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Chapter 5 Contemporary Household Strategies for Survival and Prosperity This chapter examines variation in the economic strategies that the secondgeneration residents of San Jose employ to survive (and, ideally, to prosper) under economic conditions greatly changed from those that their parents confronted during the initial settlement of the community earlier in this century . As Palawan’s frontier has moved on to other, more remote areas of the island, the generation of community residents raising their families today must make their living under conditions confronting their peers throughout the rural Philippines: scarce and costly farmland and intense competition for limited off-farm employment opportunities. Such conditions place a premium on educational attainments, political contacts, and the ability to move comfortably in wider social spheres, as well as on more traditional ingredients for success such as foresight and hard work. I have already begun to explore, in chapters 3 and 4, various solutions that San Jose residents have worked out to deal with these conditions. They involve such basic decisions as whether to remain (like one’s parents) in agriculture or to seek nonagricultural employment, or whether to remain in San Jose or to move elsewhere—choices that in turn entail many others (what kind of agriculture, what kind of employment, and so on). Here I build on an insight from the previous chapter, that global distinctions between agricultural and nonagricultural lifeways, however logical or appealing on macro-evolutionary grounds, in fact tell little about processes of change internal to the household. Viewing households as flexible adaptive groups where individuals confront their possibilities and make choices (Wilk 1991a), I instead pursue a different classificatory approach to economic strategies, one that relates contemporary household strategies to those that were pur91 sued in the community a generation ago. The resulting typology, while admittedly idiosyncratic, is more revealing than conventional approaches of the variable consequences of economic change for household functioning. In the years following 1988 and completion of the first phase of my restudy project, I shifted my research focus away from the community as a whole and onto the history and organization of particular households. San Jose continued to grow rapidly, and its sheer size was making it an increasingly unmanageable unit of study. More substantively, from the standpoint of my research interests, the community appeared in danger of being swamped by the recent migrants discussed in the last chapter, individuals whose own changing lives and present role in the community social order seemed of uncertain relevance to the story I wished to tell about San Jose. This latter story seemed more to concern San Joseans, wherever they were found today. The experiences and present circumstances of a household that had left San Jose in, say, 1982, to move to a more remote community or to Puerto Princesa City somehow seemed more germane to the processes of development and change I hoped to understand than did the experiences and present circumstances of a household that moved to San Jose in 1982 after spending its formative years elsewhere in the Philippines. I also wished to take account of some recent developments in anthropology and the increasing discontent with “community studies.” Part of this discontent arises out of the sorts of “wider systems” concerns that informed the discussion in Chapter 2, concerns that lead one to view a focus on communities and other local groups as methodologically inadequate to capture the nature and causes of local-level economic and social change. But there has also been a shift in focus in the other direction, away from whole communities and onto their constituent households. As was discussed in Chapter 1, households are now widely seen as problematic entities, of variable organization and behavior. This latter development did not only seem important to me; I also found it interesting and felt that I was, by virtue of my finegrained data, ideally positioned to explore it. My approach in this chapter is to focus on the particular experiences of ten first-generation or core households (see Chapter 4) and the various secondgeneration or offspring households to which these particular core households have given rise, by the marriage of sons and daughters, as the latter have come of age. The ten first-generation families arrived in San Jose from Cuyo between 1940 and 1959, but mostly between 1944 and 1952. By the time of my 1971 fieldwork, all ten families had children and were otherwise well established, albeit in different socioeconomic circumstances. Only in three households, those of relatively...

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