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INTRODUCTION

Abatan, Buguias, April 15, 1986

Five long hours by bus from the highland resort city of Baguio lies the unremarkable town of Abatan, a cluster of colorless storefronts of corrugated iron. Perched on a narrow ridge between the headwaters of the Agno and Abra rivers, the huddled buildings of this unpretentious town belie its importance as the marketing headquarters of the northern Benguet vegetable district, centered here in the municipality of Buguias. Where the ridge drops sharply away on both sides, metal sheeting gives way to terraced gardens of cabbages and potatoes extending hundreds of meters down the mountain slopes.

Abatan on most days presents a stark townscape, but a traveler passing through on April 15, 1986, would have witnessed a remarkable sight. On that day, dozens of vegetable trucks packed with villagers converged from miles around on the center of town. Some five thousand persons, representing over forty villages, had come to receive meat and rice beer, to dance and sing, and, most importantly, to worship their ancestors. Of the many prestige feasts celebrated in the Buguias region every year, this event was extraordinary. The celebrants had laid out a repast worth over 300,000 pesos, or $15,000 U.S., including twenty-seven water buffalo and cattle, scores of hogs, heaps of rice, and countless jugs of rice beer. The purpose of the staggering expense was to enlist supernatural assistance for accumulating further wealth.

The Transformation of Buguias Livelihood

Only fifty years ago, the ridge on which Abatan sits was covered with thick forests of pine and oak. On the lower slopes of the adjacent Agno Valley, herds of cattle, water buffalo, and hogs roamed

free in a landscape dotted with small hamlets, irrigated rice plots, and sweet-potato fields. But fierce battles at the end of World War II ravaged herds and fields, demolishing in the process an extensive local trade network that had underwritten social power and wealth. The old ways were never to revive. Within ten years, most residents of Buguias municipality were fully committed to market gardening.

For a time, temperate vegetables provided a measure of real prosperity. Considered a showcase of rural development during the 1960s, the area's landscape still signals the relative wealth of its inhabitants. Houses here are more solid, and clothing more ample, than in almost any lowland area of the Philippine archipelago, a fact not completely explained away by the cool highland climate. Numerous trucks of all sizes similarly testify to past profits, just as the insecticide and fungicide advertisements plastered over the public buildings bespeak a high-yield, chemical-intensive agriculture.

The wealth derived from vegetables also allowed the Buguias people to perpetuate a tradition of redistributive feasting. In earlier days, extravagant animal sacrifice typified religious practice throughout the southern highlands. During the 1830s the would-be conquistador Guillermo Galvey counted some 1,300 hog and water-buffalo skulls on a single house in the village of Kapangan (Scott 1974:214). Yet Kapangan, located on the far fringe of the vegetable district, has not seen a sizable feast in decades. By the 1980s, it was only the market-gardening villages that could finance lavish celebrations. Subsistence-oriented communities, which retained the more environmentally benign indigenous forms of cultivation, greatly curtailed their redistributive feasts after the war, in some instances abandoning the indigenous religion altogether. Benguet's modern center of Paganism—a term used by adherents and their Christian challengers alike—is the thoroughly commercialized village of Buguias Central, focus of this study.^[1]

Today, Buguias's prosperity looks increasingly tenuous. Largescale operators, vegetable traders, and chemical merchants continue to reap substantial profits, but the highland vegetable district as a whole saw its agriculture stagnate and its living standards decline as the Philippine economy stalled and sputtered through the

1970s and 1980s. Most growers have fallen deeply into debt, not uncommonly receiving less now for a given crop than they have to pay for seeds and chemicals. Nor does vegetable agriculture appear to be ecologically sustainable. Biocides and fertilizers have polluted local water supplies, erosion steadily denudes the steeper slopes, and deforested watersheds yield ever-diminishing stream flows.

