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11 Conclusion: Understanding Buguias's Aberrant Development
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The Ideology of Pagan Economics

The outsider may marvel at the persistence of redistribution in this commercialized economy, but Buguias Pagans view the redistributive aspect of feasting as secondary. Major rituals are above all an investment in future productivity, an indispensable step toward well-being in an undivided economic-social-cosmic totality. Understanding the economic logic embodied in these observances is critical for grasping how this community can at once embrace capitalism and retain its indigenous practices.

Buguias Pagans view ritual expenditures and wealth accumulation as positively linked, holding ritual as the bridge to the ancestral spirits who control each individual's fate. A married couple must work hard to earn the money necessary to honor the ancestors of both spouses, the ultimate fonts of their good fortune. Although an observer might predict that financing repeated banquets would counter capital accumulation, believers are convinced that heavenly favor will ratchet the devoted practitioners continually upward.

Pagans thus incorporate a spiritual element into their understanding of the economy. Where Western capitalists posit a two-stage cycle of accumulation and investment, Buguias entrepreneurs believe in three-stage cycle of accumulation, ritual, and investment. Baldly self-interested acts must alternate with feasting, for only by giving back a part of one's earnings to the ancestors (and, hence, to the community) can one hope to incur their good will. This is presented not as a sacred postulate, but as an inductive observation, to be debated on the basis of empirical findings. Of course, the actual evidence is ambiguous; most celebrants do not particularly prosper, and for those who do, other explanations could be invoked. But to date, no Buguias couples who have shirked major rituals altogether have prospered, giving Pagan apologists their most compelling line of evidence.

The manipulation of fortune is an ancient aspect of Cordilleran religion whose importance has only been enhanced with the move to commercial agriculture. In modern vegetable farming, beset as it is by extraordinary price volatility and frequent natural disasters, every couple's success clearly hinges in part on elements beyond their control. The belief that fate may be managed encourages


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people to plunge into this risk-fraught environment—to do such things as plant lettuce in the typhoon season or start a new bus line. The greater the risk, the stronger must be the anticipation of success; major business ventures are usually foreshadowed by signs of prosperity (sangbo). Omen interpreters readily counsel risky strategies, an index of their confidence in divining the flow of future luck, since their own fortunes ride with those of their advisees.

Buguias Pagans do not equate luck with windfall profit. Success is offered but not guaranteed; it must be captured through sincere effort. Earnest work may also help unlock ancient promises delivered to one's forebears. Such sangbo are numerous, providing many households with personal motivations to labor arduously. Operating at multiple levels, such beliefs inculcate a work ethic that far surpasses anything held by Buguias Christians.

Contention, Rhetoric, and Power

Pagan ideology is far from a single orthodoxy. Theories of reality and notions of proper conduct vary considerably; continual debate on such questions creates a shared field of discourse more than a unified body of ideas. Since whole groups of individuals have rejected the ideology of their parents for Christianity, that field of discourse has been widened and partially rent in the postwar period.

Inequalities of power color ideological discussions. Wealthy individuals seek to maintain their positions by manipulating the religious order, while less powerful groups try to counter the status quo or at least to effect compromises. In Buguias the elite cling fervently to Paganism. The richest, the chrispa sycretists, espouse Christian doctrine as well, but all seek to perpetuate the feast system.

Even the elite do not comprise an entirely homogeneous group with respect to this issue. The truly wealthy, a cosmopolitan group residing in the provincial capital as often as in Buguias, can finance their required celebrations at little cost to their businesses or to their accustomed levels of consumption. For these fortunate few, Pagan ceremonies are reasonable social and political investments, yet not indispensable ones; if the feast system were to collapse, their positions would not be jeopardized.


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The village-bound middle ranks of the elite have more at stake in the system's perpetuation. This group is largely comprised of elders who owe their positions more to lifelong diligence than to dramatic business successes. They live frugally, saving as much as possible to finance their own and their neighbors' observances. By their clothing one might suspect many of them to be among the poorest members of the community. But their role in Paganism brings them considerable power in the council of elders, and if the feast system were to collapse, these individuals would fall with it.

