Local Knowledge and Agricultural Decision Making in the Philippines: Class, Gender, and Resistance 9781501737305

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Local Knowledge and Agricultural Decision Making in the Philippines

Food Systems and Agrarian Change

Edited by Frederick H. Buttel, Billie R. DeWalt, and Per Pinstrup-Andersen A complete list of titles in the series appears at the end of this book.

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE AND AGRICULTURAL DECISION MAKING IN THE PHILIPPINES Class, Gender, and Resistance Virginia D. Nazarea-Sandoval

Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 1995 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 1995 by Cornell University Press.

Printed in the United States of America © The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nazarea-Sandoval, Virginia D. Local knowledge and agricultural decision making in the Philippines : class, gender, and resistance / Virginia D. Nazarea Sandoval. p. cm. — (Food systems and agrarian change) “Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork in Kabaritan from August 1986 to September 1987” —Pref. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8014-2801-7 (alk. paper) 1. Rural development — Philippines — Kabaritan. 2. Traditional farming — Philippines — Kabaritan. 3. Agriculture — Philippines — Kabaritan — Decision making. 4. Food habits — Philippines — Kabaritan. 5. Kabaritan (Philippines) — Social life and customs. I. Title. II. Series. HN720.Z9C66417 1995 338.9599T —dc20 94-3500

Contents

1

Tables and Figures

vii

Preface

ix

The Problem: Agricultural Decision Making in Social Context

i

2

Agricultural Decision Making: Theory and Method

io

3

Historical Development

38

4

Operational Reality: Opportunities and Constraints

72

5

Cognized Models: Ethnoagronomy and Ethnogastronomy

102

6

Decision Making as Interface

142

7

Summary and Conclusion

182

Appendix 1.

Household Composition, Domestic Space Use, and Land Use of Representative Subsample

193

Appendix 2.

Local Hand Drawn Maps of Kabaritan

201

Appendix 3.

Triads Test

208

References

2.13

Index

2,21

Tables and Figures

Tables

1. Rice culture in Kabaritan 2. Tilapia aquaculture in Kabaritan 3. Comparison of means between total sample and subsample 4. Comparison of modes of total sample and subsample 5. Prototypical comments regarding major land use options 6. Marginal comments regarding major land use options 7. Land use patterns of representative households 8. Rice varieties planted by landed households each season

77 80 91 91 128 130 168 170

Figures

1. Study area 2. Household map of Kabaritan, Sto. Domingo 3. Agricultural decision making as an interface between a cognized model and operational reality 4. Research strategies employed to tap various sections of conceptual model 5. Location of home lots of representative subsample 6. Population pyramids, Kabaritan (1986) 7. Actual number of squares devoted to general wetland 8. Actual number of squares devoted to rice fields 9. Actual number of squares devoted to fishponds

vii

11 12 15 2,6 31 84 104 105 106

viii

Tables and Figures

10. Actual number of squares devoted to community infrastructure 11. Actual number of squares devoted to community resources and services 12. Actual number of squares devoted to natural resources 13. Criteria used for plant recognition and discrimination 14. Relative importance of local criteria for plant recognition and discrimination 15. Local plant classification based on indigenous criteria 16. Criteria used for arthropod recognition and discrimination 17. Relative importance of local criteria for arthropod recognition and discrimination 18. Local arthropod classification based on indigenous criteria 19. Conceptual models of intracultural variability 20. Time allocation of different socioeconomic groups for general activities 21. Time allocation of different socioeconomic groups for specific activities in agriculture 22. Time allocation of different socioeconomic groups for specific activities in aquaculture 23. Time allocation of different socioeconomic groups for other activities 24. Time allocation of males and females for general activities 25. Time allocation of males and females for specific activities in aquaculture 2 6. Time allocation of males and females for specific activities in agriculture 27. Time allocation of males and females for specific domestic activities 28. Time allocation of males and females for other activities 29. Food consumption of different socioeconomic groups 30. Food consumption of males and females 31. Food consumption during wet and dry seasons 32. Local paradigm for evaluating rice varieties 33. Local paradigm for evaluating major land use options

108 109 no 114 115 117 118 120 122 139 144 145 145 146 152 153 153 156 156 163 164 166 171 173