Yet despite growing ecological peril and economic uncertainty, the people of Buguias remain committed to the gamble that is market gardening. Although they live under a constant threat of market collapse, farm families hope for the unpredictable upturns, wagering their crops—and increasingly their environment—on the day when they may reap the coveted "jackpot" harvest. For gambling is a fundamental precept of life in Buguias, albeit not exactly gambling as we conceive it. Many of the manifestations are familiar: boys of five and six wager their pocket money on the flip of a coin; young men frequent the cardhouses, cockpits, and casino of Baguio City; even elders bet compulsively at rummy. But most Buguias people do not consider fate to be blind; rather, they believe that risk can be manipulated through ritual. Like their grandparents before them, most contemporary villagers attempt to ensure the success of their most chancy undertakings through placating their ancestors and feasting their neighbors. It is the resulting nexus of economy, ecology, and religion, with its unusual concatenation of capitalist transformation, cultural persistence, and environmental degradation, that forms the core of this work.

Commercialization and Local Change

Commercial Agriculture and Environmental Degradation

The environmental destruction accompanying the spread of commercial agriculture along the margins of the global economy is now well documented by geographers and anthropologists. Areas previously marked by sustainable subsistence cultivation soon exhibit such symptoms as rapid soil erosion, deforestation, and pesticide

contamination (Nietschmann 1979; Blaikie 1985; Grossman 1984; Grant 1987). Damage most commonly results when impoverished growers are forced to retreat to ever more marginal lands (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). In Buguias, however, it is primarily the most prosperous farmers—those wealthy enough to hire bulldozers to flatten hilltops and to construct private roads—who precipitate erosion and deforest the slopes. Wealthy growers expanding into the fertile eastern cloud forests also destroy watershed vital for the entire valley, and increasingly outcompete the growers in the older, exhausted districts. But all villagers, rich and poor alike, degrade their lands, especially by unleashing biocides and fertilizers into the streams of the region.

This devastation does not stem from cultivators' ignorance or mismanagement. Benguet vegetable culture is in many respects intricately fitted to the local landscape, with each crop cultivated in the precise microhabitat to which it is best adapted. Moreover, most gardeners are aware of the dangers of chemical contamination and denuded slopes. But the commercial system in which they are imbricated leaves them few alternatives. With a long-term decline in profits and a notoriously capricious vegetable market, growers must feverishly intensify production in a desperate attempt to avoid losing ground during poor seasons (what Bernstein [1977] calls the "simple reproduction squeeze"). And the prospect of unpredictable price jumps propels them in the same direction; the lure of a jackpot harvest brings an even higher pitch of activity during the perilous typhoon season, a time marked by accelerated erosion and periodic market windfalls.

The environmental and social pressures of market-oriented agriculture in the global periphery can be extraordinarily destructive; in the worst cases, as Watts has shown for Nigeria, the "horrors and moodiness of the market" (1983:xxiii) can bring famine and mass starvation. But the vegetable districts of northern Luzon have as yet seen only the early warnings of an ecological and economic debacle. The vegetable farmers today remain the envy of both subsistence growers in the mountains and impoverished peasants in the lowlands. Nor has the market's individualizing force brought cultural dissolution as it so often does. In fact, far from destroying local culture, commercial development has greatly enhanced its

central feature, the redistributive prestige feast. But the very continuation of communal feasting has actually become an accomplice to the environmental breakdown.

Commercialization and Redistributive Feasts

While Buguias's environmental destruction replicates a sadly familiar pattern, its elaboration of communal feasting in conjunction with commercial gardening is unusual. Such rituals need not vanish as a community becomes tied to larger economic circuits; indeed, the most famous redistributive rite, the potlatch of northwest North America, flowered after trade links were established with European merchants (Belshaw 1965:28). Yet a long-standing scholarly tradition holds that such feasts, and communal ties in general, wither away once a society is incorporated into the world economy. Bodley (1975:167), for example, argues as follows:

Integration is not possible unless tribal cultures are made to surrender their autonomy and self reliance. When these are replaced by dependence on . . . the world market economy, a whole series of changes will follow until virtually all of the unique features of tribal cultures have been replaced by their contrasting counterparts in industrial civilization.

