The following are the abstracts of the papers accepted for the workshop:
Sira-Sira Store: Variety, Ephemerality, and Food Security in Times of Crisis
Anacorita Abasolo, PhD Student, Environmental Science, University of the Philippines Los Baňos
Sari-sari stores are a quintessential part of the Philippine micro economy. These stores typically have a small floor area, are operated in residences, and sell a variety of goods mostly in small packets. Ubiquitously found in residential clusters in rural and urban communities, sari-sari stores are the most accessible go-to retail stores for daily needs and also in times of crisis. My work closely examines sari-sari stores and their role in providing food security in times of crisis, such as extreme weather events and now the pandemic.
I situate my work in Capiz, a province with a vibrant agriculture and fishing economy that is regularly impacted by typhoons on a yearly basis. Sari-sari stores in the coastal communities of Capiz are typically described as ephemeral, best captured in the playful expression “sirá– sirá store”. The word sirá, in Hiligaynon, means “to close”, which locals use to depict sari-sari stores as often temporarily closed due to limited supplies. Most sari-sari stores in Capiz are household-managed, with capital coming from micro-loans, surplus income from daily fish catch, and income from family members engaged in wage labor. Their existence are then highly vulnerable to households’ _financial struggles. When compounded by environmental disasters, it is then common to see sari-sari stores closing from time to time.
Despite their “sirá-sirá” nature, sari-sari stores appear to play an important role in household and community livelihoods and food provisioning most especially in times of crisis. Even when there is no crisis, sari-sari stores already serve as the source of some of the basic daily needs of household owners, such as money for school fees, food, and livelihood materials such as fish nets, gasoline (for fishers), and expensive chemical inputs (for farmers). These stores also become the source of credit for neighboring households facing financial difficulties. In times of environmental crisis, neighboring households rely heavily on sari-sari stores as immediate source of food in a form of credit. The food provisioning function of sari-sari stores also extends to the community level. For example, I observed that local governments purchase food from sari-sari stores for their relief packs, especially when roads become inaccessible immediately after a crisis event.
Bahay Kubo and the Making of the Filipino Identity
Stephen Acabado, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles
Using the quintessential Philippine garden described in the folk song, “Bahay Kubo,” this paper emphasizes how Filipinos’ ideas of food is based on an active regional interaction and a regional maritime trade that spans at least 1,000 years. “Bahay Kubo” is first learned in pre-school. The song is supposed to broaden children’s knowledge of the culture of local foodways, but its Tagalog-centric focus tend to leave out local and indigenous histories. I use food and plants as backdrop to a discussion on Philippine links with the broader Asian Region and the global maritime trade in the Early Modern Period (1400-1820 CE). I also examine human-environmental interaction through a historical-ecological approach to argue that changes observed in the Philippines were part of a more extensive regional process that connected the islands to other parts of the world.
Pacification Through Pineapple: The Role of the Del Monte Plantation in American Colonialism and Land Rights Issues in Bukidnon, Philippines
Inigo Acosta, PhD student, Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
My paper will align with the conference’s themes by analyzing the historical emergence and subsequent impacts of the Philippine pineapple export industry through the lens of the Del Monte Corporation (Philippine Packing Corporation) in Bukidnon, Philippines. This builds on fieldwork conducted during my MA where I collected primary source data through ethnographic interviews with former employees of the corporation as well as indigenous inhabitants of the province. Through interviews and secondary sources, this work argues that the Del Monte plantation was a tool of the American colonial state in the Philippines to pacify the “wild” native inhabitants of the island through employment opportunities to create docile agricultural workers, sanitation and educational incentives, and encouraging migration of Christian peasants from the north and central regions of the country to populate the sparsely inhabited Mindanao.
My research argues that American “agribusiness” companies set a precedent for arbitrary and top-down land acquisitions that has remained in the post-colonial landscape of Philippine rural politics and has negatively impacted land rights issues for indigenous peoples. Using an anthropological lens, I argue that the root of this tension is the different spatial and social understandings of land and property ownership between the corporation and the indigenous peoples of Bukidnon. This is grounded in fundamental culturally specific questions of: who owns what, who does what, who gets what, and what do they do with the created surplus wealth?
This analysis draws on Timothy Mitchell’s arguments regarding how “colonizing” refers not only to a Western presence, but also to the spread of a political order that inscribes a new conception of space (Mitchell, 1991). In this context, I argue that the dominant ontological mindset of Philippine plantations has its origins in Spanish colonialism with the Regalian doctrine or Jura Regalia and the American Torrens System which proposed that all “unclaimed” lands in each territory could belong to a central authority such as a monarch or a central land registry regulated by parcel maps. This mindset contrasts significantly with responses from my indigenous respondents and prior ethnographic research (Gaspar, 2000) that has proposed that indigenous ontologies of land ownership prioritized ecological stewardship, communal ownership, and customary laws such as rituals that formalized possession to a specific clan or family.
