Tiruray Traditional and Peasant Subsistence: A Comparison

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My 1979 book Teduray Subsistence: The Transformation from Shifting Cultivation to Plow Farming set out to describe in some detail and with quantified data both the traditional subsistence system (swidden, hunting, fishing, and gathering), as it was experienced in Figel, and the peasantized subsistence system (sedentary plow farming under tenancy), as it was lived in Kabàkabà. In doing this, I was also ableto make some systematic comparisons of the two systems with regard to relative efficiency, productivity, and resulting diet. This essay is a summary article setting forth the essential contrasts andcomparisons. It was first published in a book edited by Harold Olafson, Contributions to the Study of Philippine Shifting Cultivation, published in 1981 by the Forest Research Institute of the University of the Philippines, Los Banos. I edited and slightly revised the essay in 2015.

TEDURAY TRADITIONAL AND PEASANT SUBSISTENCE: ACOMPARISON

Stuart A. SchlegelProfessor Emeritus of Anthropology

University of California, Santa Cruz

Many observers from differing perspectives have viewed

shifting cultivation, or swidden, systems in the humid

tropics in a negative way. In 1957, the Food and

Agriculture Organization (FAO) staff wrote a report

that stressed the low carrying capacity of most forms

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of shifting cultivation, and the harmful effects on the

environment that result from exceeding this capacity.

Appealing for research and technical effort to overcome

its serious problems, they called tropical shifting

cultivation:

. . . the greatest obstacle not only to the immediate increase of agricultural production, but also to the conservation of the production potential for the future in the form of soils and forests.1

In the eyes of a multitude of forestry operators,

agronomists, and government officials, shifting

cultivation in most tropical nations has been seen as

wasteful of potential, destructive of the environment,

technologically backward, and typical of a more

"primitive" level of society than that of settled

agriculturists.

Social scientists have tended to be more generous in

recent years in their evaluation of shifting

cultivation, recognizing numerous positive aspects, and

1 Food and Agricultural Organization, “Shifting Cultivation,” Unasylva, Vol. 11, p. 9, 1957.

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stressing that under traditional circumstances many

forms represent a highly stable adaptation to the

tropical environment, which is essentially conservative

of both the fertility of the soil and the integrity of

the forest.2 Nevertheless, much of the social science

literature continues to refer shifting cultivation

systems to a level somewhat below that of settled

agriculture, and to regard swidden cultivators as

rather more "backwards," plow farmers as more

"developed." This quote from a cultural geographer,

otherwise fully sympathetic to shifting cultivation as

an adaptation, is quite typical:

. . . shifting cultivation, in broad terms, was theelementary and pioneering cropping system used by the early agricultural occupants of many forested regions all over the world. The substitution of a better and more advanced cropping system has been slow, gradual and related to the rest of group culture. Where group cultures have not advanced shifting cultivation remains the standard practice.3

2 See, for example, Conklin, Harold, Hanunóo Agriculture: A Report on an IntegralSystem of Shifting Cultivation in the Philippines, Forestry Development Paper 12, Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization, 1957; Spencer, Joseph E., Shifting Cultivation in Southeastern Asia, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1966.3 Spencer, ibid., pp 4-5.

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"Better and more advanced" in what way? The assumption

that sedentary plow agriculture is a "higher" form than

shifting field cultivation need not derive from an

ethnocentric bias. The usual basis for the assumption

is that, compared to shifting cultivation (with its

hand tools and dibble sticks), settled permanent field

agriculture (with its work animals and plows) is

technologically more complex and sophisticated and,

thus, by its very nature, a more productive and less

prodigal use of the land.

