Sacrifice and Sharing in the Philippine Highlands

The Buid are a group of shifting cultivators inhabiting the highlands of Mindoro. They continue to resist incorporation into the economic, political and ideological systems of the lowland Philippines. This study focuses on the relationship between their value system and their history of resistance to the lowland world. Some of the most striking features of this value system are a thorough-going equality between women and men, old and young; a devaluation of dyadic ties of kinship and reciprocity; a high rate of divorce and remarriage which is positively valued; and, on the religious plane, the legitimation of belief through the direct personal experience of the spirit world in communal seances and sacrifices. This study is based on field research among the Buid of Ayufay, a community which formed the first large, permanent settlement in its history to counter the threat to their land, property and persons posed by settlers from the lowlands. The work will be of interest to students of ethnicity, highland/lowland relations, and indigenous resistance to the world system, as well as to anthropologists interested in kinship and religion in Southeast Asia.

In Stigma and Culture, J. Lorand Matory provocatively shows how ethnic identification in the United States-and around the globe-is a competitive and hierarchical process in which populations, especially of historically stigmatized races, seek status and income by dishonoring other stigmatized populations. And there is no better place to see this than among the African American elite in academia, where he explores the emergent ethnic identities of African and Caribbean immigrants and transmigrants, Gullah/Geechees, Louisiana Creoles, and even Native Americans of partly African ancestry. Matory describes the competitive process that hierarchically structures their self-definition as ethnic groups and the similar process by which middle-class African Americans seek distinction from their impoverished compatriots. Drawing on research at universities such as Howard, Harvard, and Duke and among their alumni networks, he details how university life-while facilitating individual upward mobility, touting human equality, and regaling cultural diversity-also perpetuates the cultural standards that historically justified the dominance of some groups over others. Combining his ethnographic findings with classic theoretical insights from Frantz Fanon, Fredrik Barth, Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu and others-alongside stories from his own life in academia-Matory sketches the university as an institution that, particularly through the anthropological vocabulary of culture, encourages the stigmatized to stratify their own.