Engineering the Philippine uplands: Gender, ethnicity, and scientific forestry in the American colonial period

Abstract

The policy discourses and “technologies of rule” of the U.S. colonial state in the Philippines (1898–1946) rationalized people, territories, and natural resources in a way that conveyed implicit gender and ethnic biases. Through its ethnological surveys, the colonial government firmed up boundaries of ethnic identities and habitats by classifying people into ethnic categories and partitioning their territories into officially recognized administrative units. The Kalanguya, an upland group living in southern portions of the Cordillera region, have not been “pulled out” of anonymity by these surveys or state-sponsored ethnological studies. Thus, they have not benefitted from state-allocated resources such as protected reserves nor have they been granted seats in public office like other upland groups. For their part, upland women were seen as belonging to the private sphere of domesticity, despite their contributions to upland livelihoods and subsistence, while upland men were centrally located within the orbit of public state transactions. As a result, upland women were never recognized by forestry officials as resource managers in their own right, nor were they treated as capable political subjects with rights to own and make claims to resources in the uplands. Forestry agents also classified and determined which varieties of forest resources were suitable for commerce and they delineated certain spaces for private disposition and others, especially the forest and uplands, as falling under state control. The U.S. colonial state's social engineering in the uplands privileged men over women as gatekeepers of resources by defining how resources would be used and by rendering particular groups like the Kalanguya as anonymous in the ethnographic landscape.

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Notes on contributors

Babette P. Resurrección

I have benefitted greatly from the useful comments of Ineke van Halsema, Ben White, Frank Hirtz, Edsel Sajor, and an anonymous reader on an earlier draft of this paper, as well as from insightful exchanges with Thanh-dam Truong on issues pertaining to “women and the state.” I also wish to acknowledge the Institute of Social Studies in the Hague for their financial and institutional support for my ongoing doctoral researchon gender relations, resource use, and environmental change among the Kalanguya of Nueva Vtzcaya, Philippines.