Preface

What is it about a veranda that encourages minds to loosen up the tight knots of schemas and paradigms and to interconnect in the most interesting fashion? The house I rented in Kabaritan (located in Laguna, Luzon, Philippines) was blessed with a small veranda. It was there my informants, my local assistants, and I brought, processed, and either dried, cultivated, or bottled plant and arthropod speci¬ mens that we collected along our transects. It was there we played games of guess what plant or insect I’m holding although you can’t see it. It was there we gossiped about who caught the most freshwater fish, such as tilapia (Tilapia nilotica) and milkfish (Cbanos chanos), that had escaped from neighbors’ fishponds and fish pens during the recent flood and marveled at how the lives of people mimicked current local movies (instead of the other way around) to the extent that a nearly perfect one-to-one correspondence could be worked out between local personalities and the popular movie characters. One breezy afternoon, when people were returning from their fields, I called out to some passing neighbors and invited them to the veranda for snacks. My insect box was open and in it were various preserved specimens, pinned in neat rows and ready for identifica¬ tion. Among the lot were tiny leafhoppers of different colors, each about the size of a pinhead. My magnifying glass was lying beside the box. A farmer whom I had been eyeing with considerable interest since my first week in Kabaritan because he seemed to possess a lively intelligence coupled with joyful irreverence toyed with my magnify-

x

Preface

ing glass. So I held it for him and directed his gaze to the tiny leafhoppers right below. Surprised, he called his neighbors and pointed at what was absorbing his attention. “Locusts, look, lo¬ custs!” he cried out. The scene was evocative of a line from Gertrude Stein’s A Circular Play: “Can you see the moon? Can you see it seen?” (quoted by Peacock, i986:vii). If I was looking for a metaphor for my research problem, this one was hard to beat. Cognized models are the magni¬ fying lenses or, alternatively, the selective filters of our minds. They direct our attention to the “relevant” field, however that might be defined, exclude other information as peripheral, and either empha¬ size or minimize our focus of attention (in the same manner that the minuscule leafhoppers swelled, in the eyes of my friend, to locust proportions). Thus the operational reality, or what is out there, may be discovered, dissected, or distorted based on the lenses and filters that we, as individuals, as members of households, and as members of communities have been socialized to carry in our heads. Because different individuals are socialized in different groups with different expectations and sanctions, it is not surprising that our lenses differ and that the more disparate our backgrounds, the more incongruent our models are. When development workers are per¬ plexed as to why “mature” technologies have not been adopted, for instance, the best place to start looking for answers is at discrepancy between the models that generated these technologies and the cog¬ nized models of potential users. Between the cost-benefit analysis of planners and the cost-benefit analysis of local farmers is a dark middle phase. On one hand are the normative assumptions and expectations of more formal models and on the other are indigenous systems of understanding evolved through a series of farmers’ long¬ term and short-term adaptations to the complexities of their world. The problematic middle phase, often neatly labeled and then dis¬ missed as a “black box,” consists of opportunities and constraints as experienced and as perceived by the farmers themselves. To complicate matters further, the same set of factors may be viewed as opportunities or constraints depending on the percep¬ tion of different categories of farmers. Although the economic ra¬ tionality of farmers in general has been established beyond argument (Chayanov, 1966; Popkin, 1979), such rationality depends on indige¬ nous decision-making criteria and processes that may vary signifi¬ cantly as a function of class and gender. Discussing problems associ¬ ated with the planning and implementation of development projects,

