3
Social Relations:
Power and Labor

Introduction

The Buguias people remade their landscape only through great effort. Their labors were of necessity socially organized; each person's work was determined, in large part, by his or her place within the community. As in most human groups, individuals had widely varying abilities to select their own tasks and to command the labor of others. Such power was generally determined by age, gender, and family position (with permutations for individual ability and personality), but more importantly, by the control of productive resources.

Although some scholars would equate class division with state formation (for example, White 1959:299), most prewar Cordilleran societies were at once village-based and highly stratified. Three social "classes"—taking the term in its most general definition—constituted the population of prewar Buguias. The "commoners" (henceforth, without quotation marks) cultivated their own dry fields and often labored together in cooperative projects. While overtly independent, most remained in chronic debt to their wealthier relatives and neighbors. Commoner men cared for, but rarely owned, livestock. Commoner women, for their part, labored long hours in their uma fields. As was true in all classes, tasks were gender-segregated, and commoner men and women inhabited discrete economic spheres. Members of the elite baknang class, however, commanded others to work on their own sometimes grandiose agricultural projects. Servants and slaves, composing the third social class, remained ever at the beck of the rich, who could also entice commoners to work for them with wages. The elite could also tap the labor of still another group, the itinerants from less prosperous Cordilleran communities.

Power relations reflected back on the landscape of prewar Bu-

guias. The territory of any class-based society is characteristically divided into distinct segments over which different individuals hold certain powers. Through the prewar period, Buguias was increasingly subdivided into private and semiprivate plots. This was no smooth progression, however, as three conflicting tenure systems-one indigenous, one American-imposed, and the third of mixed provenance—formed separate arenas of contention. Yet all three systems evinced some movement toward individualized tenure, both reflecting and furthering elite power. Nonetheless, the elite class by no means enjoyed uncontested authority in territorial control or in any other dimension of life.

Prewar Buguias was a society of fluid classes, not lithified estates. A common-born person could rise to wealth, while highborn scions frequently fell. Moreover, class divisions were tempered by interclass genealogical and marital links. Cross-class family ties formed a potential vehicle for upward movement. Each class was marked by its own mobility patterns, closely tied to inheritance customs and redistributive obligations.

Labor and capital, land tenure, and social mobility thus form the substance of this chapter; yet class dynamics also include much more. The exercise of power in local politics, the legitimation of class through ritual, and the creation of wealth in trade all contributed in essential ways to the Buguias social formation. These sundry elements will be taken up in their turn in later chapters.

The Commoners

Animal Sharing

Few persons in prewar Buguias owned the large animals they tended. Commoners typically received their animals on loan, as infants or yearlings, from the village elite, with the understanding that any offspring would be shared. The actual apportioning varied according to the animal lent and the relationship between the borrower and lender.

Hog-lending arrangements varied greatly. When a female piglet was transferred, the caretaker would usually keep the entire first brood, and two of every three in subsequent litters; if the loan were a mature sow, the owner could usually take the choice one of every three piglets. Few commoner women could tend more than two or

three brood sows; occasionally they owned one outright, but more commonly they "leased" all. Caretakers could not easily acquire breeding stock, for their own shares were typically devoted to rituals or sold for cash. Most commoners were eager to raise swine for the rich, but a few resisted the entailed subordination. Yet even reluctant individualists could often be pressured by wealthy patrons into building a pigpen and borrowing stock.

Cattle and water-buffalo lending (pastol , a Spanish-derived term also referring to the caretakers themselves) was more prestigious though not as ubiquitous as hog lending. Few men could care for more than a few water buffalo, but the ambitious could raise twenty or more cows, steers, and bulls. Enterprising caretakers commonly borrowed stock from several sponsors. Commoners would usually sell their own shares for cash, sometimes to their own patrons—who might immediately "lend" them back again. Pastol agreements typically favored the lender, since he could claim the first offspring, the third, the fifth, and so on; under such terms, the vagaries of reproduction ensured the animal owner a greater share.^[1]

The basic pastol contract included provisions for a number of contingencies. Castrated male calves, for instance, might be sold at maturity with the profit divided equally. Yet conflicts sometimes flared, as when cattle fell from precipitous slopes. After such an occurrence the caretaker had to show evidence that the death was indeed accidental. Dead and seriously maimed cattle were usually butchered and sold by weight to interested neighbors, with most of the profit accruing to the animal's owner. A magnanimous baknang, however, would be expected to give a feast and freely distribute his windfall meat.

The customary apportioning of calves and piglets might not be realized if the commoner caretaker were deeply in debt to his or her patron. In this instance, the baknang could claim all offspring, although many often simply let their credits accumulate through subsequent breeding rounds. For the common people, the indebtedness that usually began at marriage was exacerbated by the terms of animal sharing.

