Tiruray Gardens

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TEDURAY GARDENS: From Use-Right to Private Ownership

Stuart A. SchlegelProfessor Emeritus of Anthropology

University of California, Santa Cruz

This essay emerged from a number of conversations I had in the mid-1970s with Prof. Joseph Spencer, one of the great authorities on Philippine cultural geography and a University of California colleague of mine. We were discussing the shift in traditional societiesto notions of private ownership, and I suggested to him that the Teduray material on gardening, in the context of their attitudes toward use-right and property and their conservative ideas regardingswidden cultivation, might give a clue— even an example— of how such a shift could take place. We thought of preparing a long comparative piece together on the transition worldwide to the notion of private ownership, but after a few stabs at drafts, Prof. Spencer said he was too busy with other things and that I should go ahead and tell the Teduray story. The present essay appeared in the Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society in 1981 (Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 5-8).

The Teduray are a Philippine hill people, who

numbered some 25 to 30,000 persons at the time of my

work among them during 1966-67, and who lived in

relative though rapidly decreasing isolation in the

northern part of the Cotabato Cordillera, a range of

low mountains which curves along the southwestern coast

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of Mindanao, facing the Celebes Sea, in the province of

Maguindanao. Their original habitat was the extensive

rainforest of that area, although today it is rapidly

being logged, and about half of the ethnic group have

been forced to adopt a more typical Filipino lowland

peasant way of life as plow farmers outside of the

forest. Those still there when I did my research in a

small community, deep within the forest — whom I will

usually refer to in this essay simply as the Teduray —

purchased or traded for a few items from a coastal

market, notably iron tools, cloth, and salt, but for

the most part they subsisted on the proceeds from

hunting and fishing, extensive gathering of wild foods,

and swidden (or “slash-and-burn”) cultivation.

A central feature of their life for this essay is

that land tenure among Teduray consisted of right of

use and not formal ownership. The forests around their

settlements were considered an ample good and each

family could work as much land as they felt able to,

locating their swidden wherever the land is not

actually being used by someone else. They augmented

their diets from gardens planted near their homes.

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To describe the Teduray understanding of use-rights

and property, it is necessary to introduce a Teduray

concept. In their language, the central term

traditionally pertaining to property is géfê.1 To be géfê

of something is to have exclusive rights over its

present use. A person's belongings — his entingayen —

include all the things one calls one's own, in the

sense that one stands to them in the relation of géfê. A

man is thus said to be géfê of his house, of his wife,

of his tools, of a wedding he is celebrating for his

daughter, or of a legal proceeding that concerns him

directly. In short, he is géfê of any object, person, or

even a ceremony in which he not only has an economic

and emotional interest, but also has legitimate

personal oversight. Such things — his clothing, his

family and his rituals — are "his" so long as his

rights over them continue. The word géfê may be glossed

into English as "legitimate user" or, more simply and

loosely, as "owner," but the essence of the Teduray

concept is right-of-use.

1 See also Schlegel, Stuart A., Traditional Tiruray Morality and Law. Berkeley,Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1970, where this concept in Teduray legal and moral thought is elaborated.

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Tenure of land among Teduray in the forest was

grounded in this concept. A swidden site belonged to a

man who was its géfê until the end of the harvest and

the site no longer bore cultivated produce, after which

time he was no longer géfê over that site. Population

density among Teduray in the forest was quite low, so

that land was ample and not thought of as a scarce

good, and every family was entitled to as much land as

the family felt able to work. Land selected by an

individual for a swidden became that family's to use

for a crop cycle, once it had been publicly and

properly claimed and marked. A great deal of

cooperative work by neighbors would take place in the

course of a cropping cycle on each field cropped by the

community, but each family planed and organized their

particular field and the family had sole rights to the

produce. The family was thus géfê of that particular

plot in terms of an exclusive private right of use.

Some planted crops would yield useful products during

the early regeneration cycle, and so long as they did

so the géfê of that plot alone was entitled to harvest

them.

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Thus, forest Teduray did not conceive of themselves

as formally holding any private possessory right over

specific swidden sites beyond the produce from a single

cropping cycle. Among the Teduray, use-rights were not

inherited by children or other descendants. Land no

longer harvested reverted to the public domain and had

the same free-good status as any wild forest area.

Individuals could hunt freely anywhere in the wild

forests around the neighborhood, and there was no need

to avoid lands that formerly were utilized as primary

cultivation sites. When the forest growth had been

sufficiently restored to be reworked, anyone could

select the site without regard for a former géfê. With

regard to swidden land, in short, the Teduray employed

a pure concept of right of usufruct.

