Incorporation and “Peasantization” of Hill Peoples: The Buhid Mangyan

Abstract

The demise of the colonial era and the birth of republics in South east Asia have seen the rapid incorporation of the hill groups into the nation-states of the region. In each of the developing nations of South east Asia, the desire for industrialization and the need to finance the purchase of industrial machinery from the West and Japan have resulted in policies encouraging the exploitation of forest and mining resources, often found within the ancestral holdings of the hill peoples. This expansion and internal colonization of the hill frontiers have brought the hill peoples out of their peripheral existence into diverse forms of linkages with the urban, regional, and national centres. Given this incorporation into the central states of the region, what direction of social change would the hill peoples take? This essay focuses on the nature of the varying responses of the hill peoples to the process of incorporation. It describes the sources of susceptibility and resistance to social change of an incorporated hill people. Specifically, this paper deals with the question of how a com munity oriented to slash-and-burn agriculture has responded to the penetration of market economy, coincident with the domination of a centralized form of government. I chose Mindoro island in the Philippines and the Buhid Mangyan in the uplands of the island as the focal point of my case study. Mindoro presents not only the challenge of ethnographic investigation but also some fascinating problems in the cultural history and dynam ics of contemporary social change of the region. While the island has attracted numerous explorers through the ages, actual social anthropological research has been sparse, compared to that on other parts of the Philippines. Since the Second World War for instance, only one major work has been published on one of the six ethnic groups on the island.