The Rational or Moral Tulisan?

Making Sense of Peasant Banditry in pre-20th Century Colonial Philippines

© 1995, 2003 Virgilio Rojas Dept. of Economic History Stockholm University, Sweden

Introduction

The imposition of Spanish colonial rule and the feudal system of production it created generated inherent social tensions in pre-20th century Philippine so-ciety. While these tensions were generally held at bay, as evidenced by the long 350 year interval of civilian compliance among the local peasantry to colonial policies (a trend which would later be immutably reversed by a successful nationwide armed liberation struggle in 1896), latent peasant resentment did erupt in periodic and intermittent episodes of civilian non-compliance via abortive uprisings, festering banditry and millinnerian activity.

This exploratory report theoretically focuses on one of these episodic forms – banditry or tulisanismo (in the native Tagalog dialect), which thrived with distinctive vigor and durability in the rice-growing Southern Tagalog and Central Luzon regions surrounding the colonial capital of Manila. Noted areas were marked by high tenancy rates, large ecclesiastical haciendas or estates and intense colonial resettlement programs (reduccion). This high-tension bandit-infested landscape also became the logical breeding ground for both leadership and rand-and-file material to the revolutionary forces in the 1896 War of Independence, which finally destroyed Spanish colonial state power.

In this phase of apprenticeship on the origins and dynamics of s-c ”pre-modern” movements or modes of popular protest, one faces a number of intriguing theoretical questions. Why did some peasants elect to leave the relatively safe and low-risk quarters of civilian compliance, to venture into the high-risk and

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insecure environment of tulisanismo? What general and specific structural and agency conditions and constraints entered into the choice equation?

Intiuitively, one may reasonably presume a possible systematic correlation between the specifically high degree of ecclesiastical feudal property and corresponding political and social relations, and the frequency of local tulisan-ismoi over time in the geographical area concerned. But even if that systematic link could be established, one still has to deal with the problem of tulisanismo in agency terms, i.e. why in heavens given shared structural conditions and the grievances they tended to generate many still responded with compliance even as a few ”deviants” turned to banditry and non-compliance. What accounts for this discrepancy?

And what in heavens made disgruntled segments of the local peasantry, when finally pushed to individual and collective action, elect to articulate their gripes in precisely this mode, i.e. banditry, and not other forms of protest?

Is banditry an historically specific mode of behaviour accounted mainly for by an historically relatively stable peasant village economy, essentially bounded by moral values and group solidarities, but increasingly breaking at the seams in the face of modernization (agrarian commercialisation, urbanisation, capitalist industrialisation), as s-c ”moral economy” exponents like Hobsabawm (1965) once suggested?

Or is banditry a rationally calculated enterprise to up individual profits under conditions of relative deprivation and scarcity in a village society where free-rider problems and competition among profit-maximizing individuals invariably undermine group solidarity, as adherents of rational choice theory propound?

Is the peasant bandit acting out essentially on moral or rational premises? Is the bandit a moral or rational peasant?

The Theoretical Fault-Line

The either-or answer to these questions is put in stark relief in the by now classic if contrasting inquiries of James Scott (1976) and Samuel Popkin (1979) into the nature and dynamics of peasant societies and resistance in Southeast Asia. Elsewhere, explicit assumptions underlying Scott’s moral economy versus Popkin’s rational peasant models are recapitulated in different ways by current scholarship on peasant rebellion in Southeast Asia, the main currents of which may be decomposed into three different frameworks: millenarian, class conflict, and local politics theories.

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A critical discussion of how well the employed assumptions and conclusions tally with the empirical evidence presented by concerned scholars will serve as indispensable guideposts in setting up a workable framework and research strategy by which to approach the problem of banditry in the Philippines. As this problem poses questions along similar lines, noted critical discussion may hopefully tease out relevant ideas which may help firm up problem formulation and the derivation of a series of of workable hypotheses around which the direction of research may be organised.