The final part of paper will align with the conference’s theme of the impact of extractive industries on indigenous food systems and well-being. I examine the role of the post-independence inter-island migration to Mindanao and subsequent expansion of American agribusiness plantations under new conglomerated yet disintegrated forms of ownership. I look at how Western ideas of land ownership permeated and seeped into Philippine agrarian consciousness with migrants from Luzon and the Visayas replacing and reproducing the colonial state’s land acquisition policies. I draw on several interviews with IPs who expressed that, it is not the American colonial officials and Del Monte managers who are most responsible for their struggles, but rather, the Philippine State and the inter-island “Dumagat” migrants. Nevertheless, to end, I draw on recent literature to connect the impact of American colonial plantations to preset-day issue facing Bukidnon IPs including poverty, hunger and resistance.
The “Undocumented” Foodscape: Food (In)security, Disaster, and the shifting ecologies in an urban informal settlement in Manila.
Maria Carinnes Alejandria, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Santo Tomas
The concept of foodscape has been used to define the social systems that determine the processes of creating and accessing foods. Key to this frame is an exploration of the intersection between communities and their environment which impact the meanings and preferences associated with foods. This paper discourses on the role of urban housing crisis on the development of localized distinctions on valuable and non-valuable foods. Drawing from ethnographic data among informal settlers in an urban coastal area in the city of Manila, this work locates how the concept of food security is redefined in a community that has been subjected to varying forms of environmental vulnerability as a byproduct of their undocumented status. More specifically, I elaborate on their forms of negotiations in terms of 1) food source turfing, 2) valuation of food for trading, and 3) development of food sharing networks as strategies to address household food insecurity. This study also interrogates the role of the shifting environment of the community in determining the types of food that are considered socially acceptable. From garbage piles along the shoreline where tirtir (recycled leftover food) are collected to the polluted estuary joining Pasig River and Manila Bay where seafood is harvested, the extent of food security of a household is dependent on periods of flooding that could redefine the community’s foodscape. The findings of this query contribute to a nuanced understanding of food as it considers the socio-ecological contexts of the people who consume these. This paper concludes with a critical note on the role of urban development planning in the redefinition of food access and utilization among vulnerable sectors which underpins the widening disparity in health equity.
Toxic Precarities and Slow Time in the Igorot Kankana-ey Vegetable Gardens
Jose Kervin Cesar Calabias, PhD candidate, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong
This paper is taken from my autoethnographic graduate thesis on Igorot Kankana-ey commercial vegetable gardening in the municipality of Buguias in Benguet province in northern Philippines. In this project, I interface my personal memories, including family photographs of ritual feasting, family gatherings, and agricultural activities with fieldwork conducted in the area from 2016 to 2017. Weaving focus group discussions and in-depth interviews of these Indigenous Filipino vegetable gardeners and other actors and institutions of the industry with my family’s archive and lived experience as vegetable gardeners, I describe and analyse the contemporary eco-cultural practices surrounding Igorot Kankana-ey commercial vegetable gardening that shape and mobilize an ecocritical Kankana-ey indigeneity. I argue that this risk-driven economy of Indigenous agriculture has brought about other forms of “toxic precarities” on Indigenous livelihood, identity, and communities in which land or daga is central to their ecological gamble; from plying the dangerous highland roads, racing to sell their goods especially during typhoon season of which landslides and road accidents are common down to risking soil structure and integrity for intensive agrochemical monocropping and cliffside terracing. These also reconfigure Indigenous feasting practices where, such as in my family’s case, certain ritual obligations are modified, postponed, or even discontinued by certain family members mostly for economic reasons, “risking” ancestral/spiritual “anger.” While there are other known environmental damages of agrochemicals and other pesticides and fertilizers used in the region, other long-term social, cultural, and biological effects of commercial highland vegetable gardening have yet to unfold, emphasising how temporality in the vegetable gardens is slow, incremental, and toxic. Therefore, these toxic precarities and “slow time” usher in other forms of equally risky and precarious labour such as overseas work and other forms of circular migration participated by younger more “mobile” members of the community that often leave the land or daga to be tended by an aging community. While contemporary forms of Indigenous identification and social movements regard land as crucial to indigeneity, the economic gains or what Martin Lewis described earlier as the “jackpot” from the risk and gamble of commercial highland vegetable gardening sought after by Indigenous gardeners continue to complicate the struggle for ancestral land rights, environmental preservation, and indigeneity.
My research can contribute to the aims of this workshop as it rearticulates the agricultural process from the lens of cultural studies to emphasize the ecocritical politics of indigeneity, including the risks both natural and cultural that are made by Igorot Kankana-ey gardeners to continue to supply majority of the need for fresh highland vegetables in the country’s capital alone, making us rethink what is at stake for rural Indigenous peoples to continue to put food on the nation’s table.
