Agriculture, Domestic Animals, and Rice Culture
The bread-fruit tree, the banana, the coconut palm, to take only a few examples, require only the slightest attention to make them yield useful food for many years. For other…
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From Peoples of the Philippines by Alfred Louis Kroeber, 1919.
Agriculture and Domestic Animals. There is a widely prevalent theory that mankind as a whole has passed through three successive stages with reference to its food. According to this view, people were first hunters, fishermen, or gatherers of roots and berries; after a time they came to domesticate animals and lead a pastoral life; in the last state, they are reputed to have added the domestication of plants, in other words, agriculture.
This theory rests upon two foundations. The first is the observation that all nations of hunters possess a comparatively rude civilization always, at any rate, inferior to that of Europeans. The second prop to the theory is the knowledge that the Hebrews and certain European peoples changed from the pastoral to the agricultural life about the beginning of the historical period. It will be seen that these two facts are a very slender foundation on which to rear a hypothesis applicable to mankind in general. Indeed, it has long since been noted that there are so many contrary cases that the theory must be looked upon as untenable. In the whole of aboriginal America, for instance, animals other than the dog were domesticated in only a few place and at best utilized only to a subsidiary extent. In a large part of both North and South America, however, agriculture was practised, in many regions intensively, and there can be no doubt whatever that this mode of life was entered directly from the hunting and root-gathering stage.
Domestic animals are kept in most parts of the East Indies, but always among people that also till the soil and in every case place much more dependence on their crops than on their pigs and fowls. Side by side with them live tribes that neither keep animals nor farm but are pure hunters. In fact, the breeding of animals is so universal an accompaniment of agriculture, and so distinctly secondary to it throughout Oceania, that there is hardly any conclusion possible but that it was developed as a side-product of agriculture and probably subsequently to the latter.
The problem therefore shifts from the general but erroneous theory, to the question of how the transition from a hunting to a farming life was accomplished in the Philippines and East Indies. In the nature of the case, such a transition happens much more easily in the fertile tropics than in more temperate latitudes. The bread-fruit tree, the banana, the coconut palm, to take only a few examples, require only the slightest attention to make them yield useful food for many years. For other crops, such as the sweet potato, which is grown so abundantly in the Philippines, the procedure is little more difficult. All that plants of this type need to produce a bountiful crop is a clearing to give them a start, and some protection against the natural growths that threaten to choke them out of existence.
The many difficulties that confronted and must often have discouraged the incipient agriculturist in more northern latitudes are therefore scarcely present in the tropics. All that is required to convert even quite uncivilized tribes from hunters to farmers is the realization of the desirability of greater steadiness of food supply. This desirability must become a necessity as soon as the population attains density, as has obviously often happened on the comparatively small areas of an archipelago.
If then agriculture can be slid into, as it were, by even lowly tribes, it is hopeless to look at the present time for a precise knowledge of the very first beginning of the art in the Philippines. Agriculture may have been adopted time and again by disconnected peoples and under diverse conditions. Where natural conditions make the acquisition of a new cultural phase so exceedingly easy that a slight stimulus suffices, there is every probability that this stimulus first occurred in the very remote past.
The presence in the Philippines of some bands of Negritos that do not farm, does not in any way antagonize this conclusion or seriously complicate the situation. Just in proportion as the majority of natives became dependent upon agriculture, they would require less territory for their maintenance. That territory would also tend to be concentrated in the lowlands, leaving the mountains and denser forests of little use or interest to them. This condition in turn would leave these wilder tracts wholly at the disposal of the less numerous hunting peoples, and so enable these to live without being seriously pressed for subsistence. In this way it is conceivable that the establishment of agriculture might itself incline for a very long time to perpetuate the hunting stage in closely adjacent regions. This conclusion is particularly applicable to the Philippines, where we know that the bulk of the population has long been concentrated on the coast.
