Shopping in the Rainforest: Provisions of Uneven Living at the Sari-Sari Store

Abstract

This article examines how patron-client relationships deepen into relations of pity, obligation, and dependency through rural neighbourhood stores. Based on ethnographic research on Palawan Island, I examine relations between Tagbanua and their store-owning neighbours in order to consider firstly, how social differentiations of class and ethnicity are reproduced through stores, and secondly, the role of these stores in the reproduction of contending moral claims regarding the foundational basis of this inequality. I suggest that what is being debated can be understood in terms of a right to provision. In drawing on this case study, I argue that the right to provision allows us to consider how the right to provide is bound within claims about the right to be provided with the conditions that make viable provision possible. Shopping in the rainforest, therefore, concerns the moral claims central to how a person can make a living and live with others.

Keywords:

• Neighbourhood Stores
• Everyday Politics
• Moral Economy
• Livelihoods
• Standards of Living
• Philippines

Introduction

From Reyna’s house I walked down the forest trail to one of the sari-sari stores along the road. Reyna and her adult daughter Lyn were sitting at the small store Lyn was attempting to establish in front of the nipa hut where she lived with her young children. The Tagbanua women were eating pastries from a plastic bag. Referencing their snack, Reyna explained an official had driven by handing out cash to local constituents. This event was noteworthy news but not surprising, being a common practice by politicians to garner support prior to elections. Upon receiving the money, the women had purchased their snack from the larger store next to Lyn’s own store/house. This too was noteworthy, being a purchase beyond what was possible without a windfall, but also a common practice as Lyn and her relatives often shop there—the goods available at her neighbour’s store being more extensive than the limited and non-perishable items Lyn stocked at her own. On this day, like others, the shopping practices of Tagbanua families like Lyn and Reyna’s were oriented around the more established sari-sari store of their neighbours.

Stories about the purchase of goods are politically telling. Reyna and Lyn’s story opens this article in order to introduce sari-sari stores—not as the backdrop to an example of electoral politics but rather as an institution integral to the political economy of life in this forested region of a Philippine island. This paper examines how patron-client relationships are established and deepen into relations of pity, obligation, and dependency through rural neighbourhood stores. Though sari-sari stores are ubiquitous across the urban and rural Philippines, there are few studies of neighbourhood stores in rainforests, and their role in the social reproduction of inequality is yet to be fully appreciated in the literature on moral economy.

Sari-sari stores concern what Benedict Kerkvliet (1991; 2013) called everyday politics. Though the patronage-for-votes described above has long been recognisable as politics in the Philippines, matters of credit, livelihoods, and rice are truly at the heart of everyday political life regardless of their impact on the usual political topics of elections and rebellions (Kerkvliet 1991, 15–16). Underlying divisions of status and class, Kerkvliet argued, are ‘contending claims about what constitutes a just use and distribution of resources’ (ibid., 17). For those Kerkvliet worked with in San Ricardo, key to these contending claims were different positions on what it is that determines who has what—particularly, the degree to which this can be said to be determined by the market without consideration of how one treats others. What was at stake for the residents of San Ricardo were debates of moral economy that have been discussed across the Philippine archipelago since the late twentieth century: a right to survive, a right to make a living, and a right not merely to subsist but to live.

Theorisations of ‘the rights to … ’ have been pivotal to anthropological debates on moral economy in the twenty-first century (Bize 2020; Ferguson 2015), particularly addressing what kind of investigations can be meaningfully said to be studies of moral economy (Edelman 2005; Palomera and Vetta 2016). Though most anthropologists are familiar with James Scott’s work on everyday resistance of so-called peasants in Southeast Asia, some might not realise work on moral economy at the level of everyday politics has been crucial in Philippine ethnography. Everyday politics addresses an oft under-appreciated aspect of asymmetrical social relations: what constitutes politics for those whose subordinate positions mean that they are unlikely to have recourse to stand up to those in superordinate positions beyond subtle acts of moral claim making. Resil B. Mojares explains how the production of public political discourses in Philippine society had involved the marginalisation of certain groups from the realms of ‘talking politics’ (1998, 354). Scholarship continues to demonstrate why the Philippines is such an important place from which to understand how moral claims upon people and resources are actively made through absence, inaction, and silence (Curato 2019).

