Ritual Economics and the Social Order

The success of the Buguias people in retaining their redistributive feasts by no means generates social equality. But neither exploitation nor social stratification is new to Buguias. Both were deeply rooted in the precolonial social order, and both are perpetuated by the long-term functioning of Pagan economics.

Prestige Feasts and Social Differentiation

Several benefits accrue to elite celebrants, most immediately the legitimation of their wealth and enhancement of their prestige. Material reward may also follow; the respected baknang can attract clients more readily than could a disparaged noncelebrant. And for a would-be political leader, winning the support of the electorate requires major ritual investments.

But the wealthy receive their most substantial long-range benefits from the feast system through financing the rituals of their poorer neighbors. True, ritual loans carry minimal interest, but

weighty debts put the borrowing class in a perpetually subservient position, allowing the elite essentially to control the community. Higher rates of return might be obtained in the short run by investing elsewhere, but the long-term benefits of maintaining a large and docile clientele are significant.

Redistributive ceremonials have been seen to serve the upper strata in other places and times as well. In the chiefdoms of northwest North America, elite villagers enhanced their positions through the potlatch even as they dispensed with much of their property (Drucker and Heizer 1967). The same was once true in Toraja mortuary rites; according to Volkman (1985:6) "ritual was thought to affirm a person's 'place' as a noble, commoner or slave, distinctions based upon descent ('blood') and, at least ideally, coincident with wealth." And whereas the "cargo" feasts of syncretic Catholicism in Mesoamerica have often been analyzed as regenerating social equality (Cancian 1965:137), Cancian found their effects at least in one Chiapas district to be more ambiguous:

Service in the cargo system legitimizes the wealth differences that do exist and this prevents disruptive envy. There is, in effect, sufficient leveling . . . to satisfy normative prescriptions, but not enough to produce an economically homogeneous community [1965:140].

Cancian's observations hold as well for Buguias. Here, too, prestige feasts function simultaneously to redistribute riches and to reconstitute a hierarchical social order. Celebrants transform material wealth into symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1977), and while their prestige no longer allows elite villagers to mobilize labor directly, it does bolster their power in less direct ways.

For the community at large, the survival of the redistributive complex combines with the vagaries of vegetable farming to make for complex movements across class lines. Over a single generation, certain families in every class grow richer, while others, racked by ceremonial as well as other debts, fall lower in the social order. Shanin's (1972) analysis of Russian peasant household mobility patterns—highlighting the interactions of centrifugal (differentiating), centripetal (leveling), and cyclical mobility, and giving weight to chance events in each household's trajectory—provides an apt analogue.

In contemporary Buguias, chance cannot be overemphasized,

for the incorporation of risk into the deepest level of the ideological system influences all forms of mobility. The same belief in the manipulability of luck that supports entrepreneurialism has also proved devastating on occasion by encouraging untoward gambling. When Buguias residents gamed only among themselves, money remained within the community, the luck of the cards acting as a redistributive mechanism of sorts (cf. Mitchell 1988). But gambling has become a net drain for the community since the opening of a casino in Baguio City. If it is difficult for a habitué of Las Vegas or Monte Carlo to accept the inexorability of a slot machine's take, such notions are resisted even more strongly by Buguias Pagans, long schooled to consider luck the province of the ancestors. Of the four Buguias couples to have reached metropolitan elite status in the 1960s and early 1970s, three are said to have lost their fortunes in the plush rooms of the Baguio Casino (see Finin 1990 on Igorot gambling in general).

Analyzing the Social Formation of Buguias

The resulting social and economic structure of Buguias defies all conventional categories; however, all Cordilleran peoples have long been considered "tribal," based on their indigenous small-scale social organization, successful resistance to imperialism for several hundred years, sociocultural distinctiveness from the Philippine lowlanders, and retention of indigenous religion. This categorization is far from perfect; most Cordilleran groups have long been internally stratified, all were eventually brought under American political hegemony, and a large number have for some time been Christian.

The Benguet vegetable growers exhibit "peasant" characteristics as well, and several scholars refer to them as such (Russell 1983; Solang 1984; Wiber 1985). Powerful outside groups extract a large share of the gardeners' produce; labor-exchange practices coexist with wage work; and production is both for the market and for subsistence (see Wolf 1966; Shanin 1973; Scott 1976). The Benguet people have become subject to surplus extraction by both national elites and metropolitan states—a process that many scholars argue is sufficient to turn tribal peoples into peasants (Howlett 1973; Connell 1979; Howard 1980; Grossman 1984).

But the same vegetable growers have also been termed "petty commodity producers," a category related to, but not identical with, that of the peasantry (Russell 1989a; see Watts 1984:20). Unlike peasants sensu strictu , Benguet's rural (or "simple," or "petty") commodity producers cannot retreat to subsistence cultivation in the event of poor commodity prices. Thoroughly enmeshed in commercial relations, they have little to buffer them from the brutal backwash of commodity price collapses.

And finally, Buguias cultivators may even be called "capitalist farmers" inasmuch as they depend on wage labor (at least for portaging vegetables) and exhibit a (modified) capitalist economic logic. This latter attribute may be appreciated by substituting "the Buguias vegetable garden" for "the capitalist farm" in Wolf's (1966:2) classical definition of that economic form, yielding the accurate statement that "[the Buguias vegetable garden] is primarily a business enterprise, combining factors of production purchased in the market to obtain a profit by selling advantageously in a products market."

In short, Buguias vegetable growers can reasonably be classified as tribal cultivators, as peasants, as petty commodity producers, or as capitalist farmers. Each label points to important features of the community; none fully captures its present social and economic complexity. One must thus be careful in using and in interpreting such terms, for the mere act of labeling can create a fundamentally distorted picture.

Materialism and Idealism

The analysis presented above accords primacy neither to ideology nor to economics. The insistence on considering equally both religious belief and social structure springs from the conviction that both the ideal and the material have irreducible roles in human history. Few benefits are to be gained from jumping on either side of this hoary divide, a leap that recent social theory shows an increasing reluctance to make. For Marcus and Fischer (1986:85), "any materialist-idealist distinction between political economy and interpretive approaches is simply not supportable"; for Mann (1986: 19), the long-standing debate between the two has become a "ritual without hope and an end" (see also Errington 1989:296). As Stephen Toulmin (1990) so brilliantly shows, the current task is

precisely to rejoin such dichotomized oppositions sundered by Descartes and maintained in separation by over three hundred years of stultifying, modernist thought.

At present, most scholars interested in economic transformations on the margins of the world economy still rally to the banner of materialism. Here, at least, the heirs of Marx and Comte stand together. Even those who most insightfully probe the interactions of structures and ideas usually vow fidelity to the materialist cause, as no charge appears to be more deadly than that of idealism.^[4]

But I would argue that we would be better off not merely suspending this debate, but rejecting the notion that the two terms can be separated at all. Even when confining oneself strictly to economics one must confront the ineffable and purely ideal premises and trust upon which the entire modern financial edifice rests.

So too in Buguias: ideology and economy, faith and work, discourse and production—these are terms that cannot be disentangled and assigned relative priority. To expend our energies on such futile gestures is indeed to perpetuate a ritual without hope or an end.