This sort of assumption is all too often merely

challenged by counter assumptions. The purpose of this

essay is to question the notion that sedentary plow

cropping necessarily marks a productive "upgrading" of

shifting field slash-and-burn cropping, by presenting

neither a logical nor an ecological argument but rather

some data drawn from my research among the Teduray.4

4 For a full and detailed report on Teduray subsistence activities, both traditional and peasant, containing the complete data underlying this essay, see Schlegel, Stuart A., “The Subsistence Economy of the Tiruray of Mindanao, Philippines,” unpublished manuscript available on request from the Rizal Library of Ateneo de Manila University in Quezon City, Philippines, 1977. For a somewhat abridged version, with almost all of the descriptive detail, but less quantitative data, see

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The Teduray

The Teduray are a Philippine hill people on the island

of Mindanao in the Philippines, among whom I did

research in the 1960s. A prominent feature of their

society was that it had divided into two quite distinct

types of life. The ethnic group had traditionally lived

in the rainforest, and those who still lived there

practice the old tribal ways. But a great many Teduray

by the mid-‘60s lived in the Upi Valley and northwards,

and had been profoundly acculturated into Filipino

peasant life. It seems to me that the Teduray were a

living example of a very significant social

transformation that had occurred at one time or another

over much of the globe. I systematically studied and

compared several Teduray communities, some within the

rainforest and others outside it in the acculturated

areas, so, I can describe two of those communities as a

case study of how the shift from tribal organization to

Schlegel, Stuart A., Tiruray Subsistence: The Transformation from Shifting Cultivation to Plow Farming, Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979.

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peasant organization played out in their subsistence

activities.

The Teduray lived in their forested mountains, with a

swidden and foraging subsistence system, since time

immemorial. Even their myths of origin tell of no

different location or way of life. And they practiced

their shifting cultivation system caused no evident

damage to the environment. Since the beginning of the

present century, Teduray forests — especially in the

Upi Valley and northwards — have been cleared away and

permanently destroyed, but this was not because of

traditional Teduray social and subsistence patterns,

but due to a whole range of severely acculturating

forces.

The story of cultural contact and its associated

ecological change began with late nineteenth-century

Spanish military and missionary efforts in the Cotabato

area, touching the northern fringes of Teduray society.

The American occupation that replaced Spanish rule

introduced very profound influences and significant

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acculturation among the Teduray. The decades under

American rule — interrupted by World War II and ending

in 1946, when Philippine independence was recognized —

were a time of vigorous efforts to break down Teduray

isolation, and to bring them into "modern" ways and

institutions.

The area directly affected was roughly the northern

third of the Teduray homeland. There a system of public

primary and elementary schools were established, many

along the road that was built to connect the lowlands

to the Upi Valley, others on a network of trails

reaching well into the interior. At the southern end of

the road an agricultural school was established in Upi,

where the technology, the skills, and the ideals of

sedentary plow farming were stressed as an advance over

the "primitive" swidden-keeping

traditional in the area. The Teduray in the effectively

American-administered region — which dropped off

sharply as one went beyond the roads and the valley

into the southern interior — were taught to formally

title and thus to "own" land, a concept entirely novel

to them. They were led to clear away the forests so the

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land could be properly cultivated. They were instructed

in the care and use of carabao as draft animals. All of

this represented the technical side of American

presence, but emphasis was also placed on conversion of

the Teduray to Christianity from "paganism," on the

introduction of Western institutions and ideas of "law

and order" to supplant their traditional legal system,

on teaching them to speak English for day to day

interactions, and, by the mid-1910s, on an ever-

increasing immigration to the area of Christian

homesteaders from Luzon and the Visayas, as well as

Muslim homesteaders from the Cotabato lowlands.

The rapid and deep acculturation that characterized the

American period was well advanced in the region when

the Republic of the Philippines assumed sovereignty,

and thereafter its main characteristics were preserved

and, to an extent, extended. In particular, the

ecological changes were intensified when, in the 1950s,

logging franchises were awarded and timber-cutting

activities began to push far into the still forested

and traditional interior south of the Upi Valley.

