The Rational or Moral Tulisan?

Making Sense of Peasant Banditry in pre-20th Century

Colonial Philippines

© 1995, 2003 Virgilio Rojas

Dept. of Economic History
Stockholm University, Sweden

Introduction

The imposition of Spanish colonial rule and the feudal system of production it
created generated inherent social tensions in pre-20th century Philippine so-
ciety. While these tensions were generally held at bay, as evidenced by the long
350 year interval of civilian compliance among the local peasantry to colonial
policies (a trend which would later be immutably reversed by a successful
nationwide armed liberation struggle in 1896), latent peasant resentment did
erupt in periodic and intermittent episodes of civilian non-compliance via
abortive uprisings, festering banditry and millinnerian activity.

This exploratory report theoretically focuses on one of these episodic forms –

banditry or tulisanismo (in the native Tagalog dialect), which thrived with
distinctive vigor and durability in the rice-growing Southern Tagalog and
Central Luzon regions surrounding the colonial capital of Manila. Noted areas
were marked by high tenancy rates, large ecclesiastical haciendas or estates and
intense colonial resettlement programs (reduccion). This high-tension bandit-
infested landscape also became the logical breeding ground for both leadership
and rand-and-file material to the revolutionary forces in the 1896 War of
Independence, which finally destroyed Spanish colonial state power.

In this phase of apprenticeship on the origins and dynamics of s-c ”pre-modern”

movements or modes of popular protest, one faces a number of intriguing
theoretical questions. Why did some peasants elect to leave the relatively safe
and low-risk quarters of civilian compliance, to venture into the high-risk and
insecure environment of tulisanismo? What general and specific structural and
agency conditions and constraints entered into the choice equation?

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Intiuitively, one may reasonably presume a possible systematic correlation
between the specifically high degree of ecclesiastical feudal property and
corresponding political and social relations, and the frequency of local tulisan-
ismoi over time in the geographical area concerned. But even if that systematic
link could be established, one still has to deal with the problem of tulisanismo in
agency terms, i.e. why in heavens given shared structural conditions and the
grievances they tended to generate many still responded with compliance even
as a few ”deviants” turned to banditry and non-compliance. What accounts for
this discrepancy?

And what in heavens made disgruntled segments of the local peasantry, when
finally pushed to individual and collective action, elect to articulate their gripes
in precisely this mode, i.e. banditry, and not other forms of protest?

Is banditry an historically specific mode of behaviour accounted mainly for by

an historically relatively stable peasant village economy, essentially bounded by
moral values and group solidarities, but increasingly breaking at the seams in the
face of modernization (agrarian commercialisation, urbanisation, capitalist
industrialisation), as s-c ”moral economy” exponents like Hobsabawm (1965)
once suggested?

Or is banditry a rationally calculated enterprise to up individual profits under

conditions of relative deprivation and scarcity in a village society where free-
rider problems and competition among profit-maximizing individuals invariably
undermine group solidarity, as adherents of rational choice theory propound?

Is the peasant bandit acting out essentially on moral or rational premises? Is the
bandit a moral or rational peasant?

The Theoretical Fault-Line

The either-or answer to these questions is put in stark relief in the by now classic
if contrasting inquiries of James Scott (1976) and Samuel Popkin (1979) into the
nature and dynamics of peasant societies and resistance in Southeast Asia.
Elsewhere, explicit assumptions underlying Scott’s moral economy versus
Popkin’s rational peasant models are recapitulated in different ways by current
scholarship on peasant rebellion in Southeast Asia, the main currents of which
may be decomposed into three different frameworks: millenarian, class conflict,
and local politics theories.

A critical discussion of how well the employed assumptions and conclusions

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tally with the empirical evidence presented by concerned scholars will serve as
indispensable guideposts in setting up a workable framework and research
strategy by which to approach the problem of banditry in the Philippines. As this
problem poses questions along similar lines, noted critical discussion may
hopefully tease out relevant ideas which may help firm up problem formulation
and the derivation of a series of of workable hypotheses around which the
direction of research may be organised.

What prospects and perils highlight any puritan application of either one of the
conteding paradigms on peasant society and behaviour generally implied in the
phenomenon of civilian non-compliance and its distinct articulation in banditry?
What questions tend to be factored in and out of the picture by these rival
theories?

Often, rival models may, as the critical surveys of David Little (1989) and James
Rule (1988)ii demonstrate, be applied, with equally impressive results, on essen-
tially identical empirical material, while leading to diametrically opposite con-
clusions.

Initially probing into the theoretical and empirical implications of sundry

models through the critical eyes of Little and Rule, this modest report hopes to
size up the relative utility of each model or theory in developing falsifiable
hypotheses and a sustainable explanatory framework of banditry.

Bluntly put, how far will a rational choice or moral economy model or other
theories on peasant rebellion take a novice like this author in terms of system-
atically and adequately explaining peasant-bandit behavior in ”pre-modern,”
pre-revolutionary colonial peasant society in the Philippines? Is the peasant
bandit a rationally calculating ”entrepreneur” and innovator, or is he a conser-
vative defender of violated traditional village moral conventions?

