1. Several scholars, overgeneralizing the notion that economic change brings cultural ruin, have misrepresented the linkages between redistribution and commercialization in Luzon's Cordillera. Solang (1984:163), for example, argues:

While lavish feasts and canaos are held up to now, these, however, occur less frequently and still under a subsistent economic structure. . . . The level of surplus [necessary to hold them] is that associated with a subsistence economy. . . . With the entry of cash and other factors the Cordillera economy is getting marginalized.

Solang's argument is perhaps correct for the central and northern Cordillera, areas with which he is more familiar. It should also be noted that Eder (1982:111) has found that in Banaue (Ifugao) increasing commercialization is connected with a decline in ceremonial redistribution, while Pertierra (1988) correlates commercialization with the acceptance of Ilocano (Christian) identity in a community in the Cordillera's western foothills.

In the Philippines, and more broadly throughout Southeast Asia, redistributive ceremonies are widespread, having survived easily the spread of universalizing religions in many lowland areas (see, for example, Griffiths 1988; J. Scott 1988; vonder Mehden 1986). Yet many such rituals are presently disappearing. James Scott (1988), for example, finds many re-distributive devices, including feasts, threatened with extinction in Sungai Bujur, Malaysia. This is so, he argues, because the mechanization of agriculture has now obviated the need for labor control, formerly achieved through redistribution. This pattern is perhaps widely spread in lowland Southeast Asia, but clearly not in highland zones.

Among the Toraja of highland Sulawesi, however, the feast system seems to be endangered because formerly low-class individuals can now finance high-class funerals for their poor relatives with money earned as wage migrants, leading many persons to doubt the whole system's authenticity (Volkman 1984). Clearly, the relationship between redistribution and commercialization varies greatly from region to region. [BACK]

2. Russell (1983:261-263) attributes the perceived anticommercial attitude of the Ibaloi in part to an "ethnic rhetoric" perpetuating stereotypes that she believes "distinguish between the qualifications of workers, and allow entrepreneurs not only to exploit a cheap labor force, but also to justify and legitimize their right to do so." She says further: "The result is to create a situation that perpetuates and restricts Ibaloi from expanding into . . . commercial roles."

The Buguias perspective is markedly different. Wealthy farmers along the Mountain Trail, in Bad-ayan, and in Bot-oan, do hire workers from other cultural groups (Kalanguya, Northern Kankana-ey, and Ilocano—almost never Ibaloi), but their rationale in doing so is strictly economic, never ethnic. Russell (1983) also shows, however, that certain Ibaloi individuals, and even villages, are marked by a strongly commercial orientation. [BACK]

3. Sheldon Annis (1987) discovered in one region of Guatemala that individuals economically marginalized through poverty and those socially marginalized through entrepreneurial activities were inclined to leave syncretic Catholicism for Protestantism. Protestants overall tend to perform better economically than their Catholic peers, but they do so at the price of risking their cultural identity. The contrast with Buguias could hardly be more marked. [BACK]

4. For example, E. P. Thompson (1978:4, 12) excoriates the self-proclaimed materialist Althusser for expounding an idealism comparable to theology if not astrology, yet Thompson himself has been accused of "swerv[ing] too far toward idealism and voluntarism while giving short shrift to material and structural analysis" (Trimberger 1984:221). [BACK]

5. The Buid of Mindoro also offer swine to their ancestors, and their ceremonies also seem to lack an ecological dimension (Gibson 1986). Here the contrast with Buguias lies in the social realm. Buid individuals gain no prestige when they sacrifice to their ancestors; indeed, their whole social order prevents anyone from enhancing his or her own status. Furthermore, the ancestors here stand in a completely different position vis-à-vis human society. They are provided their (insubstantial) shares only to keep them quiet, for they are regarded as aggressive, stupid, and entirely unwelcome intruders. Buid ancestors are "bought-off" rather than beseeched, as are those of Buguias. And as a final contrast, Buid rituals function to decompose the household in recreating the larger community (Gibson 1986:177), where Buguias rituals unite households as they demonstrate divisions (as well as bonds) inherent in lineages, classes, and especially hamlets and villages. (See J. DeRaedt [1964] for an ecological theory of variations within the Cordillera in regard to the status of ancestors.) [BACK]