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CHAPTER 3 ◆ Failing to Progress DEVELOPMENT ITSELF NEVER SEEMED to arrive in Haliap. Instead, its precursors—exercises of classifying, researching, and training— occupied villagers along with a revolving cast of local officials, national agencies, and international donors. These development engagements required villagers to learn a new language and to identify and think about themselves and their village in new ways in order to communicate with government officers and development donors. Villagers made explicit the transformations required of them through the ways they used the Filipino English phrases that described their interactions with development initiatives. To enjoy development’s bene fits, people first had to bring themselves in line with (take on the priorities of) government policies and donor programs by conforming to (adopting the language and categories of) their requirements and accomplishing (filling out) forms. Doing so, they attended offices (visited, often waiting in line) and coped up with (struggled to meet) preconditions that they donate labor and goods to project activities, at the same time affixing their signatures to a stream of attendance lists, application forms, surveys, and other paperwork. Committing their time and labor, villagers anticipated that development should reciprocate by delivering progress. Balancing livelihood activities with meetings, working bees, and seminars, villagers found that participating in project activities demanded changes in how they thought about themselves. Their Filipino English idioms stressed the verbs—aligning, conforming, accomplishing, attending, and coping— that marked the ways development tried to make the village a legible field in which governing institutions could operate. These same words also suggested that development was largely about form rather than substance. Luis took a leading role in Haliap’s 1990s development activities, working with two internationally funded projects. He juggled his commitments with farming a rented field and doing day labor on relatives’ farms. He spent his free time hanging out at Angelina’s store and decided to court her. Their son, Oscar, was born in mid-1996 and they married a year later. Having left the Iglesia in his twenties, Luis rejoined the church, and Angelina, a Catholic, converted. Upon their marriage Angelina inherited a quarter-hectare rice field from her parents. FAILING TO PROGRESS ◆ 65 Luis and Angelina, land-poor but educated and ambitious, made ideal project beneficiaries. Their land was kurang (insufficient), producing only enough rice to feed them for eight or nine months. That was, of course, Luis observed, if they did not “entertain guests.” The strain in his voice when he made this comment suggested the implausibility of restricting one’s household stores from circulating in Haliap. To grow rice, Luis and Angelina needed cash to buy seed and fertilizer and to pay workers. Sustaining the exchange-labor relations needed to plant and harvest their small field conflicted with Luis’s development project activities. Luis sought ongoing work and status through development, but the couple needed to balance the two, because their rice alone would not give them a secure livelihood, yet development activities could not guarantee money to buy food. Luis explained to me: “Marriage . . . , a child . . . this makes you plan. Plan for each day, next month, next year. Before I had my son, I would dream, but not really plan for it. Now I plan for my dreams.” All three of them were living in Angelina’s old store, which she had finally closed in late 1996. Luis called it “the house of a chicken.” It was a one-room wood and galvanized iron shack with a dirt floor, no running water, and no toilet. Seeking assistance from relatives and looking for paid work farther afield had not given them security. “There’s nothing here for us, no jobs,” Angelina told me. They hoped that by participating in development as a volunteer and casual laborer, Luis would eventually find secure paid work. Luis and Angelina defined progress very simply: “permanent jobs.” For them, regular salaried work was necessary to found any stable livelihood they could reasonably hope to attain. But the improvements that government programs and donor projects offered the village had not been designed to provide people with ongoing salaried work. Instead, these projects and programs were directed toward inculcating civic virtues and creating progressive—meaning more strategic , better-informed—independent farmers who inhabited a bounded place where, by producing commodities for national or global markets, they could become self-sufficient. Mid-1990s development programs actually heightened the sense of insecurity among land-poor households like Luis...

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