Abstract:
A study of the social groups concerned with the productive technology of the Ibaloi of Northern Luzon was undertaken in a small community in Northeastern Benguet Province, Philippines. This research had two broad goals: The first goal was a practical concern for understanding the social context of traditional communal irrigation. The second goal was to gain insight into the corporate control of productive resources in a cognatic society. In relation to these goals, the Cordillera Central Region of Northern Luzon was chosen as a research area for several reasons: First, the Ibaloi and other Cordillera ethnic groups utilize communal irrigation in their traditional wet - rice subsistence economy. Second, the Ibaloi are a cognatic society and it was believed that they had only been marginally affected by the kinship, jural and bureaucratic systems of the Spanish and American colonial regimes. Third, the rapid spread of vegetable production into upland rice - producing communities has required that Cordillera peoples reassess their productive resources and realign their allocation of such resources to a new technological requirement. This state of ongoing change was considered interesting for evaluating some of the above issues.
The research design required, first, a descriptive investigation of the productive resources of the Ibaloi, and the ownership and use patterns. This was followed by an assessment of the corporate models of George Appell (1974, 1976) as applied to the ownership of these resources, here applicable. The difficulties in applying Appell’s model led to further data gathering in problem areas identified in the model. These problems focus on what Brown (1984) has called the “plurality of jural units” sometimes found in certain societies and with certain other gaps in the model, including lack of diachronic perspective. These gaps aremost clearly seen when the model is applied to the organization of communal irrigation in an Ibaloi community. Nevertheless, the model, and its gaps, proved extremely instructive in identifying and focusing on those socio-jural areas where conflicts could and did occur.
The thesis will address some of these gaps and will point out the utility of improving our models of group ownership in regards to development issues such as irrigation, land tenure, resource utilization and jural disparity. It will also identify the utility of such concepts for the analysis of the ownership of resources in cognatic societies and will suggest further directions for research.
