Wagering the Land

Wagering the Land: Ritual, Capital, and Environmental Degradation in the Cordillera of Northern Luzon, 1900–1986 by Martin W. Lewis traces the dramatic transformation of Buguias, a highland community in the Philippines, as subsistence agriculture gave way to commercial vegetable production in the decades following World War II. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork and oral histories, Lewis shows how prosperity from the vegetable boom financed spectacular redistributive feasts while simultaneously eroding the ecological foundations of village life through deforestation, soil loss, water shortages, and chemical contamination. Far from displacing “tradition,” however, commercialization reinforced the region’s ritual economy: ancestors were honored with ever larger sacrifices, and the ethic of gambling—placing one’s fortunes at risk in hope of a windfall—became a cultural template that united high-stakes farming with ritual obligation. In Buguias, capital accumulation and religious practice were not opposing forces but mutually sustaining enterprises, producing a distinctive, if fragile, synthesis of market capitalism and ritual Paganism.

Structured in two parts, the book reconstructs prewar subsistence systems, social hierarchies, and trade relations before turning to the postwar decades of boom and crisis. Lewis carefully documents how wealthy farmers and traders, rather than impoverished cultivators, were often at the forefront of ecological destruction, bulldozing hilltops, clearing cloud forests, and intensifying chemical use. At the same time, the profits of commercialization underwrote the continuation—and expansion—of prestige feasts that bound community life together. By situating Buguias in the wider context of political ecology and global capitalism, Wagering the Land challenges conventional wisdom that markets inevitably dissolve communal traditions or that environmental decline is primarily a story of poverty at the margins. Instead, Lewis demonstrates how ritual and risk, ecology and economy, fused into a form of “aberrant development” that preserved social order even as it undermined its own material base. This deeply researched and vividly written study offers essential insights for anthropologists, geographers, historians of Southeast Asia, and all readers interested in the complex entanglements of tradition, capitalism, and environmental change.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.