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Philippine Social History: Global Trade and Local Transformations.

Article  in  The Journal of Asian Studies · May 1986

DOI: 10.2307/2056590

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Review
Reviewed Work(s): Philippine Social History: Global Trade and Local Transformations. by
Alfred W. McCoy and Ed. C. de Jesus
Review by: Vicente L. Rafael
Source: The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 45, No. 3 (May, 1986), pp. 655-658
Published by: Association for Asian Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2056590
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 BOOK REVIEWS-SOUTHEAST ASIA 655

far too little about those faceless ministers

able to tell us very much about what Burme
we might consider intellectual changes through his period.
It is a joy at last to see a scholarly monograph on Burmese history, the footnotes
to which are almost entirely references to Burmese-language sources. And it is a
gratuitous bonus that what Lieberman has to say not only tells us a great deal about
a subject on which we knew little, but it also provokes us to reconsider what we
thought we knew about other states of the region.

DAVID K. WYATT
Cornell University

Philippine Social History: Global Trade and Local Transformations. Edited

by ALFRED W. McCoy and ED. C. DE JESUS. Manila and Sydney: Asian Studies
Association of Australia in cooperation with Ateneo de Manila University Press
and George Allen and Unwin Australia, 1982. (Southeast Asia Publication
Series, no. 7.) xii, 480pp. Maps, Figures, List of Abbreviations, List of Meas-
ures, Glossary, List of Contributors. N.p

This book is meant to represent "the fruits of an important decade's research on

Philippine social history" (p. v). In tracing the histories of the major ethnolinguistic
regions of the archipelago, the authors bring to light much archival material that
has been adumbrated but largely unexplored by previous scholarship. The authors
also chart recent, predominantly Anglo-American efforts to find ways around the
functionalist frameworks and the nationalist obsessions that have marked much of
Philippine studies since World War II. One senses this acutely in the constant stress
of the essays on the tight weave between economic changes occurring within and
outside specific localities and the social transitions attendant upon such changes from
the middle of the eighteenth century to the twentieth. It is the reciprocal effect of
one on the other that is the most apparent leitmotiv of this collection. By uncovering
new data organized around themes that have national and global import, the essays
present the potential, as Ed. C. de Jesus says in his conclusion, for "opening up new
fields of investigation" and broach "a wide range of questions" for future research on
the Philippines as well as for other parts of the non-Western world (p. 453).
Although they build on the pioneering works on regional and social history by
such scholars as Edgar Wickberg, John Larkin, and Benito Legarda, these essays
distinguish themselves from previous studies by situating in many instances local
histories within the context of theoretical issues pertaining to the global spread of
capitalism and the emergence of "underdevelopment" put forth by such writers as
Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank, and Hans Bobek. It is not surprising
then that, although they deal with areas as diverse as the Sulu Zone and the Cagayan
Valley, the authors produce a cluster of complementary findings. A summary of some
of these follows.
Colonialism, by systematically working through and thereby privileging an elite
group, effected complex class divisions within native societies. From Central Luzon
to Kabikolan, Western and Central Visayas to Bukidnon and Magindanao, Spanish
and, later, United States colonial policy maintained the authority of indigenous and,
in time, Chinese mestizo elites over the rest of the populace. Yet colonial rule also
profoundly altered the terms of elite authority. These studies convincingly demon-
strate the vital links between foreign capital and a principalia class encouraged by

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 656 JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES

