Barons, Brokers, and Buyers: The Institutions and Cultures of Philippine Sugar

Abstract

Michael Billig, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003, 320 pages.Sally Ann Ness, Where Asia Smiles: An Ethnography of Philippine Tourism, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, xvii + 301 pages.Reviewer: Lisa M. Mitchell University of VictoriaThere is considerable anthropological interest at the moment in the transnational flows of capital, humans, and goods and in the consequences of these forces for local groups. The two books considered in this review--Ness's analysis of tourism in Davao City, Mindanao and Billig's study of sugar production on the nearby island of Negros--are significant contributions to this area of study. That the setting for both books is the Philippines is significant, continuing a renewed anthropological interest in this country.Barons, Brokers, and Buyers: The Institutions and Cultures of Philippine Sugar is an analysis of elites, power and bureaucracy on the island of Negros, the region of the Philippines known as Sugarlandia. Author and economic anthropologist, Michael Billig, sets out to explain why sugar is no longer the powerhouse of the Negros economy and to argue that economic and political domination on that island has shifted from a rural agrarian elite to an urban, commercial, industrial and financial group based in the Makati district of Manila. What stands out in this fine book is the extent to which both the decline and the shift are deeply shaped by a colonial past and current international processes of production and exchange, as well as, by local organizations, ideas and players.Acknowledging his neo-Weberian predilection (p. 11), Billig investigates this area of economic activity through meanings, morals, and values, institutional forms and conflicts. In his first chapter, he also outlines the stance of relative objectivity (p. 12) or he adopts as the best way to understand how conflict, oppression and inequality operate in sugar production. Chapter two is an excellent overview of sugar's history in the Philippines, from the Spanish colonial period, through the American years and Marcos' kleptocracy, up to Billig's own fieldwork in the 1990s. Billig then richly details the many factors contributing to the decline in the sugar industry (chapter three) before focussing his analysis on the anachronistic quedan (coupon) system of ownership rights in the sugar as it moves from planter to miller to trader (chap. 4). Discussion follows about conflicts between the old agrarian elite and the new urban industrial, financial, commercial elite over importing foreign sugar (chap. 5) and rationalizing the sugar industry (chap. 6).Overall, Billig's work succeeds more in analysing the decline of agrarian based power than it does in persuading this reader that power now resides in the younger, wealthier, more often Chinese, urban industrial, financial and commercial elites (p. 30). A chapter extending his meaning- and institution-oriented ethnographic lens to this emerging elite in Negros or in Makati is needed. Nor was I persuaded by Billig's justification for his stance of neutrality and objectivity. Certainly, his position of neutrality was born out the very real social conflict and violence in the sugar industry in the early 1990s and the very lines of power and influence Billig studied, ultimately forced him to leave Negros Island abruptly and for good. However, his claims that advocacy or action anthropology, which he sees as the only alternative, lead to simplistic and facile accounts and solutions [of social problems] analysis are themselves simplistic. So, too, is his assumption that advocacy is equivalent to moral condemnation. Some sections of the book are slow going, largely because of the complexity of the story and the countless organizational acronyms which characterize politics and economics in the Philippines. His concluding argument that economies must be studied empirically, with attention to multiple and competing meanings will be familiar to anthropologists and appear to be directed primarily at formalist economists. …