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.