Here I examine how social differentiations are reproduced through stores and the reproduction of contending moral claims regarding the foundational basis of this inequality. I suggest what is being debated be understood in terms of a right to provision. The right to survive is a moral discourse importantly discussed in studies of market relations and livelihoods across the Philippines (Blanc-Szanton 1972) and on Palawan specifically (Fabinyi 2012). Though long identified as ‘the right to survive and provide’ (Blanc-Szanton 1972, 129), provision is the dimension of ‘the right to survive’ that has received less acknowledgement than the former even though it is inseparable from its questions of moral economy. Here I discuss the right to provision as the need to have a livelihood in order to provide for one’s own (and by extension, the need for those who have to provide what is needed to make provision a possibility for those who have not). At the very least, this involves an expectation that one’s need to provide is acknowledged, and that where possible barriers to provision are removed by those whose position and resources enable them to do so. Patron-client relations between Tagbanua and their store-owning neighbours have developed through histories of markets shaped by colonialism, extraction, and environmental governance—and the associated intergenerational reproduction of social differentiations. In drawing on this case study, I argue that the right to provision allows us to consider how the right to provide is bound within claims about the right to be provided with the conditions that make viable provision possible.

James Carrier reminds anthropologists of a distinction between moral values that are the context to shopping, and those emerging from shopping transactions. After Marshall Sahlins, Carrier suggests that, ‘if obligations produce transactions, transactions produce obligations’ (2018, 25). Certainly recent Philippine ethnography demonstrates why obligations are not fixed, and how an increasing prominence within social relations disrupts assumptions about personhood and relationality (Bulloch 2021). What it becomes possible to understand through shopping in the rainforest are the moral claims central to how a person can make a living and live with others (see Miller 1998; Wilk 2016). What the lens of provisioning therefore offers is the opportunity to understand how asymmetrical relations deepen through shopping transactions and, in doing so, give rise to contending moral claims about the basis of inequalities but without losing perspective on the historical context of these circumstances. Provisioning, as Susan Narotzky writes, ‘is a complex process where production, distribution, appropriation and consumption relations all have to be taken into account and where history defines particular available paths for obtaining goods and services’ (2022, 56). Provisioning cannot be separated from broader histories of colonial capitalism, market relations, and indigenous perspectives (Aguilar 1998). As Dana Docot (2021) explains in discussing anti-poor responses to resource redistribution via community pantries, legacies of empire shape contemporary moral framings of poverty in the Philippines.

In the following paper I offer an ethnographic case study of what I call ‘the provisions of uneven living’. The provisions of (uneven) living are sugar, coffee, uncooked rice, soap, and matches obtained by Tagbanua who harvest almaciga resin in order to shop via sari-sari stores. In another, absolutely related sense the provisions of uneven living are what make possible social differentiation, as stores simultaneously mediate almaciga markets. The neighbourhood sari-sari store is a place where these two kinds of provisions of uneven living converge, as Tagbanua families engage in what is widely considered an undesirable livelihood activity in order to provision the needs of daily living. Based on ethnographic research on Palawan Island¹ I first introduce sari-sari stores, then outline the interconnected transactions of shopping and harvesting almaciga. Next I provide an historical context explaining how almaciga became such an undesirable means of provisioning. In subsequent sections I examine how the difficulties of provisioning are discussed by those concerned in terms of moral claims about standards of living and the basis of inequality. I conclude by discussing the relevance of sari-sari stores for thinking through the right to provision.

Stores and Their Miscellany: Transnational Flows, National Icons, Local Institutions

Sari-sari, a term similar to miscellaneous, refers to the combination of goods that shoppers find inside the neighbourhood store. This variety has been linked to a Philippine aesthetics of assortment without space—an excess of the seemingly diverse mixed together that en mass threatens to spill beyond the frame (Navarroza in David 2021). Store façades feature a window framed by goods, displayed to customers ordering from outside: sachets of shampoo, 3-in-1 coffee, or bitsin (seasoning) hang in strands. Along the counter, jars are filled with individually-wrapped confectionary that can also serve as change. Paz’s store was at the forest gate. Those transporting forest products from the uplands pass here to the house/stores of lowland neighbours to meet the buyer’s agents. Beside a bench where customers can sit to drink beverages, crates of empty bottles from San Miguel Brewery and Coca-Cola await collection. Shelves inside displayed the goods Paz was beginning to stock: packets of mung beans; Fortune cigarettes; Maggi noodles; Nescafe instant coffee; a thin yellow headband; Tang drink mix; a few single Pampers nappies.

