Explanation:
She is up and at the water faucet before most in her area of the village. With only four faucets to serve at least 650 people, the sooner one reaches the faucet, the sooner one can wash one's dishes, clothes and self. After tending to herself, she hoists the filled plastic container to her shoulder and walks home. These may be the only moments she has to herself that day. After boiling water for a morning drink of coffee or ginger tea, she joins other members of the family in the fields planting, weeding, harvesting corn, rice and vegetables, and cooking the midday meal. It is her duty as a T'Boli woman to do such things and, if she has a child (five children is the average), attendance to the child adds to her list of responsibilities. Arriving back at the village, she undertakes the chores which close the day. Having collected vegetables from the area and pounded the rice, she cooks the last meal, cleans the home, and prepares for the next day's routine.
This is the day-to-day life of the traditional T'Boli woman: a life determined by duties to family, community and husband. Age determines the effort expended upon these activities. An older woman has more authority over younger members of her extended family, whether they are male or female; she is able to visit with friends and neighbors between her responsibilities. Although, ideally, the woman's role complements the agricultural duties of the man, most T'Boli women consider their role "tey megal" or very difficult. However, according to most T'Boli men and women, the roles of both sexes are made still more difficult by the transitions forced upon them by modernization.
The T'Boli are one of the 87 tribal groups in the Philippines which make up 15 percent of the population. They number approximately 60,000 and reside inland from the southern coast of Mindanao. Until the present generation, the T'Boli were hunter/gatherers and agriculturalists, using slash and burn techniques to farm both the upland mountainous regions and the flat lowland areas. Twenty-five years ago written T'Boli did not exist, polygamy was more actively practiced, and barter was the principal form of economic exchange - it has since been replaced by a money economy. Like their Muslim neighbors, the majority of T'Boli women were, as the opening profile suggests, mute attendants to their families, husbands and farms.
In the last thirty years, the migration of mainstream northern Filipinos to the southern regions of Mindanao has caused a shift in social roles and values. The "lo-landers," as the colonists are commonly called, brought not just land rights but also different cultural and family norms. Superior knowledge of the market economy enabled many of the northern migrants to establish themselves in positions of economic and political power. Many of the T'Boli were forced from their land in the lowland areas and into upland regions, limiting their agricultural production and economic security. Markets for cash exchange were established. Buying and selling stations and drying and shelling operations for rice and corn production were created. Although some bartering still exists among the T'Boli, the influence of a market system inevitably wove itself into the fabric of T'Boli life.
Even to the casual observer, the disruptions of the traditional roles assigned to family and the sexes' work are evident. Generational and financial differences are marked. The young people favor blue jeans over the traditional lemwek, or long skirt, worn by the elders. Those who can afford to attend school, those who can't don't and are pushed closer to the margins of the emerging society.
The T'Boli community of Lemsnolon, where I lived and worked, straddles tenuously the forces imposed by "the lo-landers," governmental attempts to control and market colorful tribal customs and artifacts, and their own security needs in the midst of such contradictory influences.
The dynamics of modernization are also at work changing the lives of T'Boli women. Caught between tradition and modernization, they have adapted in a variety of ways.
Ye Igi is the mother of five, a farmer and tribal dancer, entertaining such dignitaries as President Marcos both in his palace at Malacangang and in Lemsnolon. She is also an artisan and entrepreneur, who makes and sells her necklaces of molten plastic to tourists and friends.
She shapes the plastic into a small bead around the thin metal rod with a knife inherited from her mother years ago. With painstaking concentration she winds a thinner reed of plastic thread around the bead and places it in the face of a heated log, then repeats the process. For the experienced artisan it takes approximately half an hour to make each bead and one week to complete the entire necklace. Ye Igi has been able to make a necklace