What prospects and perils highlight any puritan application of either one of the conteding paradigms on peasant society and behaviour generally implied in the phenomenon of civilian non-compliance and its distinct articulation in banditry? What questions tend to be factored in and out of the picture by these rival theories?

Often, rival models may, as the critical surveys of David Little (1989) and James Rule (1988)ii demonstrate, be applied, with equally impressive results, on essen-tially identical empirical material, while leading to diametrically opposite con-clusions.

Initially probing into the theoretical and empirical implications of sundry models through the critical eyes of Little and Rule, this modest report hopes to size up the relative utility of each model or theory in developing falsifiable hypotheses and a sustainable explanatory framework of banditry.

Bluntly put, how far will a rational choice or moral economy model or other theories on peasant rebellion take a novice like this author in terms of system-atically and adequately explaining peasant-bandit behavior in ”pre-modern,” pre-revolutionary colonial peasant society in the Philippines? Is the peasant bandit a rationally calculating ”entrepreneur” and innovator, or is he a conser-vative defender of violated traditional village moral conventions?

Capturing the Peasant Bandit: On Moral or Rational Grounds?

How does one make most sense of banditry as a distinct form of peasant non-compliant behavior? Two outstanding but conflicting accounts on the structural- institutional nature and dynamics of peasant economies and behavioral patterns may supply relevant clues to the issue of moral economy versus rational choice models. While the former views traditional peasant society as being organised

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cooperatively through shared moral values and essentially self-synchronizing communal institutions, the latter sees the same society being organised on the basis of the rational peasant striving for private family security and welfare, with long-run destabilising effects on village solidarity and welfare.

The most imaginative and state of the art application of these contrasting models on Southeast Asian material can be found respectively in James Scott’s Moral Economy of the Peasant and Samuel Popkin’s Rational Peasant. The extension of above-noted general dispute is nowhere more crystal clear than in the way these antipodal accounts address two central issues at stake: whether typical Southeast Asian peasant behavior is a function of shared communal values (Scott) or self-interested rationality (Popkin)?; whether these motives foster self-preserving and stabilising (Scott) social arrangements, institutions and patterns of collective behavior, or exercise a long-term destabilising impact (Popkin) on the latter?

Scott’s Model: Moral Village Economy & Morally-Constrained Peasants

Focusing on the Depression rebellions of the 1930s in Vietnam and Burma, Scott seeks to explain why normally compliant peasants yield at times to risky non-compliant behavior. To make sense of this otherwise rare behavior he first specifies what makes for normal conformism among peasants and the motives which shape that behavior within a moral village economy model. Scott’s typical moral village economy is predicated on the following assumptions:

that village economy ecologically, technically, socially operates basically on critical subsistence margins;

this marginal situation invariably reproduces what may be labelled as a ”susbsistence ethic”, a set of standards through which peasants evaluate the institutions and persons around them through the lens of risk and subsistense security” (Little: 30-31). Thus the ethos of ”reciprocity” and the ”right to susbsistence” are central moral principles which govern routine social patterns and injunctions of peasant life and provides them with constraints on both actions and choices of rich and poor alike;

governed by the subsistence logic, the village economy tends to breed institutional arrangements to ensure collective welfare, facilitate crisis-management and a minimal standard of welfare for every village member.

When these conditions are forfeited at any point in time, like when a significant dissonance between existing material conditions (e.g. dramatic tax hikes or deteriorating tenancy conditions) and the terms of the subsistence

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ethic occurs, Scott’s model predicts the likelihood of rebellious behavior among peasants whose sense of justice has been offended in the process.

In Burma and Vietnam, as Scott argues, this increasing dissonance came in the wake of expanding commercialisation and market economies; and the growing usurpation of traditional political functions by a more efficient colonial bureaucratic state. The varying impact of these disruptive forces elsewhere is acknowledged and attributed by Scott mainly to existing differences in communal values, type and degree of cohesion of local insurance systems, and institutional arrangements.