Labor Organization and Gender

The daily travails of the commoners varied fundamentally with gender. Women toiled primarily in the dry fields. They often would

return home, heavily laden with sweet potatoes, only when dark fell. Work in the kitchens and piggeries also fell to female hands. Although women usually labored in their fields alone, some of their arduous tasks could be lightened through cooperative labor exchange (ogbo ). Overall, women's work was spatially concentrated and temporally demanding.

Male labor, however, was spatially dispersed and much less consuming. The male commoner's only routine job was cattle oversight; the conscientious pastol would once or twice daily determine the whereabouts of his stock. This entailed long hikes, but required only several hours a day unless the animals strayed. Because their daily chores were light, men often tended small children (feeding their babies premasticated sweet potatoes). Men generally cultivated the family dry field only if their wives were ill or recovering from childbirth. Women might complain that their husbands harvested tubers with the care and skill of wild hogs, but those without help were hard pressed. And men's work in childcare was important; one woman, abandoned by her wastrel spouse, had to place her mischievous children in a deep hole so she could attend to her crops. The few men who mastered female farming skills were teased but grudgingly admired, as were those women who reached proficiency in such male tasks as blade sharpening.

The daily schedules of both men and women were punctuated by seasonal and single-occurrence tasks. Here men usually handled the heavier burdens: clearing new umas, weeding pastures, mending and building fences and trails, cleaning canals, constructing and rebuilding terrace walls, cutting and carrying firewood, and preparing rice fields. Other seasonal tasks, such as rice transplanting, fell strictly to women, and still others, such as rice harvesting, were shared by members of both sexes. Women often joined their husbands in digging puwals, usually accomplished in labor-exchange ogbo groups. Ogbo labor debts were strictly accounted, and a woman's contribution was valued the same as a man's.

The people of Buguias usually accomplished their non-routine jobs cooperatively, either through ogbo or through a more commercial arrangement called dangas. The individual organizer of a dangas project would acquire labor in exchange for food and drink, with no further obligations incurred. The emoluments provided had to be of high quality; goats or dogs were usually butchered and

rice beer provided. Such activities were, not surprisingly, usually initiated by the wealthy.

Day to day, commoner men worked far fewer hours than did women; at the same time, adult males undertook those tasks requiring travel outside the community. Only men served the ten days annually on road corvée duty as required by the colonial government; more importantly, most trade with neighboring peoples was their prerogative. These activities were consistent with the relative lightness of men's quotidian obligations; women simply could not abandon their fields for more than a few days at a time. In the final tabulation, women shouldered the greater burdens in prewar Buguias—as in most societies the earth has known. Buguias women had considerable social standing and authority compared to women in many parts of the world, but men nevertheless held greater political and religious power, and it was they who ultimately ruled prewar Buguias.

Even after accounting for gender differences, the chores of the commoners were not all identical. Some variation could be ascribed to temperament; certain men, for example, avoided the burden of raising cattle, while others maximized their pastol commitments. Certain specialized jobs were limited by their long apprenticeships. Buguias's few blacksmiths did little but work metal, and even expert basket weavers might easily ignore animal husbandry. Both occupations passed from fathers to sons or nephews. Other specialties, such as terrace building (mastered by few) and roof thatching, entailed only occasional, supplementary employment. A few select older men, however, found full employment as ritual specialists.

The Elite and their Servants

The Baknangs

The animal-owning baknang class was internally stratified; the smallest "baknang of pigs" might have a dozen animals let out to neighbors and relatives, while the richest could own hundreds of cattle, hogs, water buffalo, and horses—as many as a thousand animals in all. These very wealthy baknang were few; in the early American period only one, Danggol, lived in what is today Buguias

Central, although by the later colonial period this number had doubled to include Berto Cubangay (Danggol's son), and Paran, an immigrant from a village to the east. The following discussion concentrates on the wealthier individuals.

Most baknang women were little removed from the economic milieu of their poorer relatives; few indeed escaped the drudgery of the uma. The wealthiest were also required to manage female servants and tend to a constant stream of visitors. The topmost men, however, occupied themselves strictly with managerial and financial work: overseeing livestock, supervising rice-field construction and pasture maintenance, and lending money and conducting trade. Unlike their poorer relatives, they seldom directly engaged with the land; rather, they directed others—their servants, assistants, contract workers, and livestock caretakers. Ultimately, the male baknang's role was that of community "leader." These men essentially governed Buguias (both in the indigenous and the American-sponsored systems), organized its religious practices, and headed its traditional courts. These capacities await analysis in later chapters; here we are more interested in the role of labor, as organized by social power, in deriving subsistence from—and thus transforming—nature. We have already seen how the elites acquired commoners' labor through animal lending and dangas "wages"; now we will examine several groups of people over whom they exerted more direct control.

