Politics, Property and Law in the Philippine Uplands

by Melanie G. Wiber

The Ibaloi village of Kabayan Poblacion combines a subsistence agricultural economy with a market economy that has grown up as a result of subsequent waves of colonization. The Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century, following the trail of gold and slave-bearing Chinese trade junks, and were followed in 1898 by the Americans. The Ibaloi, who were gold miners and traders, cattle barons and vegetable producers, have since then come to be known as an Hispanicized uplands people, acculturated to Western ways and struggling to come to grips with new economic realities. This book examines the Ibaloi property system and demonstrates that the changes which have taken place since the Spanish arrival were complex and had numerous directions and relationships, many of them steered by the nature of Ibaloi society itself, others by the Spanish, and still others by the resources of Benguet Province. What began as a study of the Ibaloi property system rapidly became an exercise in understanding developments over time in social stratification, ritual and law. Wiber’s research has led her to challenge the dependency theory of legal pluralism, whereby peripheral zones are forced into economic dependency by having to exist within two legal structures, their own and another imposed by a central power zone, in favour of the social science view of legal pluralism. Thus all heterogeneous societies experience legal pluralism, but in different and individual ways, as people have a tendency to manipulate the law to their own advantage. She also takes issue with the narrowness of current anthropological terms relating to property systems and whether they are applicable to non-Western societies and argues for a reorientation of anthropology to end the tendency to generate simplistic models of property, kinship and law.

Paperback

First published January 20, 1994

About the author

Dr. Melanie G. Wiber joined the University of New Brunswick in 1987 and has been Full Professor of Anthropology since 1995. Her research focuses on economic and legal anthropology, natural resource management, the fisheries, and gender issues.

Dr. Wiber is currently finishing up a six-year project on integrated coastal management with the Coastal Community and University Research Alliance (CURA), funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). On this project, she collaborated with a team of community organizations and served on the management team. In addition, Dr. Wiber is participating in the five-year Canadian Capture Fisheries Research Network, where she is working on Project 1.1 (social sciences in support of assessing knowledge needs in fisheries management). Dr. Wiber supervised both masters and doctoral students funded by both projects.

Dr. Wiber has received numerous national and international research grants, including SSHRC standard research, conference and workshop grants, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology funding, and a visiting scholar grant from Wageningen University in the Netherlands. She has been a regular visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany, focusing primarily on legal pluralism and property studies.

Her recent publications have focused on new forms of property rights in quota management systems and in genetics, cultural property, community-based management in the fisheries, and gender issues. The University of New Brunswick has granted Dr. Wiber two Merit Awards (1998, 2006), and a Research Professorship (2003). She is a board member for the International Commission on Legal Pluralism (1999 to the present), and has served as Commission Secretariat (2001-2006). She is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Legal Pluralism.

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