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The effect of all these major changes on Teduray

society was to divide it, in a sense, into two. Many

families in the acculturating area, having lost control

of their social and physical environment, moved away

from all the change and sought to continue their

accustomed life style in a more remote part of the

forest with communities of still traditional people. At

the time of my research in the mid-1960s, I estimated

that less than half of the Teduray, perhaps some 10,000

persons, still lived in the forest according to the old

way of life. The remainder, in the northern area, had

become a Teduray version of Philippine peasantry. They

had taken up plow farming, been drawn deeply into the

cash-and-credit market economy typical of Philippine

peasant society, begun sending their children to

school, adopted Christianity, and learned to settle

their disputes in Philippine municipal courts or

through the intervention of their usually non-Teduray

landlords. Between the two extremes of society — which

I will refer to as the "traditional" and the "peasant"

sectors — there is no clearly marked cultural fault

line, but rather a loosely defined zone of transition

where people live with greater or lesser involvement in

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the new institutions, practices, and ideas. Two

neighborhoods where I did research — one traditional

and one peasant — are representative of those two

sectors of Teduray society.

Figel

Figel, located deep in the interior, some three

kilometers inland and 20 kilometers up the Tran Grande

River from its mouth, is the community where I

documented subsistence patterns typical of the

traditional Teduray. Figel neighborhood numbered some

126 persons, comprising thirty-one nuclear families in

twenty-nine households, residing in seven hamlets. All

Figel people were related to each other by some

consanguineal or affinal tie, a fact that does not

reflect any Teduray rule of custom, but rather the way

the community developed, through voluntary association

for work cooperation, along lines of kin closeness.5

5 For the history of the development of both Figel and Kabàkabà communities, see: Schlegel, Stuart A., “From Tribal to Peasant: The Tiruray Example,” Studies in Third World Societies, Vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 73-95.

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Figel is elevated about 120 meters above sea level in a

major riverine valley, surrounded by dense forest.

Humidity is constantly high, with a mean near 75

percent; temperatures show very little seasonal

variation, most daily readings falling between 22° and

37° C.; and rainfall is relatively heavy and well

distributed throughout the year, peaking in July and

August. All around Figel is a greatly diversified

tropical rainforest that supports a large, highly

varied assemblage of wild animals and birds.

Kabàkabà

Kabàkabà, located just north of the Upi Valley in the

heart of the acculturated area, is the neighborhood

where I studied the subsistence activities typical of

peasantized Teduray. Like the other peasant Teduray

neighborhoods, it is smaller than its traditional

counterparts, and was made up of 69 persons in 12

families, each a single household. Kabàkabà is a

neighborhood to its members in the sense that they live

near each other, help each other occasionally with farm

work, and associate with each other more intensely than

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with people living elsewhere. But it is not a

neighborhood in the traditional Teduray sense of people

who associate together to cooperate in shifting

cultivation.6 In Kabàkabà, each family lives and works

where it does because their landlord, who lives

elsewhere, has given them tenancy status and assigned

them a part of his or her land. Some of these families

are related, but they are not there primarily because

of those relationships, but because they were offered a

piece of land to work there.

Kabàkabà stands on a slight slope some 500 to 580

meters above sea level, and, except for some very small

thickets along the Kabàkabà Creek, is completely

cleared of trees. Most of the area is in cultivation;

the rest is covered with grasses and weeds. Two small

creeks run through Kabàkabà; the nearest sizable river

is some five kilometers away. The neighborhood is a

three-kilometer hike from the main provincial road,

where the landlord resides. Humidity, temperature, and

rainfall are not significantly different from those in

6 The word inged, which I gloss as "neighborhood," is still used in Kabàkabà, but with awareness of its different meaning.

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Figel (some 50 kilometers to the south). Since the

rainforest is gone, gone too from the Kabàkabà scene is

the abundance of plant and animal resources available

to Figel people.

The Figel Traditional Subsistence System

The traditional Teduray subsistence system, as

represented by Figel, consists of shifting cultivation,

hunting, fishing, gathering of wild resources, and

marketing. These will be briefly described in this

section, and the comparable aspects of the peasant

system at Kabàkabà in the next section.

