Harold C. Conklin: Atlas of Multispecies Relations in Ifugao

ABSTRACT

In his Ethnographic Atlas of Ifugao, Harold C. Conklin describes the agricultural practices that have shaped a landscape of extensive terraced irrigation. While the book may be read as an anthropocentric story of human control of plants and animals, I demonstrate that the book also describes how humans and nonhumans are entangled through relations of mutual responsiveness. By drawing on concepts such as ‘sympoeisis’, ‘becoming-with’ (Haraway [2008]. When Species Meet. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press), and ‘dwelling’ (Ingold [2000]. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge), I uncover the Atlas’s hidden story of the terraced landscape as an ongoing materialisation of multispecies mutuality. I argue that it is in Conklin’s focus on the coordination of temporalities that multispecies relations become most visible, and I show how the introduction of high-yielding rice and Pentecostalism have led to interruptions in these carefully coordinated temporalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Temporality
• multispecies anthropology
• domestication
• becoming-with
• the Philippines

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 I conducted fieldwork in and around the municipality of Banaue, Ifugao in 2003–2004 and 2007–2008.

2 Earlier scholars (e.g. Beyer 1955) proposed that the Ifugao terraces were 2000–3000 years old, while more recent historical and archaeological studies claim a more recent origin of the terrace systems, seeing them as results of population expansion into the highlands as a response to Spanish colonization (Keesing 1962; Acabado 2010).

3 Conklin began his anthropology studies at Berkeley in 1943 where he was taught by Robert Lowie and Albert L. Kroeber. A year later, he was sent to the Philippines as a soldier in the US Army. When his service ended, he remained in the Philippines and spent three and a half month with the Hanunóo in Mindoro. When returning to the US, he completed his undergraduate studies at Berkeley and was admitted to graduate studies at Yale. After he received his PhD in 1954, he held a position at Colombia University before he, in 1962, became professor at Yale University where he stayed until he passed away in 2016.

4 Along with scholars like Charles Frake (1962) and William Sturtevant (1964), Conklin promoted an ethnoecological approach that combined studies of environmental knowledge with linguistics to understand how people organize and classify their knowledge about the environment and how this is related to their practices with plants and animals.

5 The little chicken and the domestic piglets on one of the other pictures on the same page most probably had their throats cut over in a later sacrificial ritual. Taking care of chickens and pigs while they are alive, feeding them particular kinds of food, making sure they are well, is a requirement for them to become suitable sacrificial animals (Remme 2014b, 2018).

6 Conklin’s multispecies perspective on pond fields is thus aligned with recent re-theorizations of domestication that sees domestication not as a singular relation between humans and a particular plant or animal species but rather as characterized by open-ended, multispecies and potentially transformative ecological relations (Lien et al. 2018; Swanson 2018; Remme 2018).

7 The idea that human civilization emerged with our ability to transform our environment through labour was also foundational for Marxist social theory, which was also a major inspiration for Childe’s work (see Lien et al. 2018).

8 I met Conklin in Bayninan, Banaue, in March 2004 when he was on one of his last fieldtrips to the area (see Remme 2017a).

9 It seems Conklin actually made more impact on anthropology through his Hanunóo research. His PhD thesis ‘The relation of Hanunóo culture to the plant world’ (1954b) is still considered a landmark in the development of ethnobiology (Hunn 2007; Dove 2017: 175; Ludwig 2018: 416).

10 Michelle Z. Rosaldo’s examination of Ilongot notions of self and emotions in Knowledge and Passion (1980) for instance, was published the same year as the Atlas, as was Clifford Geertz’s symbolic analysis in Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century-Bali (1980).