PART I
PREWAR BUGUIAS

2
Food, Fuel, and Fiber:
Human Environmental Relations in Prewar Buguias

Introduction

A view of Buguias from the air in the 1920s would have revealed a complex landscape of interwoven plant communities. On the highest reaches of the eastern slope, outliers of the dense, oakdominated cloud forest (or kalasan ) protruded below the misty ridgeline of the Cordillera. Downslope, the oaks gave way to single-species pine stands, forming a true forest on the higher and steeper slopes and thinning out at lower elevations. Near the upper hamlets of the village, pines crowned a savannah community of short grasses, yielding on steeper sites to cane-grass swards. Still farther downslope, the pines dropped out altogether, leaving only pasture grasses on the lowest slopes.

Within this broad zonal pattern, variations of soil, relief, and long-standing agricultural practice created a vegetational mosaic. The shady northern faces of steep side canyons supported diverse hardwood thickets, while on their sunny southern exposures grew a jumble of brush, pine, and coarse grasses. Scattered throughout the landscape, but particularly in the lower reaches, were sharply bounded cultivated plots. Most contained tangles of sweet-potato vines, a select few were flooded and planted to rice, and small plots surrounding the village's several score dwellings supported diverse assemblages of herbs and fruit-bearing trees.

This landscape was a cultural artifact, continually reshaped through the labor of the Buguias people as they wrested their livelihood from the land. In provisioning themselves, the Buguias people transformed their homeland, altering both its physical substrate and its biotic communities. Through cultivating and pasturing they worked their greatest ecological transformations. But the residents

of Buguias also gleaned a harvest of wild edible plants and animals, as well as vital nonfood plant products (including fibers, woods, and medicines). All microhabitats of Buguias thus contributed to human livelihood, and all were remolded in turn by human activities.

But if the Buguias people transformed their landscape, the human impact varied widely in extent and duration. Sites found suitable for terracing were entirely remade; others, such as ravines, were only casually tapped for wild produce. The territory of Buguias was thus loosely divided into separate geographical zones, each subjected to different kinds of human pressures.

The fundamental division enclosed the cultivated from the "wild." Both cropped and non-cropped lands were further subdivided according to the plant associations they supported. Agricultural plots were of three distinct named types: dry fields (devoted largely to sweet potatoes), flooded rice terraces, and door-yard gardens. Less exact divisions marked the uncultivated lands, as many species (the insular pine, for example), could grow in virtually any area; yet even here, distinct plant associations emerged in part through human interference. These various plant communities, both wild and cultivated, might aptly be called subsistence sectors (what Wadell [1972] refers to as "agricultural subsystems"), highlighting at once their role in provisioning the human community and their spatial boundedness.

The areal configuration of subsistence sectors was never static. In the long view, fields and pastures expanded steadily. New dry fields could be carved from woodland, meadow, or canebrake; hillsides were slowly terraced; and new pastures sprouted from the charred soils of former woodlands. In specific instances, the direction of change could be reversed. A rice field might yield to cane or brush, for example, if its supply of water suddenly diminished.

The following chapter reconstructs Buguias subsistence as it existed in the 1920s and 1930s, the earliest period accessible through living memory. Deeper historical background is examined through archival sources where possible. The first section details each of the three major agricultural sectors: dry fields, door-yard gardens, and rice terraces. The next two sections outline the products of uncultivated lands. Here subsistence was less rigidly constrained by sector; domestic animals, for example, could often wander through

vast uncultivated areas. These discussions are thus organized along product rather than sectoral lines, first considering domestic stock, and then moving to undomesticated plants and animals. The fourth section examines first human agency in the formation and maintenance of distinct communities of uncultivated plants, and then turns to the processes of agricultural intensification at work in the prewar era.

Agricultural Fields

Dry Fields: Uma and Puwal

The core of livelihood in prewar Buguias was a distinctive form of dry-field cultivation called uma , derived from swidden practices. Like its slash-and-burn antecedents, uma agriculture entailed cutting and burning woody vegetation prior to planting, and in earlier periods all Buguias dry fields had probably exhibited the common features of long-fallow swidden horticulture. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the interval between cropping cycles had been shortened sufficiently that most dry fields in central Buguias were cultivated for much longer periods than they were fallowed. In the puwal variant, slashing and burning no longer preceded planting. Both umas and puwals were intensively cultivated plots, adapted in many respects to a savannah rather than to a woodland environment.

Sweet potatoes, the staple of both people and domestic hogs, dominated the dry fields. Tubers were consumed in such quantity as to completely color the memory of prewar subsistence; this was the time, the Buguias people say, "when we ate only sweet potatoes." The common people typically dined on boiled sweet-potato tubers seasoned with sweet-potato vinegar, garnished with sweet-potato leaves, and perhaps completed with a dessert of sweet-potato syrup. In seasons of tuber scarcity, dried sweet-potato chips, either reconstituted in soup or pounded and cooked with millet, sufficed. Subsidiary dry-field crops, including several kinds of beans, peanuts, sesame seeds, maize, panicum millet, sorghum, and Job's tears, provided seasonal supplements, but were never abundant in most households. Among the poor, mealtimes were indeed a matter of "tugi angey " (or "sweet potatoes only").

Buguias dry fields could thrive only on select sites. Slopes had to be gentle for soil fertility maintenance. Clay-rich soils were always favored, for lighter earth would not retain adequate moisture for dry-season (December through April) growth. The natural terraces above the Agno River formed ideal sites, but many had long been appropriated for rice terraces. The gentle and irregular eastern slope of the village afforded the most numerous suitable locations. Here the favored sites were U-shaped hillside indentations formed by slope failure. The flattish deposit of deep soil at the slump foot could support sweet potatoes throughout the year, while the adjacent scarps produced superior tubers in the soggy wet season. In areas of suitable soil and slope, however, uma fields could form a continuous band of cultivation.

In the heart of every Buguias dry field lay the sweet-potato patch, monocropped for fear that other plants would stymie the all-important staple. The generally heavier-feeding subsidiary crops were relegated to the field edges, or occasionally to central strips. Typically surrounding the nucleus were rings of sorghum, panicum millet, maize, and various pulses. Annuals, such as maize, sorghum, and millet (often interplanted with kidney beans) were favored for central strips, since they would not interfere with the long-term sweet potato rotational schedule. In the wettest months (July through September), larger field segments normally planted to sweet potatoes might be devoted to millet or peanuts. (Some growers, fearing rat predation, would distance their millet crop from brushy surrounding growth by planting it in the center of the field.) Seed of the perennial baltong bean (Vigna sinensis ) were sown among stumps or rock outcrops where they would not interfere with sweet-potato cultivation, while brushy kudis beans (Cajanus cajanus ) often occupied drier slopes on field margins.

Buguias women cultivated approximately a dozen varieties of sweet potatoes. Some women intercropped multiple cultivars; others preferred segregation. Generally, those with large fields (.5 hectares or more) cultivated monovarietal patches, which allowed easier management since each cultivar matured at a different rate. The specific varieties planted, whether in mixed or segregated patches, depended in part on the partialities of household members, as each variety had a distinct taste and texture.

Buguias women planted sweet potatoes thrice annually, and harvested each planting up to three times before the vines reached exhaustion at the end of one year. The first planting, in April or May, either anticipated or coincided with the first rains. By October this planting's initial tubers, though fibrous and of poor quality, were ready for harvest. February marked a second harvest interval, and the final one occurred in May. The dry-season tubers were of higher quality, but as the vines aged, quality declined. A second planting in September or early October produced a superior initial crop; the young vines flourished with the copious rains and the tubers could mature as the soil dried. This planting's harvests occurred in January, again in May, and finally in August. December, marking the start of the dry season, brought the final and least productive planting; success then was possible only in the most moisture-retentive fields. Yet this crop too could produce through the entire year; only in the poorest fields was year-round cultivation impossible. Here harvests would be completed early in the dry season, the remaining foliage burned, and the uma fallowed until the arrival of the rains.

The multiple plantings of differentially maturing sweet-potato varieties coupled with (partial) seasonal rotation with other crops and complicated by the differing physical attributes of each field, required a fine-tuned seasonal labor schedule. Uma work was also highly skilled; even the harvest was demanding, since individual tubers had to be removed at their most palatable stage without damaging the vines. Only carefully tended plants could produce through an entire year. From December to March, the prime harvest, Buguias women sliced and sun-dried the surplus, which would form the mainstay in the lean season following the early rains.

The typical uma was cropped for five to ten years, at which point declining yields forced a two- to three-year fallow. This long cropping period was possible only through continual labor. Weeding was the most arduous task; Buguias women would dig several feet into the ground to remove the tenacious roots of ga-on (Imperata cylindrica ) in particular. Weed foliage obtained both within and from the edges of the uma was buried in the field along with the old, uprooted vines, thus helping to replenish the soil.

Intensive dry-field cultivation required gentle slopes and deep soil, but new fields were sometimes relegated to substandard sites. Steeper plots could be upgraded by leveling; stone-walled semi-terraces minimized erosion while maximizing dry-season moisture retention. Unlike rice terraces, such dry terraces needed some slope, since a flat field would waterlog in the rainy season, resulting in tuber rot. These semiterraces were comparatively easy to construct; often little more than a few carefully placed boulders sufficed.

The nutrients added to the uma from field-margin weeds, downward-moving soil (notable in slump-foot cultivation), and legume root nodules were insufficient to offset harvest losses. Over time, tuber size diminished while insects and pathogens multiplied. Exhausted fields were then left to natural succession. Typical invaders included the ubiquitous bracken fern, several exotic composites (Tithonia maxima and Eupatorium adenophorum ), and the cane grass Miscanthus sinensis. After a few years these fallowed umas were cut, burned, and replanted. Abandoned fields on drier sites or in pasture areas were, in contrast, invaded by sod-forming grasses (especially Themeda triandra and Imperata cylindrica ), after which they were characteristically opened to cattle. These tenacious fire-adapted grasses precluded further recourse to the techniques of uma. Rather, if the site were to be recultivated the sod had to be overturned, a practice known as puwal cultivation.

In making a puwal, the cultivator would invert sections of sod with iron-tipped poles. If turned to a depth of some 30 centimeters at the end of the dry season, the grasses would be killed and the soil both aerated and enriched by decaying leaves, roots, and manure. Newly made puwal fields could be quite fertile, encouraging the conversion of prime pastures, even those never previously cultivated. After soil preparation, the puwal was cultivated much like the uma.

Recultivation of the fallowed dry fields was relatively easy; the mandatory fences were already in place (although, if wooden, they would need repair), and, at least with umas, the light successional vegetation could easily be cleared. Newly married couples, however, often had to create new fields. These could be either uma or puwal, depending on the site chosen. Any pine standing on the

site would be salvaged for wood, but other woody plants would be burned in situ for soil enrichment.

Door-Yard Gardens

Haphazard plantings around the houselot constituted the second subsistence sector, the door-yard garden (ba-eng ). Some gardens produced large quantities of vegetables, fruits, and even cash crops, but most were small affairs. Yet the garden did hold two advantages over the uma: manure-enriched soils and easy access.

Tobacco and potatoes, considered too demanding for dry-field cultivation, often grew alongside the nutrient-rich pigpens. Hog manure was also periodically distributed through the rest of the garden.^[1] It could be used to fertilize sweet potatoes only if thoroughly composted (Purseglove 1968, v. 1:85), a difficulty that, combined with the burden of hauling, precluded manure use in the dry fields. But even fresh dung benefited most door-yard crops. Several varieties of taro grown for the piggery were especially favored in the garden because of their shade tolerance and vigorous response to casual manure application.

Condiments (Capsicum peppers, onions, ginger, garlic, and sugar cane), and vegetables (lima and other beans, squash), were grown in the door-yard garden mainly for convenience. As new vegetables, such as bitter-gourd, eggplant, and sayote (chayote), appeared during the American period, gardens became more diverse. Sayote quickly emerged as the standby vegetable of all social classes; this perennial produces ample quantities of edible leaves, stems, and fruits, and its large tubers can serve as a famine reserve. Only the larger gardens were dominated by fruit trees (such as mangoes and avocados), since frequent household relocation constrained arboriculture. Poorer households thus rarely grew more than a few banana stalks.

The most valuable door-yard crop was coffee. Introduced in the late Spanish period, coffee cultivation spread rapidly among the elite, who found the beans a valuable trade item as well as a beverage source. Having planted sizable orchards of arabica trees, wealthy individuals soon lost their inclination to relocate their homes periodically. As coffee drinking and trading spread, poorer

couples too planted smaller orchards. But in the final years of the Spanish period, blight struck, damaging especially those orchards located on clay soils. Coffee production henceforth would be concentrated in the gardens of a few wealthy households situated on rich loam.

Pond Fields: Taro and Rice

The irrigated or pond-field terrace, an artificial wetland seasonally planted to rice and, occasionally, to taro, formed the third agricultural sector of prewar Buguias. Among many Cordilleran groups (including the Ifugao, the Bontoc, the southern Kalinga, the Northern Kankana-ey, and the Ibaloi of Kabayan and Nagey), pond fields were a significant, if not dominant, element of the agricultural landscape. In the Buguias region, however, rice was a subsidiary crop, albeit vital as the source of rice beer. Buguias residents seldom ate unfermented rice, and on the rare occasions when they did, they usually mixed it with millet or dried sweet potatoes.

The first pond-field terraces in Buguias may have been designed for taro.^[2] This most versatile of crops grew unirrigated in dry fields and door-yard gardens, but it produced larger, if poorer tasting, tubers when cultivated in water. In prewar Buguias, taro grew in several aqueous niches: along irrigation canals, in natural seeps, around small ponds, on the edges of rice terraces, and in small terraces of its own. A vastly greater expanse of pond-field land, however, was devoted solely to rice.

Rice beer in prewar Buguias was a necessary ritual intoxicant. Virtually all couples occasionally brewed beer, but only the wealthy owned pond fields; poorer individuals purchased rice or worked in the paddies of wealthier relatives. Even couples possessing extensive terraces (up to several hectares) fermented the bulk of their harvests. The sweet and yeasty beer dregs, however, made a treat especially beloved of small children.

Buguias's pond-field system gradually expanded through the late Spanish and early American periods. Natural river terraces, reasonably level and low enough in the valley to be dependably watered, formed ideal building sites. Some lower terraces could be irrigated directly from the Agno River, but the necessary diversion works would be demolished annually in typhoon floods. More man-

ageable water sources were the non-entrenched, perennial side streams and the natural seeps. But by the American period, continued pond-field expansion necessitated the excavation of canals—some several kilometers long—to tap the larger eastern tributary streams.

Labor in the rice fields was arduous. Leveling and churning the muck had originally been done entirely by hand, although by the later American period some individuals had harnessed water buffalo for the task. Seedbeds, started in November or December, were ready for transplanting by January, although fields watered from the community's several hot springs could be planted a month or more later. By April, the enlarging grains required the constant vigilance of old men and children to ward off birds and other pests. In July, hastened by the impending typhoon season, the fields were reaped. After harvest they remained flooded, thus receiving nutrients from typhoon-eroded sediments. The only other fertility supplements consisted of Tithonia leaves and water-buffalo manure, the latter deposited casually when the animals worked the fields or wallowed in them during the off-season.

Compared to other Cordilleran peoples, the Buguias villagers planted few varieties of rice. Each of the two major types, glutinous diket and nonsticky, red kintoman , boasted no more than three or four distinct strains. The growing conditions of each variety were considered roughly equivalent, although one slowly maturing cultivar had to be transplanted by December. Glutinous and non-sticky grains were usually mixed for eating and for the making of beer. The Buguias people knew of many different varieties planted by other Cordilleran peoples, and some of these they recognized as superior. But although they not uncommonly planted experimental fields, few new varieties proved successful. Especially desired was a lowland strain that would produce a crop in the cloudy wet season, but no planting ever proved successful.

Buguias residents continually enlarged their pond-field system through the American period. Wealthy traders and livestock breeders initiated most new construction, which they usually contracted out to the expert terrace engineers from Ifugao and Bontoc subprovinces. (The latter workers were acclaimed for their ability to lever large river boulders into terrace walls, while the former were noted for their skilled masonry with smaller stones.) Most

Buguias people thought that terraces built by local residents lacked the durability of those constructed by outside workers.

