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.