Preface

xi

Gita Sen and Caren Crown (1987:40) pointed out that “a typical problem at this level is that locally powerful classes and groups tend to dominate decisions and bias them to their own interests.” Even more fundamental, though more subtle, is how evaluation and choice are constrained at the level of cognition by prevailing values delineat¬ ing what is right from what is wrong, what is proper from what is not — not only at the level of morality but also at the level of practical concerns. An interplay of these “intervening variables” could result in outcomes or choices that are unpredictable from classical economic theory. I cannot put this any more eloquently than Mang Juan, a Filipino peasant, whose insightful comment was quoted by the Asian Action Newsletter (cited by Antonio Ledesma, 1982:1): You must realize that we live in two different worlds. It is as if you live in the world of birds of the air, and we in that of the fishes of the sea. When birds move, they of course move fast because they fly. On the other hand, when we fishes move, we move relatively slower because we have to swim in an ocean. And so it sometimes happens that some birds want to do good for us from the height in which they fly. Condescendingly they say, “Mr. Fish, progress! Move like I do —this way and that way —so you could move faster!” We fishes of course cannot follow because we have to move in this ocean of usury, and tenancy, and other unjust relations. Hence there is a need for another frame of reference for understand¬ ing the dark middle phase or “black box” in farmers’ decision making. This book is based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork in Kabaritan from August 1986 to September 1987 (not all of which was spent on the veranda). It addresses two main questions related to lenses and latitudes. One is to what extent lenses and filters are shared by the farming population in terms of indigenous knowledge system and decision-making framework vis-a-vis the external, detached as¬ sessment of their situation (e.g., from the economist’s or the develop¬ ment planner’s point of view). The other is to what extent these lenses and filters are not shared or the degree to which native understand¬ ings vary based on the standing of their bearers in the hierarchy of economic and social relations. Closely related to the second question are the finer points: issues of patterning, boundedness, and elasticity, within a social matrix in which two important dimensions are class and gender. Not infrequently, I felt I had bit off more than I could

xii

Freface

chew but I had my lenses too, and one commanded me to swallow stoically. For expert and sympathetic help I wish to thank Billie DeWalt, Milton Coughenour, Sarah Quandt, and Andrew Hofling at the Uni¬ versity of Kentucky, as well as Richard Ulack. They provided a stimulating balance of challenge and criticism with constant encour¬ agement. I would like to single out Susan Abbott, who always knew when to guide and when to leave enough room for exploration and who never held it against me that I was juggling my own constraints. For institutional and financial support, I gratefully acknowledge the University of the Philippines for granting me a study leave, the Ford Foundation for providing a grant to finance my studies, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) for providing a research fellowship and, later, an affiliate scientist appointment to support my fieldwork and data analysis, the Environment and Policy Research Institute (EAPI) of the East-West Center for offering a visiting fellow¬ ship so I could expand my literature review, and the University of California at Santa Cruz for supporting the final stages of manuscript preparation. These institutions provided not only logistic support but also an intellectual climate conducive to unhampered inquiry. I wish to express my gratitude to some special people whose faith and flexibility allowed and motivated me to see this work to comple¬ tion. I mention their names here in the order that they have influenced the course of my professional life: Jose Drilon, Emil Javier, Joseph Hoffman, Josefa Eusebio, Albert Polak, Romulo del Castillo, Tom Kessinger, and Robert Rhoades. Without their understanding and active support, this book would never have been started, much less finished. John Flinn of IRRI first suggested that this work be published. Gellia Castillo of the University of the Philippines at Los Bunos encouraged my efforts in that direction. Tom Hargrove of IRRI and Billie DeWalt of the University of Kentucky were instrumental in exploring the possibility of joint publication by IRRI and Cornell University Press (unfortunately, this agreement did not materialize because of time constraints). Frederick Buttell, series editor for Food Systems and Agrarian Change, put me through much pain and agony, but if my arguments are more lucid now, I owe it to his unsparing critique. Terry Rambo of EAPI looked over the abstract sent to him by the dean of our college, Francisco Fellizar, and invited me to do the initial part of my revisions at the East-West Center. Cristina David

Preface

xiii

and Sam Fujisaka, both of IRRI, generously shared their resources for the completion of my draft. To them, I can only pledge that I too will try to be supportive of others when the opportunity presents itself. Neither last nor least, thanks are due to Vicky Malabanan and Boyet Angeles, who assisted me in collecting the data; Abelle Fabellar and Bheng Bartolome, who helped me process the bits and pieces into understandable tables and graphs; Vic Gapud, Norma Aguilar, Ross Lubigan, and Bert Barrion, who identified the biological specimens; and Lingkod Sayo, Fely Jalotjot, Larry Lapitan, and Jules Pacheco, who helped with the photographs and illustrations. For processing words into legible text, for unlimited patience and warm friendship, my appreciation goes to Charlotte Taraba of Lexington, Kentucky, and Johsee Reyes of IRRI. Finally, I wish to thank the people of Kabaritan, especially the twelve couples who served as my key informants, for the initiation and instruction they provided. They shared their lives willingly and allowed me a rare vision of human dignity that I find at once hum¬ bling and exalting. The strength and optimism they imparted will, I hope, last a lifetime. They trusted me to write about their past and their present, and it is with some trepidation that I have ven¬ tured to infer motives, goals, and possible trajectories. I ask for their indulgence. To my family who saw me through all the ups and downs, the mystifications and the demystifications, no words can express my debt. And it goes without saying that this is especially for my daugh¬ ter, Natasha . . . that intensity may compensate for time. Virginia

Athens, Georgia

D.

