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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.
Page 29 of 33
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
Page 31 of 33
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.
Page 32 of 33
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