Animal Husbandry

Domestic animals provided the people of prewar Buguias with ample meat, but little else. Leather strips served as ropes and whole hides as sleeping mats, but even cattle skins were often patiently chewed and swallowed. A few individuals plowed with water buffalo, and the elite sometimes rode horses, but animal power was inconsequential overall. Meat was vital, however, and people labored to fashion a landscape that could yield abundant supplies. Houselot animals, such as hogs, foraged in uncultivated areas but depended primarily on agricultural produce. Cattle, horses, and buffalo, however, subsisted solely on the fodder of the human-created and maintained savannah.

Houselot Animals: Hogs and Chickens

Hogs, raised by all families, foraged daily in the open pasturelands. At night they returned through fenced runways to their pens, situated below each house. In the grasslands and pine savannahs they rooted for worms and grubs, fungus, and wild tubers. Those in the higher reaches of Buguias could roam as far as the kalasan, or cloud forest, well-stocked with acorns, fungus, and especially earthworms. On returning each evening they were fed boiled sweet potatoes and sweet-potato peels, pounded rice hulls and bran, kitchen garbage, and human waste. Both under- and oversized tubers were relegated to the swine; in most households, well over half of the crop went to the piggery. Hogs flourished in the rainy season, but during the annual drought the earth hardened and wild foods grew scarce, and the weakened animals suffered frequently from skin diseases.

In the American period a few individuals began raising lowland hogs, valued chiefly for their ability to gain weight on the raw sweet potatoes that the so-called native hog could scarcely digest. These animals were not ritually acceptable, however, precluding them from replacing the indigenous stock. Kikuyu grass, purportedly brought to Buguias by a teacher, was also introduced in this

period. The thick stolons of this aggressive exotic, which flourished in moist microhabitats, provided a fine year-round hog feed.

Other houselot animals occupied niches similar to that of swine. The average family owned some twenty chickens, while the wealthy might possess as many as two hundred. Chickens returned each night to roost in predator-secure pens or in trees, and foraged daily in the nearby pastures. All households kept dogs, primarily for their meat, feeding them bones, scraps, and, of course, sweet potatoes. And finally, a few individuals raised pigeons, ducks, and even geese.

Pasture Animals: Cattle, Water Buffalo, and Horses

Unlike hogs and chickens, pasture animals were the responsibility of men. The average man in prewar Buguias devoted most of his labor to pasturing horses, water buffalo, and especially cattle. Water buffalo, the only ritually sanctioned pasture animal, were prestigious but not numerous. They reproduced poorly in the cool environment, and surviving calves, completely helpless for three days, often succumbed to disease or were trampled by bulls. Horses were valued primarily for their meat, although a few wealthy men kept riding mounts. But horses did not thrive as well as cattle on the Buguias grazing regime, and were thus relatively rare. Goats were raised in even smaller numbers.

Cattle, horses, and buffalo remained at pasture day and night. They subsisted largely on the native forage, supplemented occasionally with old sweet-potato vines. The few corrals generally held stock only prior to transporting or butchering. During typhoons, men herded their animals into protected areas, sometimes putting them in crude shelters built on the leeward side of hills. Otherwise livestock wandered untended, although conscientious graziers checked daily to ensure that none had wandered away or "fallen off the mountain."

Cattle were provided salt every few days, although several small herds in eastern Buguias obtained salt directly from local springs. Men could assemble their stock by blowing a water-buffalo horn, each instrument having a distinct sound that the animals could distinguish. Buguias cowboys assisted with births and watched after

the young, especially the buffalo calves. Breeding received casual attention, although healthy bulls with propitiously placed cowlicks were favored as studs. Branding occurred only at the insistence of the American authorities.^[3] Men easily recognized their own animals, and disputes arose only over calves delivered unattended in distant pastures.

Pasture Management

The so-called native cow of Benguet is a small, slowly maturing animal, optimally butchered at four years of age. Like the native hog, it is a fussy eater; several forbs unpalatable to the natives are readily eaten by introduced zebu crosses and so-called mestizo hybrids. But the Buguias pastoralists carefully managed their pastures to provide the grasses on which their stock thrived.

Themeda triandra (red oat grass), usually in association with Andropogon annulatus and Imperata cylindrica , dominated the savannah landscape of prewar Buguias (see Penafiel 1979). On the higher slopes and ridges scattered pines crowned the pastures, but only the more remote upper canyons supported trees thick enough to shade out the grass. Western range managers consider Themeda a mediocre if not poor feed, but to the Buguias pastoralists it was ideal.^[4]Themeda responds well to fire (Crowder and Chheda 1982: 297), their primary range-management tool, and withstands reasonably heavy and continual grazing.

Buguias pastures grew lush in the wet season, but produced a watery low-protein forage. As protein increased in the early dry season, cattle fattened. December thus marked the optimum time for butchering and selling. Forage quality again diminished as pastures desiccated in February and March; fires might then be lit to stimulate new growth. In the late dry season many small springs would lapse, depriving cattle of several pasture zones. By March stock sometimes had to be hand-fed with cane-grass leaves, brought in from inaccessible ravines and slopes.

The savannah landscape of prewar Buguias was an anthropogenic environment, created and maintained by human intervention. Only continual labor could prevent reversion to woody growth. As burning allowed easy management, many pastures were annually torched, and even the more remote pine woods were occasionally

singed. But fire alone would not eliminate all undesired plants; in intensively managed pastures the Buguias people dug weeds by hand. Weed infestations intensified after the invasion, circa 1916, of the Mexican composite Eupatorium adenophorum.^[5]Eupatorium , thriving in all microhabitats from dry, rocky slopes to boggy seeps, soon ranked as the foremost pest. Each plant had to be uprooted and burned, a task performed in prime pastures once or twice every year.

Grazing pressure itself helped maintain the savannah. In areas too steep for cattle but still occasionally burned, the cane grass Miscanthus sinensis dominated. Miscanthus decreases quickly if continually grazed, as its highly placed growth nodes are easily destroyed (Numata 1974:135). Cane swards could still survive, however, in remote and seldom-grazed pastures.

Although most pastures were held in common, few were overgrazed. Buguias men knew well the carrying capacities of their prime pastures, and if these were exceeded community pressure fell on the offending individual. Some persons believed in naturally—or supernaturally—enforced stocking limits. One story recounted how the ancestors had established the limit of a certain pasture at ten animals; after a greedy man added two more, the correct ratio was restored when the new animals simply "fell off the mountain." Carrying capacity estimations in prime pastures were made for roughly discrete areas, separated by natural barriers (steep slopes and ravines) and sometimes by fences. Distant grazing lands were more loosely monitored. Cattle could not even reach certain remote grasslands unless trails were first cut across intervening slopes. This was risky, as well as labor-consuming, since animals periodically slipped from even the best-graded passages. But stock could sometimes range far from central Buguias, finding greener fields perhaps, but also adding to the cowboys' burdens.

An elaborate fence network marked off cultivated areas from the open pastures. Cattle, hogs, and water buffalo continually threatened and occasionally devastated umas, pond fields, and dooryard gardens. Even chickens could destroy rice-seed beds. Old men remember that making fences and maintaining them were their most arduous tasks. The kind of fence chosen for a given field depended on the materials at hand, the desired level of permanence, and the specific animal threat. Durable stone walls were fa-

vored for larger home gardens, more intensively cultivated umas, and rice terraces. For most dry fields, pine fences, sometimes reinforced with hardwood brush, sufficed. Owing to wet-season rot, such fences demanded constant repair. Where wood was not easily accessible, Buguias men usually built sod walls with facing ditches. On the steepest slopes, living fences of agave functioned well with little maintenance. Complex fence networks of pine, stone, and bamboo protected houselot gardens, especially vulnerable to residential swine.

The Harvest of Uncultivated Lands

Uncultivated plants and wild animals also helped support the people of prewar Buguias. Gathered plants and hunted animals, while never forming staples, provided incidental protein and vitamins as well as welcome culinary variation. The production of fuel, fiber, and building materials from uncultivated lands, however, was absolutely essential.

Hunting, Fishing, and Insect Gathering

The hunting of deer and wild hogs, the only large game, demanded skill, patience, and sometimes daring. Although neither creature inhabited central Buguias, deer roamed the more remote pine forests and savannahs, and wild hogs populated the higher oak woodlands. A few expert spear-wielding hunters followed trained dogs in pursuit of game, but most men preferred sedentary techniques. Some excavated pitfall traps alongside animal trails, rendering them deadly with sharpened sticks. The easiest method of deer capture was to burn an area of brush and then hide nearby until the animals arrived to lick the mineral-rich ash. Few men were versed in the more elaborate hunting techniques, but those who were could provide ample meat for their families and their neighbors.

Smaller mammals, such as civets and rats, were both abundant and troublesome. Civets raided houselot gardens, eating even coffee berries and occasionally killing chickens, while rats feasted on most crops. Hunting these animals thus protected other food

sources and provided meat as well. Snares were usually employed, but young men enjoyed small-game hunting at night using dogs as trackers and pine torches for illumination.

Birds, ranging from large waders to tiny perchers, provided special delicacies. Buguias villagers caught migratory birds in season and residents the year round. Specialized snares were employed for different species at different times of the year; passive nooses sufficed in favorite roosts, while bent-stick spring traps snagged the warier species. The most plump and plentiful of the avian prey were the quail of the pasturelands, the snipes of the rice fields, and the wild chickens of the higher forests.

Most persons enjoyed fishing. The plentiful sculpins were sometimes netted by women, but were more often trapped by young men who would divert a river channel, thereby exposing all manner of life in the desiccated bed. Men and boys captured meaty eels with nets, hooks, and in river diversions. In rice fields and irrigation ditches, mud fish provided children with easy prey. Amphibians were plentiful in select seasons: tadpoles crowded the riverbed in March and April, and adult frogs could be captured at night, having first been blinded by torch light, in November and December.

Favored invertebrates spiced the seasonal fare as well. Fatty termites were funneled into water pots as they emerged for nuptial flights following the first rains. In the early years of this century an even greater bonanza occasionally appeared in the form of locust swarms. Buguias residents followed the insects for many miles, sometimes returning with several bushels to be dried and consumed at leisure. Lowland locust eradication programs sponsored by the U.S. were little appreciated in Buguias. More regular if less abundant invertebrate morsels included the mole crickets of the rice fields, the three varieties of rice-field snails, and the various river-dwelling water bugs. A few old men specialized in honey gathering, discerning hive locations by patiently observing the flights of bees. Honey itself was a delicacy, but wax was even more appreciated as a fiber coating.

The pursuit of wild creatures, other than deer and hogs, was—and still is—primarily an activity of young, unmarried men. Buguias bachelors still spend hours diverting streams for a meager catch of tadpoles, sculpins, and water bugs. This is not "optimal

foraging" so much as simple entertainment. In the prewar period, poorer villagers found intensification of sweet-potato patches much more rewarding than hunting or fishing. But wild meat—some of it, such as tadpole flesh, very strong of taste—did provide welcome variation to an otherwise bland diet.

Wild Plant Foods

Prewar Buguias was endowed with several wild fruits and vegetables. Brambleberries and huckleberries were abundant in pastures and woodland clearings, and wild guavas grew thick in several dry grasslands. Children gathered most fruit, consuming the bulk forthwith but usually bringing some home for their families. The foremost wild vegetable was Solanum nigrum , a weed of abandoned dry fields. Buguias residents collected wild tomatoes and Capsicum peppers (both exotics), as well as watercress. They regarded mushrooms highly and sought them diligently, gathering over twenty different varieties, some in sufficient quantity for drying. But perhaps the most essential wild "food" plant was the cosmopolitan weed Bidens pilosa , which formed the base of bubud , the yeast cake used in making rice beer.

Only in famines were wild foods essential. A delay of the southwest monsoon could bring food shortages, and real hunger would ensue if drought persisted, as it once did, until July. A prolonged typhoon could also spoil the sweet-potato crop, thus depleting the essential food stock. Even a rat infestation could cause a food deficiency. During times of severe want, the Buguias people consumed the tubers of a drought-adapted pasture legume and the pithy centers of Miscanthus canes. In the harsh famine at the end of World War II, some individuals retreated to the oak forest to gather acorns. The standby food of hard times, however, was taro. Wild taro, common in higher elevation seeps, was edible if leached, and several varieties of cultivated taro survived well through the worst storms and droughts.

Non-Food Products

The most significant use of wild plants was for nonfood products. Several wild legumes and the semiwild (and exotic) agave yielded

fibers for rope and thread. In the early American period, poorer residents pounded the bark of several different trees into fabrics suitable for loincloths and skirts. Bark clothing disappeared only in the 1930s, when it was universally replaced by cotton cloth. Wild grasses served as thatch, and a variety of vines fastened house rafters and fences. Connected bamboo lengths formed water conduits, and individual sections functioned as canteens. Artisans carved hardwood, obtained from small groves in stream depressions, into bowls, handles, and durable tools. And finally, the versatile Miscanthus cane served in all manner of light construction.

But pine wood overshadowed all other hinterland products. Straight-bole trees, found on favored northern exposures, provided lumber. Hand-split pine planks sufficed for house construction in the early period, but by the 1920s boards sawn by itinerant Northern Kankana-ey workers were commonplace. Most fences (planks and posts) were pine, and hollowed pine logs formed conduits over stream crossings in the larger irrigation systems. Pine wood also fueled the hearths and heated the homes of prewar Buguias. The villagers usually derived their firewood from the more gnarled trees of the rocky slopes and southern exposures. Smoldering fires gave warmth when temperatures dipped to near freezing in December and January and helped counter the wet season's damp. Finally, metalworks were fueled by charcoal, derived largely from pine branches and bark.

The most valuable pine product was perhaps saleng , the resinous heartwood of old or prematurely injured trees. Saleng provided illumination: torches for outside activities, and slender "candles" for the home. The Buguias people also treasured such wood for its resistance to rot; only saleng posts could support a house for more than a few rainy seasons, or serve at all in fencing.

The inhabitants of prewar Buguias did not consider wood procuring to be an especially onerous chore. Pines were still plentiful and large, and a variety of labor-saving techniques were employed. Men and older boys usually secured a year's supply of fuel in the dry season; left to desiccate in the field the wood would lose roughly half of its weight before being carried. On steep slopes logs were shunted down gravel shoots to more accessible sites, if necessary affixed to boulders for extra weight. Trees closer to settlements

were more casually, and gradually, harvested by boys who would climb them to lop off branches for fuel.

Vegetational Change and Agricultural Intensification

Since human subsistence in prewar Buguias relied on wild as well as cultivated lands, one may question just how "natural" the uncultivated lands of Buguias were. And since people continually intervened in natural processes, we must also ask whether the re-configurations they wrought were truly sustainable. The steady growth of human numbers in particular suggests that we must be cautious in proclaiming the prewar subsistence system as ultimately ecologically benign.

Vegetational Change: the Kowal Thesis

Norman Kowal (1966) argues that prior to the advent of swidden cultivation and associated burning, the Cordillera was entirely wooded. Lowland "rainforest" grew below 1,200 meters, the zone between 1,200 and 1,600 meters supported a "submontane" forest of mixed hardwoods (containing pine only on rocky outcroppings and slide scars), and above 1,600 meters grew the true oak-dominated montane forest, called the kalasan in Buguias. Following human disturbance, this series was replaced by one containing Imperata grassland in the lowest reaches, Themeda grassland from approximately 1,000 to 1,400 meters, pine savannah (botanically identical with the Themeda grasslands except for the addition of scattered pines) between 1,200 and 2,000 meters (the original hardwoods surviving in stream depressions), and montane oak forest above 2,000 meters. Jacobs (1972) argues that on the very highest level, the summit of Mount Pulog, fires caused by humans (associated with camp sites rather than swiddens) allowed a grassland dominated by dwarf bamboo to replace the oak association.