The cycle of shifting cultivation activities carried

out by Figel people is broadly similar to many other

"slash-and-burn" regimes found elsewhere in the humid

tropics. Site selection is the first stage in the

process of replacing temporarily the native forest

vegetation with humanly selected cultivates. From the

end of the previous year's harvesting work until

approximately mid-December, the men of the community

range the surrounding forests, primarily to hunt but

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also to keep their eyes open for sites for their next

swiddens.7 Each person looks for a place for his

family's new swidden according to certain well-defined

criteria: vegetation type (virgin forest is

preferred) , soil type, land topography, distance from

the residential settlement, etc.8 Traditional Teduray

have no sense of private or corporate land ownership;

all sites are occupied by right of usufruct, only for

as long as the crops introduced continue to bear. The

Figel men informally discuss the sites they have

selected, and then ritually mark them in late December.9

7 Although I give the approximate timing of activities here in terms of calendar months, the traditional Teduray do not base their timing decisions on the Western calendar but on a system of star sightings and an indigenously conceived zodiac. See Schlegel, Stuart A., “The Traditional Tiruray Zodiac: The Celestial Calendar of a Philippine Swidden and Foraging People,” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society, Vol. 15, pp. 12-26.8 Not every family cuts a swidden every year. In 1966, the twenty-nineFigel households established seventeen swiddens. The following year, which most Figel people considered to be more normal in this regard, they cut twenty-five swiddens.9 Traditional Teduray neighborhoods celebrate a corporate ritual feastfour times during the cultivation cycle: before marking new sites, following the first corn harvest, at the beginning of the rice harvest, and upon completion of the rice harvest. These rituals give expression to the corporate interdependence of the neighborhood families with each other and with the various spirits associated with food production. A variety of lesser individual ritual acts occur at different points in the cycle. All of these ritual performances are almost entirely gone in Kabàkabà.

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The next main stage of the shifting cultivation cycle

is cutting away the natural vegetation, and consists of

two main activities. First, through January, the lower

underbrush growth is slashed. This is done

cooperatively, the Figel neighborhood men working

together on each of their swidden sites in turn, until

they have slashed them all. Next, through a similar

cooperative effort, they few the large forest trees on

the sites. This generally occurs during February and

March, and involves labor which is both quite heavy and

dangerous. Once all the sites are cleared, they are

allowed to dry for a number of weeks, then the men burn

them in late March and early April.

Planting of new vegetation, its care, and its

harvesting make up the next stage of the cycle and

involve the neighborhood's women as well as its men.

First, the women plant corn in the swiddens in rows a

meter or two apart; it is usually April by this time.10

Next, after the corn has begun to sprout, they plan

10 Seventeen different varieties of corn are distinguished, with maturation periods ranging from two to four months. Twelve of the varieties are soft and sweet, known as "Teduray corn," and five varieties are the harder so-called "Cebu corn."

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rice.11 The Figel swiddens are planted in turn, the men

dibbling and the women laying the seed and cooking food

for the planting party. As the grains grow, each man

plants a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, spices and

the like in his swidden, amidst and around the rice and

corn. Finally, after the main rice crop has been

harvested, the women plant a second corn crop (July

through September). Occasionally they divide the fields

at this time between corn and a cash crop, such as

tobacco. Care of the planted swidden occupies both men

and women; the latter spend many hours in weeding, and

the men in fencing, building scarecrows, and guarding

against wild pigs, monkeys and rice birds. Each women

harvests corn on her own family’s swidden, but the

harvesting, hauling, threshing, and drying of rice

require the efforts of both men and women and are,

again, cooperative community efforts on the

neighborhood's fields, one after the other.

11 Figel Teduray distinguish 137 different varieties of upland dry rice: twenty-five of these are glutinous, used mainly in ritual contexts, and the other 112 are non-glutinous. Some of each are planted in every swidden, usually in approximately the ratio of 1:10.

