Asian Studies at Hawaii, No. 37 Ilocano Irrigation The Corporate Resolution Henry T. Lewis ASIAN STUDIES AT HAWAII UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII PRESS Open Access edition funded by the National Endow- ment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Licensed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Interna- tional (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits readers to freely download and share the work in print or electronic format for non-commercial purposes, so long as credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. The Creative Com- mons license described above does not apply to any material that is separately copyrighted. Open Access ISBNs: 9780824883768 (PDF) 9780824883775 (EPUB) This version created: 5 September, 2019 Please visit www.hawaiiopen.org for more Open Access works from University of Hawai‘i Press. © 1991 by the University of Hawaii Press All rights reserved To the memory of William C. Beatty, Jr., an inspired and demanding professor of anthropology CONTENTS Acknowledgments xiii Map Figures xv Introduction 1 Corporate Groups 15 The Family as a Corporate Group 16 The Zanjera as a Corporate Group 34 Comparisons 86 Conclusions 107 Appendixes 1. An Irrigation Agreement 113 2. Affidavit of Claim to Land Ownership 116 3. Notarized Description of Irrigation Contract 119 4. A Historical Court Case 121 Notes 141 Glossary 147 Bibliography 151 Index 155 ix What is involved in Chinese business success is not only motivation and sophistication, but also well-developed modes of concentrating and delegating authority which enable kinsmen to work together in enduring corporate groupings. Such modes seem to be largely absent in bi- laterally organized southeast Asian societies, as many observers have noted in referring to them as “loosely structured,” “individualistic,” and “atomistic.” —Robert L. Winzler, “Ecology, Culture, So- cial Organization, and State Formation in Southeast Asia” ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Two periods of field research (January–June, 1976; April–August, 1978) were supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. However, the conclusions and opinions expressed are my own and are not necessarily those of the SSHRC. I am most appreciative for the companionship and discussions with my son, Robert, who assisted me in the Philippines in 1978. Inge Bolin and Melanie Wiber, both former graduate students at the University of Al- berta, were extremely helpful in the final preparation and editing of the manuscript. Various people at the Institute of Philippine Culture, Ateneo de Manila University, assisted with logistical matters. Among those who were particularly helpful were Dr. Ricardo G. Abad, Dr. Wilfredo Arce, and Thelma G. Padero. Special mention must be made of the friendship and assistance given to me by Gerard Rixhon. A very large number of people in the villages and town of Bacarra were helpful, especially those individuals in the five communal irriga- tion systems most closely examined. Elected officials from the Federa- tion of Communal Irrigation Societies of Bacarra went to great pains to make sure that I was able to attend meetings of the federation, meet with officials of more isolated irrigation cooperatives, obtain copies of documents, attend ritual events, accompany them to supervise elec- tions, and discuss the histories and current activities of their own irrigation groups. Four individuals from the federation deserve special thanks: Lorenzo Acoba, Mariano Bonoan, Tranquilino Galisa, and Al- fredo Mercado. I am particularly grateful to these four and others for xiii xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS patiently enduring the seemingly inordinate length of time it took me to learn enough to ask meaningful and intelligent questions and the num- ber of occasions that I went over the same materials with them. They and numerous other knowledgeable members of irrigation societies in Bacarra are the true experts on the technology and ecology of local irri- gation there. Finally, I should like to note my great indebtedness to the late Fr. Frank Lynch, SJV, the organizer and original director of the Institute of Philippine Culture. This obligation goes back to 1962 when I first under- took research in the Philippines and the several times after that when he provided invaluable assistance on matters relating to my research. Anthropology and sociology in the Philippines are much the poorer for his untimely death; countless individuals like myself are much the bet- ter for his having been there. Regrettably, this monograph had its publication delayed by more than five years. As a result, some of the statements about individuals in Ilocos Norte and “current conditions” in the Philippines have changed since the manuscript’s original acceptance for publication in the mid-1980s. It is