Oral environmental histories gathered in several Benguet municipalities support Kowal's thesis. Throughout the province, even in now treeless areas, settlement stories tell of wandering hunters building their homes in "jungle" areas. Without further empirical

Figure 1.
The Buguias Environment: A Cross Section through the Southern Cordillera. Vegetation zones modified from Kowal (1966).

work (palynological analysis, for example), any discussion of vegetational change under human pressure must remain tentative. The following pages thus outline the more likely pathways of anthropogenic vegetation change in prewar Buguias.

Vegetational Change in Buguias

In present-day Buguias, montane hardwoods occupy only the northern exposures of steep side canyons. According to Kowal's model, hardwoods would have dominated the prefire landscape of Buguias, with pine restricted to dry and rocky sites. Such pockets of seasonal aridity are widespread in this area, however, and many steep southern exposures may never have supported montane forests. Although Buguias lies only sixteen degrees north of the equator, slope aspect is significant since drought occurs when the sun is well within the southern hemisphere. Furthermore, fire, which universally favors pine, can be sparked by the lightning that sometimes accompanies the year's first storms. Thus the vegetation of Buguias in earlier times was probably a mosaic of pine savannah and montane forest.

The early agriculturalists probably chose sites in the fertile montane forests for their first swiddens. With long initial fallow, forest vegetation would have been able to regenerate, but with intensification, Miscanthus cane would have spread. Indeed, in both the Ifugao culture region and in the Bot-oan area immediately east of Buguias, Miscanthus swards dominate swidden fallows (see Lizardo 1955). But with the introduction of cattle in the later Spanish period, Miscanthus would have declined while pasture grasses increased. As the fire- and grazing-adapted savannah spread, the montane forest would have retreated to ravines inaccessible to flame. In the more intensively grazed areas of the lower valley, pine would have declined, as yearly burning inhibited its regeneration. In the highest reaches—those above 2,000 meters—perennial saturation would have protected the oak forest, but even here fire could burn a few meters into the woodland each year, allowing a progressive march of grassland vegetation (Jacobs 1972). But for the most part, the higher oak forest would have remained little modified by human activity, except for the few areas cut for uma

fields and the selected ridgetops annually cleared for the nocturnal hunting of migratory birds.

The anthropogenic savannah was vital for prewar Buguias subsistence; it afforded graze for the herds and pine wood for fuel, construction, and illumination. But pine regeneration may have been inadequate to sustain this regime in the long run. Pine seedlings require some five to ten fire-free years to become established, and many pastures were burned annually. Most lower-elevation Ibaloi districts had already been deforested well before the turn of the century (Semper 1862 [1975]), owing perhaps to lowered pine vitality in warmer climes (Lizardo 1955) but probably also to the longer history of Ibaloi pastoralism. Certain Kankana-ey areas, especially those, like Mankayan, that supported an indigenous mining and smelting industry, were also deforested long ago (Marche 1887 [1970]). Whether prewar subsistence patterns would have truly allowed a sustainable pine harvest is an open question.

The people of prewar Buguias derived their sustenance from a landscape that was in part their own creation. All peoples transform nature, but here the alterations were especially marked. The vegetation, geomorphology, and even the hydrology of Buguias reflected a history of human activity. Slopes were flattened and streams diverted for pond fields, and even dry fields were sometimes terraced. The original woodland was largely replaced by a savannah grassland, which was then populated by exogenous animals. Of course, the Buguias people did not make their landscape any way they pleased, but rather grappled with their given environment, pushing its vegetation into latent successional pathways and molding its contours with materials at hand.

Deforestation, however, was not the only threat to prewar subsistence. Population began to grow rapidly in the American period, forcing the Buguias people to intensify production and to reorient their management of uncultivated lands.

Agricultural Intensification

Uma cultivation in prewar Buguias deviated most markedly from "classical swidden" in its short fallow and in its labor intensiveness.^[6] Following Ester Boserup's (1965) powerful theory of agricul-

tural intensification, one would expect precisely such developments if Buguias agriculture were responding to population pressure. With more persons deriving sustenance from the same area, fallow periods would have been progressively shortened as labor inputs were progressively increased. Demographic history, however, is difficult to establish; during the pre-American period the population of Buguias no doubt fluctuated wildly in response to epidemics, military incursions, and migrations. But during the years of American power, population did mount steadily. American and Philippine census data, although of dubious quality, reflect such growth, the recorded population of the Buguias municipal district rising from 1,612 in 1901, to 5,894 in 1948—the latter figure tabulated after the wartime devastation.^[7]

But in many respects, the degree of intensivity exhibited in prewar Buguias agriculture is better explained by ecological than by demographic factors. Since rice would not mature if grown during the wet season, irrigated terraces were necessary for this crop. Once constructed, pond fields do not require a rejuvenating fallow. The motivation for building them, however, rested as much in the ideational as in the material sphere; rice was grown more for the prestigious intoxicant that it provided than for the calories it might afford. Dry fields, however, were allowed only a short fallow, not for lack of land but rather because of the environmental requirements of the staple crop.^[8] Sweet-potato vines would produce the whole year only on sites endowed with deep moisture-retentive soils. True, the Buguias people could have grown all of their tubers in the wet season, storing enough to last the year. But storage would have demanded its own heavy labor burdens, just as it would have resulted in a less appetizing diet. Moreover, the existence of a separate pastoral sector militated against frequent field relocation; for pastureland to be recultivated, the sod had to be manually turned, an extremely laborious undertaking.

Continued population expansion under the prewar regime would have brought systematic agricultural changes. More careful management could have increased the rice yield, and the pond fields themselves could have been drained and planted to sweet potatoes in the off-season. Dry fields could have been intensified by eliminating their vestigial fallow. But increasing the sweet-potato harvest significantly would have required manuring, a labor-

demanding task that also would have stinted the fertile and easily managed door-yard gardens.

A less revolutionary method of increasing production would have been simply to expand the more productive sectors. Additional pastureland could have been converted to dry fields and terraces, while distant woodlands and brushlands could have been cleared for cattle grazing. But since land was finite, constrained ultimately by intervillage boundaries, increased production in this manner would have brought intersectoral spatial competition. Prime dry fields might have been transformed to pond fields, thus forcing new uma construction in previously marginal sites. Pasturelands, cane breaks, brushlands, and forests, however, would have gradually but steadily diminished. Indeed, much evidence suggests that these were precisely the kinds of changes that were occurring in the American period.

If the diet of the Buguias people had continued to be based largely on local subsistence, and had the population continued to grow, labor burdens would have increased, while dietary quality would have diminished. A shrinking pastoral sector would have supported fewer cattle, which would have been divided among more persons. Meanwhile, ever-increasing applications of labor would have been required to convert ever more marginal areas into arable fields or to intensify the output of existing plots.

Beyond this, the potential evolutionary pathways of the intensifying subsistence system are unknowable. As elsewhere, in prewar Buguias a range of potential choices existed, and any developments would have depended on human decisions and innovations. We need only to look at two neighboring peoples, the central Ifugao and the Bontoc, both of whom had much higher population densities in the prewar period than did the Buguias people. The Bontocs had integrated their expansive pond-field system with their dry fields; off-season terraces were drained, ridged, and planted to sweet potatoes (Jenks 1905). Much work was expended, especially since terraces were also manured, but the resulting fields were productive: in 1948, 1,000 hectares of cultivated land in the Buguias regions (reportedly) supported some 9,267 persons, while in Bontoc the figure was 20,966 (Republic of the Philippines 1954, Part 1:53—such figures are, of course, of suspect reliability). In Ifugao, the even more expansive pond fields were seasonally fallowed as in

Buguias, while nonterraced areas were either devoted to brush-fallow swidden or to intensively managed woodlot orchards (see Conklin 1980). Both of these intensified systems were probably sustainable, but neither allowed the meat consumption that was possible in Buguias.

The argument presented above is not merely an exercise in hypothetical reasoning; its purpose is rather cautionary. The latter part of this work will turn to the commercial agriculture that replaced the dry-field/pond-field/pastureland complex following World War II. I will argue that the new agricultural system represents an ecological debacle, marked by eroded hillslopes, denuded canyons, poisoned watersheds, and exterminated wildlife. But we should not allow the desolation of the modern regime to lead us into regarding the prewar period as an ecological idyll. Certainly subsistence agriculture was relatively sustainable, but with increasing population density, environmental degradation would have resulted nonetheless. Cultural ecologists have shown in many instances the utility of viewing "pre-modern" societies as adapted to their environments, but prewar Buguias shows powerfully that they should also be seen, in the tradition of cultural geography, as remaking their very landscapes—and not necessarily in a positive manner (see the essays in Thomas [1956], and, more recently, Blaikie and Brookfield [1987]).

In continually refashioning their landscape, the people of Buguias were both constrained and enabled by their natural environment. But their environmental-management decisions were also made within a limiting social milieu—within a preexisting (although constantly changing) system of power relations and social ideology. As human society changed, so too changed the relationship between people and nature.

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.

4
Religion:
The Role of the Ancestors

Introduction

The people of prewar Buguias believed that their lives were continually touched by a host of gods and spirits, both benign and malevolent. The most influential of such beings were the souls of their ancestors. These amed involved themselves in virtually all Buguias activities, dispensing luck on their descendants according to the care they received from the living. And they were demanding; lonely for human companionship and hungry for the spiritual essences of earthly things, the amed called for repeated celebration. To placate them, the living were obligated periodically to invite the dead back to earth where they could be honored through feast and dance. The rituals in which this took place formed the focus of communal life, and the climax of most economic endeavors.

Human power relations were inseparable from religious activities. The more wealth a couple possessed, the more they had to dispense in ritual. Yet by adhering to these expectations, the elite found twofold advantage within the system: their earthly prestige was legitimated and enhanced, and their spiritual futures were blessed. True, their wealth was diminished by such expenditures in the short run, but the commoners too had exacting ancestors. With commoners borrowing heavily from the wealthy to carry out their own smaller sacrifices, the baknang class was able to gather in with one hand what it had distributed with the other.

Even outside of ritual context, the supernatural pervaded day-to-day life. Omens called for careful readings, while nonancestral spirits demanded watchfulness, for they could wreak great mischief if not properly propitiated. Accidents, illnesses, and mental disturbances could all originate with supernatural agents, and thus call for sacrifice.

Gods and Spirits

The Buguias Pantheon

Religious ideology was open to personal exegesis. While the Buguias people generally shared the complex Cordilleran hierarchies and genealogies of heavenly, earthbound, and underworld deities and spirits, their interpretations seem to have been heterodox. At least in the modern period, even the relationship between the two chief gods, Kabigat and his brother Balitok, and the secondary members of the pantheon, such as Wigan and Bangan, are uncertain. To some, Bangan and Kabigat are siblings, to others, husband and wife.^[1] Above all reigns Kabunian, but again the nature of this ultimate godhead, as well as his connections with the more active heavenly beings, was fluid (see W. H. Scott 19360 [1969]). In one perhaps idiosyncratic conception, all deities are said to occupy dual incarnations: a primary being that remains in the sky-world, and a secondary shadow—intermediary to humankind—dwelling underground.

Gods were considered generally benevolent, and they received numerous petitions for succor. Each deity had his or her specialty. Balitok, for example, offered help in the curing of wounds. To invoke a god's intervention, a priest, or manbunung , had to recite the correct prayers and direct the proper offerings. Chickens were commonly sacrificed; after the gods had feasted on the spiritual essences, the participants consumed the flesh.

Spirits: Dangerous, Neutral, and Helpful

Buguias residents had to be wary of a variety of dangerous spirits. Imbag Bagisan, the underworld god of the hunt, provoked great fear. Accompanied by gruesome dogs, he prowled the earth, sating his hunger with human souls. Except on those occasions when his wife intervened on the victim's behalf, he could only be appeased with two chickens, a pig, or a dog. A variety of usually malicious spirits, generally called anitos , were capable of causing similar harm. The mante-es-bilig , denizens of thickets, caused lingering sickness, curable only through the sacrifice of a female chicken.

The sky-dwelling mante-ed-tongdo wielded potent curses that might require the offer of a water buffalo. The bet-tattew , visible as flickering evening lights, could carry away unwary human souls. More dangerous still were the te-tets , ghostly vampires that sucked life directly from the heart; little could be done to save their victims.

More commonly encountered were timungao , beings who could be either benign or vicious, depending on their individual temperaments. Timungao generally dwelled near boulders in clear-running streams, and as a rule they distanced themselves from raucous human activities. Their society closely paralleled that of humans; they were born, grew up, married, bore children, aged, and accumulated property. Usually invisible to human beings, they commonly appeared only in dreams. Occasionally a female timungao would deign to wed a man during such an encounter. The bewitched groom might then abandon the human world, unless he were divorced, at some expense, from his nocturnal companion.

But for the most part, timungao were disgusted by human dirt, noise, and dietary habits. People disturbed them by trespassing in their clear streams, by fighting among themselves, and particularly by killing and eating their pet frogs (distinguishable by their unusual number of toes). As the timungao's revenge could be deadly, one had to be careful to eat only frogs with the normal configuration of digits. Timungao were also known to harm disrespectful trespassers, although most would tolerate a person who called out and apologized beforehand. Sometimes a timungao would intervene in strictly human affairs, dispensing swift punishment on those guilty of deceiving others. Illness usually befell the delinquent party, although a mischievous timungao might be satisfied simply by urinating on the miserable offender. A good-natured sprite could even bring fortune to a deserving human, but in general these ubiquitous beings required continual appeasing since humans could not help but disturb them.

More influential than either gods or nature spirits were the souls of the dead. They usually helped the living, but they too required continual homage. By the late American period, ancestor worship formed the core of local religion, although it is not at all clear whether this was true in earlier times.

The souls of individuals who died horrible or premature deaths could become malicious in their unhappiness. The spirits of the

drowned (nagalnad ) tried to assuage their loneliness by drowning others. More dangerous were the awil , souls of those who had died particularly violent deaths. The awil of nineteenth-century Spanish soldiers killed in the vicinity caused untold harm in their never-ending quest for revenge.

To avert trouble, a person had to be on constant watch for signs from the spirits. Negative travel omens, such as the crossing of one's path by an unliked or rare animal, delayed many journeys. Even an impropitiously timed sneeze or an oddly behaving dog could ruin a business transaction. Neither did nightmares bode well, as all dreams were considered serious messages from the other realm. On waking, one would hope that by cleansing in clear water the vision could be washed away. If truly impressed, however, the dreamer would seek expert counsel, hoping that what seemed a fright was actually an encoded charm.

Spiritual Curing, Prevention of Harm, and Blessings

The person most often consulted in such cases was a female spirit medium (mansib-ok ). Mediums differed in their diagnostic methods, but most would dangle a bit of iron near the afflicted person's face, and by observing the metal's movement discern the supernatural agent and then recommend the appropriate ceremony (see Sacla 1987). The few male practitioners usually divined by scrutinizing patterns in the dregs of a cup of rice beer.

Having diagnosed her client, the medium would usually refer the individual to a priest (manbunung). Only a priest could perform the requisite sacrifice and chant the correct prayer to the responsible entity. Every supernaturally induced affliction required a different ceremony; one current-day manbunung has recorded the procedures of fifty-nine separate rituals.

Other rituals functioned to secure general blessings from benevolent nonhuman agents. Laymen chanted many simple prayers in the course of daily activities. Drinking sessions formed the most common occasions; before imbibing any alcohol, a person would toss a small amount to the ground, giving its vapors to the gods and ancestors, who would then be beseeched for general assistance. Rituals to secure good harvests, however, were few. Most

were concerned with rice culture; the all-important sweet potato was essentially ignored in ritual life.

Not all supernatural signs were negative. An oddly behaving animal, or especially the presence of a specific animal at a specific place and time (sangbo ), could presage good fortune. A dream too could bode well, depending, of course, on the medium's reading. The ancestors would also convey requests through specific signals. A deceased grandfather, for example, might appear in a dream requesting blankets. The dutiful grandchild would then accord him honor in a blanket-bestowing ritual. Major ceremonies for the ancestors, however, were not usually initiated through such specific requests. Most occurred at intervals dictated largely by the life-stage and social position of the celebrant. Such prestige feasts (pedit ) formed the heart of religious belief and practice. Before analyzing them, however, it is necessary to link the religious beliefs discussed above with the environmental patterns outlined in chapter 2.