Sari-sari stores constitute a major national distribution avenue for consumer goods. These are local institutions largely owned and run by residents and regarded as catering to the needs of those who are both their customers and neighbours. One way sari-sari stores do so is by dividing goods into smaller servings more accessible to those otherwise struggling to buy goods: customers can buy one cigarette, cooking oil to make a meal, mobile phone credit to send a few messages, or a dose of pharmaceutical tablets. Sari-sari stores are transnational in that they are a key mechanism for multinational corporations to target and generate wealth from the significant demographic of lower socio-economic classes in the Philippines via the sachet economy. Stores also broker Philippine class imaginaries. Ty Matejowsky’s (2007) work on the indigenisation of chain convenience stores (c-stores) in the Philippines explains how marketing these stores deliberately draws on the symbolic value and iconic standing of sari-sari stores (patronised by ‘the poor’) in order to position c-stores as modern sari-sari stores to middle-class Filipinos. As Matejowsky discusses, strategic distinctions capitalise on the positive associations with which sari-sari stores are regarded as Filipino institutions (including by those who do not necessarily patronise them) whilst simultaneously distinguishing c-stores as favourable to ‘dark’ and ‘unsanitary’ sari-sari stores (ibid., 264).

Neighbourhood stores are, like Paz’s and Lyn’s, often built onto the owner’s home. Sari-sari stores are places not only where purchases are made but also where waiting, meeting, drinking, eating, smoking, and gossiping can occur. In forested areas without the infrastructure of electricity or amenities such as postal delivery, more established sari-sari stores offer the possibility of recharging cell phones, collecting deliveries, and leaving messages. Though studies have tended to focus on urban stores, research on rural stores has raised important questions about power by examining how the sociality and spatiality of stores facilitates surveillance and, consequently, social control (Turgo 2013). In the rainforest region that this paper focuses on, sari-sari stores are also often key sites in the forest product trade. When I stayed with Paz her residence was being used as a delivery point for rattan brought by Tagbanua living in the forested uplands, and during one of my visits the agent of the rattan buyer was staying there also.

I gladly admit that my own experiences of shopping at sari-sari stores as a White, foreign (Australian) anthropologist evoke personal fondness for these institutions. Yet, to ethnographically investigate sari-sari stores means acknowledging their ambiguity and in-betweenness. They are at once private and public, of the home and the market. They materially connect the domestic sphere of the owner’s house to the creation of spaces that make intra-household social life possible. Sari-sari stores are often described in the literature as a survival strategy for their owners because of the (relatively) modest capital required to start this form of business (Chen 1997). However, for millions of Filipinos even this capital makes such a livelihood venture inaccessible. In this case study, it is an amount of capital beyond most Tagbanua households, a dynamic introduced by Lyn’s difficulty in attempting to establish (and later maintain) a store.

Central to understanding this inequality are relationships between provisioning and harvesting almaciga (Manila copal, called bagtik by Tagbanua people): a resin once mined and gathered that is now tapped from Agathis philippinensis to be used in manufacturing products like paints and varnishes. For many Tagbanua households, harvesting almaciga is a means of accessing konsumo (goods for everyday consumption, also referred to as ‘needs’). This trade continues to shape uneven relations for Tagbanua and those storeowners descended from Filipino migrant-settlers encouraged to Palawan Island as part of government-promoted domestic migration and land reform in the twentieth century (Dressler 2009; Eder and Fernandez 1996). Sari-sari stores became crucial sites for both accessing konsumo, and establishing this category, as definitions of what constitute necessities and luxuries shifted relative to social markers, relations, and aspirations (Conelly 1996). By examining shopping it becomes possible to understand why almaciga has become regarded locally as an incredibly undesirable livelihood: because it is often the only way to access konsumo, and, simultaneously, such an inadequate way of accessing konsumo.

Provisioning Household Needs

Household needs are regularly identified as coffee, sugar, salt, soap, matches, bitsin (seasoning sachets), and bigas (uncooked rice).² What is significant about these items, in terms of measuring standards of living, is how lacking such goods is keenly felt. To be without the means of seasoning food, lighting an oil lamp, or washing clothes means a daily, corporeal reminder of where living is at. In a country where rice is synonymous with food, eating root crops instead marks times of hunger. Coffee and sugar have become important staples for Tagbanua; their absence is greatly lamented especially upon rising early in the morning or during rainy afternoons (Conelly 1985; Eder 1987). Konsumo are, of course, not the only items Tagbanua purchase. Tagbanua lives and households are filled with other consumer goods. But konsumo has particular salience in terms of livelihood and household planning because these goods must be obtained on a regular, ongoing basis in the context of livelihood precarity.

Vilma and Jose, a Tagbanua couple, live with their adult son. Family members buy their needs from Joy’s sari-sari store, which they acknowledge is an expensive way to obtain goods. They explain their options are limited because they do not own a motorised outrigger which is required to reach the larger stores beyond their vicinity. Joy describes her store as stocking ‘the kitchen commodities’—paramount being rice but also ‘foods, sometimes the coffee, all the things in the house’. Though Joy would likely not identify as such, many Tagbanua people refer to their lowland Filipino neighbours as ‘migrants’. The ethnic distinctions between indigenous upland and lowland Filipino households are not as fixed here as in some regions of the Philippines and Southeast Asia, but are often prominent in terms of livelihoods and consumption markers. One example comes from a discussion of Vilma and Jose’s estimation that a bar of soap can be divided up to last three weeks. The katutubo (indigenous, innate) are not like migrants, I am told, because katutubo can use a laundry bar for both washing clothes and bodies. With certain intersections of ethnicity and class there is seen by some Tagbanua to also come a delicacy in needs that is not without some moral disparagement.