Slaves, Servants, Itinerants, and Clients

The servile class encompassed a varied group. Some individuals voluntarily tied themselves to wealthy patrons. Elderly widows and never-married women, hard pressed to live alone, could usually enter a baknang household in exchange for hog tending, fire keeping, and dry-field cultivation. In the early years of the century, entire families living to the east of Buguias were often forced by brigands to flee their homes, and many sought the protection of powerful families in Buguias. In return, they would provide labor services for a number of years. A rich man could sometimes protect another accused of a crime, again receiving labor in exchange. In one noted example, after the Kalanguya immigrant Kabading

was inconclusively tried, by ordeal, for witchcraft, the baknang Paran protected him from further hazing. Subsequently, Kabading built five rice terraces, four of which became the property of his benefactor.

In the early years of American rule a few individuals were held in slavery. Wealthy traders purchased slaves with animals, blankets, or cash from the Ifugao. Once in Buguias slaves remained bound for life, but they were not traded and their positions differed little from those of the other servants. Their owners sometimes encouraged them to marry local commoners, and their children did not automatically remain in bondage.

The relationships between the elite and their attached clients varied. Servile married couples and elderly women usually lived in small huts near the main residence, while unmarried male retainers (and itinerant workers) more often lodged in crude "bunkhouses." Most dependents, however, were female, since women's work was in more constant demand; the routine tasks of the dry field, house yard, and kitchen could not be accomplished through dangas payments or contract. Some serving women also cared for children, but rarely were couples of child-bearing age so prosperous. Male servants, however, primarily cared for the private herds and pasturelands of a baknang, in addition to providing a host of other minor services. The elite couples always provided patronage for their workers, paying for their funerals and sometimes their weddings, and in general assuring their places within the community. Yet by no means did such relationships approach reciprocity.

The elite could obtain labor for daily, seasonal, and single-occurrence tasks either from commoners (through dangas) or from their dependents. But some projects demanded greater skill and effort than could be locally obtained. Elite men therefore hired, by contract, itinerant workers, usually Northern Kankana-ey or Kalanguya men. These sojourners constructed rice terraces and stone walls, sawed lumber, and occasionally cleared new fields. Remuneration came as cash, animals, or blankets. The Northern Kankana-ey never stayed long, but the Kalanguya, culturally and genealogically tied to the Buguias people (and less secure in their bandit-infested homeland) not uncommonly married and remained.

The wealthiest residents of prewar Buguias commanded yet another set of clients for managerial work, namely their juvenile male

relatives. As these younger men (usually sons, sons-in-law, and nephews) acted primarily in trade, their work is discussed in that context in chapter 5. While these underlings could grow wealthy themselves in later life, their careers were anything but secure. Prewar Buguias was a stratified society, but it was also marked by class mobility—particularly striking in the downward direction.

Social Mobility

Class and Family

Social classes in prewar Buguias interdigitated along kinship lines. All baknangs had near relatives of the commoner class, and all commoners were tied not too distantly to elite families. Virtually the entire community traced its ancestry to the Kalanguya hunter Lumiaen, who arrived in Buguias in the early nineteenth century. Most elite families stemmed from Basilio, Lumiaen's wealthy son, while most commoners traced their lineage to Siklungan, his poorer offspring. But since kinship was reckoned cognatically, lines crossed and complex relationships linked most families. The generally poor immigrants were excluded from the Buguias family tree, but they could be grafted to it through marriage. Many individuals married across class lines; since customary law proscribed unions even between second cousins, the pool of potential mates was limited. Powerful families, in attempting to concentrate their wealth, sometimes allowed cousins to marry, or, alternatively, selected for their children elite spouses from other villages. But these were never standard practices, and many elite youngsters married commoners. This did not challenge the village's class structure, however, since local ideology explicitly allowed for individual mobility. Through luck and effort, poor individuals could rise, whereas children of the rich regularly fell.

Inheritance and Downward Mobility

Elite couples periodically diminished their wealth through ritual extravagance, and their fortunes could be entirely consumed at their own funerals. A month-long wake of a true baknang could

consume an entire herd. Rice terraces generally devolved as inheritance, but inauspicious funeral auguries might call for their sale to cover additional animal sacrifices. Family heirlooms, especially Chinese vases, also passed to the succeeding generation, but these only displayed potential status. Furthermore, since all children of the (usually) large elite families would inherit a share, no one child ever received adequate wealth to maintain class position. Even the sons of the topmost couples had to earn elite status—although they would receive substantial succor all along the way.