Religion and the Landscape

The relationship between community and environment in prewar Buguias was shaped by religious ideology and practices. Rituals guided economic endeavors and social relations, which in turn structured the subsistence activities that transformed the landscape. The supernatural also touched the land directly, as a number of spiritual beings were believed to inhabit specific places where they could influence human activities.

Ritual requirements molded the very dietary basis of subsistence in prewar Buguias. It was, in part, the ancestors' hunger that motivated their descendants to raise hogs. The living, of course, received quality food as their part of the bargain, and materialist scholars (such as Harris 1979) would regard their religious justification as merely a rationale or cultural epiphenomenon. Certainly most humans do crave meat and fat regardless of their forebears' demands. But in settled agricultural areas, meat production entails effort, and different individuals and cultural groups exhibit varying degrees of enthusiasm about exerting the labor needed to produce extra increments of animal flesh. The people of Buguias could have thrived on less meat; their neighbors, the Bontocs and Ifugaos, did

so without much ill effect. But the Buguias villagers, motivated in part by their beliefs, produced a surfeit of meat. As hogs and people ate the same laboriously cultivated sweet potatoes, dry fields had to produce tubers well in excess of minimal subsistence requirements (see Brookfield [1972] for a discussion of "ritual intensification").

Much the same could be argued for pond-field agriculture. Rice, even though usually fermented, did provide quality nutrition, and since rice terraces produced abundantly, their construction might well have been justified without a ritual rationale. But rituals required great quantities of rice beer—the ancestors demanded as much. Beer could be brewed from millet or corn, but the resulting product was considered contemptible. Prestige, wrapped in religion, played an inescapable role; no baknang couple could claim respect unless they were generous with alcohol made from rice.

The spirit realm also reflected directly on the landscape, albeit in relatively minor ways. Buguias religion was focused on a sky-world that touched the earth more at sanctified times than in sacred places. And while consumption in ritual feasts could be a holy experience, production was generally rather mundane. A few meager rituals blessed the rice fields, but other crops were ignored. It was rather through the timungao and other nature spirits that the supernatural directly impinged upon the landscape.

Each of the many timungao dwelled in its own specific abode. Such places were separated from human life not because they were sacred but rather because they were dangerous. If a man tried to cut a sprite's tree, his hand could be severely and immediately "deformed." Buguias residents usually left untouched the large trees and brushy thickets known to harbor timungao. Several potential irrigation sources remained untapped, as timungao were especially vexed when their waters were muddied. But ultimately, even the timungaos' favored havens were vulnerable if any one individual was willing, and able, to offer the necessary propitiation. Here too, class had its way.

The distribution of timungao may also have shaped conceptions of the community's territory. In one specific prayer, a manbunung had to ask forbearance of every timungao inhabiting Buguias and surrounding locales. These beings were not known by personal names, but rather by their locations of residence, and if any dwell-

ing sites were ignored in this petition, bad luck could ensue. This perhaps helped create and sustain Buguias's extremely intricate system of toponyms, in which even inconsequential sections of uninhabited slope are individually named.^[2]

Prestige Feasts in Prewar Buguias

The Wedding Ceremony

A couple's ritual career would begin with their wedding ceremony. A respectable groom had to furnish at least one buffalo and several pigs. In an arranged marriage, butcherings could begin with the betrothal of infants, but this practice was uncommon even among the elite. Most engagements proceeded slowly, through the office of a go-between (usually a male elder), and each step of the deliberations required its own rituals.

Marriage conferred ritual independence, although some couples continued to reside for a time in a parental home (usually the wife's). Children were expected to follow soon, but not before the newlyweds had given a second offering to the ancestors. This ceremony (sabang ) formed the first step in a graded series of prestige feasts called pedit (referred to earlier), but it was the only one incumbent on all couples. As in other prestige feasts, its ostensive purpose was to invite the ancestors to dance and eat with their living descendants. Specific to this rite, however, was the asking of favor for the young couple's progeny.

Graded Prestige Feasts: The Pedit

While all households performed many minor curative or preventive rituals, roughly one-fourth of prewar Buguias couples did not progress beyond sabang in the prestige-feast ladder. The rest moved on to tol-tolo , the first real step of the pedit series, and all respected members eventually progressed to lim-lima (lima , or five, refers to the number of pigs sacrificed on the second day). The following several pages describe a typical pedit ceremony, using the lim-lima as an example.

As with other stages, butchering would begin during an organizational meeting held several days before the actual observance.

Here the celebrants, ritual experts, and elders would immolate a single pig while they planned the celebration's logistics. On the first day of the ceremony proper the ancestors and some of the living guests arrived to be feted with two pigs of either sex.

The following day marked the essential sacrifices of otik ("swine with tusks"). The guests, representing several villages, assembled at dawn, when five ritual hogs, four males and one female, were released in a sanctified enclosure. Young men then scrambled to catch and tie down the boars, avoiding the sow for the time being. They then lashed the boars together in a line; the connecting rope allowed the ancestors to lead the spirits of the animals to the after-world. After prayer and ritual, four high-status men drove sharpened stakes into the pigs' hearts. The screams of the dying beasts pleased the ancestors, while their blood gushing to the ground foretold fertility.

After the hogs expired, the manbunung would burn blood-soaked taro slices and rice stalks on their backs, bringing prosperity to the celebrants' household. The animals were then butchered, with their livers and gall bladders carefully exposed so that the manbunung and other experts could read them as oracles. The carcasses were then singed, scraped, dismembered, and boiled. After this, members of the "meat committee" would distribute the flesh, making sure that elite (and the ancestors) were first honored with the best portions. All guests were also given raw meat to carry home. To fill the enormous appetite of the gathering, the celebrants might have to slaughter water buffalo and sometimes even cattle in a purely secular context off to the side of the main proceedings.

Once the sacrifices were completed, attention turned to dance. A man and a woman invariably danced as a pair, while brass gongs, iron bars, and wooden drums maintained the rhythm. The performers would alternate between several different dance styles, each associated with a particular geographic region. The celebrating couple danced first, followed by the village elite, with each dancer performing in the stead of a specific ancestor. All dances were punctuated by the manbunung's blessings. Eventually the roster of the ancestors would be completed, and the dance opened to the wider community. At this point even the young participated, often reveling through the night. The mood was now one of pure festivity, the participants well lubricated with rice beer. One of the

first Europeans to visit Buguias, the German traveler Carl Semper, must have arrived at such a time, for he wrote, "When I arrived in Buguias the people had been drinking . . . for five days and nights, and the general drunkenness lasted during my three day stay" (1862 [1975]: 29).

After the second day most guests returned home; only the immediate family, the village elders, the ritualists, and the ancestors remained. On the third day the elders would sacrifice another hog and possibly a water buffalo, and the fourth day marked a simple "party" for the ancestors. On the fifth day, ritual specialists would clean and bind together the heads of the ritual pigs, then slaughter a new pair of swine, male and female. The following day was uneventful, but the seventh day again required a pair of hogs as the remaining guests prepared for the departure of the ancestors. This signified the formal conclusion, even though on the following evening the celebrants' close relatives often performed their own subsidiary rites. The celebrating couple might also observe a last single-hog ritual to "dam up" the good luck bestowed by the ancestors.

The celebrating couple bore the feast's financial brunt, but some of the other participants also contributed. Close relatives had their own secondary rituals, and both relatives and neighbors always prepared rice beer used to entertain guests during the initial gathering. Throughout the festivities, a markedly communal character remained.

During the feast's public events, the ancestors were entertained, provisioned, and beseeched. But within the house, the celebrants and ritual experts strove for more intimate communication, chanting and singing to the ancestors well into the night. Some of their intonations were simple requests; others were ritual utterings meaningless in ordinary speech. During these occasions the spirits could possess certain women; through these media the ancestors prophesied and demanded additional favors, often requesting that another specific couple also celebrate a major feast. Such a woman might remain in a trance, alternating between anger, sorrow, and elation, for hours. Occasionally a man would be entranced, but most participants would regard such an event with skepticism, wondering openly whether he were only drunk.

Few couples progressed beyond the lim-lima pedit, but those with social pretentions were obligated to continue up the prestige

ladder. A given pedit ceremony was ranked by the number of hogs chased on the second day; at each successive rung the number increased by two, the scale thus ascending in odd numbers.^[3] The essential observations remained the same, but the number of villages invited and the number of animals butchered increased markedly with each step. Cattle especially were slaughtered in large numbers, as the take-home meat requirements escalated faster than did the sacrificial obligations. Swine killings roughly matched those of the lim-lima for the first seven days, but they continued for a longer period of time, determined ultimately by the advice of the ritual experts. Seventeen days was typical for a "number nine," but any untoward occurrence, even the appearance of a rat, could prolong it. Through the entire period the celebrants observed taboos; they could not eat pungent vegetables, nor could they engage in any sexual activities.^[4]

"Nine" (siam ) marked the graduating pedit, confirming a couple's baknang status. After this their prime responsibility shifted to helping their children ascend the prestige ladder. But the wealthiest could still continue their own series, celebrating "eleven," "thirteen," and so on. Upon reaching the stellar level of "twenty-five," the couple had completed one full ritual cycle and was expected to withdraw. In the "reti

The Buguias Funeral

Funerals, except for those of suicides, replicated the essential structure of the pedit ceremony. Both centered around communion with the dead, and both reflected the status of the honored individual.

On the first day of a wake, the survivors would lash the corpse to a death chair, where it would remain throughout the ceremony. A smokey fire and watchful fly-shooer at its side fought off the worst effects of putrefaction. On the initial day a male and a female pig were butchered, and, if necessary to feed the guests, a cow or steer also. The second day would pass with little ritual, simpler food being prepared for the guests. On the third day, the deceased's children huddled together under a blanket holding a single fiber, signifying the continuity of generations. Now the most sacred rituals began. Sacrifices ensued, always in male and female pairs, until

a number commensurate with the deceased's stature—and with the wealth of his or her survivors—was reached. Duality was a constant theme; guests brought paired presents (designated male and female), and were required to attend for an even number of days. Buguias wakes were often rather festive; food and drink were plentiful, and the participants commonly remained awake through the night, drinking, telling stories, and singing to the corpse.

Poorer individuals were buried at the end of the third day, but most were interred on day five. On the fifth day, three pigs, the first odd-numbered offering, usually signified the funeral's conclusion. But such an abbreviated wake would not suffice for a baknang, and the wealthiest remained in the death chair for one month or longer. (One story tells of a funeral beginning on the day a particular dog gave birth, and ending after the pups were as large as the mother.) The higher a person had progressed in the pedit series, the longer his or her corpse was expected to remain unburied. A baknang's entire cattle herd could be consumed in the process, although half of it would usually be saved if there were a surviving spouse.

At the close of the public sacrifices the corpse was placed in a coffin carved from a single unblemished pine log. But the ceremony had not yet ended. On the following night, close relatives and ritualists would retrieve the coffin and again expose the body, offering one last hog and chanting again through the night. Thirty-six hours later came the final burial. The next day, barring bad omens, each married child of the deceased would offer two hogs in their own homes. A final ceremony, also incumbent upon the married children, took place three months to a year later. During this rite the deceased, now a full-fledged amed, or ancestor, returned for the first time to socialize with the living.

But the initial burial site was not necessarily the final resting place. Not uncommonly, an ancestor would visit one of his or her descendants in a dream, pleading that his or her bones be transferred to a new gravesite. This entailed a new round of ceremonies and sacrifices. In the Spanish period, the movement of the coffin had been easily accomplished, as most were put to rest in natural caves and crevices. In that era entire families were sometimes interred in a single carved, zoomorphic casket. In a still earlier period, secondary burials were made in ceramic jars. Evidently, it was

only in the American period that coffins were buried under earth; after the war, above-ground concrete-block crypts were adopted, facilitating once again the periodic transfer of bones.

Other Rites

Several unusual ceremonies punctuated the lives of a few individuals in the Buguias community. If a couple could not reproduce they would perform fertility rites; if these failed, divorce was the usual recourse. (In the disjoining ritual the couple's hog-feeding trough would be split in two while a single animal was sacrificed.) Individuals sometimes tried to hide from bad luck by changing their names, and this too called for specific rituals and sacrifices.

Overall, ritual practices were not rigidly fixed; requirements were flexible, with specific actions negotiated by celebrants, elders, and ritual experts. Moreover, innovation and borrowings from neighboring peoples brought ever greater complexity. While some rituals remained specific to a single family, change occurred readily in the community at large, for all significant actions took place within a context of shared meanings that was itself open to discussion and debate. But remaining central to the whole was the display of status during all major ritual occasions.

Status Display

Religion was inseparable from social stratification. The magnitude of ceremonial expenditure varied directly with the wealth of the celebrating couple, and individual status reflected a history of ritual performance. Moreover, in community-wide ceremonies the relative social position of many individuals attending was publicly and precisely displayed. The exact standing of any given person was the subject of intermittent negotiation, with the ritual specialists acting as the ultimate arbiters.

High-status persons were accorded honors at all feasts. They dined first, received the choicest meats, and were provided the freshest rice beer. They also received ample shares of take-home meat. Dancing order also depended on status; the elite danced first, representing their (usually) elite ancestors. The truly poor

were often too ashamed to participate at all. High-status individuals were also privy to the inner ritual circles; they, for example, along with the religious experts, often chanted through the night in the celebrants' house. At their own ceremonies, the elite advertised their positions clearly, in part by displaying collections of Chinese porcelain vases.

Blanket Rank

The elite received special treatment at ceremonies as a prerogative of power rather than as a display of status. But ritual dancing pegged status exactly, since performers indicated their ranks with funerary blankets and accessory garments of known prestige value.

The five different blankets, which would ultimately serve as burial shrouds, reflected their owners' status in reinforcing ways. The intricately woven higher-rank blankets were elaborately patterned and very expensive. The topmost blanket, alladang , along with its five complementary garments, could only grace the community's highest echelon. The second highest, pinagpagan , was also restricted to the elite. The lower kwabao could adorn the older and more respected commoners, but most common people were entitled only to the cheaper dil-li. The poorest individuals donned only bandala , a cheap, essentially secular covering. Combinations of blankets and accessories displayed intermediate ranks; an elderly and respected commoner, for example, might be allowed kwabao complemented with a few secondary items normally associated with pinagpagan.^[5]

Four considerations determined an individual's blanket rank. These were, in order of importance: level of achievement in pedit, status of immediate ancestors, wealth of close relatives, and age. A person's position at marriage was largely inherited, but one could subsequently ascend the status ladder, even moving a rung or two during the death ceremony itself if unstinting sacrifices were offered. Such social climbing had its limits, however, as only members of the most exalted lineages could ever hope to wear the alladang.

The ultimate ranking decision, at death, rested with the elders and ritual experts. But arguments from the family of the deceased

who usually hoped for higher status regardless of cost could sway opinion. In one noted case, the alleged wizard Kabading rose two full levels during his wake, as his corpse sat in the death chair through an entire month of deliberation. Since Kabading was not notably wealthy and had not progressed far in pedit, his station at death was only dil-li. But his relatives successfully contended that because he was both a priest and a prophet, because he had produced many descendants, and because his wife had rich cousins who had helped defray the funeral costs, he should be inhumed in pinagpagan.

Ritual Experts

Knowledge of ritual matters could also influence status determination. While the office of manbunung, or priest, appealed little to the wealthy, it did provide an avenue by which a common man could gain prestige. Manbunungs led many exclusive activities, and their blanket ranks could be boosted if they had gained renown.

The Buguias priesthood was internally stratified according to depth of knowledge and performance skills. Obscure rites escaped the mediocre, and only the most capable could officiate at the distinctly different and generally more complex rituals of Kalanguya immigrants. The best of the priestly elite solemnized charismatically, gracefully covering forgotten stanzas and evoking heartfelt emotion from the participants. The worst were castigated as lazy if not greedy; one could earn such a reputation, for instance, by refusing to perform any ceremony that required only chickens.