A pivotal agent of such change is usually said to be an emergent capitalist class, if not a generalized capitalist mentality, that resists ceremonial and other social outlays. As Grossman (1984:10–11) writes:

Villagers also want to free themselves from traditional social obligations that they believe hinder capital accumulation. Their individualistic behavior is manifested in a variety of realms: the extent of sharing, reciprocity, and cooperation in cash-earning activities is less than in traditional subsistence-oriented endeavors. . . .

And even when ceremonial exchange does persist under expanding market relations, "ritual inflation" (in which wealthy individuals devote ever-larger sums to display while the poor are disenfranchised) may undermine its stability, if not the entire social order (Grossman 1984:23; Volkman 1985:7; Hefner 1983:683). In a simi-

lar argument, James Scott (1976) links the spread of commercial relations with the downfall of a communitarian ethos in mainland Southeast Asia. In the precolonial states of this region, he argues, peasant politics were centered around a "subsistence ethic" that united each community within a "moral economy" and militated against risk-taking and profit-seeking behavior. With colonial rule, however, "the commercialization of the agrarian economy was steadily stripping away most of the traditional forms of social insurance" (Scott 1976:10).

During the heyday of modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s, most scholars applauded the market's ability to displace traditional cultural forms. Religion in general was thought to fetter development (see von der Mehden 1986:5), and many observers predicted that competitive economics would destroy communal institutions, leading eventually to "detribalization" (see de Souza and Porter 1974). Present-day writers tend to view cultural breakdown in the wake of commercialization as ethnocide rather than progress, but they have inherited the assumption of its inevitability. The two schools' analysis of the occasional survival of communal feasting bears this out. What constituted for modernization theorists an irrational stumbling block has become for scholars of the underdevelopment camp a bulwark against capital, the key to cultural persistence, and a core around which to organize political resistance.

Voss (1983) has recently extended the anticommercial version of this thesis to the Cordillera of northern Luzon. He argues that redistributive rites are declining in commercialized areas, but that their survival limits capitalist penetration elsewhere. Specifically, he holds that in Sagada "the maintenance of such non-commercialized relations as redistributive feasting . . . has been instrumental in limiting class differentiation" and in molding market economics into a socially benign form, whereas in the Buguias region, he claims, socially atomized and fully capitalistic producers have reduced their ceremonial expenditures to a minimum (1983:14–15, 225–230).

Voss is probably correct in regard to Sagada, the primary locus of his research, but I would argue that he misrepresents feasting in Buguias. In Buguias not only are public feasts much more common than in Sagada, but more importantly, they are strongly reinforced

by agricultural commercialization. Farmers who successfully accumulate must also feast their neighbors. This should not surprise us. It has long been acknowledged that "redistribution" is usually a misnomer for what happens in prestige feasts; as Wolf (1982:98) writes, "Feasting with the general participation of all can go hand in hand with the privileged accumulation of strategic goods by the elite." Yet conventional academic wisdom has not taken this point to heart. Commercialization does often leave cultural wreckage in its path, but as Buguias shows, such is not invariably the case (for examples other than Buguias, see Parker [1988] and Fisher [1986]).

In Buguias, public and private interests are tightly fused. The celebrants of the community's grandest feasts are its most successful entrepreneurs, individuals who invest in business expansion as well as in communal rites. And with few exceptions, those who have renounced, often on economic grounds, the old religion they call Paganism have been unable to translate their savings into prosperity. Pagan ideology expressly endorses commercial ventures, reserving its highest accolades for the "progressive" individuals who work hard, adopt new technologies, invest in productive enterprises, and lend money for gain—so long as they also honor their ancestors and feast their neighbors.