colonial policy, beginning about the 1760s. Together, these played crucial roles in
the rise of commercial agriculture and in the shift in the terms of landownership and
management throughout the archipelago.
Like colonialism, capitalism initially consolidated the structure of elite authority
during an earlier era when there existed a surplus of land and a surfeit of labor, but
in the face of demographic pressures and the increasing scarcity of land in later periods,
the drive for capital accumulation ultimately wreaked havoc on the elites' traditional
basis of legitimacy. The commodification of labor reified traditional patron-client
ties; native notions of reciprocal indebtedness, honor, and shame were displaced onto
the register of cash.
The essays by Marshall McLennan and Brian Fegan show how rent capitalists,
coming from within or outside the community, systematically tied the economies of
Central Luzon to the world markets while they deprived local and immigrant farmers
of their land. McCoy, in a similar vein, reconstructs the way by which the "proto-
industrial" textile trade in Iloilo allowed the elites there to take advantage swiftly
of world sugar demand and to shift to a highly profitable plantation system on the
neighboring island of Negros by the 1850s. Although yielding astounding returns
to the hacienderos, the sugar industry's profits also meant the gross exploitation of
stevedores and plantation workers, whose poverty was without parallel in the country.
Norman Owen, too, shows how the rise of the abaca industry in Kabikolan, wholly
tied to the fluctuations of Western markets, was controlled by a landowningprincipalia
using its economic prerogatives to entrench itself in local and, eventually, national
politics at the expense of the landless.
The sorts of economic and social transformations instigated by colonialism and
capitalism inevitably gave rise to intraclass, interclass, and ethnic conflicts. With
regard to the latter, William H. Scott shows how the upland peoples of the Cordillera
persistently chose to resist the barbaric onslaughts of a colonial Christian order intent
on civilizing all of the country's inhabitants. In the end, the unconverted and un-
subjugated peoples of the Cordillera were relegated to the status of "backward sav-
ages," whose fierce, independent nature was seen as a sign of their recalcitrant pa-
ganism by their lowland counterparts who did submit to colonial rule. Just as
significantly, James Warren exposes the spuriousness of European characterizations
of the Taosugs of Sulu as mere heathen pirates enslaving and trading those they had
taken during their frequent raids of Christian communities between the mid-eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth century. By consulting slave accounts and situating the
Sulu trade within the context of Taosug social structure, Warren has shown that
slaves in Taosug society enjoyed more opportunities for advancement than they could
ever have hoped for as indios subject to Spanish rule.
The emergence of class antagonisms was no less complex within the colonized
areas. Fegan and McCoy have indicated that the persistence of precapitalist practices
of patronage and "millenarianist" ideas of power in areas like Central Luzon and
Western Visayas alternately supported and deflected the rise of a politicized class
consciousness expressed in modern institutions such as labor unions and electoral
politics. Perhaps most disturbing of all is Milegros Guerrero's piece on class tensions
during the second phase of thse Philippine Revolution (1898-1902). Aware of the
indispensability of foreign markets to the maintenance of their economic and social
ascendancy, elites in both Luzon and the Visayas seemed to have consistently placed
their class interests above those of the emerging Philippine nation. Because of this,
the Malolos Republic, as with all other governments that have tried to rule the

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 BOOK REVIEWS-SOUTHEAST ASIA 657

country, failed to exert a centralizing influence on the various regions. Such is not
surprising, given the political ambivalence of the members of the Congress and cab-
inet, regional elites, many of whom could never quite break with Spain and were
the first to welcome the United States. Guerrero's painstaking documentation of elite
opportunism and duplicity leaves one with the distressing sense that the Philippine
Revolution under elite leadership was the logical extension rather than the radical
renunciation of Spanish colonial rule. Because the revolution resulted in the consol-
idation of a social hierarchy viable only under the economic and military auspices of
a colonial regime, its real victors were the bourgeoisie and those who profited from
their patronage. Guerrero's conclusion-the most explicitly political one in the col-
lection-when seen in the context of the socioeconomic developments analyzed in
other essays, has repercussions for our understanding of Philippine history. The in-
tense concern with class privileges on the part of elite leaders during the formative
period of national unification, on the one hand, and the existence of discrete and
resilient linkages between local and global (as against national) markets prevalent
from the previous century, on the other hand, would undermine grandiose and po-
litically suspect attempts at writing a national history and seriously put into question
glib assertions of Filipino "nationhood."
The fact remains that a Filipino nation does exist, not so much in court depositions,
parish records, government statistics, and the like as in the realm of a collective
imagination evinced in that peculiar cultural artifact, "nationalism." It is this his-
torical tension between the idea and reality of a nation-or as Guerrero puts it,
between unifying patriotism and self-serving pragmatism-that this collection of
essays hints at but draws back from contemplating. Each essay, instead, limits itself
to setting the stage for examining this and other related questions.
Others that occurred to this reviewer had to do with matters relating to culture
and ideology. The link between economy and society would have had to be mediated
and quite possibly resisted by local culture, here understood as an ensemble of sig-
nifying practices, a logic of expressive and symbolic possibilities available to both
elite and nonelites. In its more politicized form, it takes on the nature of ideology,
furnishing the idiom with which to articulate as well as to mystify structures of
authority and their material basis. A few of the essays-those of Fegan, McCoy,
Jeremy Beckett, and Warren- tentatively take on these problems but leave one wish-
ing for more extensive treatments. This is also the case with another crucial issue in
social history: gender. Michael Cullinane, McCoy, and Warren briefly mention the
status and role of women. None of them, however, performs a sustained investigation
into the problematic place of women in the regions they study. The near absence of
women in these essays is a notable omission, given the fact that as social histories
the essays have missed out on two of the most intimate aspects of native life, those
of marriage and the family. Women as wives and mothers figured immensely in the
inculcation of notions that bear directly on practices of reciprocity and indebtedness,
as well as on the process of recognizing or rejecting authority. In this connection,
one might note the fact that narive women were particularly crucial in the rise of a
Chinese mestizo population. One wants to know more about the sexual politics that
underlay this sort of political and social transformation.
Nonetheless, by giving rise to such questions and furnishing the historical basis
for their investigation, this volume is an indispensable addition to Philippine and
Southeast Asian studies. And beyond its regional value, it may profitably be read by