Filipino Foodways and Food Consciousness in L.A.
Dana Collins, PhD, Professor, Department of Sociology, California State University, Fullerton
Los Angeles, California, is in an urban culinary capital where diasporic food cultures emerge and define urban spaces. This ethnographic research on Filipino foodways and food consciousness in LA, explores the cultural and material food ties that allow a diasporic Filipino community to connect to homeland. I am interested what those connections look like as well as how generational engagements with foods from the homeland and consciousness about food insecurity, sustainability, and procurement factor into food consciousness and foodways in LA. I offer an ethnographic inquiry into Filipino food establishments (restaurants, food stands/trucks, grocery stores, and a new generation of fusion food), and in-depth interviewing with LA chefs and restaurant owners. I anticipate finding that food (gaining access to, preparation, sharing) is a site of resistance and forging ties to homeland. I am interested in exploring whether such resistance translates into food consciousness and action, or the ways in which Filipino food workers are both conscious and unconscious about food justice.
Milk Colonialism: Dairy Cows in the Making of the Modern Hygienic Foodway in the Philippines
Nicolo Paolo Ludovice, Lecturer, Department of History, The University of Hong Kong
This paper explores the entry of the dairy cow into the Philippine foodways at the turn of the twentieth century. The mass consumption of cow’s milk, whether fresh, canned, powdered, or substituted, in the country was a product of hygienic modernity which emerged in Western Europe in the late nineteenth century. Within the context of colonial urban expansion and diseases, cow’s milk supplemented the nutritional requirements of the population while serving as an alternative to more indigenous forms of milk. This development generated interest in bringing and investing on Swiss and Australian dairy cows especially by colonial health officials. However, their entry into the Philippines during the early twentieth century was marred with difficulties including a tropical climate, raging rinderpest panzootic, and resistance from local milk producers, among others. Despite these, cow’s milk found its strongest supporters, from health officials, physicians to women and children organizations. It also resulted in a research program by the Bureaus of Science and Agriculture in the 1920s that sought to bring and breed dairy cows from South Asia in the experimental farms around the country.
This paper examines the role of the non-human animal in the Philippine foodways within a global food network. By using archival sources such as official reports and correspondences, this paper argues that the involvement of dairy cows were integral in understanding the foodways and at the same time highlighting the vulnerabilities for the animals, as reflected by the new economic and scientific strategies of the colonial government. Within the backdrop of emergent global movements and concerns on milk hygiene, food safety, and public health, local foodways were not isolated nor exceptional but finds itself as constantly interacting with global food practices. Finally, the paper also argues that the production and consumption of milk as part of the regular diet suggested partaking in the modernization of food and health which included altering the environment. In doing so, the paper explores issues surrounding the historical emergence of dairy cows and milk as impinging on the society, culture, and the environment.
The Giant Stranger: A History of Javanese Guramis in Philippine Waters
Anthony Medrano, Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies Program, Yale-NUS College
Fishes abound in Philippine waters. Their endemism and diversity have centered the archipelago within today’s Coral Triangle. But it is the stranger-ness of certain kinds of fishes, and our knowledge of them and the ways in which they “became indigenized,” that forms the subject of this paper (Fernandez 1994, 15). It narrates a story that thinks with Doreen G. Fernandez’s Tikim (and in particular her chapter “Food and Flavors”) but also one that shows how rethinking the link between food and ecology—and muddying the distinction between foreign and native—can open up new directions for Philippine studies while reimagining, more broadly, the promise of decolonial history.
As Fernandez points out, some fishes are easy. They become foods through the slightest of changes. We might think of these fishes as retaining some sense of their fish identity when they are prepared for consumption—bangus, tunsoy, tulingan, hito, and lapu-lapu come to mind. With these kinds of fishes, the link between food and ecology is clear. These foods reflect the fishes that constitute them and thus signal the kinds of waters from which their stories begin. Whether stuffed bangus or steamed lapu-lapu, the fish is there—it is visible, legible, discernable. These kinds of fishes populate not only the stories of culinary and economic life in Philippine studies, but also the interwar recipes in Pura Villanueva Kalaw’s Pamagconserva at Pamaglutong Filipino, one of the earliest Tagalog-language cookbooks published in Manila in 1934.
But in the wake of Fernandez’s Tikim and the nature of this workshop, we might ask: what about local foodways that do not reflect the fishes that make them so? How about foods that obscure their fishery beginnings? Or more specifically, what about fishes that embody a world of halo-halo ecologies—as in the mixing of origins, tastes, cultures, and natures? How do we know what we know about the storied life of these kinds of fisheries, and why might their fish tales matter in terms of the promise of decolonial history and the future of Philippine studies? For answers to these questions, this paper considers the story of the giant gurami (Osphronemus goramy Lacepede 1801).
