Mobility and Sedentarization among the Philippine Agta

Abstract

This article provides an ethnography of Agta mobility, based on fieldwork in the northern Philippines conducted over the past decade. The Agta are a population of about 10,000 people, living in small settlements distributed along the coasts and in the mountainous interior of northeastern Luzon. They follow a hunting-fishing and gathering lifestyle, which includes a relatively mobile settlement pattern. First, this article aims to document Agta mobility by exploring its drivers and by showing how it is both facilitated and limited by kinship relations. How mobility varies regionally and seasonally will also be discussed. Second, the article focuses on Agta mobility in relation to Philippine development policies. This includes a discussion of past and recent efforts at sedentarization, as well as the government’s misconceptions of Agta mobility in relation to the ongoing ancestral land titling processes. Finally, the article explores the ongoing and future developments likely to influence Agta mobility. These concern Agta parents’ recent emphasis on enrolling their children in formal education and the approval of a road construction project that will traverse Agta living areas and the associated claims on coastal land by politically influential outsiders. An underlying question of this article is how anthropological knowledge on mobility could contribute to improving policy.