Now/here no/where woman

Some of you may recall that sometime last year we had a visiting scholar, Camote, Ph.D . He has been in the field since August 2014, but sent us this short essay reacting to the culling of approximately 60 trees by SM , in Baguio City. Stock photo of Camote, PhD. Taken July 2014, towards the end of his fellowship in our kitchen. THE TRAGEDY OF THE PRIVATES*  News travels quickly through the underground networks of plants. Leaving aside the anguish that coursed through our roots as the trees on Luneta Hill fell Saturday night, I offer up this food for thought for the human communities of this city. Image credit: Sherwin Cabunilas and Bringing 182 to the Supreme Court. In 1968 Garrett Hardin wrote a seminal essay in Science Magazine entitled, The Tragedy of the Commons . His ideas will be familiar to many. Hardin used the metaphor of medieval European herders to argue that in a commons, a shared resource with open access, all rational individuals will seek to maxi...

Attended a talk delivered by Dr. Albert Bacdayan, UP Baguio. Feb. 20, 2013. "Ritual for All Occasions: The significance and persistence of the 'Senga' in Northern Sagada." The senga is a ritual in which at least one chicken and one pig -- sometimes more -- are sacrificed. The senga is usually performed for milestones such as the completion of a house, the opening of a new business, a wedding, a funeral, when someone is ill, when someone is leaving on a journey. He spoke of how Cordillerans have a ritual for almost every occasion or ailment. Indeed, the word he used was not ritual but "remedy."Dr. Bacdayan described this as a "healthy agnosticism."He mused that the abundance or such remedies and rituals is the reason there are rarely feelings of helplessness among Cordillerans. He described ritual as a bundle of activities that assures people and anchors identity. When one calls the old men and is the principal of a senga, you are perceived t...

READING ADVISORY: Lots of big words meant to justify my comparison of two seemingly unrelated fieldsites (and a sharp, sideward elbow-jab aimed at the positivist tendencies that continue to thrive in some anthropology departments). WARNING TO WOULD-BE PLAGIARISTS: Embedded in this excerpt is a curse upon your privates. At first glance the proposed comparison of the case studies presented here appears to violate at least one traditional tenet of comparative studies in general: “that the items compared must share certain fundamental traits” (Nader 1994: 87). Nader (ibid) refers to this as “the notion of controlled comparison,” based upon anthropology’s early conformity to the canons of positivist science that include the identification of and control over discrete variables in stable laboratory settings or, as might be the case with human society, in bounded, static, homogenous communities. The comparative approach of this study has been questioned repeatedly on the following terms: the ...

A whole new way of looking at my theoretical chapter . If only putting it all together could be this much fun! I'm considering sending my "revised" chapters to my supervisors in this format heeheehee! Credit where credit is due: A whole new way of procrastinating http://wordle.net/

Is the end near? [the answer here] "How would we know if it was? Do the new modes of information exchange that we're constantly inventing exacerbate our anxieties? Or is millennialist paranoia some sort of cultural constant? Of course, these questions are difficult, if not impossible to answer. So i'll take a wild guess: as communities continue to become defined more by common ideologies rather than common geographies and as ideological contrasts become further exaggerated as a result, we become less able to identify with each other because our world-views are simply becoming less compatible. In other words, the more we choose to spend our time conversing with people who are interested (or worried) about exactly the same things that we are, in relatively tiny but globally dispersed communities, the more we feel like the rest of the world is just plain crazy." Demetrie Tyler

READING ADVISORY: This post is a not-so-random dissertation excerpt in disguise. Mwahahahaha! In choosing a stance which explains the ethnographic present as a result of an irretrievable past, anthropologists often stand with their backs to the future. Generally speaking, the future is remarkably absent as an explicit object of anthropological research during fieldwork. Often, the future comes later in the literature, in the form of reflections, projections, and recommendations indirectly addressed to policy-makers, development-workers, missionaries, and other similar agents of change making incursions into the anthropologists’ area of study. Unlike many anthropologists, environmental scientists and planners in various disciplines are obsessed with the future: scenarios and models based on visions for the time to come are their most important analytical instruments. Policies and environmental concepts such as sustainability and conservation, restoration and regeneration, in combinatio...

CONTAINS ACADEMIC LANGUAGE. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK . ‘The history of an environment is a history of the activities of all those organisms, human and non-human, contemporary and ancestral, that have contributed to its formation. We should liken the environment not to a container or backcloth within or against which life goes on but rather to a piece of sculpture, or a monument, except in two respects: first, it is shaped not by one hand but by many; and second, the work is never complete. No environment is ever fully created, it is always undergoing creation. It is, as it were, “work in progress”.’ (Ingold 1992: 50-51) Ingold uses the term landscape to refer to the aspect of the environment that is immediately visible to us. A landscape is a totality of actions and interactions. It is the unfolding relations of beings and the environment, in congealed form. When we look at a landscape, we see ‘… a record of – and testimony to – the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt wi...

Ahem. Brace yourself for a dose of academic blather. Boundaries do not exist in and of themselves in the world. For instance, a stream running between the territories of two Kalanguya villages in Benguet is not a boundary in and of itself. Rather, it is designated, recognized, and maintained as such by the Kalanguya who live by it. Boundaries are purposively made by people to separate themselves or to separate matter or certain objects from the rest of the environment (Barth 2000). In the dynamic of environmental action, boundaries are ubiquitous. Protected areas are delineated and zoned, objectives are placed within time-frames, stakeholders are identified and categorized, nature is recreated as “natural resources”, livelihood practices are classified as sustainable/unsustainable and legal/illegal. Intertwined with this is the indigenous peoples’ movement and its goals of recognition of their rights to land by virtue of their identities and their histories. Thus, boundaries of inclusi...