Today, the giant gurami constitutes one of the main fishes (along with dalag, hito, and bangus) used to make burong isda (a fermented fish-rice mixture), an enduring staple and a kind of halo-halo production in its own right. But like abucado (Persea americana), kamote (Ipomoea batata), papaya (Carica papaya), pinya (Ananas cosmosus), guyabano (Annona muricata), kakaw (Thebroma cacao), mais (Zea mays), sibuyas (Allium cepa), kalabasa (Cucurbita spp.), bayabas (Psidium guajava), kamatis (Solanum lycopersicum), and sili (Capsicum spp.), the giant gurami was introduced to the archipelago’s foodways and ecologies rather than borne from them (Amano et al., 2020). Brought to Manila from Jakarta in 1927, the giant gurami was promoted widely by the Philippine Bureau of Science as a viable food fish for mass cultivation because it fed on plants (kangkong in particular) and thrived in a range of wet landscapes—from ponds and canals to rice fields. It was the growing of rice and fish in the same palay fields that made the giant gurami an especially attractive species to the farming publics of central Luzon. In tracing a history of Javanese guramis in Philippine waters, the paper reveals that it was largely local knowledge production—rather than foreign expertise—that shaped the study of this fish and its fisheries in the interwar archipelago. In this way, the story of the giant gurami centers the work of Filipino scientists and shows how their archive (and archives like theirs) can be used to further a new kind of agenda for Philippine studies, one anchored in the entanglements of food, environment, science, and security. More critically, however, the story of the giant gurami speaks to the possibilities of a new kind of history—a decolonial history borne from knowing the lives of diasporic fishes and how these fishes “became indigenized” within the country’s foodways and ecologies.
Recrafting farmer livelihoods and ‘ethical’ consumption choice: Organic vegetable cultivation, food security, and social welfare in Benguet northern Philippines
Lynne Milgram, PhD, Professor Emerita and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, OCAD University
In the northern upland Philippines, the Benguet provincial government repeatedly reports on the wellbeing of the region’s extensive trade in highland temperate-climate vegetables (e.g., cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, cabbage, beans) as this industry, comprising 80 percent of vegetable market inputs nationwide, substantially contributes to the provincial economy. The bulk of this wholesale trade is funnelled through Benguet’s La Trinidad Vegetable Trading Post and the new 2016 mega-facility Benguet Agri-Pinoy Trading Center (Milgram and Mendoza 2021). What government communications fail to note, however, are consumers’ increasing concerns with the industry’s extensive use of commercial pesticides (Lu 2009; Reyes and Laurean 2007) and the growing movement among NGOs and agri-entrepreneurs to embrace alternative more sustainable cultivation practices such as organic farming (e.g., Landicho et al. 2014; Macanes and Basalong 2009; Salazar 2014; Suh 2015). Consumers’ growing demand for more ethically-produced fresh produce and their willingness to pay higher prices mean that more Benguet farmers are shifting their cultivation from conventional to organic practices. In so doing, their efforts begin to mitigate the precarious economic and environmental conditions that private, government, and corporate sector business practices have caused.
Grounded in ongoing research (since 2015) on food-provisioning livelihoods in the northern Philippine Cordillera, this paper analyzes the shifting dynamics of Benguet’s wholesale and retail vegetable trade in which organic cultivation is steadily increasing its market share. To this end, I outline the local parameters of what constitutes “organic” production and I review the guidelines Benguet farmers must follow and the incumbent costs they assume if they choose to obtain organic certification for their produce. To illustrate organic vegetable cultivation practice, I analyze three viable collectives that adhere to a social entrepreneurship mandate: 1) La Top, Benguet’s first and largest organic farming cooperative; 2) Northern Mountain Growers, founded and administered by nuns from Our Lady of Atonement Cathedral, Baguio City; and 3) Green Cordillera Network, a Benguet NGO working with coffee and vegetable farmers. I additionally draw on interviews conducted with the Benguet Organic Practitioners Association and with smaller community farmer associations to reflect on the opportunities and constraints that emerge for farmers through group cooperation and conflict. Given the lack of adequate government support for small and medium-size businesses nationwide (e.g., no crop and insufficient health insurance) (Yasmeen 2018), many farmers cannot meet their subsistence needs. Thus, when demand outstrips supply, cultivators may betray the trust of their support organizations by selling all or part of their produce to a higher bidder. At the same time, controlling alternative production sites such as organic farming constitutes a last frontier for capital expansion. The Benguet government thus devises strategies to penetrate such emergent practices in order to extract value from them often resulting in struggles over land, livelihood rights, and access to resources. In this light this research asks:
- To what extent can social enterprises and alternative food provisioning-livelihoods supporting organic farming expand from their small start-up premises and still maintain their transparent social justice mandate and practice?
