Order Against Harmony

Abstract

I started doing fieldwork among a tribal group in the southern Philippines in 1970. I investigated this people, on and off, for the next 37 years. This is an indigenous cultural community (as the official label goes in this country) named ‘Palawan’. They are agriculturists who live in scattered small settlements. Their peacefulness and egalitarianism was immediately obvious and not something new: other anthropologists had encountered a similar situation in this part of the world and elsewhere. There was no problem with that, and a number of books and studies were to be published on non-violent, peaceful, and egalitarian societies by a host of anthropologists during the eighties and nineties (see Howell and Willis 1989; Boehm 1993; Silverberg and Gray 1992; Sponsel and Gregor 1994; Kemp and Fry 2004). But there was a less conspicuous aspect of the situation that bothered me somehow. No matter how hard I looked there was no ‘group’ or ‘social unit’ to speak of, outside the domestic family. The only entity that could be called a ‘group’ was the local group or settlement. This was the usual situation, actually, and many other similar cultures in the Philippines, Borneo and the Malay Peninsula display a local group, hamlet, village, settlement, neighborhood, seen as the basic locus of social interaction defined on a face-to-face basis (see for instance Jocano 1968: 35–37; Eder 1987: 28–31; Gibson 1986: 71–76; Schlegel 1970: 10–11; Nimmo 2001: 135–7 on the moorages of sea nomads; Dentan 1968: 79–80 on the “band”). I have rather stubbornly pursued the study of this ‘local group’ over many years (Macdonald 1977: 175–179, 2007: 23–25) and I have shown that it had some kind of weak corporate reality. I am now of the opinion that its corporate reality is indeed so weak as to be nonexistent. So here we are, with supposed societies which have no groups. What kind of ‘society’ is that? If a social organization is that which can be analyzed into separate collective units that interact with each other (see below), then this hardly looks like a social organization. Put another way, as Gell remarked of the Chewong: “In the absence of almost all the features of social organization” it is hard to use an “orthodox approach”, and to make sense at all of their way of organizing themselves (Gell 1985: 366). I shall say more on that later.