Culture, Place, and Nature. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020. xiii, 175 pp. (Tables, map, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-295-74815-3.
Though there is no hint of it in its title, Mountains of Blame is all about “shifting cultivation,” a manner of agriculture which entails temporarily clearing and burning a patch of forest to plant. Designed to mimic forest diversity and succession, as practiced traditionally (integral to the mode of subsistence), it entails long fallow periods (a decade or so) and therefore requires a certain freedom of space and movement, including settlement (see Charles O. Frake, “Cultural Ecology and Ethnography,” American Anthropologist 64, 1962). The Philippine government has always frowned upon this practice. The author, Will Smith, initially sought the view from within, asking: In the current context of climate change, how do households understand and value swidden agriculture? (46). The investigation confirms continued appreciation of swidden cultivation by subsistence-oriented locals. It also uncovers “mountains of blame.”
Slash-and-burn farming has always been seen as problematical. Indeed, the first chapter of Mountains of Blame contains a useful lookback at official approaches in the Philippines to shifting swidden or “kaingin” farming, which, even from the very beginning of colonial forestry was officially perceived as destructive because of the use of fire, looked down upon for leaving land “idle,” and problematic to control because of farmer household mobility. It has been officially a “crime,” for more than a hundred years (Kaingin Law of 1901), but from the 1970s, social forestry programs pushed “alternative livelihood” and sought to be “community-based,” and in 1997 the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act upheld indigenous rights to own and manage forest areas within surveyed “ancestral domain.” While policy softened in terms of approaching kaingin as a criminal act, the practice of kaingin basically however continues to be imagined as a “problem.”
The book takes the reader to the uplands in the southern end of Pala’wan, a place of indigenous people, the Pala’wan. (A side note: Pala’wan Island has been dubbed the “Last Frontier” in the Philippines, however the migrant population in the research area are in the coastal plains and have not entered into upland indigenous spaces.) The historical sections in chapter 2 discuss movements and interactions between different kinds of people on the island, in the context of for example, colonial administration, Pala’wan as part of the “Sulu Zone” a couple of centuries before, the settlement of the frontier, and a multiplicity of outside-funded projects focused on “rooting people in place,” and also memories of the much higher productivity of swiddens in the past. The period of fieldwork dates to 2011. By this time, the opening of swidden bears an incredible burden of censure: taking blame for forest fires, global warming, and climate change! By this time, many of the indigenous Pala’wan in the study area have internalized the environmental discourse of certain long-running forest protection projects, many have become more inclined to pursue sedentarized market-oriented (but more precarious) options such as wet rice cultivation, “agroforestry,” and other “alternative livelihoods” that had been pushed by outside interventions, also they seek waged labor down below.
The author’s elicitation of experiences of drought in recent memory, especially the El Niño of 1997–1998, uncovers that diverse tubers and rootcrops procured from the forest and from swidden fields proved to be the most reliable foods for survival; even lowland assimilated families leaned on sharing and exchange with their relatives in the uplands during the crisis! In spite of the trend toward settled-in-place “modern agriculture” however, the author’s interlocutors emphasized the need for continuing, and in fact redoubled, swidden cultivation of hardy plants, such as varieties of cassava, together with careful nurturing of seed stocks of rice. (This was discussed in chapter 3, and I think it is a significant finding.)
Shifting cultivation, it turns out, is so central to the Pala’wan way of life, the idealized pattern of weather is in relation to the annual swidden cycle. At this point, the conversation on swidden farming takes an unexpected turn in relation to climate change, as the author bumps into a local moral-ecological view in which the indigenous farmers expressly regard themselves to be responsible for incidences of extreme and unseasonal climate. Clearing and planting of swidden are so carefully timed (by constant monitoring of diverse environmental signs) to expected rain the week after, uncooperative weather (such as no rain or rain that is too heavy) is deemed consequent to contravention of traditional practices and values in the uplands. This unexpected perspective of “self-blame” for climate change, by marginalized upland dwellers, then becomes the focus of analysis of the book.
In reflexive critique, the book delves into how climate is “socially constructed,” and discusses how the dialogue of local self-blame in the mountains is at cross purposes to international climate change discourse. The language of the latter (ironically, framed by environmental and indigenous peoples’ rights movements), which the author coins as “climate dreamtime,” more familiarly casts indigenous folk in stereotype for being “knowledgeable” and “vulnerable”—i.e., first to be aware of and first to suffer the effects of global warming (e.g. https://www.wri.org/insights/indigenous-peoples-and-local-communities-are-worlds-secret-weapon-curbing-climate-change). (Which also leads to the question, given the valorization of “indigenous knowledge” as reservoir of expertise and wisdom that could save the world, why not stronger international advocacy to just leave them alone, to pursue their shifting cultivation?)
Pala’wan self-blame for climate change is founded on a “different logic”; it is actually a critical evaluation of their own social transformation, and wielded “to rhetorically resist their marginal position” (125). The manifestations of social decline that are related enumerate how children no longer obey their parents, neighbors don’t share, earth is becoming old, incest, loss of icons of authenticity such as the loincloth, or rice wine, which also points to ritual decline, and basically translates to indigenous people’s loss of self-determination and power (both political and cosmic)—no longer able to wield custom law, and to undertake ritual intercession in order to control the weather (112). This conversation that was brought to the fore is “ethically and conceptually unsettling” (4) for those used to the international discourse on indigenous peoples and climate change. “Though for the Philippine state, the control of Pala’wan customary social practices, like ritual executions” (the protocol to resolve incest), “is distinct in intent and practice from the governance of forest resources, for many Pala’wan, they are indistinguishable elements of a broader project of state control of live and livelihood” (128).
This book has a clearly and sensitively thought out exposition. The author struggled to write it up with honesty and self-reflection, and without glibness, although the writing is very academic, quite dense at times, and the reader has to pause to take apart overly large mouthfuls of sentences—such as a definition of “mountains of blame” (6–7): “spaces where interlocking concerns over culpability for environmental decline and developmental concerns over the backwardness of ethnic minorities converge and come to inform the everyday lives of upland peoples.” The book should be recognized as a rare work of oral history and ethnography that throws down a legitimate challenge to listen to the struggling folk who live in and with “mountains of blame.”
Maria F. Mangahas
University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City