Theoretical Underpinnings

The conceptual framework adopted here derives in part from "regional political ecology," a recent movement formed through the marriage of the environmental concerns of cultural ecology and the developmental focus of political economy. In this emerging literature, social conflict and land degradation tend to be emphasized over the communal harmony and environmental adaptation highlighted by earlier scholars. (See, in geography, Grossman 1984; Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Bassett 1988; Zimmerer 1988; Hecht and Cockburn 1989; and Turner 1989. In anthropology, see Schmink and Wood 1987; and Sheridan 1988). Inspiration is also found in traditional cultural geography, which approaches the human modification of local environments as deeply rooted historical processes, molded in part through the cultural perceptions of human agents. Culture is viewed here not as an autonomous, "super-organic" entity (see Duncan 1980), but rather as inextricably bound

up with politics and economics, continually reconstituted and reshaped through subtle interplay between individuals and social groups.

The underpinnings of the "political" side of political ecology derive largely from radical development studies. This tradition has been fruitful in illuminating specific economic processes behind local environmental change in the modern era, which must in most instances be analyzed within the context of global capitalism. But it has also biased the field against recognizing that "precapitalist" societies, and certainly "socialist" ones, often evince similar processes of land degradation. Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) offer one corrective in the novel tactic of collegial disputation, one writer arguing from a Marxist background and the other countering from a behavioralist stance throughout a coauthored text. Although writing in a dialogic mode is not an option for the solo author, I have allowed a degree of theoretical agnosticism into this text by (loosely) employing both Weberian and Marxian notions, tending toward the latter when analyzing the economy, and veering toward the former when considering religious issues. Both traditions offer powerful lenses that can profitably be trained on social and ecological change in Buguias; to take either one alone is to risk limiting inquiry and obscuring those processes that defy expectations.

One of the fundamental premises of this study is that social, cultural, economic, and ecological change must be analyzed in dense empirical detail. Here I am especially inspired by Stephen Toulmin, whose richly eloquent Cosmopolis (1990) thoroughly undermines the modernist agenda of "universal, general, and timeless" theorization and instead leads the way into a more humane appreciation of "the oral, the particular, the local, and the timely" (1990:186)—all conceived within a fluid ecological perspective. Thus, while employing a variety of theoretical constructs, I have avoided couching the findings within any "grand theory." My ethnographic sensibility leads me to seek "explanation[s] of exceptions and indeterminants rather than regularities" (Marcus and Fischer 1986:8); by the same token, as a geographer I am wary of "spatial over-aggregation" (Corbridge 1986). Broadly similar patterns often emerge where modern economic processes transform ritual and ecological practices, but a useful heuristic for directing the questions must not become a limiting template for interpreting

findings. Commercialization has often dissolved communal bonds, but its failure to do so in Buguias does not necessarily mean that we have found an aberrant exception. In practice, this means being willing to revise radically one's preconceptions. I argue from experience here; having arrived in Buguias with a deep Polanyian (see Polanyi 1957) skepticism regarding "precapitalist" markets, I was only gradually, and painfully, disabused of this romantic notion as I delved into the commercial history of Buguias.

Field Methods

In probing the paradoxes implicit in interpreting "the other," Marcus and Fischer (1986) conclude that fieldwork is essentially dialogic, a fact that they argue should be acknowledged by incorporating the voices of the studied not as informants but as collaborators. Such an approach, they claim, can open doors to indigenous "epistemologies, rhetorics, aesthetic criteria, and sensibilities" (1986:48).

This project followed Marcus and Fischer's dictum in important ways. From the day I arrived in Buguias with Karen Wigen, my wife and fellow geographer, research was not only facilitated but actually guided by a local couple, Lorenzo and Bonificia Payaket. The Payakets took keen if often amused interest in all of our questions, repeatedly suggesting new avenues of inquiry. In particular, although we entered the field with no intention of studying religion, they insisted on introducing us to indigenous priests. Their message was simple: to understand Buguias you must understand religion. Eventually we deferred.

