Geographical Patterns

The relationship between religion and economic change varies significantly across the southern Cordillera along three main axes. Foremost is the survival of ritual feasting in areas of commercial agriculture, generally those along the Mountain Trail and in the upper Agno Valley. Further, within those areas, it is the older valley settlements that retain the most elaborate ritual forms. Finally, a third crosscutting areal pattern follows cultural groupings: villages inhabited by the Southern Kankana-ey tend to be both more "progressive" economically and more conservative religiously than their Ibaloi neighbors. Let us take up each of these patterns in turn.

The survival of prestige feasting in commercialized areas is at one level a simple matter of resources. Before the war, low population densities allowed extensive pastoralism, providing abundant

meat for ritual feasts throughout the area. With rapid demographic growth in Benguet during the late prewar and postwar periods, the ratio of stock to humans declined dramatically, with the consequence that sacrificial animals increasingly had to be imported from the lowlands. Only those villages able to parlay cash crops for meat could continue to celebrate lavish feasts after the war.

The eastern cloud-forest villages, however, many of which have yet to recover their prewar populations, were battered by the long-term depression of the highland gold industry. When the miners of Suyoc could no longer afford prodigious quantities of pork, the oak-woodland dwellers lost their main outlet for hogs and hence their essential source of cash. The increasing availability of cheap manufactured goods administered another blow, destroying the copper-ware industry and impoverishing the iron workshops. The final assault on the old economy was the privatization of village hinterlands; this, coupled with the ban on the open pasturage of hogs, made local meat production much more difficult than it had been.

Given, then, that for economic and ecological reasons prestige feasts persisted only in areas of commercial farming, it remains to be explained why the more elaborate forms survived only in the older villages of the Agno Valley—poor cousins, in fact, to the prosperous Mountain Trail vegetable districts. The answer lies in the local configurations of social power. Whereas the latter communities emerged wholly new after the war, social arrangements in the valley towns carried over from prewar times. Entrenched elders, who benefitted most from the traditional system, used their power to lobby for retention of the old ways. Also significant was the fact that Buguias farmlands never became concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy growers. Here dramatic individual changes of fortune have continued to occur, and ascension into the elite, while increasingly difficult, is still possible. This social and economic fluidity has supported the elders' arguments that anyone can prosper through appropriate ritual observances.

Finally, there is a persistent difference in entrepreneurial ethos between the two dominant peoples of the southern Cordillera: the Ibaloi and the Southern Kankana-ey. Although commercial farms dominate several Ibaloi districts, most continue to produce primarily for subsistence.^[2] In Kabayan, an Ibaloi village directly south of Buguias, vegetables have been grown as cash crops for a number

of years, but poor returns during the 1970s and 1980s persuaded many Kabayan residents to abandon market gardening altogether (Wiber 1985:428)—a response unthinkable in Buguias. Even in the commercialized (and traditionalist) Ibaloi community of Trinidad, graded prestige feasts have declined, although curing and death rituals have persisted. Moreover, the wealthiest farmers here have been able to stint on their ceremonial expenditures (Russell 1989b ).

The key to this widespread difference in commercial attitudes appears to lie in the two peoples' strikingly different histories of class formation. As the onetime premier gold producers of the southern Cordillera, the Ibaloi baknangs sustained a rigidly stratified society, closing their ranks to upward mobility. Marriages did not cross the class divide, and commoners had virtually no hope of reaching elite status. This distinct socioeconomic evolution had repercussions for both commercial attitudes and ritual practices. The relative fixity of hereditary status discouraged commercial risk-taking—on the part of aristocrats as well as commoners. This in turn reduced the economic incentive for holding ceremonies, which among the Southern Kankana-ey were often undertaken to ensure business success. The Ibaloi elite of Kabayan had once used the feast system to acquire the rice terraces of their less-wealthy co-villagers, but with the decline of their economic hegemony after the war they began to abandon the prestige feast altogether (Wiber 1989). Yet at the same time, the Buguias elders were reforming their pedit into the centerpiece of a grand conceptual tableau, one encompassing both a modernizing economy and an age-old cosmos and one that explicitly posits a central role for social mobility.

The emergence of Buguias Central as a center of modern Paganism is thus a product both of the community's economic position in past generations and of its recent development. In particular, all three of the criteria that perpetuate redistributive rituals in the postwar era—the development of commercial agriculture, the existence of a long-settled community run by tradition-minded elders, and dominance by Southern Kankana-ey rather than Ibaloi cultural elements—have converged in Buguias Central, boosting this community to prominence as the center of modern Cordilleran Paganism. By the late 1980s, followers of the leading mankotom of Buguias, the community's prophet and premier adviser, could call him simply "the number one Pagan."