Understanding the Teduray concept of land necessitates a deeper insight into their view on property or user rights. This can be gleaned from the Teduray word gefe, which roughly corresponds to having exclusive right over a particular item’s present use. According to Schlegel, to be gefe of something is when a person not only has an emotional or even economic interest in any object, person or even a ceremony, but also has a legitimate personal oversight.
This same concept applies to the use of land, in the sense of right of usufruct. A swidden belongs to a person who is gefe until after harvest time, during which the site is lain to fallow and that person is no longer gefe over the site. Once it has been publicly marked through community rituals, a land selected by an individual for swidden is free for his use.
For the Teduray, the right to use the swidden site is not hereditary. After a single cropping cycle, the site reverts to public domain and cannot be inherited by descendants. In this context, the Teduray concept of land utilization is inextricably linked with their concept of use-right.
(Blogger’s note: This post is the fifth 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.)
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