- To what extent can social entrepreneurs and the farmer collectives they support embed their initiatives in broader socio-economic and political contexts to engage effective infrastructure change? Or do their initiatives simply address symptoms rather than root causes of inequality and widespread agrarian development across sectors?
- How effectively does Benguet’s organic vegetable cultivation practices respond to consumers’ preference for sustainably-produced vegetables?
Drawing on scholarship on social entrepreneurship (e.g., Nichols and Cho 2006; Phan et al. 2014), and on that of sustainable agriculture, food provisioning, and commodity chain flows (e.g., CWEARC 2016; Cabannes and Marocchino 2018; Dale et al. 2021; Kinwan et al. 2017; T. Mendoza 2004; Montefrio et al. 2020; Reuter 2018), I suggest that the growth in Benguet’s organic farming sector is, in fact, realizing, albeit in degrees, farmers’ and consumers’ goal of establishing more sustainable ecological and resilient food systems. While socio-economic and political constraints have indeed challenged the efficacy of this movement to activate “real” social change on some levels, the new opportunities for farmers and consumers that have emerged encourage these food provisioning stakeholders to continue to massage organic farming practices to realize the food security goals for which they advocate.
Sanitizing Buru: The Re-placement and Re-moralization San Agustin’s Fermented Landscape
Melanie Narciso, PhD candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Georgia Athens
How do cultures consume their landscapes when their landscapes cannot be ingested, stomached and digested? A possibility is the re-creation of a more swallowable place!
Such is the case of San Agustin, an agricultural village in the town of Candaba in Pampanga, Philippines. The village is known to be home of many buru-makers. Buru, fermentation fish with rice, has been the residents’ default technique to preserve abundant fish brought about by seasonal floods of the Candaba swamp of which the village is part of. Recently however, buru has become less of a product of the landscape and much more of it becoming its recreator. While San Agustin enjoys a reputation of being a commercial buru-making center and one of the most progressive barangays in town, its bears an extremely poor past – a history literally littered with human excrement and redolent of fecal stench that for a time defined the place and its locals. Residents have turned to buru-making to tell a different story.
This paper talks about how the rise of the commercial production of Candaba buru reinvented the once notoriously smelly and dark fermented tradition into a clean, pretty, stink-free concoction of pink fish and white rice. It traces how this new clean buru aesthetic has become not only the quality standard but also a moral taste of commercial and household buru-makers alike. Looking at this biography of buru though the intersections of anthropology of landscape, material, senses and memory, highlights this clean buru as an intervention to eradicate the characteristic buru stink— a mnemonic of their oppression as a people. It is a cleanliness drive that replaces evocative ingredients as rotten fish and dark rice with placeless and memoryless ingredients as aquaculture-grown fish and delocalized rice. In effect, it is a memory work recreating a progressive sense of San Agustin and consequently a reverse engineering of San Agustin terroir.
This work foregrounds the role of cognition of landscapes in the reinvention of food traditions as well as place. “Cognized landscapes” tackled here are less-brain centric—more anchored on the cognitive, affective agencies of memories carried by situated material (specifically food) and bodies. While this story repeats the themes of agriculture modernization, climate change, and biocultural resource erosion battering the Philippine landscape, it highlights swamp-based food commodification and heritigisation these issues co-produced, and the sensory/memory productions therein. The latter include multi-scalar senses of place: geographic imaginaries that enforce proper foodways and swamp citizenry.
Such sensory/memory mediated, place-based reinvention of food interfaces with the much talked about yet understudied concepts as econutrition and food systems in the Philippine nutrition scene. Still lacking much anthropological analysis, the field is wide open for new lenses. The critical lens of place and body would carve a place-based nutrition and/or Filipino ethnonutrition; one anticipated to be transgressive considering many universals central to the nutrition profession. But such faithfulness in producing food anthropologies of specific ecosystems and marginal landscapes to address place-based food problems promises a different and unforced position to re-examine dominant discourses.
Exploring the Possibilities of Settler Filipino Food Sovereignty within Tkaronto©
Kaitlin Rizarri, MA student, Adult Education and Community Development, University of Toronto, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
In Canada, Filipinos constitute one of the largest migrant groups in the world today that move to work abroad (Parre.as, 2008), one quarter of immigration has been under the Live-in Caregiver program, and in Toronto specifically, Filipino’s are overrepresented in low-paying jobs (Kelly et al., 2012, pp. 70-75). Parre.as (2008) describes this system as the “three-tier reproductive labour system”, where Filipinos are employed to “produce” (settler colonial) societies (4). Employer-locked programs and poverty create significant vulnerability, enhancing food insecurity amongst settler Filipinos. In a study that examined the effects of the Live-in Caregiver Program, Tungohan et al. (2015) found that many Filipinas could not afford to purchase food: they were only allowed to eat food that was “leftover” (94), food was leveraged as control by their employers, and they were not permitted to eat Filipino food.