Joy is also the almaciga middletrader, buying from Tagbanua harvesters and selling to buyers elsewhere. What initiates the harvesting and sale of almaciga is Tagbanua approaching Joy with orders for specific goods. Joy tallies the costs of orders to calculate the amount of credit she will get advanced from a buyer and will then purchase goods. Almaciga harvesters do not get into debt with the buyer—they get into debt with Joy by ordering goods and she gets into debt with the buyer in order to advance goods to almaciga harvesters. This is not barter—almaciga bought from Tagbanua, and household goods advanced or sold to Tagbanua, are both valued in cash terms.³ Joy can obtain goods for her store because of compounding factors—her inter-generational position as an almaciga middletrader, connections with almaciga buyers, boat ownership, capital from paddy rice farming and copra production, and income from her husband’s job (government-funded, in the ecotourism sector). Similarly, many Tagbanua buy from Joy’s store because of compounding factors—resorting to almaciga harvesting to obtain goods, not owning a boat, not having a paddy rice field, being unable to practise upland shifting rice cultivation due to fear of government surveillance and punishment, and marginalisation from jobs in local government and ecotourism.

The Reyes family harvests almaciga and buys sugar, coffee, salt, soap, and matches from Joy’s store. But if they have enough money to purchase beyond what is quickly and locally available in the small-but-expensive amounts accessible to low income households via the sari-sari store, their preferred option is to order via Alejandro, a Tagbanua man who often travels in his own boat to the pier. The Cruz family also try to buy their needs from the larger stores at the pier, and if not there then via Alejandro’s own smaller store when they can. The Cruz family’s most important livelihood is planting rice, and their most significant source of income is Bato’s work as a carpenter. But the family also sells almaciga to Joy. When Tagbanua man Jamil asks Bato why he is harvesting almaciga when he already has a good job as a carpenter, Bato answers that when there is no lumber and he is waiting for work, he goes to the mountains to harvest almaciga in order to obtain ‘house needs’. To make sense of Jamil’s question—why someone with the opportunity of a good source of income would resort to harvesting almaciga—and Bato’s answer—that almaciga harvesting is a means of provisioning needs in the absence of another option—I turn to the history of how almaciga became such a means of provision.

Almaciga, Provisioning and Sari-Sari Stores

Palawan forest products have an extensive history in the insular Southeast Asian trade. After Spanish colonisation in the sixteenth century, capital ports of the Philippines such as Manila became partially connected to Europe through the galleon trade, but other regions of the archipelago were often quite separate from these networks and engaged with global markets through different routes and relations (McCoy 1982). Although Spanish presence in Palawan Island was not extensive initially, particularly owing to the region’s association with endemic diseases and conflict with the Sulu Sultanate, Spanish colonial documents do describe the trade of resin by indigenous peoples on Palawan (Ocampo 1996). The Sulu economy was based on a hierarchical system of Taosug datus (chiefs), who maintained power and wealth through raiding for slave capture and collecting tributes (Fox 1954; Warren 1982). A result was the escalation of often inescapable and sometimes intergenerational debt for Tagbanua. Debt would continue to be an outcome of almaciga harvesting for Tagbanua as markets subsequently became mediated via Chinese and then Filipino merchants.

Following attacks on the Sulu Sultanate, efforts sought to re-establish a largely abandoned Spanish presence on Palawan Island via initiatives in the late nineteenth century to encourage domestic migration through the granting of land, transport, tax exemptions, and the promise of infrastructure. Initiatives to encourage domestic migration continued through American colonialism, and after Philippine independence. During the 1920s the west coast of central Palawan Island was transformed through colonial forestry projects, commercial logging, and the settlement of migrant traders (Dressler 2009). As transportation became more affordable, and other parts of the Philippines suffered high rates of deforestation as a result of significant logging, Palawan’s comparatively high levels of forest cover, low population, and government incentives became more attractive to some domestic migrants, particularly those suffering land scarcity, overfishing, and conflict (Ocampo 1996).