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After the second corn crop is harvested, a variety of

residual productive plants continue to be harvested for

some time. The site, however, is not further worked; it

is allowed to lie fallow, so that the process of

natural reforestation may take place. New swiddens, the

following year, are cut in another place in primary or

secondary forest, and no one makes any effort to return

to a specific site previously cut by the same

individual. Shifting of the fields is thus random, and

not rotational in character.

These different activities— selecting, cutting,

burning, cropping and fallowing— make up the normal

shifting-cultivation cycle of traditional Teduray.12

They form, however, only one part of Figel's total

subsistence activities. All around Figel, the

rainforest contains plentiful wild game that the men

hunt, and many wild plants the women gather. Similarly,

12 In addition to this normal cycle, two alternate successions are practiced, though only infrequently. Additional grain crops may be introduced to a swidden beyond the normal one rice and two corn crops.Or, a field in an early stage of fallow may be slashed and burned. Figel people recognize that both these practices greatly increase the possibility of a terminal succession of the plot to grassland, rather than to reestablishment of the forest, and the practices are, therefore, strongly discouraged.

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the Tran Grande River abounds in fish, eels,

crustaceans, and other edibles. The Figel people are

shifting cultivators, to be sure, but they are also

hunters, fishers, and gatherers, and these foraging

activities produce a significant portion of their

subsistence base.13

All adult males hunt regularly, and in certain seasons

— especially June to December, when their major swidden

labor is finished for the year — hunting and fishing

are their main activities. Their most highly prized

game are wild deer and pig, though they also bring down

monkeys and a great variety of fowl. Many different

methods, traps, snares, and weapons are employed,

mostly by single individuals, although in some

instances several men go hunting together, and certain

hunting techniques are specifically group activities.

Fishing contrasts with hunting in being done by both

men and women, though by the latter to a much lesser

extent. Again, they employ a large variety of

techniques, traps, and devices, and a take a

13 Identification of all wild flora and fauna regularly exploited, as well as all domesticated plants grown on swiddens, is given in Schlegel, op. cit., 1979.

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considerable number of different aquatic resources

from the river that form, with the meat from hunting, a

significant portion of the traditional Teduray diet.14

Finally, the importance to the traditional food base of

wild flora gathered from the forest would be difficult

to overstate. The forest contains a variety of

nourishing edibles: starches, vegetables, seeds, nuts,

and fruits, as well as other goods, from firewood to

medicines, needed for daily life.

Marketing is the last element in the traditional

subsistence system. Although the Figel people either

grow, hunt for, or gather the great majority of the

goods they need and use, certain items they need have

to come from outside the indigenous Teduray world and

be purchased at a coastal market. Traditional Teduray

do not weave or smith, so clothing and iron tools must

be purchased, as well as salt, cooking pots, bedding,

ceremonial exchange items, and the like.15 Marketing 14 A record of all food consumed by representative Figel and Kabàkabà families over an entire year, along with a nutritional analysis of thetwo diets, is presented and discussed in Schlegel, Stuart A. and HelenGuthrie, “Diet and the Tiruray Shift from Swidden to Plow Farming, Ecology of Food and Nutrition, Vol. 2, pp. 181-191, 1973.15 Prior to the establishment of markets in the early part of the present century, Teduray obtained such goods through a system of

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thus plays a role, although a very small role, in the

total subsistence activities. Figel people use the

market at Salaman, Lebak, one of the several weekly

markets found in peasant towns of the province. Their

commitment to the market, however, is completely

peripheral. They typically buy only such goods as they

cannot produce or procure domestically, using cash they

receive on the same market visit in exchange for forest

products, especially stripped rattan. Figel people are

not users of cash in other settings, so to them what

they get for their rattan and immediately give for the

tool are like script exchange markers only. They are,

in fact, quite unaware of the market as a place for

maximizing economic advantages. Their focus is entirely

on meeting one's family's specific immediate needs, and

therefore the Salaman market is viewed by Figel Teduray

solely as a minor adjunct to their domestic subsistence

base, a source of a few special goods.