As a pre-condition for food security (McMichael, 2010; Patel, 2010; as cited in Sumner et al. 2015, 246), food sovereignty (FS) is defined as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through sustainable methods and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems” (La V.a Campensina, n.d). Within this context, my research, and forthcoming paper for Halo Halo Ecologies will reflect on my interviews with Filipinx/a/os farmers based in Canada who consider themselves passionate about food sovereignty and/or food justice. I believe diasporic Filipinx/a/o farmers have unique lived experiences that can enhance the discussion to what Filipino food sovereignty means, the implications and/or connections it has to foodways within the homeland, how food sovereignty is a portal for food security, and to be in good relationship with Indigenous communities both in the diaspora and in the Philippines. Further, my research will engage with how diasporic Filipinx/a/os farmers are living in the wake of the disruption of Filipino foodways and how their Land work contends with present realities of settler colonialism within Turtle Island (North American). My literature review has included foodway disruption in the Philippines during the American period as documented by Orquiza (2020) and the project of settler colonialism that brings hungry Filipinos to Turtle Island, while dispossessing and disregarding Indigenous foodways on their sovereign land, such as Indigenous Land Education (McCoy et al., 2016; Tuck et al., 2014; Calderon, 2014; Kimmerer, 2013; Settee and Shukla, 2020) and Asian settler colonial studies (Fujikane and Okamura, 2008).
I am in a unique position to conduct this research as I am both Filipina and Mi’kmaw (Indigenous to Ktaqmuk or Newfoundland). For this reason, and in alignment with Indigenous Research Methodologies that often integrate a personal connection to methodology, (Absolon, 2011; Kovach, 2009, Wilson, 2008), I have chosen Two-Eyed Seeing as understood by (Reid et al., 2020; Reid, 2020; Iwama et al., 2009; McGregor, 2018) as my methodology. As a modified version of the traditional way of using Two-Eyed seeing, I use both Kapwa (forthcoming) the “self-within the other” (Mendoza & Perkinson, 2003) and the second ‘eye’, Indigenous paradigms, to develop interview questions for participants. In this way, both communities’ perspectives and intimate connections to the food system are fully represented. As a medicine grower myself, the intimacies farmers have with the Land surface complex discussions that tap into the intersections of colonization, settler colonialism, climate crisis and their decolonial positionings, which would contribute in a significant way to Filipino transnational understandings of food sovereignty and Halo Halo Ecologies edited volume. As this research is already underway, a full paper of 5,000-7,000 words will be completed in May, 2022.
What Makes Water (Un)potable? A Look at the Life History and Future of Water
Clarissa Ruzol, PhD student, Anthropology Programme, London School of Economics and Political Science
Before drinking water nourishes our bodies, water is first nourished by blending and filtering the inherited technolegal properties of water that define its past and future forms. This prompts us to ask what (un)potable water carries, or does not carry, as a medium that sustains our bodily functions. Metro Manila’s water is said to be potable if you asked the employees of the water concessionaires and the government water agency. But over the past generations, residents have increasingly subsisted in bottled filtered water. Framing water as food that nourishes the body entails tracing the life history of water and the extrapolation of its future. What this paper alludes to is the understanding that the available (un)potable water in our taps is not merely defined by the biochemical attributes of safe water, nor is it necessarily a matter of preference in taste (i.e., filtered water is preferred over chlorinated water). Instead, the meaning of (un)potable water is under the firm tutelage of the history of water bureaucracy in Metro Manila. The study explores how water is abstracted from the general category of nature in the form of fresh water, rain, or river, and into a material object that is being ingested to provide nourishment as an obligation of Metro Manila’s water bureaucrats to its citizens. What does this obligation look like? How does water transmute from being a ‘river’ to its state of ‘raw water’ and eventually as ‘clean and (un)potable water’? The paper aims to decipher the meaning of (un)potable water shrouded in its technical, legal, and colonial past using ethnography and critical discourse analysis to be discussed in three broad sections. First, the history of the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System is presented by reading how archives of its past write about drinking water from the time it was known as the Carriedo Waterworks during the Spanish colonial period, through the organisational changes in the American regime, and until the privatisation schemes in the 1990s. The second section will be drawn from an ongoing ethnography of engineers, lawyers, and managers of a dam project currently being implemented. The dam is supposed to solve the water crisis of Metro Manila today. This section begins its enquiry before water is dammed and collected as ‘raw water’ by following the places where water is not found, in processes of consent-seeking and inscriptions in paperwork and designs that schematise the conveyance of its flow and future form. Lastly, it probes the faith of the apprehended water’s life in the technolegal devices that manage treatment facilities producing the refined water being distributed across Metro Manila. The study aims to contribute to the discussion of foodways in the Philippines by describing the material politics of water found in the water bureaucracy promising to work and ensure the supply of clean water to its citizens. But as this paper potentially reveals, looking at the control of potable water could tell us more about the contemporary dynamics between national security and people’s welfare than water provisioning alone.