After a few weeks in Buguias, a basic routine was established. Each evening, two or more of us would meet to determine the next day's explorations, the Payakets suggesting local experts with whom we could consult on a given topic. The following morning, we would walk to where the chosen individuals lived and interview them, often through the agency of field guides. In the early months our inquiry was limited to the village of Buguias Central. Gradually we began to venture farther afield, eventually making foot and bus journeys of several days to visit each settlement prominent in Buguias's history.

After returning home we would again confer with the Payakets, who would judge the reliability of our findings, suggest individu-

als who could either corroborate or give conflicting accounts, critique our field maps, and add observations of their own. These evening discussions can only be described as seminars. The sessions grew particularly lively when the Payakets brought with them individuals expert in the subjects at hand. But all conversations eventually wandered freely, leading in many unexpected directions. Nor did we limit ourselves to empirical findings; our evolving interpretations also formed a conversational mainstay.

Through these alternating interviews and evening discussions we gradually elicited the outline of Buguias's history presented here. Although I have also consulted the standard sources of historical scholarship (colonial documents, travelers' accounts and diaries, early scholarly reports, and newspaper articles), these rarely elucidate the most important local developments. Since Buguias was and is a predominantly oral culture, living memory is the primary source for reconstructing the community's past. In seeking standards of reliability, I follow Rosaldo's (1980) lead; where numerous individuals reiterate the same story, without contradictions, I have accepted it as most likely true. Where consensus is not obtainable, conflicting versions are retained with no attempt to choose among them.

Any interpretation is by nature partial, as much allegory as analysis. As such, the story told here remains to the last only one among several possible "true fictions" (Clifford 1986) that could have been wrought from the ethnographic materials pertaining to Buguias. If my time in Buguias proved conceptually liberating, it did not, however, divest me of all prior ideological baggage. Moreover, the individuals with whom I worked have undoubtedly inscribed on the text their own prejudices and programs as well, seeking to project their community in a specific light. The author bears final responsibility for any errors compounded through the numerous tissues of interpretation that constitute the work.

Identifying Buguias in the Ethnographic Landscape

The indigenous inhabitants of the Cordillera, collectively referred to as Igorots (a term some groups find offensive), were never hispanicized, and they retain a limited cultural autonomy to this day.

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Map 2.
The Standard Ethnographic Map of the Cordillera of Northern Luzon.

Western ethnographers have divided these highland peoples into seven or eight major groupings, once considered tribes, now usually termed ethnolinguistic groups (LeBar 1975, Keesing 1962; see map 2). But the categories employed here reflect a convoluted history of academic misconceptions (for an indigenous scholar's as-

sessment of the standard ethnographic classification, see Magannon 1988).

In the nineteenth century, Spanish and German observers partitioned the Cordillera by entirely different schemes; these may have been less accurate but they were no more misconceived than those later perpetrated by the Americans. The American ethnographic map originated with the outrageously sloppy scholarship of Dean C. Worcester, self-styled white deity of the archipelago's non-Christians (see Hutterer 1978). Finding the Spanish and German classifications cumbersome, Worcester (1906) took it upon himself to define new groups among the highlanders. Unfortunately, he seriously misunderstood the foreign-language sources he was criticizing.^[2] In classifying the various Cordilleran peoples, Worcester ultimately relied on visually distinctive cultural features casually observed by himself and his friends.^[3]

Competent ethnographers later modified Worcester's system. In Benguet, Moss (1920a , 1920b ) successfully insisted that the linguistic groups called Kankana-ey (or Kankanay) and Nabaloi (or Ibaloi), long recognized by all able observers, deserved separate "tribal" status. But Worcester's overall scheme prevailed, distorting subsequent ethnographic perceptions. Some of his so-called tribes, such as the Kalinga, were but melanges of dissimilar cultural groups (some of which have since coalesced to a degree); other more coherent groupings, most notably the Kalanguya (or Kallahan), received no recognition at all, simply because neither Worcester nor any colonial anthropologist happened to visit them.^[4] Recently linguists have begun to devise a more accurate classification system, but many geographic subtleties continue to elude cultural taxonomists (see, for example, Wurm and Hattori 1983; for the best work on southern Cordilleran linguistic and cultural groupings, see Afable 1989).