Nazarea-Sandoval

Local Knowledge and Agricultural Decision Making in the Philippines

I The Problem: Agricultural Decision Making in Social Context

Kabaritan is a lakeshore community bordering Laguna de Bay, the largest freshwater lake in the Philippines. Because of its nearness to the lake, its rich alluvial soil, and its warm climate, Kabaritan strikes the onlooker as an undisturbed rural landscape. But the signs of de¬ velopment are already visible: concrete houses alongside nipa (dried palm) huts, motorized bancas (fishing boats) and tricycles, kitchens equipped with all sorts of electrical appliances, living rooms with diplomas on the wall, pool and dice tables tucked away in discrete places, and sari-sari (local variety) stores with security grilles. Al¬ though the residents of Kabaritan have always fished and gathered shellfish, their main occupation is farming rice in well-irrigated paddy fields. Recently, this livelihood has been supplemented by a highprofit, quick-turnover enterprise: raising tilapia (Tilapia nilotica), a freshwater fish, in aquatic nurseries, actually converted rice fields, and selling the fry or fingerlings to fish pen operators around the lake. My formal introduction to the people of Kabaritan occurred at one of the regular meetings of the village cooperative, Samahang Nayon. I was introduced as an inaanak, or godchild, of Aling Maring (not her real name). This is not entirely false (though not entirely true either) because Aling Maring, a sprightly woman in her early sixties, and I struck such a deep chord of good vibrations when we first met that we had since envisioned ourselves as related. Aling Maring’s introduc¬ tion was supplemented by the extension worker, who said I was a i

2

Local Knowledge in the Philippines

Ph.D. student doing research, married, with one child. I could not have done any better. By the time I attended the Samahang Nayon meeting, I had already gone around Kabaritan several times, watching, visiting, learning, and yes, prying into the people’s way of life. At that time, they knew me as a curious (in both senses) student who was interested in what crops they planted before introduction of the modern rice varieties, where they got their tilapia breeders, how they procured the chicken manure for their ornamental plants and their fishponds, and why they removed Azolla and spiders — both being aggressively promoted by extension agents as organic fertilizer and as “friendly insect,” respec¬ tively—from their fields. They probably considered me too inquisitive for asking them how many different kinds of neighbors they had and a little strange for wanting to know how husbands and wives allocated work, leisure, and food. But they told me later that they were grateful that at least I did not ask the usual questions about their credit standing with the Rural Bank and the Land Bank. They confided that they would have hidden behind closed doors if I had done so. I am glad I did not ask the questions they dreaded and infinitely thankful that they put up with me because around that time I could no longer avoid the questions I was pursuing. I was fascinated by internal differentiation masked by complementarity and interdependence and convinced more than ever that, in studying agricultural decision making, I had to focus on cog¬ nized models or local perceptions in the plural form. I was to find out later that this is not a rare phenomenon in anthropological research: to start out with a problem in mind, in my case, agricultural decision making of rural cultivators, and to find out that one cannot study the phenomenon as if it were happening in a vacuum, like Galileo’s falling bodies. Marilyn Strathern (1987:11) wrote profoundly about this tendency: [There is] a device which anthropologists have used for a long time — that of displaced focus. Young refers to it in his metaphor of indirect gaze, looking just to one side of a distant clock tower to make it yield its message. In setting out to do one particular thing, one also does other things, minimally the grounding and contextualization of that task. . . . Any directed activity has to assume a context. To address the notion of inequality, for instance, implies fashioning the ethnographic context for the application of the concept.

