The Burden of Responsibility: Predicaments of Environmental Life in the Caraballo Mountains, Northern Philippines
2022 (English)Doctoral thesis, monograph (Other academic)
Abstract [en]
Indigenous people are not obviously, or naturally, stewards of the environment. But when the idea that they are such custodians gains legal traction, and when indigenous land-use practices are codified to reflect environmental principles, they become a burden of responsibility that has significant consequences for the lives and the livelihoods of indigenous communities.
This thesis is about Ikalahan people of the Caraballo Mountains in Northern Philippines and the vicissitudes of their obligation to the environment. Based on twelve months’ ethnographic fieldwork, the thesis explores what happens when the legal recognition of Ikalahan people as an indigenous group demands that they re-fashion their ancestral land from a place where they practice swidden agriculture into a space where they are supposed to ensure environmental conservation. It explores how the Philippine state utilizes scientific knowledge such as cartography and forestry to facilitate the expulsion and estrangement of Ikalahan people from their land even as it relies on those people to maintain their ancestral land as an exclusive ecological sanctuary.
How do Ikalahan communities enact this environmental responsibility, and how do they contest it? The different chapters explore how villagers deploy the cultural power of shame to impose ecological obligations, how they also create tactics to evade and subvert such obligations, and how they use the rhetoric that the land should not be monetized to, precisely, monetize it. The chapters also discuss how traditional moral principles provide a means for Ikalahan people to both understand and facilitate the economic inequalities that have emerged since their land was transformed into an ecological zone.
By addressing how Ikalahan communities negotiate the consequences of their legal recognition as indigenous people, the thesis contributes to the expanding literature that shows how indigeneity is not a neutral label, but is, rather, a potentially burdensome positionality whose attachment to the environment is anything but straightforward.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Uppsala: Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University , 2022. , p. 189
Series
Dissertations and documents in cultural anthropology : DICA, ISSN 1653-0543 ; 25
Keywords [en]
Indigeneity, Indigenous People, Environment, Conservation, Legal Recognition, Swidden Agriculture, Ikalahan People, Philippines
National Category
Cultural Studies Law and Society Social Anthropology Forest Science Ecology
Research subject
Cultural Anthropology
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-486935ISBN: 978-91-506-2977-4 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:uu-486935DiVA, id: diva2:1705055
Public defence
2022-12-09, Geijersalen, Engelska Parken, 6-1023, Thunbergsvägen 3P, Uppsala, 13:00 (English)
Opponent
Supervisors
2022-11-172022-10-202022-12-01