Although manbunungs occupied an essential ritual office, they were not the most important religious figures. Real ideological power resided rather with the mankotoms , the ritual advisers and prophets of Buguias. Although a manbunung performed ceremonies, he could not determine what they should include; priests could not be so entrusted, it was thought, since they might choose the most expensive ritual in order to increase their own remuneration. A spirit medium would recommend minor curative rites, but a mankotom would specify the procedures of the major ceremonies honoring the ancestors. These several men determined the sequence of pedit and the magnitude of funeral rites; they also served as the ultimate arbiters of social standing. This was not a position

for the poor, although a few men of intermediate standing did reach it, and while it was coveted by the rich, few from that class ever achieved it. The mankotom's position was always tenuous, for his authority finally rested on his ability not only to remember the past but also on his ability to predict the future.

The Ideology of Ritual Performance

Wealth in prewar Buguias permitted lavish ritual performance, which in turn conferred social status. But underlying the feast system was a more recondite economic calculus; couples performed ceremonies primarily in hope of enlarging their own stores of material wealth, which would allow even more grandiose future celebrations, hence even more prestige, and so on. The seeming paradox posed in the proposition that consumption was the route to accumulation was resolved in beliefs concerning the rapport between the living and the dead. In all likelihood, such ideas evolved slowly in the Spanish and American periods, as they have continued to do during the postwar era; as a result, it should be kept in mind that later innovations may have inadvertently been introduced into the oral accounts upon which this analysis is based. The basic workings of the system, however, have clearly been in place for the entire reach of present-day lore.

The Luck of the Ancestors

According to the local economic-cosmological model, luck—vital in every endeavor—was controlled by the ancestors. Certainly the Buguias people considered hard work essential for realizing potential good fortune, just as sloth was considered capable of bringing its own destitution. But fortuity was primary. The nature of a couple's luck hinged on their concourse with their deceased parents, grandparents, and more distant ancestors. To ensure blessings from above, they had to please these amed, and since the dead yearned to return periodically to feast with their descendants, pedit was mandatory. If the offerings were inadequate, the amed would readily indicate their displeasure.

The ancestors relished dance, but they were also greedy for the

spiritual essences of hog flesh and rice beer. They also rejoiced in blankets and even money; a cache of silver peso coins, placed upon a stack of funeral blankets, adorned every pedit ceremony. The dead needed such (non)material things because they too existed within a wealth-based, and mutable, social hierarchy. A soul entered the afterworld with a blanket-signified rank, but could subsequently rise or possibly even fall according to the oblations offered by living descendants. To cinch the matter, an ancestor's power to bestow bounty on the living depended, in turn, on his or her afterlife position. The welfare of the living was thus partly contingent on the gifts that each couple managed to send skyward. The newly rich encountered a special burden here, since to ensure continued success they had not only to placate but also to empower their lowstatus spiritual allies.

Normal communications between earth and heaven were indirect, vague, and subject to misinterpretation. A clear channel, however, opened with every death. While in the death chair, an individual remained in limbo, shuttling back and forth between the two realms until the final burial on earth, corresponding to acceptance in the afterworld. Hence the extravagant attention lavished on the corpse; revelers at the wake sang and chanted unceasingly to the body, asking it to convey special requests to the ancestors. Here also lay the significance of the double burial; with the first interment the soul sojourned in the afterworld, gathering a store of luck that it could redistribute if brought back to earth for a brief period. Since the cooperation of the recently released spirit was vital to the success of this endeavor, the living hoped that through flattery they might secure an enthusiastic messenger. A funeral of an elder was thus not an entirely unhappy occasion. Story telling, joking, and drinking lightened the somber ceremonies at the house of the dead.

Even if well-feted, the ancestors still constituted a threat, thus requiring additional ritual precautions. Two parallel dangers lurked here: an amed might pine for a specific living person's companionship; or, a certain living soul might opt for more constant spiritual communion. In either instance, death could come prematurely. Here lay the peril in visiting a wake on an odd number of occasions; if the pair (essentially a sexual metaphor) were not completed, one's now unbalanced soul could more easily be lost. Spe-

cial ceremonies were also needed to resegregate the quick from the dead. In nonritual settings, however, the afterworld was not so beckoning; in fact, languishing elders would occasionally bundle themselves within their own death shrouds, hoping to frighten their souls into remaining earthbound a while longer.

Ritual and Power in Human Society

During rituals the Buguias people generally feasted together in communal harmony. Disputes were put to rest for the nonce, and the few rivalries exhibited were playful. For example, if someone were to fall asleep during a wake, another might regale the corpse by saying: "Look here, this fellow is ignoring you, so why don't you give to me the favors he requested?" But good will did not always infuse human relations, and mundane disputes were sometimes referred to the afterworld. In trial by ordeal, for example, the ancestors and gods were asked to judge, and were expected to give immediate evidence of guilt or innocence. Moreover, the threat of supernatural sanction always made perjury a dangerous litigation strategy. A curse befalling a liar might persist for years, fomenting perennial ill feelings between contesting families.

On the whole, the Buguias people prized amicable settlements and were proud to note that the blood feuds endemic to many other Cordilleran regions did not plague their society. Yet violent disputes did occasionally erupt, and the opposing parties could try to curry favor from the more powerful ancestors. Since both parties could do the same, human quarrels could escalate into contests between different afterworld factions. A few individuals, usually Kalanguya immigrants, were judged guilty of manipulating malignant spirits for their own benefit; these mantala were greatly feared and occasionally killed, secretly or in public.

The Tong Tongan Jural System

Regardless of ancestral advocacy, most disputes were ultimately settled in the tong tongan , or indigenous court system, the focal point of political power in prewar Buguias. Here the male elders arbitrated suits and sentenced criminals; the issues they faced

ranged from murder to divorce to animal damage in an uma. Not surprisingly, power and to some extent, even membership, in this jural body were not merely functions of age, but also of pedit performance. While an elder of the lowest respectable rank would rate the status of elder, the dominating voices were those of the more elderly elite. But even the richest could not rely merely on their ceremonial renown or economic muscle; a powerful voice had to be eloquent, reasonable, trustworthy, and ultimately convincing to the other jurors. Lower-status elders, however, were usually reluctant to contest their higher fellows. Thus a strong bias pervaded cross-class tong tongan proceedings; poor parties often prosecuted their cases with reluctance, relying instead on the high-class jurors' sense of justice.

Religious significance imbued the tong tongan. Contestants would always purchase a pig for joint sacrifice, while both winner and loser offered additional animals (batbat ) after the settlement—the losing party paying for both. The Buguias people trusted these rituals to quell the ill will and bad luck engendered in litigation. Here too status nudged the scales. A batbat, for example, required only a chicken, but a victorious baknang, if callous, could demand of the loser a pig, the theory being that a man of stature should always perform a lavish rite.

Grounds for Belief

The purported economic linkages between the sky-world and earth rested as much on quasi-empirical demonstration as on faith. The efficacy of prestige feasting was superficially palpable; those couples who held the grandest feasts possessed the greatest wealth, which implied ancestral favor—itself derived from gifts offered in ritual. But this tautology did not suffice. Rather, the Buguias people called for direct evidence tying past performances with present conditions. This was the province of the mankotom. It was his duty to keep track of many individuals' supernatural messages (dreams, sangbos ), their subsequent ritual actions or omissions, and their resulting economic successes and failures. It was on the basis of this body of narrative evidence that the mankotom gave advice and offered prophesies.

If an advisee followed the recommended course but garnered no

luck, he could always question the skill of the mankotom rather than the verity of his own beliefs. Those mankotoms with poor records found their careers abbreviated, but successful forecasters enjoyed ever increasing renown. Of course, even an ascendant prophet occasionally blundered, but then he could always accuse the celebrant of neglecting some minor but essential duty. As a person of considerable ritual power, the mankotom could be tempted to serve himself. One adviser was suspected of having intentionally staged an inappropriate and incomplete ritual so as to offend the ancestors and bring down a disliked advisee. But such a ploy was perilous, since it could destroy a mankotom's reputation, the very stuff of his power.

The Economics of Ritual Expenditure

All rituals entailed expense. An angry nature spirit could usually be appeased with nothing more than a chicken, although an irritated timungao might exact an expensive white pig. But the ancestors, and the living persons honoring them, demanded real livestock slaughter. In any given ceremony this could escalate beyond original expectations, as bile omens might require additional sacrifices. With this eventuality in mind, celebrants sometimes stockpiled small, cheap pigs. In funerals, the paired offerings increased the risk, since a single malformed gallbladder might call for two new animals.

Nor was livestock the only expense. The guests also required carbohydrates and plenty of expensive rice beer. Furthermore, the ritualists demanded pay: the manbunung received the hind leg of a pig or the foreleg of a water buffalo, and the mankotom was given a large portion of the finest meat. As major ceremonies called for several manbunungs, the outlay here could be significant.

A funeral burdened both the estate of the deceased and the personal fortunes of the surviving children. Guests brought alms (used spiritually by the departing soul and materially by responsible family), but these could never cover the entire cost of the funeral. Many believed that if the personal property of the dead (animals and rice terraces) were spared, his or her spirit would be prone to haunt. Further, the alms givers received raw and cooked meat to take home in proportion to their contributions. And finally, the mar-

ried children of the deceased were further burdened with private postfuneral observances for which no assistance was forthcoming.

Social Stratification and Religious Expense

On the surface, ritual expenditures disproportionally taxed the rich. This was especially marked in funerals and above all in pedit, where each step entailed geometrically inflated expenses. But on all occasions, elite couples demonstrated their stature by redistributing lavishly. This also extended to the nonritual feasts (saliw ) that accompanied such occurrences as the completion of a house or the engagement of one's child.

The Buguias ideology demanded the redistribution of wealth. The elite could accumulate only so much; eventually public pressure, or the desire for supernatural favor, would force them to some extent to decapitalize.^[6] No one could live on the fruits of wealth alone, and even the richest had to pursue income actively. But, in the great irony of Buguias religion, a favored method of reacquiring wealth was to exploit the religious observations of the commoners. Here was a fine opportunity for usury.

Every self-respecting commoner had to begin adult life with a series of expensive rituals, beginning with the wedding ceremony. Social pressure motivated laggards; villagers denigrated any woman who married a man too poor or frugal to supply a buffalo ("Are you so cheap that he could take you with just a chicken?"). Couples who failed to perform the postwedding ceremony of sabang humiliated their parents, who feared for their own status—both on earth and in the afterlife. If a couple did not at least initiate the pedit series they suffered continual shame. Everyone was obligated to entertain the ancestors and to feast the living; the wellbeing of the entire village rested here. Further costs were encountered with sickness, and, more importantly, with funerals. Only members of the servile class could ignore the demands of the spirits and the corresponding responsibilities of community life.

One may well wonder how people of little property were able to afford such celebrations. The only answer was long-term debt. Few managed easily to return the principal, and interest charges—often hidden—exacerbated their plight. Most commoners remained constantly in debt, often owing their labor as well as their livestock to

the village financiers. This put them at a psychological and monetary disadvantage in communal affairs. Debtors were often cowed, and wealthy creditors could argue with little opposition the right to dictate a poor couple's ritual schedule, saying, "You couldn't do anything if we didn't lend you money, therefore you should do as we say."

Interest arrangements for ritual expenses varied. Loans were often "on the hoof," in which case the lender immediately received a large chunk of flesh as partial compensation. On other occasions the baknang would lend money for the purchase of a specific animal. In this instance, several parties might claim "interest meat," including the creditor, the animal's caretaker, and its owner. Interest on simple cash loans also varied; usually a year's grace period was allowed, after which rates ranged between zero and 30 percent annually, depending on the generosity of the lender and on the familial ties of the two parties.

A few debtors escaped altogether by moving away, either to Baguio City or to a more remote district within Benguet. But most commoners continued to pay off their old debts—although they usually accumulated new ones in the interim. If a borrower owned rice terraces, the lender could take possession after several years of nonpayment and eventually claim them outright. One baknang in particular was alleged to have amassed extensive terrace holdings in this manner.

One could not claim baknang standing if one did not lend animals for prestige feasts. This was a responsibility of rank, albeit one that could be used to advantage. But by exploiting the poverty of neighbors and relatives the unscrupulous baknang would arouse community censure. In characteristic circularity, however, communal approbation could readily be reacquired through further ritual expenditures. Both despite and because of their considerable outlays, a few powerful individuals retained control of the community's underlying financial structure.

Power and Religion Reconsidered

Political power in prewar Buguias rested largely on wealth legitimated by ritual performance. If any baknang couple had tried to shirk their ritual responsibility (an unthinkable occurrence), their position would have faltered, for it depended critically on popular

support. The elite had few real means of coercion in the indigenous system; even in exercising political power they worked with, not against, the public. The commoners accepted elite domination in part because the wealthy, by feasting the entire village, proved themselves worthy of respect, and, by honoring the ancestors, helped ensure the prosperity of all Buguias people.

Most Buguias residents considered the differentiation of human society into rich and poor, powerful and weak, to be the natural order of things. Social stratification pervaded their universe, being marked just as strongly in heaven as on earth. The gods of Benguet were noted above all else for their wealth, as is evident in Sacla's (1987:53–56) masterful translations of ritual chants:

It is said, Pati came down;
The progenitor of the wealth and mighty;
He came down with pigs, your pigs . . .
It is said, Balitoc came down
Whose gold scales balance perfectly;
A precious scale used in Suyoc;
Yes, because he is wealthy and mighty;
He came with pigs, your pigs . . .
It is said Kabigat came down;
With precious coins in the amount of twelve and a half;
He used to purchase pigs for pedit;
Yes, because he is wealthy and mighty;
He came down with pigs, your pigs . . .
It is said Lumawig came down;
He has power to cast out evil;
Yes, because he is wealthy and mighty;
He came down with pigs, your pigs . . .
It is said, Bangan came down,
Bangan from Langilangan;
Wearing an alad-dang blanket;
She wore such garment because
she is rich and mighty . . .

Even nature spirits in Buguias were class-divided. The wealthy timungao, of course, could cause much greater harm or bestow much better fortune than their more modest colleagues. If a human were to break an (invisible) porcelain jar of a baknang ni timungao , serious consequences could be avoided only through a very expensive ritual.

But individual class positions, whether in human or ancestral society, were never regarded as ordained; it was rather the economic interactions between these two spheres that allowed mobility in both. As everyone hoped to prosper, the luck-bestowing ancestors lay at the focus of religious life. Although individuals competed for material gain, their relations with their forebears ultimately hinged on communal engagements. The centrifugal tendencies of a commercial and competitive society were partly balanced by the centripetal forces inherent in common worship and food sharing.

In more immediate material terms, however, the resources necessary both for upward mobility and for the wealthy to maintain their positions were derived largely from interregional trade. It is this mercantile sphere, which also formed the essential preconditions for Buguias's later commercial transformation, that we shall now examine.

5
Commercial and Political Relations

Introduction

Prewar Buguias was by no means a wholly self-sufficient community. The inhabitants of the upper Agno Valley were widely noted as long-distance merchants. Through trade the Buguias people procured part of their subsistence needs; more importantly, through incessant buying and selling they developed a mercantile orientation. In Buguias it was commercial endeavors, not agrarian practices, that formed the pivot between the economic and the ideological realms, the mundane and the spiritual. And it was the legacy of prewar trade that nurtured the postwar vegetable industry.

Paralleling the community's economic linkages were political ties. For just as prewar Buguias was not self-sufficient, neither was it wholly autonomous. From the beginning of the twentieth century, the village lay within an international structure of power relations centering on the American colonial government in Manila. Compared to many other peripheral regions of the world economy, imperial power was relatively light here, but in many respects American policies, intentionally and accidentally, molded the development of Buguias society.

Trade Relations

Historical Background

Well before the Spanish era, southern Cordilleran miners exchanged gold in coastal villages for Chinese porcelains, raw iron, cloth, livestock, and other goods (Scott 1974; Keesing 1962). Highland-lowland commerce in all probability expanded through the Spanish period as the population erratically grew and as the mountain people responded to new trade opportunities. After the state mandated a tobacco monopoly in the 1780s, for example, highland-

ers soon began exporting large quantities of contraband tobacco to the lowlands (Scott 1974: 232).