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 658 JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES

anyone interested in the social history of Third World countries and the spread of
capitalism.

VICENTE L. RAFAEL
University of Hawaii at Manoa

Nous Gens de Ganchong: Environnement et &changes dans un village malais

[We People of Ganchong: Environment and exchange in a Malay villagel. By
JOSIANE MASSARD. Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scien-
tifique, Centre de Documentation et de Recherches sur l'Asie du Sud-est et le
Monde Insulindien, 1983. Preface by P. E. Josselin deJong. 443 pp. Maps,
Figures, Tables, Photographs, Glossary, Appendix, Bibliography. FrlOO (pa-
per).

The title of this book accurately describes its aims and content. It concentrates
on the relationships of villagers in Pahang to their environment and to each other,
particularly in the economic sphere. The first two chapters set the scene, presenting
a short history of the area as seen through documents and through the eyes and
recollections of the inhabitants and a discussion of the location and limits of power
in the village. Chapter 3 deals with the question of Islamic law and ethics versus
adat, and chapter 4 discusses the village economy, its poverty, lack of employment
choices, and absence of solidarity with the poor of other ethnic groups. Chapter 5,
on kinship, ends the first section of the book, devoted to the setting in which the
research took place.
The second section, "Relationships with the Environment," is double the length
of the first and represents the core of the study. Although the first section does not
add greatly to the knowledge of specialists in Malay studies, the second contains
information of value rarely found in ethnographic research in Southeast Asia. The
first chapter, "Perception of Space," is the weakest. Its bow to Structuralism forces
the material into a neat dichotomy that does not always jibe with reality, either that
presented by Josiane Massard in other portions of the book or gathered from other
ethnographic sources. For example, here she locates spirits outside the village, in the
forest, or above the village in treetops, in contrast to the human beings who live
within the village; elsewhere she speaks of earth spirits who live inside the village
along with human beings, rather than outside or above it. Much more successful is
her discussion of the villagers' use of plants and animals, in which she displays an
impressive, almost encyclopedic, knowledge of the local ecology. In the chapter on
"Plants and People," Massard does not limit herself to the use of plants as food, but
she discusses every aspect of plant cultivation and use, from rubber tapping, rice
cultivation, and cash cropping, through employment by artisans, to ritual offerings
and medicinal herbs. Her discussion of wild plants, and the appendix that details
their use, is particularly valuable. With the exception of my own research in neigh-
boring Trengganu (Laderman, Wives and Midwives: Childbirth and Nutrition in Rural
Malaysia [University of California Press, 19841), there is nothing comparable in the
literature. The chapter on animals is equally detailed, discussing fresh-water fishing
(a subject that has not previously been treated in detail in Malay studies), hunting
and trapping, and animal husbandry. Massard also discusses food preparation, the
religious and symbolic meanings of food, and its social values.
The third section, "The Web of Exchange," is also extremely detailed in its
observations of village economy and the obligations entailed in seemingly "free" co-

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