A Pantry of Things: Care Work, Crackdowns, and Carceral Arrangements in Food (and) Activism
Zeke Sales, BS student, Department of Geography, University of the Philippines
With the contemporary emergence of urban community pantries in the Philippines, this paper configures urban arrangements like state-planning, food-logistics and housing, through metonyms of the pantry, cabinets and containers. The furniture pantry, here tied as material analytic, enables new modes of perception, mirroring questions of disposability, the preservation of bodies and fermenting social movements during periods of lockdown. In the height of a raging pandemic, the Duterte government has managed to hammer an Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) that places the lives of critics, activists and human rights workers’ lives in evermore peril. Notwithstanding crackdowns and mass extrajudicial killings, which preceded the ATA, the government’s National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF ELCAC) retains a large sum of the national budget despite the prevalence of underpayed frontliners, slow-vaccine rollout and insufficient amelioration programs. These shortcomings have brought to fore various mutual-aid initiatives such as community pantries, that is, donation satellites where people give “according to their ability, to each according to their needs”. Not exempted from suspicion: community pantry organizers have equally experienced red-tagging – labeled as communist terrorist – and intimidation from the NTF-ELCAC, endangering the lives of volunteers and donors alike. With vast reaching protests in social media, viral memes on acronyms that signify the communist party (CPP) and its longstanding armed guerrilla unit (NPA) were retorted as “National Pantry Association” and “Community Pantry of the Philippines” to decry pointless militarist protocols during the pandemic. Such intense biopolitical arrangements cut through the geobody’s symptoms in terms of incessant privatization of healthcare, food insecurity through land conversions and the targeting of individuals, like environmentalists, critical of the state (Winichakul, 1997).
Drawing on debates surrounding entanglement and new/old materialism, I operationalize the pantry as active agent terminus of a foodscape. I capture, with the use of photography, the thing’s assemblage – containing kitchenware, essential spices and etc. – along with a series of interviews with the urban poor about dwelling and displacement. I approach this with a framework that takes on the human body as part of the production of space (Lefebvre, 1991) fortified in conversation with the material load and texture of the pantry to archive ingredients consumed by bodies in the global south. I also draw on the writings of political prisoner and agroecologist, Angie Ipong to extrapolate the carceral geography of collective urban farming in cities, cells and haciendas through her books Red Rose for Andrea (2012) and Bungkalan (2017) – the latter being applied into continuous organic farming practices through occupation of vacant lots in urban and rural areas; the same practice which lead to a succession of massacres in the island of Negros. Employing Achille Mbembe’s (2019) ethics of the passerby, I simultaneously bring together the agroecological hype in urban poor communities and relocation sites in the peri-urban fringe (Ortega, 2016) as political acts of reclaiming the land from neoliberal property arrangements with the furtherance of genuine agrarian reform. Lastly, I conclude by envisioning this mirage as an alternative to anthropocentric arrangements in foodscapes and urbanizing spaces. Approximating Bruno Latour’s (1993) “a parliament of things”, I formulate what is called “a pantry of things” to retrace the domestic and macroeconomic infrastructures that belie food in a more-than-human imaginary.
The Practice of Agroecology in Lumad Schools
Thea Kersti Tandog, Assistant Professor, Department of Social Sciences, University of the Philippines Mindanao
Mary Jill Ira Banta, Member of Liyang Network
Lumad, which is a Visayan term meaning ‘native’ or ‘born of the Earth’ (an assertion, therefore, of autochthony), is the collective name for various indigenous groups living in Mindanao, the southernmost region of the Philippines. Since the 1990s, many Lumad groups, with the support of advocate groups, have established Lumad schools. Lumad schools integrate cultural education, which involves strengthening Lumad cultures in their curriculum, with science using participatory and Freirean approaches. Since their inception, Lumad schools have been integral in the construction of social, economic, and political relations among Lumad students and their particular communities. They have deepened and enriched the perspectives and practices of Lumad communities with the aim of equipping Lumad communities with tools in the latter’s assertion for self-determination. One of the practices developed in Lumad schools is agroecology which aims to train Lumad students in sustainable farming as well as self-sufficiency. In this paper, we will argue that the Lumad schools are significant instruments in establishing food security and in deepening the environmental relationships of Lumad people. We will also explore the context in which it has become a necessity for their communities to shift to agroecology. This paper will be divided into four parts. First, we will trace the contemporary history of farming in Lumad communities and why there was a desire to incorporate agroecology in Lumad schools. We will connect integration of agroecology to the frustrations brought forth by intensive agriculture, land grabbing, development aggression, and militarisation in the Lumad ancestral domains. These four blights are the main culprits in environmental destruction in the ancestral lands of the Lumad as well as their imprisonment in unequal relationships with corporations such as Monsanto that sell GMO (genetically modified organisms) crops along with synthetic pesticides. Second, we will contextualise the practice of agroecology and highlight the role of advocates such as Liyang Network and Save Our Schools (SOS) Network, among others, in facilitating this shift. Third, we will discuss how agroecology impacts the social, economic, and political relations between and among Lumad students, their communities, and the nation-state in general. Here, we will also discuss the narratives of Lumad students in their practice of agroecology and how it has impacted their lives, perspectives, and ways. Finally, we will highlight the role of agroecology in the fight of Lumad communities for environmental and land defense. We see this practice as a form of resistance to the increasing political aggression against the Lumad, and the annihilation of the Lumad population and their cultures. We hope that this paper will shed light on the significance of agroecology, not just as an educational tool, but as a social practice that benefits the Lumad communities in the midst of environmental destruction and climate change in the Philippines.
