The Teduray and Their Economy

For a long time, the Teduray practiced a subsistence system mainly based on traditional swidden cultivation. Supplemental food supplies were procured through hunting, fishing, and gathering. Other necessities of life, such as iron tools for slash and burn agriculture, household implements and personal items, were obtained through trade with the Maguindanao.

Weaving, blacksmithing and pottery are industries unknown to the Teduray. They used to wear hand-beaten bark cloth. Cotton material, particularly the sarong dress, only came in through trade activities. These articles were obtained by exchanging their rattan, almaciga, beeswax and tobacco.

Among the more populous settlements of the Teduray, internal trade goes on during market days. The traders are mainly menfolk, because the Teduray females are extremely shy and not much given to business transactions. It is they, however, who carry the barter products to the market for their husbands. Tobacco is the main crop cultivated for the barter market. But rice and corn are also grown, to be sold to buy basic needs such as knives, chickens and piglets.

Following an indigenous system of astronomy, the Teduray reckon the beginning of their swidden cycle by referring to the appearance of certain constellations in the night sky. By December or early January, swidden sites are ritually marked. Laborious clearing of the thick forest growth and cutting down of the big trees follows. All the menfolk of a settlement work on each household’s swidden site, until all the swidden are cleared and ready for burning by March or April. Corn and several varieties of rice are planted in the clearing with men and women working together. The women take charge of harvesting and storing the first corn in May or June and the first rice in August or September. The next phase is the planting of tobacco or a second crop of corn as well as more tubers, fruits, vegetables, spices and cotton.

Teduray upland farming is methodical, as are most other indigenous swidden methods. After harvest, the field will not be used until it has lain fallow for many years, so that the vital jungle vegetation may be reestablished.

The swidden cycle of the traditional Teduray is, in its essential stages and phases, similar to that of other slash and burn systems. Each year, each household selects and marks off an area of the forest where it intends to make a swidden. Working together as a team, the men in the neighborhood then move from one swidden to another, slashing away the undergrowth and felling trees. When the vegetative debris of the cutting operations is well dried, the site is burned. It is then planted, again cooperatively, with both men and women joining in the work. Corn is planted first on the swidden, then rice and then a large variety of non-grain crops. Finally, after the first corn and rice have been harvested, a second crop of corn is planted and an even greater number of vegetables, tubers, fruits and other plants. The multi-cropped swiddens are a rich source of food, and continue to yield long after the year’s cycle of work on them has ended and the family has begun to prepare another swidden in a different location in the forest. The former site is not worked again, however, but is allowed to return to forest. Traditional Teruray recognize very clearly the importance of the forest to their way of life, and carefully avoid over-exploitation practices which could lead to the forest’s being replaced by grasslands.

When the swidden fields have been planted to crops, there is not much work left for the menfolk except hunting, fishing and gathering food in the jungle. Aside from their skill at setting traps and snares, Teduray hunters are experts in using the blowgun, bow and arrow, spears and the homemade shotgun, this last weapon acquired after World War II.

Since ancient times, the Teduray have been known as skillful hunters and trappers. A total of 28 hunting methods have been recorded by Schlegel. The Teduray prepare their traps for deer and pig when their swidden crops have started growing on the hillside slopes, since the game are expected to come out of the forest to foray for food. The fresh shoots creeping out of a burnt clearing usually attracts the animals (Patanne 1977:511).

In recent years, the polarization of Teduray society into the traditional and the acculturated has been most pronounced in the differentiation of their subsistence systems. Two Teduray settlements were the basis for this observation by Schlegel. The first system, traditional swidden agriculture, characterizes the settlement of Figel, while the other, a peasant economy, describes the settlement of Kakaba-kaba. Schlegel describes the first as a system adapted to the tropical rainforest, consisting of slash and burn and shifting cultivation. It is augmented by hunting, fishing and food-gathering activities, and is only marginally dependent on trading with the coastal economy. He describes the second as consisting of plow farming in areas which have virtually lost the old forest cover with almost no exploitation of or dependence on forest resources and having an extensive involvement with the market economy of a rural lowland society (Schlegel 1979:164).

(Blogger’s note: This post is the sixth part of a nine-part series on the Teduray people. Each part is posted every Monday starting October 6, 2014. The text is copied as it appears in Defending the Land: Lumad and Moro People’s Struggle for Ancestral Domain in Mindanao. The book, published by a consortium of non-government organizations, has an “anti-copyright” notice and may thus be freely reproduced.)