In general, ritual obligations weigh heaviest on those of intermediate wealth. The poorest can simply decline to celebrate without fear of being turned away from their neighbors' feasts. But this option is not open to the less successful members of respectable family lines, individuals who must endure the financial and social pressures of their richer relatives. If such persons announce that they cannot afford the requisite ceremonies, they are virtually cornered into joining a Christian church. Converting will not convince relatives to desist from their hounding, but it does afford an ideological stance from which to resist, as well as an alternative community. Although all Christians do not convert for economic reasons, Christian leaders recognize that initial leanings toward the church often stem from resentment against the expenses of Paganism and the relentless pressures associated with it.

New Christians in Buguias are encouraged to study the scriptures in order to derive a less worldly foundation for their beliefs. In essence, they are taught to reject the premise that material wealth reflects spiritual worth. The fully converted level the charge of materialism against Paganism, accusing traditionalists of debasing the spiritual with the economic. Pagans, who insist that it is precisely through material goods that the linkages between heaven and earth are made manifest, return the accusation, arguing that Christians prefer to squander their wealth on personal luxuries rather than to share it with the community at large.

Max Weber and the Spirit of Capitalism

Precisely because of the prevalence of redistributive mechanisms and ideologies stressing luck or magic, "tribal" religion has often


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been regarded as perhaps motivating production but necessarily as restricting accumulation—hence thwarting economic development (e.g., Goode 1951:136). The same view has been promulgated with regard to Cordilleran Paganism. In the 1960s, for example, Tadaoan (1969:247) expressed the concern of the Commission on National Integration that "pagan beliefs and practices . . . were the root-cause that retarded economic and educational projects."

Specific sects of the universalizing religions, by contrast, have long been believed to inculcate the very spirit of capitalist enterprise. Observing the Protestant affiliation of most European leaders of industry at the turn of the century, Max Weber (1904 [1930]) argued that Calvinistic "worldly asceticism" had been the ideological font of capitalism itself. The Protestant businessman, he argued, would rather invest capital than squander it in sinful pleasures, thus confirming his divine election through his pecuniary success.

Weber's followers have since found a similar ethos in the faiths of other entrepreneurial groups, including Jodo and Zen Buddhism in Japan, Santri Islam in Java, and Jainism and Zoroastrianism in India (Bellah 1968:243). Yet such assertions are rarely made for any but the so-called high religions. As Eisenstadt (1968:18) writes:

It has been claimed that the more "magical" or "discrete" a religious system is, the less it is likely to facilitate the development of more continuous secular activities. The multitude of dispersed religious rituals found in most "primitive" religions were shown to inhibit the development of such sustained effort.

Indeed, converts to universalizing religions have often formed entrepreneurial islands within "tribal" societies.[3] Legitimating their actions by reference to their new ideologies, market-oriented converts can free themselves from onerous social demands. In Kapepa, Zambia, for instance, most successful commercial farmers are Jehovah's Witnesses who use their beliefs "to justify the repudiation of certain social relationships" (Long 1968:239).

In Buguias, the situation is reversed. Here, Jehovah's Witnesses and other Christians are distinctly less entrepreneurial than are traditionalists; in Buguias it is communitarian Paganism that inculcates both a strong business drive and a remarkable work ethic.


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And unlike the people of Kabylia, Algeria (Bourdieu 1977), those of Buguias do not disguise or "socially repress" the connection between social actions and economic gains. The linkage of ritual and accumulation is not only recognized but constitutes the subject of frequent debate.

The symbiosis of religion and capitalism is if anything more tightly forged in Buguias Paganism than in radical European Protestantism. Where early modern Calvinists interpreted wealth as a sign of election, riches for Buguias Pagans are the necessary means to obtain spiritual favor. Far from being fatalistic, their belief is interventionist to the last. "Worldly asceticism," however, quickly evaporates in Buguias's rituals, replaced by an otherworldly hedonism that Weber's bourgeois businessman would find utterly sinful. But the Buguias traditionalists revel in such extravagance only so long as it remains in a ritual context—and Weber may have exaggerated the asceticism of the Calvinist burgher in any case (see Schama 1988:334, and Leroi Ladurie and Ranum 1989:113, 114).


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