also the case that new studies on communal irrigation, both within the Philippines and without, have come forward or are about to be released, and were this book being written today these stud- ies would have to be considered. Nonetheless, despite the delay, what is said about communal irrigation and corporate principles of social or- ganization in Ilocos Norte is as valid now as it was then. Other than making adjustments for a few time periods and current population esti- mates, the only formal change that I have made is in the dedication to the late Bill Beatty, who passed away early last year. As my first mentor in anthropology, I wish that he could have seen it. Figure 1. Northern Luzon, with barrios of Buyon and Mambabanga indicated. Figure 2. Laoag area, Ilocos Norte Province. Figure 3. Cauayan area, Isabela Province. Figure 4. Dams, canals, and fields involving four zanjeras in the municipality of Bacarra. Figure 5. Block map showing division of land between zanjera and landowners (proprietarios). Inkalian lands are those owned outright by zanjera members; inkapulo lands are those of water buyers. Figure 6. Parcel map showing two atar blocks with individual shares (bingay) of particular members and pieces of communally worked land (komon). Introduction IN MARCH 1963, Mr. Domingo, a village elder, retired farmer, and a pi- oneer settler, pointed to an acacia tree above the opposite bank of the Magat River as the place where the “battle with the headhunters” had begun.1 Just below there the Kalingas2 started to cross in their bangkas [wooden dugouts], four canoes with thirty or forty warriors, all yelling and waving their spears. On this bank there were about fifteen of us, plus a sergeant and four privates from the constabulary [detachment in Cauayan]. We had our bolos [machetes] and the soldiers had rifles. The sergeant had his men shoot into the air, and he yelled at the Kalingas to go back but they didn’t stop. We had faced a small group of them earlier [in the month] and they said this was their land and we must leave. Now they wanted to fight; to take our heads, I suppose. When they were halfway across, the sergeant told his companions to stop firing and he aimed at one of the Kalingas standing in the first canoe. He shot him, in the chest, right through his [wooden] shield. The others stopped yelling, and stared at his body in the water, and then they went and got him. We never saw them again. And they never came back. We went to our camp, our families were waiting, and we celebrated with what little we had. We thanked God and the ser- geant for the way it ended. We built our houses near the river, but after a bad flood some of us started a new barrio on the bluff overlooking the floodplains. We named it after the trees that grew there, a kind of wild coconut [babanga]. We 1 2 ILOCANO IRRIGATION called it Mambabanga—the place of wild coconuts. But there’s nothing wild here now. It’s been ours for almost fifty years. We Ilocanos, most of us from Bacarra and Vintar [Ilocos Norte], settled this area by clearing and draining the swamps, we drove away the Kalingas, we got sick with malaria and some people died, we built a dam and dug irrigation canals, and we made this a good place for growing rice. We were real pioneers, just like those people in the [American] movies, and we are very proud of that. Numbering over 6 million people, just over 10 percent of the more than 59,906,000 Filipinos (1989 estimate), Ilocanos are the third largest of eight major ethno-linguistic groups that make up the complex of Phil- ippine lowland cultures. Ilocanos are less well known than the more numerous Tagalogs in and around Manila or the Visayans from the cen- tral Philippines, and are generally considered to be less typical of the Christian Filipinos. All lowland Christian populations differ in terms of language, religious practices and beliefs, food preferences, art forms, and material culture. However, with the exception of Ilocanos, lowland Filipino populations are strikingly similar in their general patterns of culture and their overall forms of social organization. Once referred to as the “Yankees of the Philippines” by American officials who recruited them in large numbers to work in Hawaii and California, Ilocanos are said to be and see themselves as hard working, thrifty, industrious, pioneering, faithful to moral (and economic) obli- gations, possessing a reverence for the land, and fiercely loyal to friends and kin—characteristics that are similar to those expressed by other Fil- ipino subcultures but exhibited by Ilocanos in greater measure. While other Filipinos may grudgingly acknowledge some of these virtues, they also will often add their disapproval by stating that Ilocanos are aggres- sive, overly assertive, stingy, land hungry, prone to violence (especially in politics), possessively jealous, and exceedingly provincial.