As regards domesticated animals, it is notable that the Filipino kept only three besides the dog. These are the common fowl, the pig, and the carabao or water buffalo. All three of these varieties also occur wild on the islands, the chicken as the jungle fowl, the pig probably as a variety originally wild, whereas it is doubtful whether the buffalo is native or has been introduced by man. Cattle and sheep were not known in the Philippines until after the arrival of the Europeans. Horses and goats are bred by some of the natives of Mindanao, but there is every indication that these were introduced by the Mohammedans, or at the utmost during the last phase of the period of Hindu influence.
The buffalo is now used both as a draught animal and for riding, but there seems to be no record of its being kept for any other purpose than food in the pre-European period. In fact, wheeled vehicles were unknown and roads on which they could have been used did not exist. Even today, the more remote pagans of Luzon keep their buffaloes only to slaughter them.
It is also not native practice in the Philippines to milk the buffalo or to utilize any dairy products. This is a habit characteristic not only of the East Indies, but of southeastern Asia.
Perhaps the most notable thing about the place of domesticated animals in primitive Filipino life is the fact that animals are never killed other than for a sacrifice, and that the flesh of sacrificed animals is always consumed wholly or almost wholly by the worshippers. This seems to have been true of all the natives when discovered, and is still the custom of the uncivilized peoples. Since sacrifice is the most important act in ceremonial, it is clear that the Filipino thinks of eating flesh as essentially an accompaniment of religion, and conversely of religion at least in all its greater and more public manifestations as always ending in a substantial meal.
This devotion, in theory at least, of domestic animals to the purposes of religion, is likely to be an importation. The idea of animal sacrifice is cardinal in the religion of the ancient Greeks, Hebrews, and other nations in the region of the eastern Mediterranean. It is not essentially East Asiatic; or if ever it was, fell at an extremely early period into nearly complete disuse. The more or less uncivilized regions in which the life sacrifice still prevails, such as large parts of Africa, are so situated that the practice might easily have been introduced by diffusion from its original Mediterranoid center. There seems considerable probability that the sacrifice usages were also carried eastward from their earliest hearth, presumably through India, and thence to the East Indies and the Philippines. It does not of course follow necessarily that the breeding of animals was unknown before. But its identification with the sacrifice concept is so undeniably close today, that there exists the very strong possibility that both traits of culture were carried into the Philippines as merely two aspects of a single set of practices.
Rice Culture. Rice is the staple food of the Filipino of every condition, and the thing that probably occupies his life-long attention more than any one other. His most regular labor is that which he performs in the cultivation of this plant. In place of money, he uses measures of rice, both as standards of value and in actual transfers. The greatest article of wealth among so thoroughly pagan a people as the Ifugao is the rice field. A man that inherits enough of these is thereby rich and his position in society established.
Rice fields are the last of his possessions which an Ifugao willingly allows to pass from the tenure of his blood line. Every tribe whose religion has not broken down before Christianity or Mohammedanism, practices at least one important ceremony whose main purpose is the production of rice; frequently a whole series of such rituals are performed for each stage of rice agriculture the clearing of the ground, the planting, the cultivation, the harvesting, and the preservation of the crop. It is significant that even though other crops are grown, they very rarely have special ceremonies devoted to them.
The native point of view is clearly that if the success of the rice is insured by the necessary magical and ceremonial means, other crops will automatically take care of themselves. When plant food is offered to the spirits in any connection, it is almost invariably rice. In short, the Filipino not only eats rice, but thinks in terms of rice, and if his civilization is to be described in a single phrase it can only be named a rice culture.
Something like a hundred varieties of rice are distinguished by the natives. But from the point of view of the student of Filipino life, these fall into two great classes; swamp rice, which can be grown only in marshes or under irrigation; and upland or mountain rice, which needs no watering beyond that supplied by the rains. The distinction between these two types is important because of its effect on the habits of the people. Swamp rice keeps its cultivators in the lowlands, or forces them to construct irrigation works which become elaborate in proportion as the country follows rugged contours.
Upland rice has a much smaller yield, but possesses the advantage that it can be grown almost anywhere, and makes possible adherence to the kaingin system of scattered clearings in the forest.
Kroeber, Alfred Louis. Peoples of the Philippines, American Museum Press, 1919.
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