On the west coast of Palawan these waves of migration intersected with the commercial logging industry in a coercive and often violent transformation of the political economy (Broad and Cavanagh 1993). Particularly following the Second World War, Filipino migrant-settlers appropriated and privatised land through strategies of securing title and converting land into what were considered ‘productive’ uses, such as lowland wet paddy rice cultivation (Dressler 2009). During this period some Filipino migrant-settlers entered into the forest product trade, often to raise capital for eventual livelihood plans of lowland paddy rice agriculture (ibid.). After becoming established in such, some used this capital to open sari-sari stores. The introduction of sari-sari stores caused lasting change for the forest product trade as Tagbanua entered into not only debt but also debt-bondage with Filipino migrant-settler storeowners (Dressler 2009; McDermott 2000). The value and exchange of goods became dominated by the buying and selling of commodities valued in cash terms and the decline then end of barter as a pervasive form of exchange. A dynamic that continues is for Tagbanua to obtain household goods on credit to be repaid in the delivery of almaciga. Because almaciga is priced low and store goods are priced high, debt is the most common outcome of these transaction trajectories.⁴

These trends intensified throughout the 1960s and 1970s after the Philippine Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) introduced a concession system for almaciga (De Beer and McDermott 1996, 151). Tagbanua, who were unable to travel to Manila to participate in the public bidding for concessions, could only sell their products via the agents of concession-holders. These conditions further enabled Filipino storeowners involved as intermediaries to classify, price, and value almaciga in terms largely unfavourable to Tagbanua collectors, whilst simultaneously inflating the price of the goods they sold Tagbanua trapped within ongoing debt relations. There was immense competition under the concession system. As competition increased, almaciga resources became ecologically degraded in quality and quantity, meaning harvesters spent more time travelling further to bring greater amounts of almaciga to collection points for less income⁵ (Cadeliña 1996, 62). As Tagbanua became further involved in debt cycles, almaciga harvesting became a less profitable activity (Conelly 1985).

James Scott (1972) noted the importance of face-to-face interactions in such arrangements, a dynamic that continues to be cited as significant for understanding how certain relations deepen into expectations of obligation (Carrier 2018; Kusaka 2017). Local, regular interactions of purchasing and selling goods are practices that occur through and establish asymmetrical relationships of familiarity and trust—ones through which Tagbanua households often become involved in suki relations with sari-sari storeowners. At one level suki is a term used throughout the Philippines to describe relations that can develop from shopping at sari-sari stores (Davis 1973; Szanton 1972, 136–137). Storeowners reciprocate a regular customer’s loyalty with discounts, extending credit, and extra goods—such as when a woman whose store I visited often and with whom I was on friendly terms presented me with a banana for my breakfast as I was making a purchase.

The term suki may also refer to the patron-client relations Tagbanua have been involved in with sari-sari storeowners through the almaciga trade. Ongoing debt has become not only central to provisioning for Tagbanua families but is also the means through which a supply of cheap labour and forest goods is maintained. Patronage has a strong presence in everyday life in the Philippines because debt incurs not only economic but also moral binds (Torres-Mejia 2000). The moral debt for being extended ‘assistance’ often cannot be repaid and ties patrons and clients together. Patron-client relations, like other asymmetrical relations in the Philippines, are embedded within social, political, and ideological orders (Pertierra 1988, 42).

Contending Moral Claims

Joy describes selling goods and buying almaciga as one involvement—as a ‘helper’ of Tagbanua people. Joy hints at how these are hierarchical relations of dependency when she refers to her Tagbanua neighbours as ‘my collectors’ or ‘my harvesters’. This is a role she describes herself as continuously and reluctantly pushed into. Neither this situation nor its moral framing is unique to Joy. Many women such as Joy who are forest product middletraders also own sari-sari stores. Far from coincidence, this pattern indicates how and why many indigenous peoples have become involved in almaciga—in order to obtain household necessities. These roles are often reproduced through generations, as Joy references in her account.

The business starts from my grandmother, and then to my mother, and then to me, and then the people ask me how to help them like that. My almaciga business is by force because of naaawa [feeling pity] but now I’m not concentrating on almaciga. But the people just asking me how to help them. … Before the license is owned by my lola [grandmother] and it come to my mother and uncle, and then the time comes that the katutubo have the right—the full rights—to stop the concession because of some reason they don’t like something like that. But now they just push me to buy almaciga because they don’t have anything. No one can sacrifice. No one will do anything like that. So I’m forced like that to help them.

Joy is describing the process that occurred when the DENR began granting concessions to indigenous tribal associations in the 1990s.⁶ Her account also references the dynamics that continued despite this process, given the trade remains dominated by enduring patron-client relations. (This particularly happens because a financier is still required to fund the costs of transporting and selling forest products, including state requirements, which far exceed the capital of indigenous peoples in this region.) Although some Tagbanua elite are involved in the trade as local agents; ultimately, Tagbanua harvesters cannot sell almaciga without the ‘assistance’ of intermediaries like Joy and those she sells to (the buyers who finance the requirements of the trade).

