Who Shall Succeed?: Agricultural Development and Social Inequality on a Philippine Frontier

by James F. Eder

This book records the emergence and institutionalization of social inequality in San Jose, a pioneer farming village located on Palawan Island in the Philippines. Early chapters reconstruct the historical circumstances surrounding San Jose's settlement and growth under conditions of relative equality of opportunity. The community's development is examined in detail through the experiences of eight migrant farmers, all self-made men some conspicuous successes, others conspicuous failures. Comparing and evaluating the causes of pioneers' successes and failures, Professor Eder stresses that the origins of inequality in San Jose depended less upon the individuals' time of arrival or amounts of starting capital or other such factors than it did upon personal differences. Social inequality, for the most part, had its basis in a level of motivation and in a kind of 'on-the-job competence' that some men and women brought to the frontier and others did not.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 1982

About the author

James Eder's research interests have long concerned how the tribal and peasant peoples of Southeast Asia, and particularly those of the Philippines, have experienced development and change, broadly understood. His fieldwork in the Philippines has centered on Palawan Island, where his interests include demographic and subsistence change among the Batak, a tropical forest foraging people, and agricultural intensification and economic diversification in San Jose, a farming community on the outskirts of Puerto Princesa City.

In recent years, Eder has begun to re-cast these and other longstanding research interests around issues of natural resource management and use, while at the same time scaling up to a broader view of Palawan and of the Philippines as a whole. One current research project, Migrants to the Coasts, examines the challenges that the continued migration to Palawan of ethnically-diverse fisherfolk from elsewhere in the Philippines pose for the establishment of marine protected areas and other elements of successful community-based coastal resource management programs. Another current research project, Re-Envisioning the Upland Philippines, aims to better capture the ecological, economic and social transformations presently underway in the nation's uplands than present models allow. This latter project will involve three months of fieldwork in Palawan and a multi-national research conference at the University of San Carlos in Cebu City.