In addition to the swiddens they annually cleared

and planted, each Teduray family maintained a garden

near its house. In these gardens, they grew such crops

as taro, manioc, and sweet potatoes. Most of these

crops were also grown, though sparingly, in the

swidden; the Teduray considered that extended cropping

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there would have drastic implications for forest

regeneration, so they did not maintain such plantings

for long. They were greatly concerned that land used

for swiddens should permitted to lie fallow under fully

natural regeneration for a sufficient number of years

that the regrowth of jungle forest would mature

properly. Many aspects of their particular system of

shifting cultivation — size of plots, length of

cropping cycle, length of fallow, and types of crops

planted — proceed directly from their concern that

forest growth should fully reclaim the land following

the cropping cycle. They knew and feared the terminal

succession to grassland that would result from too

short fallow or incomplete forest regeneration.

Gardens, on the other hand, were viewed as a very

different kind of commitment of land. Recognizing that

the concentrated planting of such root crops as taro,

manioc, and sweet potatoes could, and would, eliminate

effective reversion of that land to forest, the Teduray

viewed their gardens as longterm plots, to be treated

differently from their swiddens. Teduray gardens were

located both within the hamlet and close to it, but the

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sites were selected with care, carefully managed, and

kept in continuous production for many years.

The concept of use-right over these gardens was no

different from that concerning any other thing over

which a family was géfê. A family had the use of land

for a garden under exactly the same terms as any other

land over which the family was géfê. There was no change

in the concept of tenure with regard to garden land,

just a significant shift in the way the land was used.

No new terminology had been introduced to distinguish

short-term cyclic use of land for swiddens from long-

term continuous use of land in gardens, but clearly the

concept of use-right was being stretched to cover a

rather different order of landholding — something that,

in effect, resulted in a private possessory right. The

Teduray recognized that such concentrated planting of

root crops over a continued period of time would

effectively commit the plot, that it would eliminate

the possibility of the plot's returning to forest and

to free public use, and that it would leave the

individual who planted it as permanent géfê. Thus,

importantly, when a man dies, his wife continued to be

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géfê over garden land (as she did of his tools or other

personal effects); she did not retain rights over

swidden land after it was fully harvested. The

difference is that her use of the garden was permanent

and continuous.

In this regard, it is worthy of note how Teduray

responded conceptually to the first beginnings of

permanent field plow farming among them. Even in the

traditional neighborhood where I lived, a few men had

started rather tentatively to use carabao to plow small

fields and plant commercial corn in addition to working

their swiddens. When this began to occur, the plowed

fields — maximally planted and temporally permanent —

were immediately and intuitively classed by the

community as a kind of garden and referred to by the

same term. The plowed fields, like the gardens, were

seen as removed from the public domain.

There is an important point to these observations.

It might seem "logically" that any shift in the tenure

system from one associated with shifting cultivation to

one associated with permanent field cropping must have

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involved a change in a basic pattern of thought. But

the Teduray example suggests this may not necessarily

be the case. Regularly in permanent gardens and then

eventually in permanent plowed fields, the Teduray

readily applied the same basic concept which they

utilized in dealing with their primary fields: the géfê

had rights to the plot for so long as he was using it.

It was not the cultural idea of géfê that underwent a

shift, but rather the way land was being used in

practice. Yet the transition was clearly observable

there from a classic pattern of usufruct to what is, at

least in embryo, the practice of private possession of

permanent fields.

I suggest that the Teduray case is of considerable

interest to a study of the development of permanent

field agriculture out of shifting cultivation. It

documents this development actually in the process of

taking place, and such empirical data are uncommon.

Moreover, it indicates the significance of the garden

as an aspect of the total subsistence system, an aspect

that has all too often been neglected in the

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literature.2 But, especially, the Teduray material is

suggestive with regard to understanding the emergence

of a notion of private property.

Contrary to what might be readily assumed in the

abstract, it suggests that the critical innovation may

well not be a shift in cultural ideas about tenure, but

one in the technological practices on the land. A

garden, and by extension a plowed field, was used on a

permanent basis by its géfê, and thus the géfê became not

merely its user but also its possessor, meaning in the

modern context, of course, its “owner."

2 See Spencer, Joseph E., Shifting Cultivation in Southeastern Asia. Berkeley. LosAngeles, and London: University of California Press, 1966: pp. 145-148.