Constellations of power: Philippine ecopolitics reexamined

Alternatives

Volumn 23, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 213-243

  Sajor, Edsel E ^b   Resurreccion, Babette P ^a  

^a INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL STUDIES   (Netherlands)

^b NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 22044448460     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437549802300203     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. Richard Peet and Michael Watts, "Development, Sustainability, and Environment in an Age of Market Triumphalism," in Richard Peets and Michael Watts, eds., Liberation Ecologies. Environment, Development, Social Movements (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 9.
2. "The Encompassing Web: The Ramifications of Enclosure," Ecologist 22, no. 4 (1992): 149-155, at 154.
3. This view, of course, is especially associated with Michel Foucault. See, e.g., Alan Sheridan, Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth (London: Tavistock, 1980), p. 184.
4. By "work" or "labor," what is meant is any kind of human activity that is intended to transform, modify, move, or manipulate any part of nature, whether it be virgin nature or nature that has already been extensively modified; that is, whether it be mining, transport, making and using machines, or putting letters in envelopes; see Andrew Sayer, Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 17.
5. See, for example, Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield, Land Degradation and Society (London: Methuen, 1987);
6. Donald Moore, "Contesting Terrain in Zimbabwe's Eastern Highlands: Politicl Ecology, Ethnography and Peasant Resource Struggles," Economic Geography 69, no. 4 (1993) 380-401;
7. and Nancy Peluso, "The Political Ecology of Extraction and Extractive Reserves in East Kalimantan, Indonesia," Development and Change 23, 4 (1992): 49-74.
8. See, for example, Ted Benton, "Biology and Social Theory in the Environmental Debate: in M. Redclift and T. Benton, eds., Social Theory and the Global Environment (London: Routledge, 1994).
9. Peter Dickens, Society and Nature: Towards a Green Social Theory (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), p. 51;
10. see also William Catton, Jr., and Riley Dunlap, "Environmental Sociology: A New Paradigm," American Sociologist 13 (1978): 41-49.
11. Andrew Sayer, "Notes on geography and the relationship between people and nature," Society and Nature: Socialist Perspectives on the Relationship Between Human and Physical Geography (London: London Corporation of the Union of Socialist Geographers, 1983).
12. A realist epistemology cautions us to recognize that nature existed prior to human action. While nature may have its own causality and human knowledge of nature has its boundedness, the "experience" of nature is something socially mediated and within the contingency of time-space considerations. See, for example, Dickens, note 7, or Sayer, note 8.
13. Center for Environmental Concerns, "The State of the Philippine Environment," Policy Papers 28 (Quezon City, Philippines: CEC, 1989), p. 5.
14. Kummer argues that, for the Philippines, the majority of upland agriculturists are practicing some form of nonshifting cultivation, and deforestation is the result of commercial logging and the expansion of small-scale agriculture (the two cannot be considered separately; population pressure per se is not a major proximate cause of deforestation. See David Kummer, "Upland agriculture, the land frontier and forest decline in the Philippines," Agroforestry Systems 18, no. 32 (1992): 31-46, at 31.
15. For example, state discourse on swidden agriculture and indigenous peoples has shifted over the years: in the postwar period, the state's approach was generally punitive and regarded upland peoples as culprits behind deforestation, whereas today, the approach is more participatory, as reflected in the state's social forestry program, which regards indigenous people as basically sustainable stewards of the environment. See, for example, Antonio Contreras, "Discourse, politics and structure of upland development in the Philippines," Forestry Development Center: Policy Paper 29 (University of the Philippines at Los Banos, 1990).
16. Isagani Serrano, Bataan: A Case on Ecosystem Approach to Sustainable Development in the Philippines (Manila: Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement, 1992).
17. See, for example, Robin Broad and John Cavanagh, Plundering Paradise: The Struggle for the Environment in the Philippines (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
18. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings (1972-1977) (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 122.
19. Department of Environment and Natural Resources. Government of the Republic of the Philippines, "Interim Guidelines Governing the Issuance of 'Muyong Resource Permit' in the Province of Ifugao." Memorandum Circular No. 96-02 (Quezon City: DENR, 1996).
20. Majid Rahnema, "Power and Regenerative Processes in Micro Spaces," International Social Science Journal 11740, no. 3 (1988): 361-375, at 372.
21. Haripriya Ranggan, "Property vs Control: The State and Forest Management in the Indian Himalaya," Development and Change 28 (1997): 71-94, at 78.
22. Broad and Cavanagh, note 14, p. 71.
23. Foucault, note 15, p. 99.
24. DENR, Upland Development Program: A Decade and a Half (Quezon City, Philippines: DENR, 1996), p. 1.
25. However, all lands were placed under the ownership of the Spanish crown in the Spanish colonial period dating from the sixteenth century. The landmark Carino case in 1903 was the first open struggle of indigenous people challenging the state's claims on their ancestral domain. See Owen Lynch, "Native Title, Private Right and Tribal Land Law: An Introduction Survey," Philippine Law Journal 57 (1982): 268-306.
26. Norman Long and Anne Long, Battlefields of Knowledge: The Interlocking of Theory and Practice in Social Research and Development (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 23.