The Kabàkabà Peasant Subsistence System

ritually established trade-pacts with Maguindanaon Muslim peddlers; see Schlegel, Stuart A., “Tiruray-Maguindanaon Ethnic Relations: An Ethnohistorical Puzzle,” Solidarity, Vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 25-30, 1972; alsoSchlegel, op. cit., 1977, 1979.

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The peasant Teduray subsistence system exemplified by

Kabàkabà contrasts with the traditional one in Figel in

almost every particular. It consists of sedentary plow

agriculture in place of traditional shifting

cultivation, virtually no hunting, fishing or

gathering, and a greatly expanded interaction with and

dependence upon the market.

A Figel shifting cultivator is, in a real sense, his

own person, but a Kabàkabà plow farmer is not; he works

as a share-crop tenant for a landlord. In the usual

arrangement, the landlord provides the land and the

working animal, in return for which he receives half of

each crop grown by his tenant.16 The landlord of

Kabàkabà is thought to be fair, even generous, by his

tenants, in how he administers this relationship, and

such respect is quite common throughout the area.16 Other arrangements pertain when the tenant owns his own working animal (the division then giving 80 percent to the tenant), and when the tenant uses a working animal owned by some third person (40 percent for the tenant, 40 percent for the owner of the animal, 20 percent to the landowner). These sharing schemes apply to rice, corn, and entire fields of cash crops. Vegetables grown in small doorstep gardens need not be shared with the landlord, but he has full rights to the entire produce of any permanent crops, such as coconut or fruittrees.

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The four main crops grown in Kabàkabà — rice, corn,

onions, and tomatoes — are not integrated into a single

cycle of activities as was the case in Figel, but are

grown separately by each family on discrete plots, with

each plant following its own timetable.17 A family

normally grows a single rice crop each year, but may

plant as many as three corn crops. Also, different

families plant and harvest corn at different times

throughout the year. The following describes a typical

year's grain cropping for a given family:

January They begin plowing a rice field.

17 The reduction of the production of highly diversified swiddens — onthe average some 30-60 plant types in a single field — to a mere four crops is one of the most striking of the many contrasts between the two systems. Not every peasant Teduray family specializes in onions and tomatoes, as do those of Kabàkabà, but growing only one or two cash crops besides corn is the general practice. Other commonly grown cash crops include peanuts, beans of various sorts, eggplants, pechay,and mustard; like corn, those are grown specifically to raise cash in and for the market. In Figel, where the forest is still intact, families could raise cash for the market by preparing forest products,such as rattan lashing, for sale. The peasant shift to cash-crop growing may thus be seen as a direct adaptation to the loss of the forest.

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February Harvest corn planted in the

previous year’s rice plot.

Prepare and plants the field again in

corn.

March Finish preparation of the rice

field and plant it.

April Begin another corn field.

July Harvest the corn planted in

February.

August Harvest the rice field.

September Replant the rice field in

corn.

October Harvest the corn planted in April.

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November to December Go to harvest rice on the paddies

of other nearby Upi Valley

farm owners, on a share basis.

Tomatoes and onions are, like corn, grown steadily

throughout the year, without any seasonal rhythms. The

work of growing and of selling these cash crops is done

entirely by the women. In a typical year, a family may

harvest as many as four crops of tomatoes and five of

onions.

Thus the Kabàkabà men are kept busy preparing fields by

repeated plowing and harrowing, planting grains,

plowing and cultivating corn fields, caring for the

carabaos and bulls, and dragging sacks of grain to

their landlord's house and to market. The women are

occupied with weeding in the rice and corn fields, with

care of the onion and tomato plots, with harvesting on

all the various family fields, and with selling their

vegetable produce in the market.

