I visited them again for two months during 1975, then supported by an Arizona State University Faculty Grant-in-Aid. I lived with the Batak for four months during 1972, following twenty months of dissertation fieldwork in a Cuyonon farming community elsewhere on Palawan, while supported by a National Institutes of Mental Health Predoctoral Research Fellowship. I visited them periodically during 1968, at which time I was still in the Peace Corps but teaching adult Tagalog literacy in a Tagbanua community close to the Batak's home. In between, I made a series of shorter visits to the Batak. The first is the breadth and depth of my data, which span a period of fifteen years-from 1966, when I first encountered the Batak while a Peace Corps volunteer assigned to teach high school in Palawan, until 1980–81, when I studied them for sixteen months while supported by a sabbatical leave from Arizona State University and a Wenner-Gren Foundation Grant-in-Aid. This volume differs from previous work on the subject in two important respects. Western anthropology of documenting the impact of modernization and development on indigenous peoples. And beyond these recent and most closely related works, there is a long and important tradition in At a more regional level but of the same genre are Shelton Davis's Victims of the Miracle and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf's Tribes of India: The Struggle to Survive. Colin Turnbull's controversial The Mountain People, a case study of the Ik of Uganda, centered needed attention on the potentially grim consequences of culture loss and social dysfunction (regardless of any ethical questions it may have raised). Charles Wagley's Welcome of Tears, an eloquent account of the demographic and cultural demise of the Tapirapé Indians of Brazil, is probably closest in subject and intent. This work is a detailed account of the Batak's encounter with, and apparent defeat by, the “outside world.” To be sure, it is not the first book of its kind. Many escaped these catastrophes only to fall victim to less visible but equally powerful forces-the ecological changes, social stresses, and cultural disruptions set in motion by incorporation into wider socioeconomic systems. In the centuries following the era of European expansion, the ravages of epidemic disease and wholesale alienation of land and other tribal resources obliterated hundreds of tribal populations. In some cases, the causes of tribal disappearance are tragically obvious. The story of the Batak is one that has been repeated throughout the contemporary tribal world: a society that has seemingly thrived for centuries suddenly falters and passes out of the human record. Undernourished as individuals, decimated as a population, and virtually moribund as a distinct ethnolinguistic group, the Batak appeared destined for extinction sometime early in the twenty-first century. But even as they had also adopted portions of the lifeways of surrounding peoples, they found themselves in much reduced circumstances. They still survived, as did a part of their former hunting-gathering lifeway. And no longer did the Batak appear to be an economically, culturally, or evolutionarily successful people. Palawan in search of land and a better way of life. No longer were they isolated from surrounding populations everywhere were the homesteads and villages of Filipino farmers who had come to Whether or not they enjoyed a state of “primitive affluence,” the Batak must have achieved at least a modicum of success in meeting their subsistence needs and in resisting whatever perturbations penetrated their realm from the outside world, for they had survived for centuries.īy the closing decades of the twentieth century, however, the Batak were in disarray. Like their presumed distant relatives, the Andaman Islanders, the Semang of the Malay Peninsula, and the various Negrito groups on Luzon, they lived in small, mobile, family groups and hunted or gathered a variety of forest, riverine, and coastal foods. Isolated by land from other indigenous tribal populations on Palawan and by the Sulu Sea from all but sporadic contact with Filipino and Muslim peoples elsewhere in the Philippine archipelago, the Batak had evolved an elaborate tropical forest foraging adaptation. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the Batak of the Philippines were a physically and culturally distinct population of about six hundred individuals inhabiting the mountains and river valleys of central Palawan Island.
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