Introduction

The Batak are an indigenous people of Palawan Island, the Philippines (Krieger 1942, Eder 1987; see Fig. 1.2, p. 6), who speak an Austronesian language related to that of other peoples in the Palawan region and classified with the Visayan group of Philippine languages. The Batak closely resemble other so-called ‘Philippine Negritos’, both in their mobile hunting and gathering lifestyle and in their physical attributes (short stature, dark skin colour and curly hair), which earned these distinctive-looking people their name. Approximately two dozen ethnolinguistically distinct groups of such peoples are found in the Philippines, including the Mamanwa of Mindanao and a series of groups known variously as Agta, Ayta, Aeta, Ata or Ati, which are scattered widely in northern, eastern and west central Luzon, the Bikol Peninsula and the islands of Panay and Negros. The total number of these peoples is difficult to estimate with any accuracy but is probably in the order of 15 000–20 000 persons (Eder 1987).

Philippine Negritos, in turn, resemble other small, dark, hunting and gathering folk of Southeast Asia, in particular the Andaman Islanders and the Semang of the Malay Peninsula. Collectively, Southeast Asian Negritos have long been presumed to represent the surviving remnants of what was once a more widespread and more racially and culturally homogeneous population (e.g. Cooper 1940, Fox 1952). Such claims remain speculative.

This book records a dramatic and unique event in the lifetime of a single community: the emergence and institutionalization of social inequality. It concerns the settlement and growth of San Jose, a pioneer farming village located on the east coast of Palawan Island, the Philippines. San Jose is one of many such villages founded during the 1930s and 1940s by migrant swidden farmers from Cuyo Island, 300 kilometers distant (Map 1.1). First by sailboat and later by motor launch, these migrant “Cuyonons” left an isolated and over-populated homeland to seek a new life on a largely uninhabited but potentially prosperous island that shares with Mindanao the distinction of being the nation's last frontier. During their early years on Palawan, those migrants who settled in San Jose were preoccupied with shifting cultivation of upland rice and with clearing the virgin forest from their homesteads. Their lives were subsistence oriented in a culturally homogeneous social order that was only marginally linked to the market economy.

Today, San Jose is a fully occupied community with numerous links to external socioeconomic systems. Its residents, responding to the market opportunities created by rapid postwar population growth in nearby Puerto Princesa City, specialize in the production of fruits, vegetables, and livestock for sale in the town marketplace. Favored by geographical location and a high level of return for their farm output, they enjoy rising incomes and standards of living.

Cuyonon life was not always marked by extensive social status differences between neighbors. Until the twentieth century, Cuyonon economy and society were identified only with the small and isolated island of Cuyo itself. In this chapter, we will see how similar Cuyonon farmers once were in their basic economic and social characteristics. To be sure, even in Cuyo, people were not literally “equal” in such attributes as landownership, income, or social status. But economic stagnation and social isolation minimized the import of any differences in these realms. In practice, rural Cuyonon differed little in living standard or life-style. Further, drawn largely from the middle ranks of their home villages, those farmers who actually left Cuyo to homestead land in Palawan were broadly equal in wealth and social status.

A volcanic island, Cuyo is located in the Sulu Sea midway between Palawan Island and Panay Island (Map 1.1). Spain Catholicized Cuyo early (1622) and long retained the island as its principal foothold in this part of the Philippines. From Cuyo, the Spanish nominally administered, but never fully controlled, Palawan Province, which embraces both Palawan Island itself and numerous small islands, including Cuyo Island. In contrast to Cuyo, Palawan Island never had an indigenous lowland population but was instead sparsely inhabited by a number of upland groups: the Batak, the Tagbanua, and the Palawan.

Yet it was the Cuyonons who were destined to inherit Palawan Island or at least to so dominate it that they would also become known as “Palaweños.”

The backgrounds, economic circumstances, association patterns, and other attributes of San Jose residents discussed in the text were all correlated with their positions in a status order whose principles were independently derived. Here I explain how I constructed the scale representing this status order. First I describe the status rating procedure; then I show how I combined the separate status ratings in a single composite status distribution along which I distinguished three analytical strata for sampling purposes.

The rating procedure

I obtained the raw data necessary to construct a scale of social inequality by asking a panel of nine status raters to make separate status placements for each family in San Jose. The only qualifications I imposed on rater selection were that the raters not be newcomers to the community and that they represent all socioeconomic circumstances. In addition, I chose persons that I knew fairly well and had found open and frank in previous interviews. I interviewed each rater separately but in the same manner. I first introduced the general idea of inequality using a standard, noncommittal introduction: Maski sadin ka magpakon, beke' parariho ang mga tao, maski digi sa San Jose, “Anywhere you go, people are not the same, even here in San Jose.” I then went on to say that one could usually visualize such differences in terms of groups, using hand movements to indicate that these groups might be arranged higher and lower.

This chapter and the next examine the sources of short-term stability in San Jose's status order. A starting point is the observation, widely made in San Jose, that farmers, once rich or poor, tend to remain that way – although the tendency is only that, and the exceptions are noted and commented upon. But the workings of village economy and society today, at least over the short term, do seem to promote the well-being of the rich and inhibit that of the poor. In the words of Polly Hill, who studied socioeconomic differences in a rural Hausa village:

In Chapters 6 and 7, I will explain how rich men travel with the wind while the poor must travel against it. My explanation elaborates upon the notion that not all farmers occupy the same decision making environments. Of course, each farmer's decision-making environment is ultimately unique, but there are important regularities within and between status levels that are my concern here. In brief, my argument is: confronted by unique patterns of opportunities and limitations, and acting on their own status-related perceptions of the costs and benefits of various courses of action, farmers of differing social status positions diverge systematically in how they earn their livings and in how they utilize their leisure time.