In Kabàkabà, exploitation of wild resources is

virtually nonexistent. The tiny thickets along the

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creek and the surrounding cultivated fields allow some

limited shooting of certain birds. Occasionally a

monkey may appear and raid a corn field, but the area

has long ago been cleared of all wild pigs, deer, and

chickens. Similarly, the creeks and the Mateber River,

some five kilometers away, contain very little food

resources, being either too small or long ago having

been "fished out" by the adjacent population.

Therefore, Kabàkabà people do almost no hunting or

fishing. They purchase their fish and meat in the local

Nuro market. And, in like manner, with the forests gone

so too are the main sources for any significant

gathering of wild goods, so virtually all of a family's

needs must be bought in the market. The contrast

between the subsistence activities of Figel and

Kabàkabà is nowhere more striking than in the almost

total elimination of the hunting, fishing, and

gathering elements.

On the other hand, market relations assume vastly

greater significance in Kabàkabà. In the peasantized

subsistence system they are part of, the marketplace

has become a central economic institution. Kabàkabà

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people use the market in Nuro, some seven kilometers

away in the Upi Valley — a weekly peasant market

dominated, like the Salaman market, by Muslim and

Christian vendors and patrons. There, they both buy and

sell many more things than the Figel people do in

Salaman. Farming needs — such as work tools, rope,

sharpening stones, rubber and rattan, and a whole range

of household needs such as kerosene, kitchenware,

flashlights and batteries, soap, starch, medicines, and

the like — must all be purchased. In addition, they buy

paper, pencils and other school needs for the children,

along with candy and comic books. Moreover, in marked

contrast to Figel people, the Kabàkabà families obtain

a great deal of the food they eat at the Nuro market.

Sugar, coffee, tea, oil, lard, bread, vegetables (other

than onions and tomatoes), as well as meat and dried

fish, garlic, pepper and other spices — all come from

the market. Even their starch staples must be purchased

for daily eating, because most of what they grow is

sold. Accordingly, cash to buy these items is thus a

major need for Kabàkabà people, not the peripheral sort

of thing it was to the Figel Teduray, and the most

common way of obtaining the cash they need is from sale

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of their share of their farm produce. In short, the

market has become a central and crucial feature of the

peasant Teduray subsistence system. By no means,

though, have the Kabàkabà people entered the market

arena on favorable terms; like many peasant farmers

elsewhere in the world, they are regularly exploited by

countless middle men, and subject to a temporal cycle

of selling cheaply at harvest time, and buying at far

higher prices between harvests. But whatever the terms,

the market and money have become central institutions

in their lives.

Comparisons and Conclusions

In this final section, I present several sets of

figures in terms of which these two subsistence systems

maybe compared. But, first, I would say a word about

Teduray perceptions and feelings.

The shift from the traditional way of life in the

forest to that in an acculturated community such as

Kabàkabà has not only involved a big change in

subsistence activities, but it has also meant a radical

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reworking of many aspects of Teduray existence: their

diet, dress, and demeanor, as well as their political,

legal, and religious relations. The Teduray involved in

this shift have not found it congenial; in fact, they

have resisted becoming Filipino peasants. Where

possible, many traditional people have tried to avoid

the changes, at least for a while, by moving to a place

in the forest that is still isolated. But others have

been unavoidably caught in the changing social and

physical environment, and have had to change with it,

whether they cared to or not.

Why have they shown such resistance to change? The

reasons are surely complex, and involve, at the very

least, a natural and quite human dislike of seeing a

long-accustomed and happy way of life forcibly altered

into something new. But the Teduray also state quite

openly a very pragmatic basis for their opposition to

peasantization. They say that, as they perceive the

situation, they are being forced to work much harder

than the traditional Teduray, and for less return. The

data from my research suggest that they are quite right

in this perception.