Popkin’s Model: The Competetive Village and the Rational Peasant

Like Scott, Popkin highlights the main features of the typical village economy in pre-colonial Vietnam and the changes it underwent as a consequence of colonialism and commercialisation in the 19th century. In similar vein, Popkin chronicles and attempts to explain the rise of large-scale non-compliant behavior among peasants transmitted through the Catholic Church, the communist Viet Minh, and two syncretist religious movements, Cao Dai and Hoa Hoa. But he approaches these problems in a way that puts Scott’s assumptions and conclu-sions on its head.

In fact he argues that at no point in time did peasant behavior, whether compliant or otherwise, take its cue from the redistributive and welfare insu-rance systems implied in Scott’s moral economy village model. As far as the motivational bases of peasant behavior are concerned, he argues in more strict terms. Vietnamese peasants acted and behaved essentially according to profit-maximizing principles. They were motivated by considerations of personal and family welfare rather than group interest or moral values (ibid: 34). For Popkin, collective behavior in the form of massive rebellion is consistent to this assumption only if seen as an aggregation of individual peasant rational choices.

Popkin’s alternative traditional village model is the exact anti-thesis of Scott’s communitarian model, with its totally contrasting features:

a village economy rigidly stratified along lines of skewed distribution of wealth and power, where contending groups (rich and poor) operate competetively rather than cooperatively on the basis of personal and family self-interest and under conditions of uncertainty and oppression (see also Rule: 49-51);

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a village economy marked by low rather than high levels of institutiona-lised collective welfare security and insurance; the prevalence of market-determined private credit and usurious institutions; and the presence of ”outsiders” with whom powerful village interests to ally themselves in a bid to advance individual positions of self-interest. Basically, institutions and collective activities that might benefit the entire village will not emerge due to public goods and free-rider problems (i.e.when conflict between private and public interest arises, decision-makers will opt for private ones);

a village economy where normative injunctions and values, far from shaping peasant social life are themselves prone to manipulation by self-interested actors;

village institutions are ”highly plastic, giving way easily to the arrival of a new set of social and economic forces” (Little, op cit: 36-37); these institutions having little constraining role in terms of massive changes in the economic and social environment; in fact the opposite is usually true, i.e. in pursuit of self-interest, peasants in new contexts will alter customs and traditions in the process.

An immediate comparative advantage of departing from these assumptions in explaining rebellious behavior, contends Popkin, is that unlike Scott’s (who tends to see collective action largely as a reactive response to assaults on traditional subsistence rights), the model more adequately captures cases wherein resistance is levelled not so much against disruptive external forces (like growing commercialisation and other similar variables noted earlier on) as against notably unpopular traditional village institutions.

However, the model is not entirely unproblematic, since it has to deal with Mancur Olson’s proverbial free-rider problem attached to rational choice assumptions. Free-riders ought as it were to make such movements rare since they aim for public goods! To adequately understand these problems, Popkin connects the explanation of peasant political behavior to an analysis of the incentives and disincentives that confront the individual decision-maker (on rank-and-file and leadership levels alike) at any given point in time. The rationality of resistance will thus depend on the types of mobilisable organisational resources available to peasant movements, those reducing the risks, costs, and uncertainties of non-compliance. A crucial resource is the presence of what Popkin calls ”political entrepreneurs”— the rational and self-interested leader with a personal stake in founding and maintaining collective activity.

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Striking a Middle-Way: Little’s Intermediate Village Model & Morally Responding Rational Peasant

David Little’s critical evaluation of the Scott-Popkin dispute issues in sum the verdict of a deadlock: ”Scott and Popkin use their motivational assumptions to explain many social phenomena – the character of village institutions, the dynamics of peasant political action, and peasant response to modernisation. Neither offers direct evidence at the individual level to uphold his analysis of peasant motivation, instead each supports his position by referring to the predicted aggregate consequences that these analyses generate.” (ibid: 38)

By integrating seemingly antagonistic assumptions undergirding contesting paradigms into an intermediate model of a village economy and collective peasant behavior, and then specifying the critical operative conditions under which respective assumptions will work or not, Little attempts to resolve the stalemate.