Often a single son from a rich family would reoccupy his father's position. Although the successor's personal business fortunes were ultimately paramount, succession could hinge on the parents' funerals. All children had their own funeral-related ceremonies, in addition to being obligated to help finance the main wakes; together these rites might force decapitalization. The wealthier brother (or, occasionally, brother-in-law) could sometimes exploit his siblings' distress and acquire their properties. The eldest sibling, having had a longer period in which to accumulate wealth, was thus advantaged, even though the youngest usually secured the largest share of the family bequest. Not surprisingly, inheritance accords could be contentious; while ailing parents might seek to establish concord before they died, the community's elders often had to negotiate, and enforce, settlements. The elders would weigh many considerations, including the financial assistance the parents had previously given to each child, as well as the help each heir had provided the parents. Education counted as a parental gift, depriving some of the earliest graduates of any property legacies.

Occasionally a baknang line would sink entirely to commoner status. The local sages would interpret this as a sign of ancestral disapproval—in one noted instance, said to have been brought on by incorrectly performed rituals.

Upward Movement

The typical commoner was so burdened with debt (much of it ritually incurred) that upward mobility was all but impossible. But a few managed to rise, usually by working for a wealthy relative. Marrying the daughter of a baknang provided a good business en-

trée, but the wedding costs, borne by the male party, were restrictive. Still, a young man recognized by his prospective father-in-law as outstandingly clever and industrious might find wedding loans readily forthcoming. Nor was it absolutely impossible for one to prosper through personal efforts in animal husbandry. One man named Calayon, for example, climbed from poverty to mid-level baknang status, although it took him an entire lifetime. Calayon first trafficked in chickens, moved on to hogs, and finally graduated to cattle leasing. He advised others that they too could prosper if they followed his example and if they maintained the proper relations with their ancestors.

Members of the serving class had few hopes for prosperity, although a few skilled immigrants could rise. The accused wizard Kabading, for example, eventually reached a fairly high position. Slaves, however, remained impoverished. Although their children were not necessarily bound, most did remain servile; a good marriage provided their best route to independence. Today, their descendants still constitute the poorest segment of the community.

Class conflict did not rend prewar Buguias society; familial ties and expectations of reciprocity tempered dissonance. Still, certain baknangs were privately censored for self-serving actions, and one was secretly reviled (by some) for abusing his power. Yet no members of the elite could automatically maintain position simply by possessing wealth. Legitimation was a continual and costly burden, albeit one borne (we may presume) reverently. But for this story we must wait for chapter 4; more immediate for the present concern is the land-tenure system that allowed the elite to control key sectors of production within Buguias.

Land Tenure

Inasmuch as individuals exerted varying degrees of control over different parcels of land, power relations in prewar Buguias were etched on the landscape. Most land remained under what might loosely be termed communal tenure, but elite men were increasingly privatizing individual parcels. Privatization had indigenous roots, but flourished under an American land policy that generated several conflicting tenure systems. The contradictions among them would cause considerable strife, but not until the postwar period.

Indigenous Tenure

Under indigenous tenure, all community members theoretically had unrestricted access to the forests and grasslands surrounding the village, although de facto land use even here proved unequal. Open lands used primarily as pastures were divided into semi-discrete sections by natural and artificial barriers. Each caretaker usually grazed his cattle in pastures near his home, although the animals often could wander relatively freely toward the higher slopes. As the baknangs scattered their animals among many commoners and over many pasture segments, most "herds" comprised cattle of diverse ownership lent to sundry caretakers. Still, elite couples usually possessed most of the animals pasturing near their own homes and thus they dominated certain pastures.

Dry fields, in contrast, were semiprivate, since individuals held recognized rights over their own plots while cultivating them. Cultivators gained the privilege of permanent cultivation by investing in permanent improvements, such as stone walls. Since land remained relatively plentiful throughout the prewar period, however, few conflicts erupted here.

By the middle years of American rule, some Buguias cattle lords adopted the techniques of land improvement to lay claim to private pastures. By enclosing and thoroughly cleaning a plot of grassland, a cattle owner could gain the community's consent to his exclusive grazing rights. But few could afford the required fencing, and even the wealthiest maintained private paddocks of no more than a few hectares.

Houselots also formed de facto private property since occupation was not easily disputed, but there were exceptions. Door-yard produce, for instance, was considered free to all, and children regularly exercised the privilege. Neither were house sites themselves sacrosanct. As most couples occasionally transferred residence, house sites frequently returned to the village common. In rare cases, poor couples could even be forced out of their homes by individuals with competing ownership claims. Present-day elders tell of one avaricious prewar baknang dispossessing several commoners who had established healthy coffee plantations on land that he was able to claim as his own.

