Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables, figures, and maps
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Rich man, poor man: life in a frontier farming community
- 3 The economic and social origins of the migrant farmers
- 4 Eight migrants
- 5 The origins of social inequality
- 6 The maintenance of social inequality: earning a living
- 7 The maintenance of social inequality: earning prestige
- 8 The perpetuation of social inequality?
- 9 Conclusion
- Appendixes
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables, figures, and maps
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Rich man, poor man: life in a frontier farming community
- 3 The economic and social origins of the migrant farmers
- 4 Eight migrants
- 5 The origins of social inequality
- 6 The maintenance of social inequality: earning a living
- 7 The maintenance of social inequality: earning prestige
- 8 The perpetuation of social inequality?
- 9 Conclusion
- Appendixes
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
During the 1930s and 1940s, a number of men and women left the overpopulated island of Cuyo in the Philippines to homestead a hitherto unpopulated region on the island of Palawan. Poor, uneducated, and of humble birth, these migrants soon differentiated themselves into haves and have-nots. Moreover, once this differentiation developed, it stabilized, and it is now being transmitted to a second and third generation of Cuyonons on Palawan. This book analyzes the origins of social inequality in terms of particular individuals, in a particular time and place, and the conditions under which it is maintained. Few topics have a more perennial concern for social scientists, philosophers, and men of practical affairs. Hence this study, although focused on a small community in the Philippines, illuminates larger problems: Why do developing communities embark upon trajectories of growing social inequality, and where do such trajectories ultimately lead? Must they necessarily terminate, as Marx envisioned, in a class polarization between the privileged few and the impoverished many, or can the “benefits of development” be more broadly shared?
I first went to the Philippines in 1965, a Peace Corps volunteer assigned to teach biology at Palawan National High School in Puerto Princesa City. Later I moved to a rural community, remote but otherwise not unlike San Jose, the community on which this book is based. Here I taught adult Tagalog literacy and the rudiments of vegetable gardening, working as an activist with people and problems that would later interest me as a scholar.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Who Shall Succeed?Agricultural Development and Social Inequality on a Philippine Frontier, pp. xi - xviPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1982