The case of Buguias reveals the inadequacies of the standard classificatory scheme. The community lies in the interstice of three linguistic or cultural groups; two of these, the Ibaloi and the Southern Kankana-ey, are now recognized, but the third, the Kalanguya (or Kallahan), remains virtually ethnographically invisible (see map 3). Although Buguias was probably an Ibaloi settlement originally, its residents today are most closely related (genealogically) to

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Map 3.
The Languages and Dialects of the Southern Cordillera.
Mandek-ey, or I-Buguias, is at present spoken only
in the southernmost hamlets of Buguias Village.

the Kalanguya; the village dialect (called Mandek-ey, or I-Buguias), while containing elements of all three neighboring tongues, is also most closely affiliated with Kalanguya. Over the past sixty years, however, Kankana-ey has penetrated southward into the village, and today Mandek-ey survives only in the southernmost hamlets of Buguias. As a result, outsiders generally classify Buguias as a Southern Kankana-ey community.

The geographic referent of the term "Buguias" is also equivocal. It originally referred to a single territorially based village, in some respects an indigenous microstate. Like other sizable Cordilleran villages, Buguias was accorded a vague political status under the Spanish colonial regime; gradually this solidified, and today Buguias forms a barangay , the smallest political territory in the Philippines. The modern barangay, called Buguias Central, corresponds

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Map 4.
Buguias Village. The dashed line encloses the modern barangay of Buguias Central; the solid line encloses the
traditional village, or ili , of Buguias. The traditional village was divided into four constituent units (Tanggawan,
Balagtey, Giwong, and Demang) during the American period. These smaller ili function today

imperfectly to the old village, since over the years some hamlets have been grafted to the original community while others have been deleted from it (see map 4). Only in the ritual realm does the old communal structure survive, and even here it was significantly transformed when the village elders, sometime in the American era, split the old village into four constituent sacerdotal units.

But "Buguias" also refers to an area larger than the barangay, or village, of that name. The southern Cordilleran peoples have long classified their neighbors according to several partly overlapping ethnographic systems, based respectively on language, environment, and proximity to large, older settlements. Since Buguias has long been an important community, its name is applied to a region extending well beyond the boundaries of the village itself. To their Cordilleran neighbors, "the Buguias people" includes not only the inhabitants of Buguias village but also the residents of surrounding communities—individuals who would identify themselves as being from Buguias when visiting distant places.

Roughly corresponding to this region is Buguias municipality in the imposed political hierarchy (see map 5). Both the Spanish and the American colonialists administered sections of the southern Cordillera through the larger villages, first designated rancherias , later townships, then municipal districts, and finally municipalities. Since the Americans continually sought to economize by consolidating these units, municipal boundaries remained unstable. Early in the century, for example, "greater" Buguias annexed its northern neighbor, Lo-o. Even under the postcolonial Philippine regime, Cordilleran municipal boundaries have shifted as municipalities have vied for several tax-rich border zones. At the same time, villages within the same municipality have sometimes contended for the seat of local government, further reworking geographical alignments. Buguias municipality, in fact, has for some years been administered not from Buguias Central but from the more accessible crossroads community of Abatan.

In this work, "Buguias" will refer both to the indigenous ritual village (now divided into four units) and to the modern barangay. Although the boundaries of these two divisions are not exactly coincident, ambiguity is minimal. When the larger regional unit is intended, it will be designated either as Buguias municipality or as greater Buguias.

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Map 5.
The Municipalities of Benguet Province. (Refer to map 1 for relative
location.) The city of Baguio forms an enclave, independent from the
surrounding province.

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.