Rice terraces were the most completely privatized element within

the indigenous land tenure system; only they could be inherited, bought, sold, and mortgaged.^[2] This tenure arrangement may have gradually emerged in Buguias owing to the investments required to establish a pond field, or it may have been adopted from the land codes of other terrace-making Cordilleran peoples. Whichever the case, an individual in prewar Buguias could usurp common land simply by carving out a new rice field. And because of the clear ownership prerogatives, investments in terraces, an option mainly open to the rich, yielded much greater returns than investments in dry fields. The land-tenure system thus reflected and reinforced distinctions of social power.

The American Intervention

The first American surveying team arrived in Buguias in 1903, determined to isolate private land from the "public domain" (owned, in their eyes, by the Insular Government). The surveyors sought out property owners, hoping to award them with genuine titles.^[3] But American conceptions of land tenure clashed with the indigenous system, and the officials sent to carry out the work lacked the dedication that would have been necessary for success. They meted only the more accessible sites; Buguias's upper reaches were ignored, and thereby "legally" transferred to the Manila government. Eventually these lands were included within the Central Cordilleran Forest Reserve—reserved for American mill and mine owners elsewhere in Benguet. Although administrators set aside small "communal forests," these were utterly inadequate and largely ignored. Compounding the imbroglio, the surveyors titled large blocks as single properties, blocks encompassing pastures, dry fields, and terraces—and controlled (in varying degrees) by many different parties. The surveyors, it must be said, received little help from the mistrustful residents. Most baknangs, suspicious of the surveyors' intentions, put forward dummy owners; one such newly propertied man was a poor, blind, and completely pliant priest.

American land policy was revised in the 1930s, when two contradictory policies were implemented. A new cadastral survey, less fraudulent than the earlier one, measured only cultivated plots and awarded titles to the actual cultivators. Indeed, the teams preferentially surveyed the fields of individuals requesting the action. But

despite this meliorative effort, most land remained either "public" or under titles established earlier. The companion American land program of the period, that of the "municipal tax declaration," formed a strikingly divergent tenure system. Although made possible and encouraged by the Insular Government, the tax declaration arrangement formed, in effect, a quasi-official local tenure system, run by the American-recognized Buguias administration. To confirm limited rights to a parcel, an individual had simply to declare ownership annually and pay a small municipal tax. Such property boundaries were loosely fixed through descriptions of natural features. Any uncultivated plot could legally be declared, so long as the declarant paid the required taxes—regardless of whether it was previously titled to another or officially within the public domain (see Arenal-Sereno and Libarios 1983).

In general, the elite welcomed the tax-declaration system, since it allowed them to aggrandize their own holdings with imperial blessing while retaining control of the tenure system itself. The poor resented it during this period, as they could scarcely afford the requisite taxes. Through the 1930s, considerable pasturage and even some forest stands were made quasi private through tax declarations. Indigenous communal usufruct rights were not thereby cancelled, but the preexisting tendency toward land privatization was strengthened.

Three incompatible land-tenure systems coexisted uneasily at the end of the American period. Many parcels were covered by overlapping claims, each of which could invoke the backing of a different level of authority: the Insular Government in Manila, the American-recognized municipality, or the body of customary law. Individual rights to land and its products varied both within and among each of these disparate systems. The contradictions did not surface until the postwar period, but the inhabitants of Buguias in the later twentieth century are vexed by the land-tenure policies of the American bureaucracy.

Land Tenure and Class

The elite of Buguias controlled sizable estates and could mobilize the labor necessary to transform them. The baknang household, with its attendant workers, formed a larger production unit than

did the commoner's nuclear family, allowing the wealthy couple to cultivate extensive dry fields and door-yard gardens. In addition, elite families held virtually exclusive rights to two further productive sectors: private pastures and pond fields. Wealthy households thus generated a far greater "subsistence income" than did others. Much of this went to in-house consumption, to feed the many guests, family members, and dependents. And of course, the rich led richer lives: they dwelled in substantial houses, wore fine garments, possessed varied tools and utensils, and regularly ate meat and drank rice beer. A true baknang couple would always serve their guests dried meat and alcohol. Yet all told, the truly wealthy still expended fewer resources on their daily lives than their incomes would have allowed; redistributive rituals consumed the greater share. While the elite monopolized the best pastures and converted the prime agricultural sites into private rice fields, a substantial portion of the fruits of these lands flowed back to the people of Buguias at community feasts.