Re-envisioning the Upland Philippines

Description
Scholars and policymakers alike have long viewed the upland Philippines in dichotomous terms: a settled, productive agriculture in the lowlands vs. an environmentally despoiling shifting cultivation in the uplands; modern peoples in the lowlands vs. traditional peoples in the uplands; and a fundamental contrast among upland dwellers themselves between indigenous inhabitants and recent migrants. Despite important truth in all three representations, they badly need to be rethought, as decades of rapid change have wrought a variety of ecological, economic, and social transformations in the uplands. But how best to characterize these transformations, and what new understandings of the upland Philippines will result? While the old dichotomous lowland/upland distinction no longer serves as well as it once did, neither are the uplands simply becoming “like” the lowlands; different ecologies, histories, and relations of marginality and power will ensure otherwise. But what are the uplands becoming? This question calls for both new forms of representation and new kinds of empirical research.

I contend that a rich and varied, economically-productive agricultural landscape is evolving in many parts of the upland Philippines; that the everyday lives of uplanders and lowlanders are inextricably linked, to the point that the lives of many individual Filipinos effectively straddle both upland and lowland residence; and that ancestral domains issues and other elements of the historic struggle between indigenous and migrant upland inhabitants notwithstanding, upland residents of varied geographic and ethnic backgrounds are today finding significant common ground in new identities and lifeways. Put differently, emerging patterns of upland land use, the omnipresence of geographic mobility, and new axes of social differentiation and cultural allegiance that today bind uplander to lowlander (and uplanders among themselves) are all transforming the upland Philippines in ways that prevailing scholarly understandings fail to credit.

The aim of my proposed project is to evidence and develop these contentions and hence to lay the basis for an alternative reading of post-frontier upland Philippine economy and society.