The Problem

3

Conditioned as I was to the ethos of mutual obligation and sup¬ port, I did not start out to study inequality. My main concern was agricultural decision making, but I found that even in a small, appar¬ ently homogeneous, community of rural cultivators, there are dif¬ ferent sets of criteria, varying processes, and divergent outcomes. Thus my indirect gaze trailed to the patterning of opportunities and constraints that influence the way actors perceive problems and make decisions about them and, eventually, to the social and sexual asym¬ metry in the distribution of knowledge on which decision making is ultimately based. Instead of finding the need to contextualize inequal¬ ity in the ethnographic reality, as in Strathern’s example, I saw the need to frame agricultural decision making in the very real dimen¬ sions of internal differentiation and polarization along class and gender lines.

He/She, Us/Them: The Construction and Reconstruction of Reality And so it was with much interest that I attended the Samahang Nayon meeting, for I wanted to see how manifest these uneven relations were. My reception at the meeting was as I had hoped —my presence was politely acknowledged and subsequently ignored as attention turned to the business for the day. The most pressing busi¬ ness was the need to arrive at a decision regarding what to do with the funds they had raised from a recently concluded pa-ripa (raffle con¬ test). The original reason for sponsoring the raffle was to raise money to build a pulungan, or meeting place, but the amount raised was not nearly enough so they had to decide what to do with it. The most popular suggestion was that the Samahang Nayon use it to purchase fertilizer and insecticides from suppliers at wholesale prices. The cooperative could then sell these chemicals to its members at a small profit and give them one month to pay, without charging interest. By reinvesting the profits, the cooperative hoped eventually to raise enough money for the pulungan. Several questions were immediately raised: Should farmers be required to pay the entire amount in cash, or would installments be acceptable? Second, should the Samahang Nayon procure the inputs for the fishponds, too? Third, would this system be adopted permanently because it would require the farmers to give up their present arrangements with dealers

4

Local Knowledge in the Philippines

of agricultural inputs, and these arrangements would be difficult to resume later on. As a case in point, a widow who farms two paddy fields told the group she had reservations about patronizing Samahang Nayon if it would sell the farm inputs and expect the farmers to pay back in cash, even with a one-month grace period. She related that she had a long¬ standing arrangement with a fertilizer dealer in town who allowed her to get everything she needed at planting time, pay only half the total amount, and then pay the rest at harvest time (four to five months later) without interest. Other “outsiders” (of varying degrees) attended the meeting, in¬ cluding an extension agent from the Department of Agriculture, an officer of the Land Bank, and a representative from the Department of Agrarian Reform. The Land Bank official joined some of the more vocal members in pointing out to the widow that although she did not believe she was paying interest, she was charged high prices, which served as built-in interest. After some thought, the widow under¬ stood, but then she stated that, even if that were the case, she could not patronize the Samahang Nayon project if it required her to pay back in cash after one month instead of at harvest time. Someone suggested that more lenient policies should be applied, particularly for those who were unable to pay cash. As an example, those without fishponds were economically vulnerable because fish¬ ponds are regarded as panalo (literally, a safety net). Many people seemed to see the sense in this idea until the representative from the Land Bank swayed them (in my impression, quite aggressively) with her persuasive arguments. She insisted that for the organization to last, one policy should be applied to all. She predicted that in the absence of firm guidelines, there would be hilian, accusations of favoritism and accompanying envy, and the organization would die a natural death. Thus the idea of a “socialized” lending scheme was nipped in the bud. Speaking of death, there was an incident one morning a few months after the meeting, after the big October (1986) flood, to be precise. A landless farmer died suddenly from an unknown cause. Many people theorized that the farmer was poisoned because he ate the “golden snail,” an edible snail similar to the escargot of French cuisine, which some well-off farmers were trying to raise in their paddy fields as another livelihood option. The mature adults were kept in irrigated paddy fields in which upright bamboo poles were spaced equidistantly. The adult snails would lay clumps of bright pink

The Problem

5

A widow winnowing the grains remaining on threshed rice stalks.