Human-Seaweed Relations: A Cultural Biography of a Food Commodity in Small-Island Communities
Jessie Varquez, Jr., PhD student, Department of Anthropology, University of Manitoba
With its myriad by-products, the intensive farming of seaweeds for carrageenan is an important global commodity. Primarily used as emulsifier and binder not only to food but also in pharmaceutical and cosmetic products, seaweed-derived carrageenan is produced annually in hundreds of thousands of metric tons with an estimated value of billions of dollars (Campbell and Hotchkiss 2017). Seaweed farming is hailed as one of the ‘next frontiers’ in agriculture and the world’s most important ‘ocean crops’ (Degnarain 2020). In this global market context, the Philippines plays a key role in seaweed farming, producing 48 million tons in 2019 (BFAR 2020). Because of the economic importance of seaweeds production in the Philippines, the industry is constantly subjected to governmental regulations, policies, and development interventions.
Except for a few publications, most studies on seaweeds in the Philippines are either on its economic importance or biological properties – with the latter aiming to harness the plants’ potential for intensive cultivation and industrial applications. My main interest, however, is geared towards human-seaweed relations – i.e., how both species are (re)configured in the process of relationship-making and co-engagements. In explicating such relations, I turn into ‘cultural biography’ (Kopytoff 1986) as a way of framing seaweeds as food item and commodity and at the same time highlighting the human actuations and valuations that shape the seaweeds’ constitution as species. I’m interested in addressing two interrelated questions: how do seaweeds figure into the lifeworld of small-island communities? and what issues and transformations emerge when these coastal communities participate in seaweed farming as driven by global market demands? To answer these questions, I investigated two small-island communities in the Philippines called Capul and Sibutu in Northern Samar and Tawi-Tawi provinces, respectively. This was part of a series of ethnographic fieldwork in 2017-2018 as a member of a team of multidisciplinary researchers looking into climate change adaptation.
Capul and Sibutu islands offer interesting and contrastive cases. Capul adopted seaweed farming, albeit now widely considered a failure, driven by a development program implemented by a local NGO and funded by an international aid. Despite the failure of introducing seaweed farming for carrageenan (locally called gusô, Kappaphycus sp.) as an alternative livelihood program for fishing families, another seaweed species thrives in the foodscape of the island. Harvested ‘wild’ from the shallow intertidal waters of Capul, gulaman (Gracilaria sp.) used to be a popular key ingredient in making gelatinous dessert recipes during the island’s much celebrated town fiestas. The knowledge in harvesting and processing gulaman, however, is gradually losing due to the availability of instant dried carrageenan, either in bar or powdered form. Sibutu, on the other hand, successfully embraced seaweed farming for carageen (locally called agar-agar, Kappaphycus sp.) since 1970s. Sibutu is identified as one of the largest seaweed producers in the country. Recently, agar-agar farmers adopted an interesting practice in intensifying their seaweed production. They now soak the agar-agar with inorganic fertilizers diluted in seawater to “charge” the seaweeds for its optimum growth. Sibutu seaweed farmers claimed that the agar-agar seemed “addicted” to “charging” for without it, the seaweeds would simply die before transplanting. This practice is said to have ecological (i.e., observed algal bloom) and social implications (e.g., longer work hours), effectively reconfiguring human-seaweeds relations.
By comparing cases from Capul and Sibutu, I examine the histories of seaweeds in these small-islands and how humans engage, transform, and threaten their relations with seaweeds and the environment. Informed by early ethnographies (Blanchetti-Revelli 1997, 1995) and inspired by anthropological studies on human-plant relations (Chao 2018; Atchison 2019), I argue that human-seaweed relations are co-constitutive and constantly re-made amidst the backdrop of agentic selves and intensified market demands. Therefore, I hope to contribute to Halo-halo Ecologies a cultural biography of seaweeds that are locally vanishing food item and globally important food commodity.