Harvesting almaciga requires spending time away from homes and fields in order to travel into the mountains to tap resin, and harvesters often require intermediaries to advance their konsumo for the duration of the trip. Joy suggests both that Tagbanua require assistance, and that her involvement in buying almaciga is a trying experience which causes her many problems (see Billig 2003, 24–25). She speaks of her difficulties, describing how she hikes a day’s journey into the mountains where the almaciga camps are located to monitor the activities of harvesters in debt with her for goods advanced. Her motivations, she suggests, are driven to a significant extent by her being needed to ‘help’ the Tagbanua harvesters who approach her (see Soon 2012). Joy describes instances of wanting to cease her involvement—telling ‘her people’ that she ‘had grown tired’ but says that on those occasions she was ‘forced’ back into the trade in order to accept forest products as payment for outstanding debts.

When Joy says she is forced because of the pity she feels, she is articulating a broader attitude—that Tagbanua neighbours are ‘pitiful’ because they have no livelihood, or no livelihood other than almaciga harvesting (such an undesirable livelihood that it could almost be considered to hardly constitute a livelihood). As her comments begin to imply, there is a naturalised view that positions livelihood precarity as a condition of indigeneity. Though many Tagbanua share an understanding that livelihood options being limited to almaciga is undesirable, their discussions of the situation differ from Joy’s, as Alejandro’s comments illustrate. Alejandro is one of a few Tagbanua elites who have been involved in the almaciga trade as an intermediary like Joy. Alejandro speaks of the difficulties of funding the government requirements of the almaciga trade. He explains that any assistance that he is able to offer in improving the position of Tagbanua people is limited to support with getting the necessary paperwork processed, given that he does not have any means to be a financer in the trade. Alejandro explains his motivations,

So I said while we are waiting [to fund and fulfil the government requirements] we must do something so that we are not suffering, because the people are the ones who suffer, not me because I am not doing bagtik anymore because I cannot harvest anymore, so it is the people who are suffering now. [translated from Tagalog]

Mahirap, the word that Alejandro uses for suffering, has connotations of poverty, difficulty, and hardship. His comments suggest this suffering is something that can, and should, be alleviated by those with the means and ability. Alejandro explains there are specific actions that those in the position to do so can undertake to alleviate difficulties. But he also locates such actions within a certain moral attitude required to navigate uneven market relations in the context of markets ordered by governance and corruption.

They are different, I want no misunderstanding. Everyone must have. Not only three have and ten do not have. Sometimes it is not enough to feel someone’s pain! You must do something about it to ease the pain so that both of you will be in good condition. [translated from Tagalog]

Alejandro is arguing that the kinds of hardship experienced by Tagbanua harvesters in the almaciga trade can be alleviated by the actions of intermediaries, local leaders, and government authorities. The frustrations of pity Joy expresses above imply that the suffering Alejandro refers to is something that harvesters themselves might be responsible for. She states that she must handle the money, saying that if Tagbanua harvesters ‘don’t know how to manage the money’ she will be the one to get into debt with the buyer. She says, ‘I’m going to the mountain and I’m looking how they can work, what they are doing there at the mountains maybe they are just get the food from you but up there they are just sleeping’. She explains her decision to refuse credit for household goods if someone already has debt with her: ‘I don’t want to have utang-utang [extend further credit] because I just make them lazy’.⁷ Her comments position poverty as a condition inextricably connected to indigeneity, and debt as an outcome that could be avoided by individual harvesters.

Standards of Living

Joy suggests that her buying of almaciga is essential because it enables Tagbanua people to obtain the goods considered necessities for living. It is the pressure to respond to this need that Joy references when she describes her involvement as forced, saying she sources ‘even [their] hair pins!’ Central to Joy’s discussion of her own moral position are critiques of Tagbanua accumulating ‘too much’ debt and buying ‘unnecessary’ items. When I ask Joy what income from almaciga harvesting is used for, she replied, ‘some of my gatherers they are buying [boat] engine, cell phone, the sink, their house, kitchen-wares, and now I have one gatherer who orders generator’. I asked her what the generator would be used for. She replied, ‘For socials. For wasting money’.

Joy is referring to the use of generators for running videoke machines. Very few Tagbanua households have a generator or a videoke machine (even fewer retain them). Buying a generator is not a typical purchase that almaciga harvesting facilitates, as indicated by Joy’s comment that this is a single instance. That is why it is important to consider what it is that Joy illustrates with the generator example. An aspect of the marginalisation Tagbanua people experience in market relations is the burden that certain forms of consumption are morally superior or inferior. What I am suggesting is significant about Joy’s comment is not that she provides the example of a generator and its inferred use over the much more regular obtaining of konsumo but rather that she is over-suggesting the importance of a transaction in the minority in order to make a moral claim.