eggs on the poles, and as the eggs developed and turned into larvae, the clumps ascended the bamboo poles until, reaching the top, they fell off as young adults. The aquatic nurseries of edible snail were just being tried out with an eye for the foreign market when I arrived in Kabaritan, and the clumps of neon pink eggs were one of the most fascinating (not to say revolting) sights that caught my attention. When Laguna de Bay flooded over much of Kabaritan, the golden snails escaped from the paddy fields where they were being kept and spread all over the rice fields. Hindsight tells us that this is to be expected because only the bunds (about a foot high of compacted soil on each side) served as enclosure, but this was not foreseen. So the golden snails attacked all green things in sight, especially favoring the tasty, tender morsels of newly sprouted rice plants. The people searched all over for a solution until they found a pesticide developed particularly for the golden snail. It was in limited supply and com¬ manded a very high price so that only the well-off farmers could protect their fields from the scourge. Many people believed that the farmer who died had eaten some golden snails that had taken the pesticide. Like all good stories, this one has a touch of irony because the local inhabitants did not like the

6

Local Knowledge in the Philippines

taste of golden snails. They were reared for the export market rather than for local consumption. The people preferred the firm and tasty flesh of the local edible snail. But after escaping from their minimal enclosure, the golden snails interbred actively with the local variety, producing hybrids with the flaccid, tasteless flesh of the introduced variety. Unable to distinguish the parent from the hybrid, and needing to eat when there was very little opportunity for hiring out because of the flood, some poor households consumed the golden snail or its hybrid —among them the landless farmer who died.

The Reality of Boundedness and the Prospect of Elasticity If, upon my initial exposure to Kabaritan, I had been intrigued by social as well as gender asymmetry with respect to agricultural deci¬ sion making, further exposure as in the case of the widow at the Samahang Nayon meeting and the unfortunate demise of the landless farmer, presumably from “golden snail” poisoning, only increased my perplexity. I remembered Galileo and his falling bodies. I envied him the simplicity of his vacuum. No air current, no resistance, no differential effect of mass — and two bodies of unequal weights fall at exactly the same rate. In contrast, starting with different economic and cultural capital, conditioned by all-too-frequent resistance to see certain choices as not feasible and therefore not worth pursuing, socialized to recognize the different “weights” of different groups of people, and sensitive to their place in the order of things, rural cultivators do not start out from the same point, do not pursue the same directions, and do not accelerate at the same rate. This makes it impossible to study agricultural decision making in a vacuum. As James C. Scott (1985:45) pointed out: “The central point to be emphasized is simply that the concept of class, if it is to be found at all, is to be found in concrete, shared experience that reflects both the cultural material and the historical givens of its carriers.” Grounding in the social reality that “class-iffies” actors leads our “indirect gaze” to differential access to resources that would account for differential success in pressing one’s interests, to the cultural ideology that makes these conditions and relations acceptable (or, at least, tolerable for the moment), and ultimately to the knowledge system that can be used either to legitimize or to undermine and challenge the existing order. One stanza from the Bambara Song of

The Problem

7

A native philosopher who wondered why those who know more feel a compul¬ sion to “make things more and more difficult for those who know less,” and where all the traditional rice varieties have gone.

the Weaver quoted by Gustav Jahoda (1982:266) is particularly rele¬ vant to this problem: Someone knows something that someone else does not know; someone does not know something that someone else knows (says the shuttle); one is in front of the other; the other is behind the first; the other is in front of the first the first is behind the other (say the steps); that one goes up, the other goes down; the one goes down, the other goes up (repeat in turn the parts of the warp)

This stanza on weaving is relevant to the problem at hand in several respects. First, it emphasizes differentiation; second, it details pat¬ terning; and third, it suggests oscillations. Conceptually, class and

