Wagering the Land

Why do market farmers in the rugged northern Philippine highlands stage ever more costly, elaborate ritual feasts so that their ancestors will shower success on ever more costly, ecologically risky farming ventures? Because the commercialization of agriculture in the area surrounding Buguias has resulted in a unique blend of new and old economic, environmental, and religious practices. Wagering the Land documents clearly the ecological degradation commonly associated with "modern" farming methods: deforestation, soil erosion, pesticide contamination, and wildlife extermination. But the breakdown of communal bonds and local beliefs also associated with modernization in most theories of rural development simply has not happened. On the contrary, traditional beliefs, and especially the redistributive prestige feasts that figure largely in the indigenous religion (called Paganism by both its adherents and its adversaries), have flourished. Development of truck gardening in the cool highlands of northern Luzon, an area perfectly suited to the cultivation of temperate vegetables, gained momentum after World War II. Martin Lewis describes engagingly the economic and social life of Buguias and the centrality of religion during the first four decades of this century, the complete destruction of prewar agriculture and animal husbandry in 1944, and the explosion of commercial farming thereafter. Unaccustomed prosperity reinforced the religious practice of lavish communal feasting, which not only honors the dead and bolsters the status of the living but also brings "good luck" to the host farmer's enterprise if the ritual succeeds in placating the ancestors. Heavenly favor thus overshadows sound environmental practices, and the region's inhabitants are quite literally wagering their lands in the hope of gaining prosperity and prestige. Anthropologists and geographers, as well as environmental and development specialists interested in the Third World in general and Southeast Asia in particular, will find important new information and arguments in Lewis's well-researched ethnography.