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.