In the late 1700s, Francisco Antolin, a Spanish friar stationed in a remote mission in the Magat Valley to the southeast of Buguias, documented an extensive and closely knit exchange system in the southern Cordillera. At that time, gold-mining communities typically procured food from nearby agricultural villages and even from the lowlands; the more prosperous mining districts regularly imported slaves from peripheral communities as well. Other villages specialized in manufacturing ironware and copperware, which, along with other handicrafts, were exchanged over long distances. Villages located athwart trade routes profited by charging tariffs on goods passing through their territories (Antolin 1789 [1970]).

At the time of Antolin's writings in the late eighteenth century, the southern Cordilleran trade network centered on two villages in the eastern cloud forest: Tucucan, located eleven kilometers east of Buguias, and its neighbor Tinoc, some twelve kilometers east-southeast of Buguias (Antolin 1789 [1970]). In this period, Buguias itself was noted for its production of copper vessels and iron tools and weapons, rather than for long-distance exchange (Scott 1974; Meyer 1890 [1975]; Semper 1862 [1975]). Sometime in the middle or late nineteenth century, however, Buguias gained ascendancy in transmontane trade—an abrupt shift evidently owing to the migration of Tinoc and Tucucan traders to the Buguias region, perhaps in response to Spanish incursions from the east. Virtually all presentday Buguias genealogies trace back to one wealthy Tucucan trader, Lumiaen, who migrated to Buguias during this period, and the Buguias people remember Lumiaen's son Basilio and his grandson Danggol as powerful merchants.

Buguias Trade in the American Period

Buguias trade patterns in the American period owed much to environmental and cultural variation within the southern Cordillera. Complex topography, vertically banded production zones, monsoonal seasonality, a patchy distribution of mineral resources, and a diversity of cultural groups all contributed to pronounced differences in local production over short distances. Trade linkages cen-

Map 6.
The Buguias Trade Sphere. Only the most important trade routes are indicated on the map.

tered on Buguias integrated multiple environmental zones and several different peoples (see map 6).

The Buguias mercantile system was predicated on a consistent pattern of exchanges carried out between specific centers of production. In the immediate neighborhood each substantial village occupied a unique position in the network. Beyond this local zone, trade involved exchanges across broad cultural and ecological zones; these included both the cloud forest (or kalasan) and the Ifugao culture region to the east, the lower elevation areas of Benguet to the south and west, and the Ilocos Coast along the South China Sea.

Kabayan, 10 kilometers to the south, was a major local partner.

At 1,200 meters, this Ibaloi village is 200 meters lower than Buguias, hence distinctly warmer and drier during the low-sun season. Its steep hillsides, however, offered fewer suitable sites for dry fields. Whereas Buguias umas yielded sweet potatoes abundantly throughout the year, those in Kabayan were barren in the dry months. Rice, by contrast, flourished here and was produced in great abundance. Kabayan's terraces were not only much more extensive than those of Buguias, but they also gave larger and more assured harvests. The residents of the two villages thus found each other natural trade partners, and many Buguias households bartering dried sweet potatoes here for rice. In addition, some Buguias residents purchased Kabayan rice with cash, clothing, or other trade goods, and not a few poorer individuals labored in Kabayan's fields in exchange for harvest shares.

Buguias residents also exchanged foodstuffs with the Kankanaey villages of the upper Agno Valley. Occasional frosts in Lo-o, 8 kilometers north, precluded the cultivation of ginger and other crops. Furthermore, the Lo-o people grew no rice until cold-tolerant strains appeared in the 1920s; earlier they had purchased necessary stores in Kabayan and occasionally in Buguias. In exchange, Lo-o exported, among other goods, meat-horses raised on its extensive bottomland pastures. Residents of the smaller settlements on the slopes above the Agno River also procured rice in both Buguias and Kabayan, usually in exchange for hogs or chickens. Hogs and cattle also flowed from these marginal communities to Buguias as interest payments, as the local system of animal lending bound these small villages tightly to Buguias financiers.

East of Buguias, along the main ridge of the Cordillera and into Ifugao province, lay the extensive cloud forest, dominated by oak and other hardwoods. The Kalanguya-speaking inhabitants of this mossy oak woodland were closely connected, genealogically and commercially, to the Buguias people, and during the American period a good part of the region was an economic hinterland of Buguias. Unlike the Agno Valley, this area was the province of professional traders, men who had learned the art of "buy and sell" and who could profit by their knowledge of the geographic variation of commodity prices.

The cloud forest produced hogs in great abundance. Its thick forests yielded ample mast, fungus, and earthworms, and its perennial humidity allowed year-round sweet-potato harvests while

militating against porcine skin disease. Here Buguias traders could also obtain forest products, such as rattan and various species of bamboo, unavailable at home. Minor cloud-forest specialties included chickens, eggs, mushrooms, honey, and migratory birds (attracted by torchlight and captured with nets on foggy autumn nights along the main ridge).

The Buguias traders brought copper pots, ironware, and textiles (especially funeral blankets) to exchange for these coveted products of the cloud forest. In addition, the local residents were eager to obtain silver pesos and copper coins—scarce items in this remote area but readily obtained by the Buguias people elsewhere in their trading sphere.^[1] Buguias merchants would also extend credit, both in cash and in livestock, to cloud-forest dwellers. In fact, the wealthiest Buguias residents managed to accumulate hundreds, and at times thousands, of hogs and cattle throughout this region, and many kalasan dwellers remained perpetually in their debt.

One thread of the Buguias trade network continued east across the cloud forest to the Ifugao district of Kiangan. An expedition to this region required some ten days, but Kiangan supplied highvalue goods, particularly water buffalo. The Buguias people valued buffalo for rituals and sometimes as work animals, but they resold most of them for profit in other Benguet communities. The Kiangan people did not raise these animals themselves, but rather imported them from the adjacent Magat Valley. Only occasionally would Buguias merchants travel so far to purchase directly from the stock breeders. Human chattel formed another element of the Kiangan trade in the early American period. Kiangan slavers typically trafficked in debtors, convicted thieves, and captives from other Ifugao regions. Buguias residents recall the average Kiangan slave as selling for roughly the same price as a large cow or water buffalo, a value similar to that found by Worcester (1903) for the lowland areas of northern Luzon.^[2]

Buguias traders traveled extensively through the northern two-thirds of Benguet, primarily to purchase swine. Benguet hogs, especially ones from the lower, warmer areas, were different animals from those of the cool, moist cloud forest. Never as fat, they were however more easily fattened. According to local theory, Benguet hogs were accustomed to such an impoverished diet (of sweet-potato leaves, rice hulls, garbage, and human waste) that they would readily eat—and even batten on—the raw sweet potatoes

that their spoiled cloud-forest cousins found indigestible. Buguias traders therefore keenly purchased such animals for fattening at home. Cash-hungry Benguet villagers would also sell their aged hogs, prized throughout the Cordillera for their long tusks. Buguias traders sometimes sacrificed tuskers in their own rituals, but more often they sold them to Ifugao and Northern Kankana-ey itinerants who were willing to pay well for this particular form of ostentatious display.

Through their extensive trade network and local production, the Buguias elite had access to a larger supply of hogs than could be consumed at home. Their outlet for this meat supply lay in the gold-mining village of Suyoc (see Lednicky 1916; Marche 1887 [1970]), 12 kilometers to the northwest. Suyoc supplied cash for the entire Buguias trade network and formed its most concentrated consumption point: its miners had both abundant coins (obtained from local traders who sold their gold in the lowlands) and a prodigious appetite for pork. Above all else, the Buguias merchants' profits came from provisioning this mining community.

The steady, high level of demand for pork in Suyoc stemmed from the exclusive concentration of the community on the mines. The miners spared no time for agriculture. Instead they imported their food: rice from the Northern Kankana-ey, sweet potatoes and vegetables from Lo-o, and hogs primarily from Buguias and Lo-o. Although the wealthy among them sometimes owned substantial cattle herds (raised in other communities), the miners could not consume beef in the rainy excavation season: the spirits guarding the ore were believed to find its odor offensive. Pork, however, was a ritual necessity as well as a staple food. Every strike called for a thanksgiving feast, and the miners performed other elaborate rituals as well. One funeral in the late Spanish period reportedly lasted three months, during which time sacrifices continued and the entire community abstained from labor (Scott 1974:286). And pork formed a staple as well, since the miners believed that only a diet of meat would provide them sufficient strength for their arduous work.

Along the coast, the Buguias merchants' main destination was the old commercial center of Naguilian (see Keesing 1962:107). Here the Buguias traders brought coffee, dried legumes, and cash. In return, they primarily purchased cloth, a good generally not produced in Benguet. Lowland Ilocano weavers furnished several

varieties of funeral blankets, loincloths for men, skirts and jackets for women, and plain white fabric. The intricate designs in funerary blankets may have followed patterns designed by the highlanders and originally used in decorating the local bark fabric, and the lowland weavers had to meet the exacting standards of their highland customers. Other notable products of Naguilian included dogs, tobacco, salt, and sugar, all of which could be obtained in Buguias but were cheaper and often of better quality in the lowlands.

Buguias merchants also conducted business in other lowland Ilocano towns. Cervantes, probably the second most important lowland destination, furnished pig iron (used in the Buguias foundries), cotton cloth, cattle, and horses. Buguias merchants occasionally visited the coastal town of Tagudin to buy Chinese porcelains. But most of these lowland trade partners began to be replaced after the first decade of American rule by the new highland city of Baguio, which grew to rival even Naguilian as a commercial center once the American colonialists established their summer capital and hill station there (see Reed 1976). Although well within the mountains, Baguio functioned as an imperial and lowland-Filipino outpost, and it eventually emerged as the preferred source for many lowland products.

As for economic relations with the far north, animosity with the Bontoc people of the central Cordillera prevented Buguias traders from venturing north of Mount Data. Since the Northern Kankanaey (living north of Data but south of the Bontoc) produced goods desired in Buguias and were themselves in need of cash, commerce did occur, but it could only be carried out by the northerners. Northern Kankana-ey men, who visited Buguias primarily for contract work, sometimes traded; northern women came specifically to sell their handicrafts, especially ceramic vessels (neither Buguias nor its neighbors produced pottery). The Northern Kankana-ey also wove and sold funeral blankets and other fabrics, in increasing competition with the Ilocano weavers.

The Organization of Trade

Financial and Social Structures

The southern Cordilleran economy was partly commercialized well before the American era. In the 1700s, traders usually carried scales

"with which they measured out gold dust like cash" (Scott 1974: 181), and by the late 1800s, while other subjugated Cordilleran areas still paid in kind, most Benguet villages yielded their tribute in coin (Scott 1974:285). Copper-working villages even minted their own copper coins modeled on Spanish currency. Indeed, the American government considered it necessary to purchase and remove these coins before issuing its own coinage.^[3]

If cash-based economies were unevenly distributed even in the southern mountains, Buguias traders turned this differentiation to their own advantage. Virtually all villagers desired cash, but few could obtain it locally. Yet Buguias merchants could acquire an abundance of coin through their foothold in the far periphery of a global economic network.

As Suyoc suffered the chronically inflated prices typical of goldmining camps, a good profit could always be made by buying low in the interior and selling high in Suyoc. Buguias elders remember well the price gaps they exploited in the prewar period. In the 1930s, one could often purchase a sizable hog in Kabayan for 25 pesos and sell it the same day in Suyoc for 35. A chicken bought in Tinoc could fetch twice as much money in Buguias, and even more in Suyoc.

A successful trader needed a good economic understanding and a facility with numbers, unaided (in the early period) by formal mathematics. One Spanish observer noted in 1877 that the mountain people "are familiar with coins, recognizing and evaluating them exactly . . . [and] they count with precision from one to the hundreds of thousands" (quoted in Scott 1974:239). The Buguias traders also recognized the utility of keeping their cash circulating. Residents of certain other Benguet villages guarded their money more warily; many of the Ibaloi elite buried substantial hoards under their dwellings (Scheerer 1932 [1975]: 199). But Buguias traders even found ways to profit from this: when the value of old coinage suddenly jumped in the early postwar years, several returned to their old Ibaloi trading partners to repurchase coins they had previously spent.

Buguias merchants customarily traveled in groups of four to eight, seeking companionship and mutual protection. Most men began trading as teenagers, usually working under a wealthy sponsor for cash wages (in the 1930s, often one peso per day, respectable pay at the time). When the party reached its destination, the

senior members would seek lodging with relatives, business partners, or local leaders. The actual transactions, however, usually required canvassing, as each trader had to seek individuals willing to sell (or buy) and ready to settle at a good price. In a few regions, however, exchange sometimes took place at customary sites, such as Abatan ("meeting place") between Lo-o and Suyoc.

To prosper, traders had to know how to handle animals as well as to make deals. Simply staying upright on the slippery cloud-forest trails during the rainy season was arduous for the uninitiated; leading recalcitrant hogs and water buffalo along these trails was an enormously exacting job. The young merchant had to master the art of man-dodo , or "hog-following." In this technique, ropes were affixed to a hog's hind feet; by expertly alternating jerks on each rope, the trader could urge the animal in the desired direction. The most skillful men could manage as many as four hogs and two water buffalo at a time, but two hogs was the usual quota.

Successful merchants also had to cultivate friendships with their trading partners. Many did so through gift giving. In the Ibaloi village of Nagey, one Buguias trader is still fondly recalled for his presents of delectable dried locust. Kinship also softened commercial relations, just as it partially molded trade patterns; many traders worked primarily in areas where they could be aided by relatives.

A young trader needed an apprenticeship, but after acquiring a small store of capital and the necessary skills and connections, he faced no barriers to independence. Although many did manage their own ventures, few developed large businesses. To do so required fortitude, skill, luck, and continued patronage, for as one began to accumulate, one's social obligations increased apace. Redistributive rituals were never-ending, and even secular feasts burdened the rising merchant. A profitable trip had to be commemorated; a trader who had earned 10 pesos selling a Kabayan hog in Suyoc, for example, was expected to devote at least half to feasting his neighbors.

Several traders prospered by reaching into new territories. The Buguias trade network ramified so intricately that no individual could master its entire extent, leading ambitious men to explore unknown districts in search of inexpensive swine. Others sought out new commercial niches. The second wealthiest person in prewar Buguias, Paran, initiated his career by purchasing coffee in

Tinoc and reselling it in Naguilian. In doing so he contravened the wishes of his father, who had advised a traditional business entree in the animal trade. Paran was disinherited for his disrespect, but he prospered nevertheless.

The supreme traders, who functioned equally as financiers, comprised the elite class of prewar Buguias. These men conducted most of their deals through intermediaries, usually sons, sons-inlaw, and nephews. Their business partners also traveled to Buguias to work out new agreements and to renegotiate old ones. The varied enterprises of the master traders also demanded specialized labor. Information had to move rapidly, and the swiftest runners found periodic employment as messengers. Immigrants often served as couriers to, and mediators with, their natal villages. Business accounts—complex ledgers of debts and credits (in cash and animals)—also required unerring attention. Although arrangements of knots in loincloth threads registered appointments, such mnemonic devices were not used to record finances. Rather, memory alone sufficed until literacy became widespread later in the American period. But the wealthiest merchant in the early twentieth century, Danggol, could rely on a famed "verbal mathematician," Palbusa, to keep track of his many accounts.

Geographical Patterns

Although Buguias may well have supported the largest trade network in the southern Cordillera, every important village nested in its own web of exchange. The larger Ibaloi settlements trafficked mainly with the lowland towns of Pangansinan and La Union. Their ties to the east and north were tenuous; compared to Buguias, they were not trade oriented (see Moss 1920a :214). But the other sizable villages of the upper Agno, Amlimay and Lo-o, exhibited a similar mercantile bent. Villages specializing in mineral extraction (Suyoc) or metal-goods manufacture (such as Ubanga, a small copper-working village) maintained different kinds of exchange systems, as they attracted many traders from other areas into their territories. Suyoc merchants themselves were concerned with little other than the gold trade. Adding another layer of complexity, the trade routes of many central Cordilleran villages also extended well into the southern mountains (Conklin 1980:98).

Ifugao miners and traders returning from the Baguio area, for example, often lodged in Buguias where they commonly purchased cattle to lead home. One Buguias family actually specialized in this narrow trade.