8

Local Knowledge in the Philippines

gender can be considered as the warp and woof, and actors may be viewed as being pegged or trapped at certain intersections by virtue of limited access to resources and to alternative consciousness, both of which would spell mobility. Indeed, the basic thesis in the writings of Marx and Engels (cited by Scott, 1985:315) is that “the class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.” Likewise, regarding gender asymmetry, Gita Sen and Caren Crown (1987:26) emphasized that “gender-based subordination is deeply ingrained in the consciousness both men and women and is usually viewed as a natural corollary of biological differences.” I hope to show, in discussing agricultural decision making in Kabaritan, that the operational reality and cognized models are system¬ atically skewed to favor certain categories of households and individ¬ uals such that, as Sherry Ortner (1984) noted, the system powerfully constrains practice. But numerous observed instances of irreverence (joyful or otherwise) regarding what is supposed to be the proper order of things —what Scott (i985:xvi) refers to as “everyday forms of resistance” — lead me to believe that there is another angle worth pursuing here and that is the prospect of elasticity of boundaries, which, at the personal and societal levels, can be expected to lead to oscillations. To set the stage, rather than to preempt my conclusion, I quote Jean-Paul Sartre (1969:87): “In the end one is always responsi¬ ble for what is made of one. Even if one can do nothing else besides assume this responsibility. For I believe that a man can always make something out of what is made for him. This is the limit I would today accord freedom; the small movement which makes a totally condi¬ tioned social being someone who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given him.” The discussion that follows progresses from the theoretical and methodological issues pertaining to agricultural decision making pre¬ sented in Chapter 2 to the behavioral outcomes of agricultural pro¬ duction relations. To give a sense of the chronological and spatial context in which decision making of different categories of house¬ holds and individuals takes place, the historical development of Kabaritan as well as its geographical setting and sociodemographic characteristics are described in Chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 outlines the evolution of resource allocation and use in the community, par¬ ticularly as it relates to land tenure and tenancy relations. Then the

The Problem

9

present social organization in the ownership of productive assets and appropriation of labor are explained. In Chapter 4, the material base that provides opportunities and constraints and thereby delimits the latitude of choice for different categories of farmers is examined. In particular, the resources available to each of the twelve representative households chosen for my sample and the adaptive strategies that each experiments with and employs are analyzed. Both the historical development and the material base have had (and continue to have) different repercussions on different individ¬ uals depending on their position in the internal differentiation of society. In the process of coping with constraints inherent to their niche, different individuals have developed systems of representa¬ tions and significations by which they understand and interpret crit¬ ical social and environmental relationships. The results of the elicita¬ tion of mental maps, indigenous knowledge, and folk evaluations are discussed in Chapter 5. In the description of their shared understand¬ ings, their “ethnoagronomy” and “ethnogastronomy,” or folk models with respect to cultivation and consumption, are elucidated. On the other hand, in distinguishing between “prototypical” (or commonly held) and “marginal” (or systematically patterned) evaluations of major land use options, the relationship between access to resources and access to knowledge is explored. Behavioral outcomes of agricultural decision making, particularly time allocation, food consumption, and land use, are analyzed in Chapter 6 with the aim of apprehending patterns of variation in relation to socioeconomic standing and gender of informants. Finally, Chapter 7 summarizes the most salient findings and relates these to theory and practice in anthropology, agricultural development, and feminist studies.

2 Agricultural Decision Making: Theory and Method

This book is about latitudes and lenses in agricultural decision making. It probes into processes and patterns of making choices among various existing and perceived alternatives with respect to land use, crop choice, and day-to-day resource management. Histor¬ ical analysis, in-depth ethnographic research, and decision-making models are used in investigating the responses of different catego¬ ries of households and individuals in a rural Philippine community to changing social, economic, and ecological conditions. These in¬ clude, in chronological order, the transition in agrarian relations from landlord-owned and tenanted rice land to post-land reform, amortizing owner-operated smallholdings, the diversification from rice monoculture to a rice-aquaculture combination, and the influx of migrant, landless workers in response to livelihood opportunities. These transitions have ushered in novel choices, altered constraints, and restructured relationships, thus providing a good opportunity to study agricultural decision making of rural cultivators under condi¬ tions of ongoing development change. The study area, Sitio Kabaritan of Barrio Santo Domingo, Bay, Laguna, was traditionally devoted to wet-rice cultivation, its inhabit¬ ants either full-time farmers or full-time fishermen of the nearby Laguna de Bay (Figures i and 2). Largely through the farmers’ own initiative, some rice paddy fields were converted to aquatic hatcheries and nurseries for fish fingerlings that are subsequently sold to opera¬ tors of fish pens in neighboring provinces. Whereas there used to be a 10

Agricultural Decision Making

ii

PHILIPPINES

LAGUNA

THIRD CLASS ROADRAILROAD +H+H+BARRIO BOUNDARYRIVER Figure i. Study area

distinct dichotomy between farmers and fishermen in the area, inter¬ ests are now converging to a rice-aquaculture farming system along with some vegetable gardening. For women, there is a growing inter¬ est in the cultivation of ornamental plants which are purchased by entrepreneurs from urban areas. In addition, women engage in buy-

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