He begins by modifying Popkin’s all-too rigid assertion that cooperative village norms and institutions will, insofar as they show the vital signs of public goods, inherently not emerge on account of free-rider problems. In fact, as recent scholarship on collective action reveals, Olson’s free-rider maxim may and can be neutralised by a set of circumstances ands that cooperative ventures rather than competition in these situations make more rational sense.

To the extent that there may indeed be rational pay-offs in cooperative behavior to acquire collective goods, there is nothing logically inconsistent in the assump-tion that rational peasant decisions and behavior will occur in the context of Scott’s traditional peasant village, where cooperation, collective action, and communitarian practices do operate. The obverse may also be posited against Scott such that under conditions of village institutional disintegration competi-tive behavior may ride roughshod over and even alter shared moral conventions, traditional institutions, and local welfare systems in favor of new ones.

On these premises, Little constructs and abstracts an intermediate village model located between the opposite extremes represented by Scott and Popkin. He argues that insofar as traditional villages approximate the typical features described by this intermediate model, collective action will be easier to achieve than Popkin predicts. Underpinning this are the following assumptions:

the model village is a relatively stable society where institutional, social, ecological, and technological relations change gradually. Like in a repeti-

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tive game theory of choice, environmental stability implies that the outcomes of any decision to join in collective projects in the future are relatively predictable;

the village is relatively insulated from external economic and political intervention. This insularity implies that the preceding conditions of predictabily which enter into the choice equation is further heightened on the basis of guaranteed continuous interaction and social exchange among villagers;

the village members have access to information about past and present activities of others due to the relatively small size of the village. Transactions among them occur on a face-to-face basis;

the village embodies many shared values (familial, moral, political, reli-gious) as well as organisations corresponding to these values, which although tendering no guarantee of success, may facilitate collective action in terms of sanctioning free-rider problems, motivating individuals toward collective welfare, etc;

social relations in this village are multi-stranded.

In sum, stated conditions (stability, isolation, richness of information, shared values, and multi-strandedness) generally support mechanisms (reciprocity, cohesive community values, convention, group size considerations, the role of local politics and organisations) that operate to override the operation of narrow individual rationality and the free-rider syndrome.

The above ideal conditions and mechanisms may solve some problems of collective action, but certainly not all. As Little instructively argues, different collective projects require varying sets of conditions to succeed. Projects with ”positively stratified” benefits will be easiest to achieve; ”equal benefit” projects supported by strong values and diffuse coercion will be possible, and ”reversed stratified” (i,e, redistributive practices) benefits will be difficult to achieve without strong support from widely shared commitments against individual rationality.

On the obverse side, what conditions may countervail the positive operation of noted assumptions, i.e. undermine cooperation and collective action in village society in favor of peasant free-riders? One crucial factor is incremental group size which, according to Little, progressively impinges on conditional recipro-cities. Traditional patterns of village interaction may be disrupted by the de-routinizing impact of demographic crises (famine, drought) or banditry, intruding market or extra-village (state) politics, which in different ways ups the uncertainty of current decisions and choices based on calculations of expected future gains.

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De-isolating trends and increasing exposure to ”outsider” to a national economy and culture may be expected to undermine collective and communitarian practices and shared values within village society. These countervailing forces tangent those summoned in Scott’s earlier discussions.

What Little’s intermediate models appears to convey is essentially that given underlying conditions Popkin’s free-riding peasants may be overriden even as narrow individual rationality to be extended to account for a wider repertoire of collective action within the context of Scott’s traditional village solidarities and institutions than hintherto permitted. While certain Scottian postulates on communcal redistributive properties are in turn overriden by the logic of individual rationality, a point which escapes capture even in Little’s extended version.

