Generation Later: Household Strategies and Economic Change in the Rural Philippines

FROM THE PUBLISHER

For most of the twentieth century, migrant settlers from throughout the Philippines have established homesteads and new ways of life on Palawan Island, a one-time forest wilderness celebrated as the Philippines'"last frontier." Short on history but richly varied in social and cultural life, these communities hold answers to two important questions about the new, post-peasant way of life now taking shape throughout rural Southeast Asia: How is this way of life best characterized, and how is it changing?

This volume presents a careful, longitudinal analysis of socioeconomic change in one Palawan settler community founded by migrant farmers and fisherfolk during the 1940s and 1950s. Based on detailed information at the levels of community, household. and individual spanning a twenty-five-year period (1970-1995), the chapters center around three basic themes: the development of a post-frontier village economy, household strategies for survival and prosperity, and individual ambitions as they relate to ideas about social standing and personal worth. The author deftly connects these different themes into an integrated analysis of change in the community across time and across generations, set within the context of wider changes in society, state, and market. Woven into this analysis are discussions of theoretical and methodological issues.