So, I want to begin by explaining that because videoke has such a high social value across the Philippines, the notion that Tagbanua people are ‘wasting money’ by purchasing a generator to perform videoke at socials is a particularly loaded one. Videoke offers an important social means through which people can make themselves and their relationships with others—as is the case not only for Tagbanua people but also for other Filipinos across the Philippines and diaspora. One day when I was staying with Paz, we attended a casual social event that included a videoke session at her neighbour's home. These neighbours owned a sari-sari store and purchased forest products from Tagbanua families. Though this session took place inside the front room of the house, the nature of both videoke performance and a space where a sari-sari store was attached to the house meant that this session was neither entirely public nor private (in that we could be heard and seen from both the store and the bus that stops outside). After witnessing my terrible rendition of a 1990s power ballad that I adore but sing very badly, Paz kindly reassured me in a tone that conveyed deep feeling that she would now always think of me when she heard that song. Videoke is an important social marker as well as a transformative experience. One day I was staying with Alejandro’s family when his spouse, Cristabel, and I heard an altercation. A man who had been drinking was denied the use of a videoke machine at his niece’s house next door and was loudly asserting that this refusal indicated she presumed herself to be above him. In another instance, when Reyna recounted with tears her recently deceased adult daughter, it was her daughter’s reputation for being an exceptionally talented videoke singer that recalled her to life. Imagining what might be afforded by generators powers the possibilities of sociality and modernity and, ultimately, what it means to live well.

Discussion

Provisioning is a lens that allows for considering how specific histories create conditions for obtaining goods, and examining sari-sari stores demonstrates that there exists an historical and regional context for the transactions, relations, and explanations that I discuss here. This includes the wider politics of upland, forest-based livelihoods in Southeast Asia whereby indigenous peoples are marginalised from resources they have historically had greater autonomy over whilst simultaneously being blamed for their own poverty (Dove 1983). In the Philippines, where a majority of Filipinos can be understood to be indigenous, the designation of specific ethnic groups as Indigenous Peoples has often relied on etic, state-legitimised notions of indigeneity disconnected from emic understandings of connection and customary law (Paredes 2022). Though indigenous rights were recognised in the Philippines comparatively earlier than elsewhere in Asia, indigenous peoples on Palawan still must navigate the exacerbating burdens of livelihood precarity and environmental governance (Smith 2020; Theriault 2019). Making claims on people and resources in terms of the right to provision therefore occurs in a context where, although there is an established policy of indigenous land rights, in practice Tagbanua do not have autonomy over forest resources.

Market involvements are framed in moral terms by both Tagbanua and market intermediaries like Joy, and these framings share an acknowledgement of the hardship experienced in attempting to provision through almaciga harvesting but diverge in terms of the explanations for these difficulties. In the context of these contending claims, the moralising of Tagbanua consumption practices is not merely disproportionate to typical examples of provisioning. The disproportionate examples also reproduce broader contending claims regarding what constitutes acceptable standards of living for whom. What the example of videoke explains is that Joy’s comment implies buying a generator constitutes wasting money not in general but for Tagbanua harvesters specifically, because within the aforementioned differentiations of ethnicity and class Tagbanua people are held to a different standard of living which is tied to explanations for poverty and social divisions.

The moral economy of sari-sari stores’ transformative potential to reproduce social differentiations is summarised by one Tagbanua customer who explained that they would prefer to purchase sugar and coffee via Alejandro because when they obtain their other groceries via Joy then ‘the money would just go in her store’. Their comment speaks to a crucial dimension of the right to provision: their recognition that Alejandro has provided what he can to support the right of Tagbanua to provision, and it also references how he is consequently regarded by his neighbours, with a kind of respect that is distinct from (and cannot be conferred solely by) wealth or position in the Philippines (Kerkvliet 1991; Seki 2022). Conversely, the customer’s moral implication is that Joy’s store is a place where their money is accumulated, but it does not flow elsewhere to change anything in their own circumstances.

Though sari-sari storeowners like Joy frame what they do as assistance, they more commonly speak of themselves as the clients of more powerful patrons rather than as the patrons of Tagbanua clients. My intention here is not to dismiss Joy’s own identification of her role as a reluctant helper. As F. Landa Jocano (1997) so importantly noted, in the Philippines personalised relations cannot be reduced to ‘cumbersome patronage’. Some of Joy’s clients might too describe her involvement as assistance, whilst also holding the right to appeal to her because her relative position and capital infer responsibility to assist those who have substantially less or neither (Szanton 1972). Such is often the case in the Philippines when transactions establish personalised socio-economic relations that deepen over time into expectations of obligation, expressions of pity, and ties of dependency (see also Cannell 1999; McKay 2012). It is the heft of these relations that weighs questions of moral economy: how can a person make a living and live with others.