By and large, the dispute between Scott and Popkin centres on theoretically different accounts of the collective aggeregation of either morally and institu-tionally determined or respectively independent self-interested individual peasant choices and behavior. However, Popkin more than Scott, braves into the dynamics of collective action (e.g. rebellion) as it is channelled through distinct organisations and movements, as well as how individual peasants within these organisations behave.

With Scott, one gets the image of peasants as constructed actors, captive subjects if you like of moral and ethical structures and institutions. In this regard, Popkin takes a more offensive and avant-garde position, putting a premium on the resource-mobilising and capabilities of ”political entrepreneurs” (self-interested organising leaders) and peasant political organisations and movements. In this sense, Popkin more than Scott has the makings of a theory of (protest) movements.

Other Theories of Peasant Rebellion

What insights radiate from the available literature on Southeast Asian collective protest movements and peasant rebellion? What other questions beside those already raised by preceding writers come to the fore there? Although banditry as a distinct form of social and political protest may perhaps at best approximate small scale insurgencies, it may still be fecund to swiftly pursue three popular approaches to large-scale peasant rebellion with the view of filtering out theoretical points relevant to banditry. The red thread in these theories is again given by the question as to what causes peasants to rebel; what prominent variables figure in these different accounts, and how do they empirically design research?

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Millenarian Theory

This approach identifies a culturally specific world view and ideology as central to the explanation of rebellion. A pioneer in this genre is none other than Eric Hobsbawm. His early inquiry into popular movements in traditional European societies (1959) distinguishes between ”pure political” revolutionary and mille-narian movements.

Hallmarks of the former are explicit programs of social, political and economic reform, rank.and-file organisation revolving around a set of shared interests, and the pursuit of a developed strategy of revolutionary politics. None of these are present in millenarian movements, rather the latter tend to evolve and cohere around a shared religious ideology based on a apocalyptic concept of historical change. The crucial message delivered by Hobsbawm’s classic study is that millenarian inspired movements do not depend on shared material interests, nor do they work through the rational political calculations of their practicioners.

Susan Nanquin’s treatment of several White Lotus movements in early 20th century China adapts this approach to Southeast Asian material. Thus she sets out to describe the motivational origins and organisational resources available to the religious sects under study. One potential lacuna in this model is the heavy emphasis on the religious bases of rebellious motivations. Moreover, it tends to ignore significant immediate political and economic factors and motives of self-interest.

Class Conflict Theory

As prime cause this model singles out class interests. By this token, rebellions are seen as political responses to exploitation and class conflict between superordinate and subordinate groups (e.g. landlords versus tenants). Thus central to the explanatory agenda are: the social relations of production that define objective material interests of affected groups; political and social

i This correlation had been suggested by one of the leading pundits on banditry in the Philippines, historian Isagani Medina, in his recent dissertation, Cavite Before the Revolution, 1571-1896 (1994), CSSP Publications, University of the Philippines. But while he makes a direct connection between the geographical frequency and specificity of tulisanismo and the relatively high intensity of colonial ressetlement policies in the Southern Tagalog province of Cavite, he does not submit systematic evidence to that effect.ii Little, David (1989); Rule, James (1988).

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arrangements shaping political consciousness and motivations of participants; the political resources available for development in collective political action.

In other words, this approach explains peasant rebellions as a function of social tensions contained in peasant society and the class consciousness of the peasant rebels. Marks (1984) studies of rebellious peasant activity in Southern China in the recent two centuries is a typical specimen of this approach. However, analytical hang-ups in the genre have been noted from different quarters: the straightforward correlation posited between exploitative social conditions and class consciousness coupled with the voluntaristic propensity to rebel, may in fact be mitigated by other non-economic, institutional, and religious factors.

Non-class factors seem to have played a significant role in shaping social conflict in village economies. Moreover, there is scant direct evidence of explicit class consciousness among followers and leaders in 19th century Chinese rebellions. There are also prof proper levels of aggregation (class interests may be viewed from perspectives that range from local to global, or elsewhere, the tendency to consider class interests on too high a level – regional, national, or local. Not to mention empirical problems of separating horizontal from vertical non-class interests (sometimes local non-class may mask extra-local class interests). In fact one may argue that class conflict models could very well approximate more modern 20th century than pre-modern conditions (i.e., when the masking capabilities of vertical village solidarities and interests operate more prominently).