In short, prewar Buguias lay at the center of two very different spatial economic structures. One, an extensive trade network, was perpetuated through the efforts of numerous individual traders, its many strands enmeshing with webs centered on other commercial villages. Buguias formed this reticulum's organizational hub, despite the fact that the village proper was not, strictly speaking, a market center. Buguias traders rather established a price-setting market wherever they went, bridging the area of supply (western Ifugao and most of central and northern Benguet) with the seat of demand (Suyoc). This was certainly not a "perfect" market, for the backwoods people had limited access to price information. But it was a market nonetheless; prices varied according to supply and demand, and deals were haggled, not instituted (on the theoretical implications of the Buguias trade system, see Lewis 1989).

Buguias's second economic region was more exclusive, more cohesive, and smaller than this long-distance trade network. At the local level, the village integrated the economies of several neighboring settlements, largely through its financial role. As purveyors of capital, the Buguias elite influenced, and to some extent dominated, the indebted economies of the village's immediate periphery. Their effective hinterland extended along the Agno River north toward Lo-o, south toward Kabayan, and eastward well into the cloud forest of Ifugao province. In so doing, it sliced across several cultural boundaries, encompassing peoples of all the major southern Cordilleran language groups.

Local Specialization of Production

The Buguias region had long provided the southern Cordillera with quality ironware and copperware. During the American period, few smiths lived in Buguias proper, but nearby villages continued to supply cooking pots and cutting tools for a wide area. This geographically segregated production system both depended on and helped to support the local trade networks. Within Buguias itself, diverse artisans also provided goods to help fill the back-

packs of local traders. While craft specialization was at best a secondary impetus for exchange, it nevertheless contributed to the integration of the southern Cordilleran economy.

Ironwork

Most larger Cordilleran villages possessed an iron smithy. The smiths of the Buguias region, however, had long been noted for their expert work; others simply could not match the temper they imparted to their implements. Accordingly, they worked in secrecy. The German naturalist Carl Semper (1862 [1975]: 29) could not even learn the locations of the local workshops. Buguias wares—and the smiths themselves—were thus in demand through much of Benguet. Local traders often carried iron goods on their rounds, while outsiders traveled to Buguias to purchase them directly.

In the late American period, iron forging was centered in the small village of Lingadan just north of Buguias proper. The smiths had to live and work in remote, wooded areas, so great was their demand for charcoal. Although legends tell of iron ore once being gathered in the river bed, it is more likely that raw iron was always obtained through coastal trade, its ultimate source being eastern China (see Scott's note in Meyer 1890 [1975]: 63). Buguias smiths fashioned sundry iron tools, most notably bolo knives, culinary knives, digging trowels, iron or iron-tipped bars, and axes. Different grades of iron served for different kinds of bolos: soft but cohesive metal for rough tasks, such as smashing bones, and harder but brittler steel for finer work.

Copper

Copper work was the true specialty of the greater Buguias region, and by the American period the area's forges supplied the entire southern Cordillera. But rather than Buguias proper, it was the small, peripheral village of Ubanga that formed the preeminent copper-working center.

Copper ore originally was extracted in the mineral district extending from Suyoc to Mankayan (see Wilson 1947). A dwindling fuel supply here probably forced the wide separation between the workshops and the mines that was later evident; Mankayan in par-

ticular was deforested early (Marche 1887 [1970]:125). Ubanga, sitting on the edge of the heavily forested Palatang region, offered a prime site for copper works. In any case, by the later American period, imported copper wire purchased in Baguio substituted for local ore in the Ubanga forges.

In Spanish and early American times, the local artisans fashioned a variety of copper and bronze items. Fine ornamental works included bracelets, arm and leg bands, and earrings, the latter finding their main market among the Northern Kankana-ey. Copper smoking pipes moved rapidly throughout the southern Cordillera. Elders still tell of local manufacture of ritual gongs, but these vital items may have always been imported. Certainly in the later American period, richly resonating Chinese bronze gongs were everywhere in use (Goodway and Conklin 1987). Completely discontinued was the making of copper coins, as the imperial government could not abide their circulation.

The large cooking vessels called gambang ("copper"), used for preparing the food of both hogs and humans, overshadowed all other copper goods. Any person raising swine needed at least one large copper pot for boiling sweet potatoes. The Ubanga smiths fabricated gambang in several sizes and shapes for the extensive market; the largest allegedly could shelter a traveling merchant from a downpour. In earlier times, more decorative urn-shaped vessels were also made, the German traveler Schadenburg having purchased one in the late 1800s for the princely sum of four water buffalo (Scott 1974: 312).

Copper working required a team of at least seven, with each individual specializing in one or two tasks. In general, it required more skill and was more arduous than ironwork, which could be done in groups of only two or three. Virtually the entire male population of Ubanga labored in this industry. Boys too young for the workshops made charcoal and gathered the pine bark and halfrotted wood well suited for the slow-burning fires necessary at certain stages of the manifold manufacturing process. The copperware industry also created linkages with nearby villages; forges were made in the neighboring hamlet of Sebang, while clay molds (used for casting) came from the Northern Kankana-ey.

Copper vessels were marketed through a complex network of intermediaries. Buguias and Lo-o merchants carried copper pots deep into the cloud forest, while Northern Kankana-ey and Kalan-

guya traders traveled to Ubanga to buy directly. Individuals also brought in broken pots and gongs for repair, and one Ubanga man made a special trade of searching out and fixing broken copperware throughout the Agno Valley. As a by-product of such business dealings, the smiths had a much better geographical knowledge of the central Cordillera (north of Mount Data) than did most other residents of the Buguias region.

Other Local Specialties

The Buguias people of today do not recall other significant local products, but the American administrator David Barrows, who visited Buguias twice (in 1902 and 19o8), was so impressed with their crafting of smoking pipes, wooden spoons, and effigy figures that he devoted a three-page journal entry to them (1908:91–93). Evidently, several Buguias artisans made four different kinds of pipes from three different materials (copper, wood, and clay). Pipe making must have disappeared soon after his visit; in the later American period Buguias traders were purchasing old pipes from the Kalanguya. Barrow's attention to wooden spoons indicates a subsequent decline in workmanship; the later examples of this art are simple utilitarian objects. The carving of representations of deities and spirits disappeared completely; evidently, as trade opportunities grew, the Buguias people abandoned several of their customary arts. A number of smaller neighboring villages, however, retained notable craft specialties, including basketry and woodplatter carving.

The Prewar Vegetable Industry

Vegetables in Benguet

The Spanish introduced cabbages and potatoes to the Cordillera well before they had established political control. Potts (1983) argues for two separate potato disseminations, the first in the late 1600s or early 1700s, and the second, linked to Benguet's first Spanish governor, Bias de Bafios, in the nineteenth century. The southern Cordillerans readily adopted both cabbages and potatoes for their door-yard gardens. Both crops were casually traded among Igorot communities and some produce was sold in nearby lowland

market towns (Perez 1902:118); as early as the 1860s, Benguet potatoes appeared in the Manila market (Scott 1974:239).

American Encouragement

When the Americans occupied the Philippines, the demand for temperate vegetables grew. Chinese and Japanese laborers, brought to southern Benguet to build Baguio City and its connecting roads, soon began cultivating a variety of market-garden crops. Trinidad Valley, near Baguio and endowed with fertile and easily irrigated soils, formed the center of the emergent vegetable industry. Japanese capital dominated until independence, and local Ibaloi villagers eventually supplied most of the labor. A second cradle of vegetable culture emerged on the high plateau of Paoay (in Atok Municipality, north of Bagio), where an American soldier, Guy Haight, established a residence and rest house while recovering from tuberculosis (Davis 1973:58). Despite his distance from Baguio, Haight managed to deliver vegetables to the city, and he also supplied the travelers who lodged at his place. Through their association with Haight, many of Atok's residents learned the techniques of market gardening.

American officials encouraged vegetable culture among the Benguet people. As early as 1901, they distributed seeds from an agricultural office (Fry 1983:216), and not long afterward they established an experimental station largely devoted to temperate vegetables in La Trinidad. The Catholic Church also fostered vegetable growing in the districts it missionized (Russell 1983: 192).

With such encouragement, the market-garden frontier began to advance. In Baguio and environs, vegetable growing spread among the local Ibaloi; by 1907 they were reported to be abandoning their mining works in favor of the more profitable truck gardens (Philippine Commission 1907, v. 1: 282). By 1908, nearly 4,000 baskets of potatoes were sold annually in the Baguio market—but demand was still not satisfied (Philippine Commission 1908, v. 1:245).

Vegetables in Buguias

This commercial frontier reached Buguias in the last decade of American rule. In earlier times, transport to Baguio had been too

costly to justify the enterprise on any scale. Only a handful of individuals had grown unimproved cabbages and potatoes for sale to the Japanese workers and American managers employed in the large sawmills to the north and west of Buguias. Local vegetable growing first took hold when the Mountain Trail, snaking along the ridgetop west of Buguias, was made passable to vehicular traffic in the 1930s. Bus service, organized by the Kankana-ey entrepreneur Bado Dangwa, soon provided ready market access. By 1940, the Dangwa Company ran some 173 vehicles, traversing much of the Cordillera (Fry 1983: 130). Even so, Buguias vegetables first had to be ported up to the ridge, a grueling 800-meter climb.

The residents of the small village of Nabalicong, located a few miles southwest of Buguias, soon discovered that dry fields cleared in the oak scrub along the new road produced prime tight-headed cabbages while enjoying easy road access. An American roadconstruction foreman, one "Mr. Clark," also experimented with vegetables in the same area. The Buguias baknang Paran envisaged profit here, and he soon engaged several of his clients to clear new plots in the area. At roughly the same time, two of Paran's sons returned from the agricultural school in Trinidad, seeds in hand, and set about growing cabbage in Buguias proper, first in fallowed rice fields and later in dry fields.

These early vegetable gardens demanded more labor than did subsistence crops. To supply the necessary nutrients, gardeners had to haul ashes and sometimes even composted manure to their garden plots. The Buguias people had long known that such materials would enhance soil fertility, but they judged the effort worthwhile only for the remunerative vegetables. Insects also plagued the new crops much more than the old. Growers dispatched caterpillars and other large insects by hand; fortunately, thrips and other pests too small for manual removal had not yet emerged as serious problems.

While temperate vegetables presented a lucrative trade opportunity, production in the prewar was dominated by the Paran family. Paran's wife, Albina, developed her own specialty in trading peas. A garden pea with a nonedible pod had long been grown in the higher elevation zone immediately east of Buguias. Albina purchased peas from the growers and arranged to have them trucked to Baguio. Pokol, son-in-law of the baknang couple, organized the

Baguio trade. As operator of the village's only store, Pokol frequently traveled to Baguio to purchase supplies; on these trips he began dealing in vegetables as well, acquiring produce both from his family in Buguias and from a few gardeners along the Mountain Trail and selling it in Baguio to Chinese agents.

The vegetable trade was in its infancy when war broke out. The movement to the Mountain Trail, which would become a torrent after the war, was still a trickle. In Buguias, only one family engaged substantially in vegetable growing and trading. Yet only a few years after the return of peace virtually the entire village would be occupied in the vegetable enterprise.

Imperial Power

Throughout the prewar period, Buguias was subjugated territory. Not since the mid-1800s had it been a truly autonomous community. Colonial designs and exactions impinged on the village in several important areas. We have already examined the effects of American land-tenure policy and have noted the role of the colonialists in fostering the vegetable industry. Imperial administrators also influenced—or at least attempted to influence—other aspects of local life, most importantly by funneling highland resources toward the nascent enterprises of American residents.

Even though well-meaning colonial authorities devised plans that were potentially destructive, few of their designs came to fruition. Colonial policy often proved feckless, and in comparison with many other colonized places, the imperial tread fell lightly here. What the Americans did accomplish, to some extent inadvertently, was to enhance the position of the indigenous elite.

The Spaniards

All Spanish attempts to gain control of Benguet ended in failure until the middle of the nineteenth century, when a series of wellequipped military expeditions subdued virtually every village. Although the inhabitants of the Amburayan Valley continued to resist until the 1880s, Buguias and its neighbors resigned themselves to paying tribute shortly after mid-century (Scott 1974:306).

Evidently, the Spaniards maintained their position in Benguet

partly by scaling down their usual tribute demands: highlanders paid only one-seventh the dues exacted from lowlanders (Scott 1974:238). Yet even these relatively light demands heavily burdened the majority of Benguet's people. Commoners could not easily afford these "tokens of non-Christian vassalage," while the additional labor duties, purportedly for public works, were much abused and universally despised. It was mainly the elite who found advantages in Spanish hegemony, gaining further leverage over their subordinates as their political power was formalized, and encountering safer conditions for their trading endeavors (Scott 1974: 239; Wiber 1986: 17).

The American Regime

When American imperialists replaced the Spanish at the turn of the twentieth century, the Ibaloi of southern Benguet put up some resistance, and several local baknangs even sent cash to the independent Philippine government (Scott 1986:82). Benguet as a whole, however, was quickly brought under American rule.

The early American administrators, availing themselves of the stable political structure they had inherited, undertook a selfconscious "experiment with civil government" in Benguet as early as 1900 (see Philippine Commission 1901, v. 1:33,34). Although Dean Worcester (n.d.:4) assumed credit for "[establishing] a provincial government in Benguet and . . . small autonomous township governments," in actuality his office had simply recognized the existing local governments. Since official correspondents found the local presidentes able administrators (Philippine Commission 1901, v. 1:34), this was simply the most effective and least troublesome mode of administration.

American tax policy, in contrast to that of the Spaniards, was intended less to demonstrate vassalage than to finance local government and public projects. Yet the Benguet region continued to run chronic deficits—a situation tersely justified by Governor Pack's relegating of the Igorots to the status of "governmental wards" (Philippine Commission 1906, v. 1:199). The colonial government's overall fiscal design in Benguet was to facilitate resource exploitation by Americans and to foster economic "modernization." Local public works, such as bridges and trails, were financed by poll

taxes and through corvée requirements (two pesos or ten days annually [Worcester 1930:44]). Governor Pack insisted that labor dues, the earlier regime's greatest curse, were instituted by the Igorots themselves (Philippine Commission 1904, v. 1:410); one can only wonder what coercive tactics may have been employed to enforce them.

In theory, the municipal governments were autonomous. Local councils passed their own ordinances, subject to the provincial governor's approval. But present-day Cordilleran scholars argue that the municipal governments held no real legislative power, functioning merely to rubber-stamp American orders (HamadaPawid and Bagamaspad 1985:192). But aside from the critical areas of land and resource policy, the Americans interfered relatively little.

Such noninterference reflected the limits of colonial power more than a lack of interest. Benguet funeral ceremonies, for example, appalled the hygiene-obsessed American functionaries (Philippine Commission 1903, v. 2:225), yet villagers easily tricked the sanitary inspectors sent to stop them. The Benguet colonial government was similarly frustrated in trying to limit interest rates on local loans (Moss 1920a :225), and in proscribing range fires (Philippine Commission 1906, v. 1:178). Overall, the most concerted police actions were directed against gamblers and "unemployed Americans" (Philippine Commission 1906, v. 1:265; Lehlbach 1907:11). Few civil or criminal cases internal to Benguet society ever reached colonial courts; Governor Pack reported in 1903 that he had served as Justice of the Peace on only eight occasions, as he could rely instead on the tong tongan system (Philippine Commission 1903, v. 1: 795).

The American authorities, like the Spaniards before them, did encounter one persistent military challenge in Benguet: the busols , or bandits, of the Palatang region northeast of Buguias. The busols ("enemies"), according to Buguias lore, were less a distinct community of people than a gang of thugs who plundered and terrorized their Southern Kankana-ey, Ibaloi, and Kalanguya neighbors. The American bureaucrats totally misunderstood the "busol problem," yet by the second decade of the century the brigands had been dispersed and pacified. Whether this was owing to the steadfast actions and conciliatory negotiations of the American

military, as its chroniclers would have it (see Philippine Commission 1906, v. 2:265), or to the unyielding opposition of Benguet citizens, newly fortified with a few shotguns, is another matter. Benguet elders insist that the busols disbanded only after one Carbonel, treasurer of Atok, dispatched their leader, Samiclay, with a well-aimed blast.

