Rice, Culture and Ideology

The role of rice in Filipino culture, religious worship and everyday life of Filipinos altered dramatically throughout the Philippines history. I study several cultural practices that demonstrate that change. My paper also focusses on the inclusion of rice in a new “anti-Green Revolution” ideology promoted now in the Philippines society by elites and traditionalists. The article includes a detailed analysis of trends in rice consumption. That numerical analysis helps to understand the place and role of rice in Filipino culture through everyday nutrition patterns. In the pre-conquest period, rice was not only regarded as an elite food or marker of social, ecological, and geographic differentiation, but also as a magical element of culture that was deeply involved in magical and occult practices of the islanders of the archipelago. The conductors of pagan rituals included only women and men could not participate in rice harvesting even in the situation of reaper amount insufficiency. Harvesting was involved in the system of beliefs in spirits and ghosts of fields and local islanders’ cosmology. The set of beliefs even included specific “rice ghosts” which “reside” in rice panicles. The remainder of this pre-colonial ancient tradition can be traced even today among the Bontok people. With the advent of Spaniards and Roman Catholicism to the archipelago, occult traditions and magical rituals gradually subsided, but rice continued to be a highly esteemed food and element of culture. Since the late eighteenth to the 1870s rice became an export product of the Philippines. It was a short period of the Philippines history when the Filipinos treated rice as a production commodity, not as a consumable good. However, throughout the main part of the archipelago’s history rice was regarded a consumer product whose consumption reflected the stratification of Filipino society. This is a crucial feature of rice sociology that may help to understand many aspects of rice as a cultural artefact in the Philippines, both in history and modern society. E.g., modern Pahiyas festival in Quezon Province held during celebrating the feast of San Isidro Labrador, the patron saint of farmers, may be viewed as an invented tradition. It did not exist in historical past but it is sustained now by a lot of Filipinos and local administration to enhance the local attractiveness for foreign tourists. Transformation of the Pahiyas from community celebration to ostentatious cultural performance entails argumentation between traditionalists that stress importance of rice as an ancient sacred thing and modernists that treat the feast as a purely secular show. In addition to Pahiyas, rice is still regarded as a cultural artefact by many Filipinos. It is a symbol of prosperity and Heaven’s grace, especially at wedding ceremonies and house-warming celebrations. The emergence of “organic rice” farming is a proof of continuing trend to regard rice as a distinctive sign of social stratification. Besides, it acquires traits of ideology aimed against total equality programme brought about by the Green Revolution. Among a group of scientists, community workers and farmers called MASIPAG (Magsasaka at Seyentipiko Para sa Ikauunlad ng Agham Pang-agrikultura), organic rice farming was initiated as a form of resistance against the Green Revolution and as a way of bringing back "traditional" farming practices. The Green Revolution scenario with its motto feed everyone that came after the notorious famine substituted low-quality cheap rice for the great variety of rice grades grown earlier. Organic rice planting is, therefore, an attempt to revive the old traditions and inscribe them into modern Filipino culture