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In the course of my fieldwork, my field assistants and

I took careful measurements of many features of the

subsistence systems in both Figel and Kabàkabà. One of

the things we recorded was the amount of corn and rice

seed planted in all the various fields of the two

communities over a year's time (Figel in 1966, Kabàkabà

in 1967). We also recorded the yields from each of

these plantings. Putting these yield figures together

with field sizes, we can compare the yields between the

two systems in the customary local units of cavans per

hectare. Taking rice first, the swiddens of Figel

produced an average of 51.9 cavans per hectare (which

is 2038 lbs/acre).18 In contrast, the Kabàkabà plowed

fields yielded an average of 38.2 cavans per hectare of

rice (1499 lbs/acre)— a decrease in productivity per

hectare between the two rice systems of some 26

percent.

A similar situation is found when corn yields are

compared. Figel swiddens produced an average of 19.6

18 The specific data from which the averages given in this essay are derived may be found in Schlegel, op. cit., 1977.

Page 30 of 33

cavans per hectare (979 lbs/acre) in the first corn

planting, and 21.2 cavans per hectare (1059 lbs/acre)

in their second corn crop. Taking the two together, the

average yield for corn from Figel swiddens was some

20.3 cavans per hectare (1014 lbs/acre) in the year we

recorded. This compares with an average yield of corn

crops on Kabàkabà plowed fields of 18.7 cavans per

hectare (934 lbs/acre) — again a decrease in

productivity of almost 10 percent.

There is a problem with the customary cavans per

hectare yield figures when one compares swiddens with

plowed fields. The latter are typically completely

cleared and fully planted, whereas the swiddens are

covered with varying amounts of fallen tree trunks,

stumps and other debris from the slashing and burning

activities — this means that a hectare of swidden is

really less than a hectare of land that is usable for

plowing. In addition, one swidden is not the same in

this regard as another. Thus, swiddens do not compare

well with each other, or with plowed fields, in terms

of yields given in produce per hectare. To counter this

difficulty, I also put the yield figures for both Figel

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and Kabàkabà together with the amounts of seed planted,

thus allowing me to derive a more truly comparable

"seed-yield ratio" for each swidden and each plowed

field. Looked at in these terms, the decline between

the two systems is even more pronounced. In rice, the

Figel swiddens averaged a seed-yield ratio of 1:40,

whereas the Kabàkabà fields produced an average seed-

yield ratio of 1:28, a decrease of some 30 percent. The

corn seed-yield ratios are 1:124 for Figel and 1:95 for

Kabàkabà, a decline of 23 percent.

These comparisons of yields become even more meaningful

when joined to labor input figures. My research team

kept records of average labor costs of the various

activities involved in the shifting cultivation cycle

in Figel and in the plow agriculture system in

Kabàkabà. These records show that the labor invested by

a typical Figel family on a one-hectare swidden through

an entire annual cycle amounts to some 2500-2600 hours

of work. But the comparable round of rice, corn, and

cash crop plow cultivation for a year on a hectare of

land costs a Kabàkabà family almost twice that amount

of labor, some 4970-5000 hours.

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In sum, the two systems of cultivation differ greatly,

in both yields produced and labor expended, and the

shifting cultivation form requires much less labor and

yields much greater results. I did not keep comparable

quantitative records on the exploitation of wild animal

and plant resources, but clearly such figures would

only exaggerate further the differences noted in

agricultural yields. Hunting, fishing, and gathering

are of great subsistence importance in the traditional

forests, and of virtually no significance in the

cleared peasant area. The labor hours which

exploitation of wild resources cost traditional people,

however, are balanced by the time required of peasant

Teduray for their greatly expanded market activities.

These data clearly render plausible — in hard economic

terms — the general Teduray reluctance to shifting from

their traditional ways to the peasant life of a plow-

farming tenant. Moreover, they surely suggest that

settled permanent field agriculture, although more

technologically complex, cannot be considered a priori to

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be necessarily a more productive regime than shifting

cultivation.