Conclusion

This paper has considered the provisions of uneven living in two, interrelated senses: how inequality is reproduced as Tagbanua obtain those goods considered the necessities of everyday life through the almaciga trade, and moral claims about the basis of this inequality. Standards of living here inseparably concern both the measure of lives and inequality, and moral framings about who or what is responsible for providing the conditions that make viable provision possible. In the case I describe, the moral claims that invoke this right to provision contend with other moral claims that contest an obligation to provide on the basis of naturalised notions that standards of living are preconditions of ethnicity and that debt is individually incurred rather than the result of an uneven political economy that structures the possibilities for provisioning via the forest trade. Sari-sari stores are places where social differentiation is reproduced—both in terms of the conditions of inequalities and narratives regarding its basis.

The right to provision concerns moral claims about obligations to provide—who can and who must do what, relative to their own circumstances—that extend beyond the neighbourhood store. What this article attempts is a demonstration of why sari-sari stores are such important institutions for understanding the reproduction of inequality and its contending moral framings. Sari-sari stores illustrate the connections of local political economy to multi-scaled processes of colonialism, capitalism, and environmental governance. Their ubiquity across the Philippines and prominence in the distribution of goods nationally offers a way of imagining how daily life in rural and urban neighbourhoods are situated within national and global networks that structure the possibilities of provisioning. Shopping at a supermarket inside one of the malls now located in Palawan’s capital, it is possible to see an example of these distribution flows in aisle upon aisle of neatly stacked, connected sachets specifically targeted at sari-sari store owners stocking their establishments. Though the case study presented here is limited to the region’s particular history of shopping in the rainforest, what is more broadly applicable is that sari-sari stores are not only situated within broader economies, politics, and moralities—but they also offer possibilities for understanding how these interconnections can be understood and experienced in everyday life.

Acknowledgements

In writing this paper I have accrued many debts that cannot be repaid and will not be forgotten. Foremost, my heartfelt thanks to those whose experiences and perspectives are the basis of this paper, and those with whom I have lived and worked during this research. Thank you to Will Smith and Wolfram Dressler for kindly reading drafts and to Raul Pertierra and Andrew Kipnis for their engagement with prior versions as conference discussants. Thank you to Ana Rosa Marginson for her research assistance. I owe an interest in shopping to the mentorship of Anna Cristina Pertierra and Diana Young. My thanks to the generous and expert reviewers, the paper has been vastly improved by their constructive comments. All errors of course remain my own. The fieldwork for this study was made possible by funding from a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant and the writing was supported by a Wenner-Gren Hunt Fellowship and the Thomas and Margaret Ruth McArthur Fellowship at the University of Melbourne.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Wenner-Gren Foundation: [Grant no. 10064].

Notes

1 In this article I begin by broadly discussing sari-sari stores located in the surrounds of the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park across three barangays and three Ancestral Domains and then later focus more specifically on households located specifically within one of these barangays and Ancestral Domain areas. I began research in Palawan approximately 15 years ago; the livelihood and provisioning dynamics discussed in this article primarily draw on data from harvesting seasons during 2010–2012.

2 These questions were part of a survey conducted across 104 households primarily by a Tagbanua research assistant in Tagalog. This section of the survey asked: What is the most important livelihood of your family; what is the other livelihood of your family; what is the most important source of your income; what is this income used for; what are the different needs of your family (with a list of items 1–5, and questions for each about the price, where it was bought from, and how often it was purchased). The survey results were used as a prompt for discussion on the topics raised, and the scoping of subsequent phases of the ethnographic research.

3 See McDermott (2000, 158–159).

4 See also Dressler (2009, 111–114); Eder (1987, 59); McDermott (2000, 94–95, 158–173); Novellino (2000); Warren (1964, 94).

5 This occurs because as competition rises, and the resource becomes more degraded, the price of almaciga decreases.

6 Following extensive lobbying by NATRIPAL (Nagkaisang Tribu ng Palawan, the United Tribes of Palawan) and further supported by the establishment of the Indigenous People's Rights Act of 1997 (IPRA) (RA 8371) (De Beer and McDermott 1996; Pinto 2000).

7 Such comments speak to much broader assumptions of ethnicity and class that have been widely linked to dispossession across Southeast Asia (Li 2023). Also pertinent to understanding moral claims on standards of living are myths specific to Palawan that explain ethnic-based divisions of wealth in terms of an inherited hierarchy whereby different ethnic groups are considered the children who are rewarded or punished for an instance of moral transgression against their parents (Warren 1964).