Education, Religion, and Economics

Hampered as they may have been in other policy areas, American officials directed considerable attention toward public education. The Spaniards had constructed a few schools, but because the graduates—automatically regarded as nuevo Christianos —became subject to full taxation (Philippine Commission 1901, FF:545), education had not been popular with the highlanders (see also Russell 1983:271). American secular schools, by contrast, were accepted in almost every Benguet district; the leaders of Buguias even offered to build a schoolhouse without state assistance (Philippine Commission 1901, FF:547–548). Within a decade, local residents educated in village schools began to replace Ilocanos as teachers and municipal secretary-treasurers throughout the Cordillera (Fry 1983:68).

American missionary activity largely bypassed northern Benguet, ensuring religious continuity and concord throughout the prewar period. Buguias Christians today argue that missionaries neglected their region because it was too peaceful; the bellicose central Cordillerans presented a more urgent target. But whatever the motives behind it, this bypassing of Buguias by church agents was to have significant consequences for subsequent cultural change.

American capitalists were a more potent force in the area. They excavated several gold mines in southern Benguet, inherited a Spanish copper mine at Mankayan, and for a period mined gold at Suyoc. They also claimed vast stands of pine to supply supports and headworks for their many mining operations. These actions were to have damaging repercussions on the indigenous peoples in the postwar period, but before the war their effects in Buguias proper were relatively benign. Most mine workers were immigrants from the more densely populated central Cordillera, and they presented a good market for Buguias traders during their periodic trips home. American mineral operations in the Suyoc/Mankayan

area simply bolstered the Buguias economy; the indigenous diggings were left to their rightful owners, and the laborers brought in to work the deeper American mines formed a new set of customers.

The American rulers also sought to "create new wants" among the Benguet people to spur development, but it is uncertain how they hoped to accomplish this (Fry 1983:100). If Buguias prospered during the American period it was because of local initiative rather than American agency. Overall, the generally well-meaning administrators had poor understandings of the local economy; Governor Pack, for instance, hopefully proclaimed in 1907 that the cattle industry was "only in its infancy" (Philippine Commission 1907, v. 1:278), evidently unaware that most suitable pasture areas had long since been developed.

The Geography of Imperial Rule

The remote Kallahan/Kalanguya-speaking areas of the southeast Cordillera were for the most part ignored by American officials, and the local residents, largely unsubdued by the Spaniards, had no desire to submit to the new authorities. Some efforts were made in the early years to bring the relatively accessible village of Kayapa into the imperial fold, but the de facto American policy was to leave the entire area alone. In 1934, J. W. Light reported that the Kayapa people were peaceful and industrious, and although they paid no taxes and did not want a school, they presented no problem for the state. The northern Kalanguya (many of whom lived within the Buguias economic sphere) were even less bothered by colonial interference. The American hope was that these "wild" people would be gradually "civilized" through contact with their Benguet neighbors.

The American policy makers hoped to encourage both economic development and social integration in the Cordillera by constructing an extensive system of graded trails (Fry 1983:77). (A trailbuilding program had been initiated by the Spaniards, but as late as 1906, S. C. Simms (1906b) found it necessary to take a detour through Cervantes when traveling from Baguio to Kiangan.) The rationale behind the transportation program was given dramatic expression by Governor Early in 1931 (Early 1931:41): "[to coalesce] the warring mountain tribes into a homogenous society which will have solidarity of interests in the next generation as it has found peace and mutual understanding in this."

Colonial Visions

To appreciate why colonial policy worked as it did one must examine imperial agents' assessments of their own roles and of the highlanders they presumed to rule. Most American administrators saw themselves as protectors and guides, bearers of civilization to a benighted land. As Benguet's Governor Pack saw it, the first Americans in the Cordillera found a group of "poor, timid and oppressed barbarians" (Philippine Commission 1907, v. 1:277). But officials stationed in the Cordillera, especially those in Benguet, quickly developed a deep respect for their hard-working "subjects." This—combined with a strong sense of frugality—contributed to the general policy of minimal interference, just as it led to prognostications of rapid economic development. At the same time, most Western observers thought that an unfortunate but inevitable concomitant of material progress was the destruction of indigenous culture—a forecast that turned out to be less prescient.

Many Spanish observers had regarded the Igorots as lowly beings indeed: filthy, vicious, scheming idolaters was the typical picture (see Scott 1974, especially p. 70). With the occupation of Benguet in the mid-nineteenth century, however—their dismal failure to missionize the area notwithstanding—local administrators began to report highly positive qualities. One Benguet governor praised the highlanders in quite extraordinary terms: "The character of the Benguet person is loyal, honorable, humble, and, above all, very respectful. His intelligence is lively, and his natural talent is superior to that of the lowlander [quoted in Perez 1902:317; translation by the author]."

Most American commentators also considered the highlanders superior in many respects to the lowland Filipinos. This reflected at once a racist disdain for Filipinos, compounded by scorn for Hispanicized culture and a "rough rider" respect for the rugged, disciplined, and sometimes belligerent highlanders (see Jenista 1978). In the early years of their rule, the Americans' tone was set by Dean Worcester, Secretary of the Philippine Interior. All the mountain people needed, Worcester was convinced, was American tutelage and protection from the lowland Filipinos.

The American administrators' admiration of the Benguet peoples is well expressed in an official report of the era: "In their town government the Igorrotes are considerate and just, and on the whole

conduct the business of the town intelligently and wisely [Philippine Commission 1904, v. 1:410]."

In part, Americans attributed the virtues of the Benguet people to a perceived meritocracy in their class stratification. Governor Pack reported that "[above the common Igorot there is at higher, richer, cleaner class—whose individuals think and study and somehow and from somewhere glean valuable information, and to this class all other classes render implicit faith and obedience [Philippine Commission 1904, v. 1:410]." It is thus hardly surprising that American policy bolstered the position of the indigenous elite.

The Future

Because of their perception of the Benguet Igorots as a hardworking people led by a capable elite and guided by a beneficent metropolitan power, the American officials foresaw a prosperous future.^[4] As Pack self-servingly and naively reported:

Owing to the public works being carried out by the insular government in Benguet Province, the Igorrotes have plenty of money with which to go to the coast and buy stock according to their ambitions, for the Igorrote is never a rich man (or Bocnong) no matter how much money he may have, unless he has animals to show for it. So the ambitious convert their hard-earned cash into hogs or cattle, and possessors of such may take a place among the counselors of their race. This traditionary custom will make these people wealth producers instead of consumers, and as they have a thorough appreciation of the protection of property afforded them by our American Government, they will become valuable allies in pushing our methods of progress still further over the mountains among our natives not yet wholly tamed [Philippine Commission 1904, v. 1:411].

The Keesings (1934:199) also saw a connection between class stratification and economic "progress": "The presence of baknangs in these mountain communities gives the people, in this sense, something of an advantage in the modern struggle toward a wider competence over many backward people whose customs are more communal."

Neither were such optimistic forecasts confined to American observers. Perez (1904:206) articulated the same sentiment in most unambiguous terms: ". . . no doubt, that within a few years Ben-

guet will be one of the richest areas of the Philippines [translation by the author]."

The Keesings (1934:196,219), at least, did worry that communal feasting might thwart economic growth (and harm the breeding stock), although they also appreciated its role in equalizing wealth. A more common forecast, however, saw Igorot culture as doomed by the forces of modernity. Its imminent demise had, in fact, been announced well before the American conquest: in 1890, Meyer (1890 [1975]: 128) declared that ". . . the Igorots are doomed like every other primitive race which comes into sudden contact with European civilization." Some observers thought that "Ilocanoization" would demolish local identity; in 1914, Robertson (1914:471) warned that with the lowlander influx, "pure culture" was disappearing and "real Igorots are becoming hard to study." Others thought their undoing would come at the hands of American sightseers: "[R]oads are to be built, automobiles, stage relays, etc. are to connect this place. Then come easy travel and tourists and then the prostituted work of the natives . . . [Simms 1906a ]."

Regardless of the postulated agent of change, indigenous religion was repeatedly predicted to be the first casualty. Several of the most discerning American Cordilleran scholars thought that they could already see this transformation at work in Benguet, the most advanced highland province. The Keesings (1934:228) found Paganism on the decline in Benguet; and as Barton (1930:123) wrote: "In Benguet foreign influences have been changing the culture and have introduced a laxity of religious observations."

As will be shown, the economic predictions of the early twentieth-century observers were remarkable for their accuracy; their corresponding cultural forecasts were remarkably erroneous. For the people of Buguias would accomplish what seemed impossible: to accept and indeed prosper in a Western economic framework while maintaining their indigenous beliefs, practices, and social identity. But before this was to happen, their old economy was to be utterly demolished in the flames of World War II.

Interregnum:
The War

The Japanese Occupation

The Japanese occupied the southern Cordillera with relative ease. On December 24, 1941, the Americans evacuated their military facility at Camp John Hay, and retreated east to the sawmill at Bobok, Bokod municipality. When they found their planned escape route a dead end, the soldiers scuttled much of their war matériel, lest it fall into Japanese hands (see Harkins 1955:22–24). When the Japanese threatened to bomb Baguio City, American officials entered negotiations; within weeks Japanese troops marched in unopposed. A few American civilians sought refuge in nearby villages, but most were eventually captured.

A few American military officials who eluded capture found the Cordillera a perfect stage for covert operations and the Igorots a promising group of guerilla fighters. One of this group's leaders, Captain Don Blackburn, had, along with Lieutenant Colonel R. W. Volckmann, escaped from Bataan and trekked back to the Cordillera (Harkins 1955:38). Once in the highlands, Volckmann and Blackburn organized a guerilla network, concentrating at first on building an organization and gathering intelligence.

The Japanese, meanwhile, had quickly reorganized the southern Cordilleran economy. They terminated all commercial gold mines while expanding the copper excavations at Mankayan (Fry 1983: 191). They also quickly established a new civilian government, staffed largely with locals; the first Igorot governor of the Mountain Province, Hilary Clapp, was appointed by the Japanese authorities (Fry 1983:194).

Buguias was little affected through the war's early months (1942 through early 1943). The indigenous leadership retained power, and life continued as before. Japanese occupation actually created

lucrative opportunities for some. Many Buguias families catered to the expanded works at Mankayan, selling fruit and vegetables to the miners and managers, and a few Buguias men joined a short-lived gold rush in the Baguio mineral zone. Here they extracted high-grade ore from the abandoned American mines until poison gases began to take a heavy toll.

By late 1943, intensified guerilla actions provoked the Japanese to interfere more directly in local affairs. Earlier they had organized villages into "neighborhood associations" on the Japanese model, but these proved ineffective in curtailing partisan operations (Fry 1983:198). Military authorities now billeted soldiers in Buguias, beloved of the Japanese for its hot-spring baths. These men at first established fairly good rapport with local residents, especially with the young boys they hired to help locate edible mushrooms and other wild foods.

Hostilities

The relationship between the Japanese and the Buguias people deteriorated rapidly as guerilla activity escalated in the war's later years. Soldiers had already killed a Buguias man for allegedly hiding the American manager of the Bad-ayan sawmill; now they attacked the local political structure, arresting the baknang Berto Cubangay. Executions of individuals accused of abetting the guerilla forces soon followed. By the middle of 1944, Buguias was at war.

Several dozen Buguias men now joined the fight. Inducted into the 66th (guerilla) Infantry, they were led by Bado Dangwa (the Benguet transportation entrepreneur), and Denis Molintas, who in turn were under the command of Blackburn and Volckmann (see Volckmann 1954:145). From their headquarters in Kapangan (Dangwa's home), the 66th Infantry patrolled most of the province, gathering information and laying the groundwork for the approaching battle. Civilians eagerly provisioned the troops—although as the war intensified this would not remain true everywhere.

With the American landing in Luzon (December 1944), the commanding Japanese general, Yamashita, ordered his entire occupying force, military and civilian, into the Cordillera. There he planned a prolonged last stand, designed to cost the Americans time, money, and lives, while allowing the Japanese breathing space to organize

their defenses for the inevitable invasion of the home islands. Baguio now became the capital of the Japanese-controlled Philippine government, and the full force of military activity in the archipelago was concentrated in the mountains (see R. Smith 1963; Fry 1983:204).

The combined American and Filipino forces soon began their assault on Yamashita's forces, ascending the slopes from the lowlands toward Baguio City. The 66th, meanwhile, attacked the very center of Japanese power with a degree of success that some Americans could scarcely believe (see Volckmann 1954:197). Now Yamashita's position was so jeopardized that he ordered a retreat to the Magat Valley, from which he retained sway over most of the Cordillera north of Baguio. The American-Filipino army now had to take two strategic passes (Balete and Bessang), but it was clear that they would eventually fall. Yamashita thus designated a final bastion, centered in Tucucan but including Buguias and environs as well (see Hartendorp 1967).

In August, the attack on this final Japanese stronghold began. From the east, American and Filipino forces marched through Kiangan; from the west, they advanced in two salients, one across the Lo-o Valley and the other right through the center of Buguias. The ground combat was fierce, and American bombers and strafers brought extensive destruction. Yamashita surrendered in Kiangan in mid-August, just as the Allied forces were ascending, under heavy fire, the main Cordilleran ridge east of Buguias (R. Smith 1963).

Social Consequences

It is difficult to convey the havoc wreaked on the people of Buguias and neighboring communities by the war. Quite apart from the combat, hundreds of thousands of retreating Japanese, ill-fed and desperate, presented a massive threat to the area's resources. By late 1944 and early 1945, the Buguias people had no option but to leave their homes and seek refuge in more remote places.

At first many hid in the higher country immediately east of the village. From here they could return each night surreptitiously to cultivate their fields. But this strategy proved not only dangerous but futile, since the soldiers consumed most of the crops. At this

point the Buguias people sought haven with relatives living in the eastern cloud forest. But as Yamashita's perimeter tightened, even the most inaccessible refuges here became untenable; this was precisely the area of the ultimate Japanese redoubt. As hostilities approached, many refugees had to cross the lines of fire to seek new sanctuaries west of the Agno River.

The food resources of the Cordillera could not support the swollen population. Ogawa (1972) graphically describes the progress of Japanese desperation; first they had traded clothes and other items for food, but within a few months they arrogated whatever edibles they encountered. Toward the end, some subsisted on tree-fern pith. In Buguias they so thoroughly raided the dry fields that several local varieties of sweet potatoes—those that could easily be uprooted—were exterminated. Some were also allegedly reduced to cannibalism. The Buguias people also went hungry. Though few seem to have starved, many lived on banana stalks and other semi-edible foods, and some reportedly bloated to death. After Yamashita's surrender, American planes dropped fliers informing the populace that food and supplies could be obtained along the Mountain Trail, but several elders, too weak to make the climb, perished just as peace descended.

Survivors returned to a devastated landscape. The fixed capital of the prewar agricultural system, the very foundation of livelihood, was demolished. Dry fields, stripped clean of crops, had overgrown with weeds; even seeds and sweet-potato cuttings were now hard to find. Rice terraces and irrigation canals were damaged, if not destroyed, and the elaborate network of fences largely demolished. All animals had been devoured. Many individuals had attempted to conceal herds in distant places, but few were successful; what the Japanese missed the guerillas took. And although the Igorot soldiers offered receipts for the animals they appropriated, these were never honored by the United States government (a source of continuing bitterness for some). Only Paran managed to keep a small cattle herd, hidden in a cloud-forest village to the south of Yamashita's perimeter, but these animals were immediately butchered to service his own funeral; Paran had refused his grand-son's entreaties to hide a second time, and thus died when American planes strafed Buguias during the final battle.

The Americans promised relief, but delivered relatively little,

considering the magnitude of the damage and the depth of sacrifice made in the Allies' cause. The veterans of the 66th Infantry received small cash payments, and those disabled in combat were provided continued support. Such payments, however, could not reconstruct the prewar economy. But, as it turned out, the Buguias people did not need to rebuild their old forms of livelihood. Suddenly they had a new opportunity servicing the exploding national market for temperate vegetables.