27. See Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1984), pp. 1-16.
28. Melissa Leach, Rainforest relations. Gender and resource use among the Mende of Gola, Sierra Leone (London: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), p. 20.
29. Tania Li, "Agrarian Transformation in the Indonesian Uplands," conference statement prepared for "Agrarian Transformation in the Indonesian Uplands" (Halifax, Canada, May 13-14, 1995), p. 5.
30. See, for example, DENR, Master Plan For Forestry Development: Main Report (Quezon City: 1990).
31. Foucault, note 15, p. 98.
32. Norman Long and Jan van der Ploeg, "Heterogeneity, Actor, and Structure," in David Booth, ed., Rethinking social development: Theory, research and practice (London: Longman Scientific Technical, 1994), pp. 62-89, at p. 66.
33. Bina Agarwal, A Field of One's Own. Gender and land rights in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 51.
34. The Kalanguya is a less well-known ethnolinguistic group who are chiefly swidden agriculturists with contiguous settlements in portions of the northern Luzon provinces of Ifugao, Benguet, Nueva Viscaya, Pangasinan, and Nueva Ecija. They locate their place of origin in Tinec, today a municipality of Ifugao Province and are sometimes referred to as Kallahan. See, for example, Patricia Afable, Language, culture and society in a Kallahan community, Northern Luzon, Philippines, vols. 1 and 2 (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, UMI Dissertation Services, 1989);
35. or, Delbert Rice, The Integration of the Ikalahan (unpublished M.A. thesis, Philippines: Siliman University, 1974).
36. See Babette Resurreccion, Farmers, Loggers on Fragile Land: Changing Gender Relations in a Philippine Mountain Village. Working Papers No. 170 (The Hague: Institute of Social Studies, 1994);
37. idem., "Women at the epicenter of degradation: Constructions of women and the environment," in Ineke van Halsema, Mirjam de Bruijn and Heleen van den Hombergh, eds., Gender and land use: Diversity in environmental practices (Amsterdam: Thela, 1997), pp. 177-188.
38. Norman Long, Encounters at the Interface: A perspective on social discontinuities in rural development (Wageningen: Agricultural University of Wageningen, 1989), p. 27.
39. Norman Long, Encounters at the Interface: A perspective on social discontinuities in rural development Ibid., p. 241.
40. See, for example, James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1985).
41. Foucault, note 15.
42. Giddens, note 24, p. 173.
43. See Edsel Sajor, "Dimensions of Local Power in Resource Conflict: The Case of a Philippine Mining Village" (unpublished M.A. thesis. The Hague: Institute of Social Studies, 1993).
44. Dante Gatmaytan, The Perils of Playing God: The Open-pit Operations of Benguet Corporation (Manila: Friends of the Earth, 1993).
45. Technology is used here in its broad sense, referring to the practices employed by a community in producing goods and services in order to feed its members, offer them shelter, meet the demand for certain goods and services, and secure its continuity through reproduction.
46. John Law, A Sociology of Monsters: Essays in Power, Technology and Domination (London: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1991), p. 186.
47. GAP is the blueprint plan of the Benguet Corporation for open-pit mining covering a surface area of 93.5 hectares and a potential ore reserve of 14.1 million metric tons with an average grade of 3.0 grams per metric ton. The whole deposit in this targeted area is estimated to last for only thirteen years when open-pit mined. The plan was hatched by the corporation in 1988, after seven years of experimenting in open-pit mining. The entire project costs Philippine P630 million (US$22.5m), of which roughly one-third is financed from the Social Security System of the Philippine government. In 1991, the corporation renamed GAP as Benguet-Antamok Gold Operations. 43. Adits are passageways to pocket miners' small tunnels.
48. See, for example, Broad and Cavanagh, note 14; or Erlyn Alcantara and Lulu Gimenez, Special Report on the Antamok Gold Project (Baguio City, Philippines: Mining Communities Development Center, 1991);
49. or MCDC, Facts About the Grand Antamok Project (Baguio City, Philippines: Mining Communities Development Center, 1990).
50. Foucault, note 15, p. 93.
51. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 203.
52. Long, note 33, p. 239.
53. See, for example, William Roseberry and Jay O'Brien, "Introduction," in Roseberry and O'Brien, eds., Golden Ages, Dark Ages: Imagining the Past in Anthropology and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 1-18.
54. This is symbolic ownership because it is actually a construction rather than a fact. Sajor's study shows that the local Kankanais, who introduced pocket mining, came to this part of Itogon just before the World War II, long after the early US corporate mining company had started to operate in the general vicinity in 1903. An earlier group, the Ibalois, occupied the place during Spanish times, but they were not miners; they were cultivators and cattle raisers. The descendants of this earlier Ibaloi group actually sold their lands to new Kankanai settlers, who later pocket-mined the place just before the war. See Sajor, note 38.
55. Sajor, note 38, p. 57.
56. Tim Ingold, "Culture and the perception of the environment," in Elizabeth Croll and David Parkin, eds., Bush Forest Farm: Culture, Environment and Development (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 39-56, at p. 53.
57. By class, we refer here to an economic grouping, formed around the tasks of the satisfaction of subsistence needs through the social organization of extraction, transformation, distribution, and consumption of the objects of nature; they are groups having differential power in the fulfillment of these tasks. See Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 24-25.
58. Broad and Cavanagh, note 14, p. 27.
59. Ibid., p. 29.