Local Politics Theory

This theory assigns a variety of local interests and organisational forms as the fundamental determinant of the occurence and course of rebellion. The main benchmark for this disparate set of works, is the view that rebellion is a form of deliberate collective action that originates from the local interests of the individuals, who participate and are facilitated by local political processes available to potential rebels.

A distinctive feature here is the observation that large-scale rebellions are often unintended, unforseen consequences of essentially local processes. The local political process is intentional and rational, while the global process is uninten-tional. This is particularly intersting for the purposes of banditry, not least in relation to sundry attempts – like Eizabeth Perry’s study of the Nian Rebellion in Northern China at a juncture (1851-63) which incidentally coincides with our Philippine investigation – to apply this model to historically reconstruct the

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gradual transformation of local bandit gangs into loosely coordinated regional forces capable of defeating the regular armed forces of the state.

Perry’s account emphasises the ecological circumstances that surrounded pea-sant life in Northern China. Critical ecological, technological, and material conditions in this area set the stage for the emergence of alternating predatory (banditry) and protective (militia activity to protect crops) survival strategies (both individual and collective) among poor peasants. An important intervening factor in this transformation were the roles of outside actors: the central government and disciplined Taipeng rebels. These externalforces merged pre-dators and protectors in common antagonism toward the state.

Is the Tulisan a Rational or Moral Peasant? Is H(Sh)e a Class, Millenarian or Ecological Invention?

The first question incited by the Scott-Popkin dispute may just have been conditionally qualified by Little’s middle-way modification of the basic assump-tions built into the conflicting accounts of the nature and dynamics of peasant village economy, motivation and behavioral patterns. His extended individual rationality model specifies in a more sophisticated manner the hypothetical workings of countervailing factors and mechanismstp both narrow rational and over-commanding moral/institutional premises of peasant motives and behavior.

One may reasonably expect the frequency and nature of banditry as a distinct moce of peasant behavior to vary, as Little’s model suggests, according to differences in levels of cohesion of traditional village institutions, demographic density, etc. Not until these differences have been explored can the peasant bandit be ”accused” with just cause for acting basically either on moral or rational grounds.

Intuitively, as the scan information on banditry indicates, there are reasons to take seriously those variable highlighted respectively by millenarian, class conflict, and local politics theories.

One may, for instance, assess the connection between comparative tenancy rates and probably transparent degrees of iniquitous landlord-peasant relations marking colonial friar estates and the frequency of banditry in these areas.

At the same time, available material indicates off-hand that peasant banditry may be a misnomer – quite a few appear to have belonged to a group of

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disgruntled colonial civil servants and could thus hardly be classified as peasants, along with the class-related gripes usually associated with them.

Filipino historian, Reynaldo Ileto (1979), an acknowledged expert in millenarian movements in the Philippines, suggests a certain connection between some of the tulisanes or bandits and certain millenarian ritual practices prevalent among them.

Finally, ecological premises and the local institutions (political and non-political) they tend to partially shape, and their contributory influence in explaining the frequency of banditry in certain areas should certainly not be dismissed.

References

Hobsbawm, Eric (1965) Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Centuries. New York: Norton.

Ileto, Reynaldo (1989) Pasyon and Revolution. Popular Movements in the Philippines. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press.

Little, David (1989) Understanding Peasant China. Case Studies in the Philosophy of Social Science. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Medina, Isagani (1994) Cavite Before the Revolution, 1571-1896. University of the Philippines: CSSP Publications.

Popkin, Samuel L (1979) The Rational Peasant. Berkely: University of California Press.

Rule, James (1988) Theories of Civil Violence. Berkely: University of California Press.

Scott, James C (1976) The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Subsistence and Rebellion in Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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