular would have developed along very different lines.

Since a finely stratified society and a highly commercialized economy were firmly in place prior to the Japanese invasion, the major transformations of the postwar period must be located in

other realms of social life. The most fundamental change during this era was the repositioning of the southern Cordillera within the global economy. Whereas Benguet's tenuous economic connection to the prewar international order was through the gold trade, the growth of a chemical-intensive temperate vegetable industry in the postwar era bound the area much more closely to national and international circuits.

The Buguias people entered these wider markets readily. They did not "resist" the new order in any of the common senses of the term. While protesting "alien" (resident Chinese) domination, they embraced the vegetable industry as a whole, including the accompanying extension and intensification of commercial exchange, the final privatization of land, the commoditization of labor, and the institutionalization of usury. Moreover, the community applauded the investment activities of its "progresso" accumulators. Voss (1983), on the basis of work among the nearby Northern Kankanaey of Sagada, argues that despite having adopted certain forms of capitalistic relations, villagers have done so on their own terms and are thus still "resisting capital." In Buguias, such an interpretation is difficult to support. The Buguias people certainly did "accept capital" on their own cultural terms, but their local economy serves the multinational agrochemical companies as well as any.