Clean and Green: Knowledge and Morality in a Philippine Farming Community by Axel Borchgrevink

Abstract

Reviewed by: Clean and Green: Knowledge and Morality in a Philippine Farming Community by Axel Borchgrevink Kristian Karlo Saguin AXEL BORCHGREVINK Clean and Green: Knowledge and Morality in a Philippine Farming Community Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2014. 292 pages. Skillfully combining approaches that highlight morality and knowledge, Axel Borchgrevink’s Clean and Green: Knowledge and Morality in a Philippine Farming Community presents an insightful analysis of village social dynamics in Bohol. The book is a welcome addition to ethnographies of Philippine lowland rice-farming communities. Like many of the strongest works in this tradition, Borchgrevink’s monograph paints a detailed picture of rural life—rich in characters and stories that alternate between the magical and the everyday—to illustrate how morality pervades practices, beliefs, and behaviors in a tight-knit community. Morality is not an essentialized, unchanging black box but is instead a dynamic kind of knowledge internalized and constituted through experiences, social interactions, and emotions. Trained as an anthropologist and currently an associate professor at Oslo and Akershus University College in Norway, Borchgrevink draws [End Page 304] from his dissertation fieldwork between 1995 and 1998 in the village of Ginopolan, Valencia, Bohol. He maintains an active presence in the book’s narrative, both as a situated observer guiding us through the analysis of the empirical material and as a figure sometimes implicated in the turn of events. Reflections on authorial positionality are necessary, particularly as they elucidate aspects of the research process often obscured (such as the complexities of employing an interpreter in ethnographic work) and as they provide a sense of how researchers end up choosing their study areas (in the author’s case, upon catching a glimpse of Ginopolan’s idyllic, green vista). The latter point deserves a little more space in the discussion as these motivations are not mere idiosyncrasies but are relevant analytically in light of the book’s call for a more attuned understanding of local variations in studies of the lowland Philippines. What drove the author to select the municipality of Valencia and the province of Bohol, for instance? The choice of study area shapes the case’s comparative usefulness and the kinds of engagement with existing studies it might have, especially if, as Borchgrevink argues, aspects of Ginopolan social life diverge from those documented elsewhere in the Philippines. Clean and Green’s narrative begins with what seemed to the author a behavioral puzzle: why would tenants continue to pay more than the legally mandated share of their harvest to landowners? He then proposes an alternative reading of this question, one that focuses on morality and departs from explanations often mobilized in studies of rural Philippines, including standard analyses that focus on class position, peasant rationality, and patron–client relations, among others. He scales up the argument further, using morality-as-knowledge as the thread that weaves various disparate issues together. For example, morality establishes the link between the spiritual potency of anting-anting, or amulets, and political success in barangay elections. Spiritual potency needs to be morally acceptable to the community for it to translate into a political following. Strong moral ideals also underpin the ubiquitous cleanliness ethic (hinlo) in rice farming and village life, wherein the practices of keeping clean become associated with the virtues of hard work, diligence, and community cooperation. In both examples he shows how morality as a type of knowledge is internalized or learned and reproduced in a tight-knit community like Ginopolan. Analysis in the book’s first half pivots on morality’s role in fostering collectivity and cooperation in village-level associations (chapter 2), in [End Page 305] avoiding open confrontation to foster harmonious relationships (chapter 3), and in (de-)legitimizing local political authority through “murmuring” (chapter 4). In the second half Borchgrevink turns to how moral models translate medical and supernatural expertise into power and prestige (chapters 5 and 6) and organize, store, and reproduce different kinds of agricultural knowledge (chapters 7 and 8). Indeed, this processual emphasis on how morality structures practices and knowledge is one of the book’s key contributions, going much beyond a dead-end analytical claim that the village is a moral community. While adept at...