How farmers choose between alternative agricultural activities with varying returns to labor was a central issue in Chapter 6. Here I explain how I estimated the returns to labor for swiddening, gardening, arboriculture and livestock shown in Table 6.3. Also discussed briefly are further details on the land, labor, and capital requirements of these production activities.

For each activity, I prepared a separate interview schedule to inquire about inputs and outputs for either a single cropping cycle or the full survey year:

The willingness of a number of farmers to record cash sales and daily labor inputs for periods of several months each greatly facilitated the input–output analyses of gardening and arboriculture. But limitations on the time I could devote to the agricultural economics aspects of my research made it impossible to obtain complete input–output data for all the productive activities on the 37 sample farms I chose to study wealth and income (see Appendix C). I did calculate cash income, subsistence income, and variable cash costs for all activities pursued on the entire sample of farms, and I completed analyses of labor productivity for 30 swiddens, 10 gardens, and several tree crops and livestock enterprises.

San Jose lies 8 kilometers away from Puerto Princesa, the economic and political center of Palawan Province (see Map 2.1). Rectangular in shape and covering 758 hectares of unirrigated flatland, it has a population of 112 households, with a total of 763 people. The national road running north from Puerto Princesa transects the community and at 1-kilometer intervals sends feeder roads off in opposite directions. On the east side, these roads end in the mangrove swamps that buffer San Jose from its only natural boundary, the ocean. On its remaining three sides San Jose borders neighboring communities. Along the highway travel buses bound for distant northern communities and the numerous jitneys and tricycles (motorcycles equipped with sidecars) that handle local traffic to and from town.

Seen from the air, San Jose is unimpressive. The landscape is a patchwork of scrubby regrowth and coconut, banana, and fruit tree orchards. Only the community school and church stand out as prominent structures. Barely visible are three stores and two rice mills, the only other nonresidential buildings in the village. Scattered here and there are tin-roofed houses and well-kept vegetable gardens, the only indications from afar that San Jose is progressive, developing, and, by rural Philippine standards, a relatively well-to-do community.

Nor does such an aerial view provide much indication of the recentness of San Jose's development. What is today San Jose was a virtually unbroken expanse of virgin forest during the early 1930s.

The migrant farmers who left Cuyo Island for San Jose shared one central characteristic: They left voluntarily in the expectation of achieving a better way of life. Beyond this, and notwithstanding their seemingly homogeneous social origins, they differed considerably in ability and motivation, and in ways that would powerfully influence their responses to the changing opportunities on the frontier. This chapter concerns the responses and experiences of eight such migrant farmers. Four were conspicuously successful in meeting the challenges and opportunities of the new order and are today all in the upper status group. The other four migrants were conspicuous failures. They did not significantly change or improve their material well-being over what it had been in Cuyo and are today all in the lower status group.

Such migrants were “failures,” of course, only in terms of economic performance; they may well have achieved other kinds of satisfactions on the frontier, satisfactions that the economically successful did not achieve or perhaps even seek. If the stories of the failed migrants are shorter here, it is only because our concern is with economic achievement, and there is simply more to be said about those whose economic lives changed a great deal between Cuyo and San Jose than about those whose lives did not. I have chosen the stories of these particular eight men for discussion because each illustrates, in particularly dramatic fashion, some of the environmental conditions and personal characteristics that contributed to the emergence and growth of social inequality.

That “the rich get richer and the poor stay the same” is an oft-repeated statement in San Jose, and one seemingly borne out by the analysis in the last two chapters. There we saw that social inequality is today associated with an incentive structure that tends to maintain the existing distribution of wealth and poverty on a day-to-day and year-to-year basis. What, however, of the children of the rich and poor in San Jose; are they destined to inherit the life chances and life-styles of their parents? Shall they be rich and poor as well? These are questions of a different order, for the ability of families to maintain their economic and social advantages over the short term is not in itself evidence that they can necessarily pass these advantages on to their offspring. To assess whether a child's position at birth in San Jose today can in fact reliably predict his position as an adult, we must change our explanatory focus and examine the possible mechanisms whereby advantage and disadvantage might be transmitted from parents to children.

This chapter, then, concerns the future. It asks whether the social inequality now established in San Jose is likely to be perpetuated across generations. To answer this question I focus on a series of events and processes occurring in the life cycle of an individual between the time he is born and the time he marries: birth itself, child-training, education, adolescence, separation from the parental household, and finally, inheritance and marriage.

During the 1930s and 1940s, a number of men and women left the overpopulated island of Cuyo in the Philippines to homestead a hitherto unpopulated region on the island of Palawan. Poor, uneducated, and of humble birth, these migrants soon differentiated themselves into haves and have-nots. Moreover, once this differentiation developed, it stabilized, and it is now being transmitted to a second and third generation of Cuyonons on Palawan. This book analyzes the origins of social inequality in terms of particular individuals, in a particular time and place, and the conditions under which it is maintained. Few topics have a more perennial concern for social scientists, philosophers, and men of practical affairs. Hence this study, although focused on a small community in the Philippines, illuminates larger problems: Why do developing communities embark upon trajectories of growing social inequality, and where do such trajectories ultimately lead? Must they necessarily terminate, as Marx envisioned, in a class polarization between the privileged few and the impoverished many, or can the “benefits of development” be more broadly shared?

I first went to the Philippines in 1965, a Peace Corps volunteer assigned to teach biology at Palawan National High School in Puerto Princesa City. Later I moved to a rural community, remote but otherwise not unlike San Jose, the community on which this book is based. Here I taught adult Tagalog literacy and the rudiments of vegetable gardening, working as an activist with people and problems that would later interest me as a scholar.