Capturing the Peasant Bandit:

On Moral or Rational Grounds?
How does one make most sense of banditry as a distinct form of peasant non-
compliant behavior? Two outstanding but conflicting accounts on the structural-
institutional nature and dynamics of peasant economies and behavioral patterns
may supply relevant clues to the issue of moral economy versus rational choice
models. While the former views traditional peasant society as being organised
cooperatively through shared moral values and essentially self-synchronizing
communal institutions, the latter sees the same society being organised on the

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basis of the rational peasant striving for private family security and welfare, with
long-run destabilising effects on village solidarity and welfare.

The most imaginative and state of the art application of these contrasting models
on Southeast Asian material can be found respectively in James Scott’s Moral
Economy of the Peasant and Samuel Popkin’s Rational Peasant. The extension
of above-noted general dispute is nowhere more crystal clear than in the way
these antipodal accounts address two central issues at stake: whether typical
Southeast Asian peasant behavior is a function of shared communal values
(Scott) or self-interested rationality (Popkin)?; whether these motives foster self-
preserving and stabilising (Scott) social arrangements, institutions and patterns
of collective behavior, or exercise a long-term destabilising impact (Popkin) on
the latter?

Scott’s Model:
Moral Village Economy & Morally-Constrained Peasants

Focusing on the Depression rebellions of the 1930s in Vietnam and Burma,

Scott seeks to explain why normally compliant peasants yield at times to risky
non-compliant behavior. To make sense of this otherwise rare behavior he first
specifies what makes for normal conformism among peasants and the motives
which shape that behavior within a moral village economy model. Scott’s
typical moral village economy is predicated on the following assumptions:

♦ that village economy ecologically, technically, socially operates basically

on critical subsistence margins;
♦ this marginal situation invariably reproduces what may be labelled as a
”susbsistence ethic”, a set of standards through which peasants evaluate
the institutions and persons around them through the lens of risk and
subsistense security” (Little: 30-31). Thus the ethos of ”reciprocity” and
the ”right to susbsistence” are central moral principles which govern
routine social patterns and injunctions of peasant life and provides them
with constraints on both actions and choices of rich and poor alike;
♦ governed by the subsistence logic, the village economy tends to breed
institutional arrangements to ensure collective welfare, facilitate crisis-
management and a minimal standard of welfare for every village member.

When these conditions are forfeited at any point in time, like when a
significant dissonance between existing material conditions (e.g. dramatic tax
hikes or deteriorating tenancy conditions) and the terms of the subsistence
ethic occurs, Scott’s model predicts the likelihood of rebellious behavior
among peasants whose sense of justice has been offended in the process.

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In Burma and Vietnam, as Scott argues, this increasing dissonance came in the
wake of expanding commercialisation and market economies; and the growing
usurpation of traditional political functions by a more efficient colonial
bureaucratic state. The varying impact of these disruptive forces elsewhere is
acknowledged and attributed by Scott mainly to existing differences in
communal values, type and degree of cohesion of local insurance systems, and
institutional arrangements.

Popkin’s Model:
The Competetive Village and the Rational Peasant

Like Scott, Popkin highlights the main features of the typical village economy in
pre-colonial Vietnam and the changes it underwent as a consequence of
colonialism and commercialisation in the 19th century. In similar vein, Popkin
chronicles and attempts to explain the rise of large-scale non-compliant behavior
among peasants transmitted through the Catholic Church, the communist Viet
Minh, and two syncretist religious movements, Cao Dai and Hoa Hoa. But he
approaches these problems in a way that puts Scott’s assumptions and conclu-
sions on its head.

In fact he argues that at no point in time did peasant behavior, whether

compliant or otherwise, take its cue from the redistributive and welfare insu-
rance systems implied in Scott’s moral economy village model. As far as the
motivational bases of peasant behavior are concerned, he argues in more strict
terms. Vietnamese peasants acted and behaved essentially according to profit-
maximizing principles. They were motivated by considerations of personal and
family welfare rather than group interest or moral values (ibid: 34). For Popkin,
collective behavior in the form of massive rebellion is consistent to this
assumption only if seen as an aggregation of individual peasant rational choices.

Popkin’s alternative traditional village model is the exact anti-thesis of Scott’s

communitarian model, with its totally contrasting features:

♦ a village economy rigidly stratified along lines of skewed distribution of

wealth and power, where contending groups (rich and poor) operate
competetively rather than cooperatively on the basis of personal and
family self-interest and under conditions of uncertainty and oppression
(see also Rule: 49-51);
♦ a village economy marked by low rather than high levels of institutiona-
lised collective welfare security and insurance; the prevalence of market-

5
 determined private credit and usurious institutions; and the presence of
”outsiders” with whom powerful village interests to ally themselves in a
bid to advance individual positions of self-interest. Basically, institutions
and collective activities that might benefit the entire village will not
emerge due to public goods and free-rider problems (i.e.when conflict
between private and public interest arises, decision-makers will opt for
private ones);
♦ a village economy where normative injunctions and values, far from
shaping peasant social life are themselves prone to manipulation by self-
interested actors;
♦ village institutions are ”highly plastic, giving way easily to the arrival of a
new set of social and economic forces” (Little, op cit: 36-37); these
institutions having little constraining role in terms of massive changes in
the economic and social environment; in fact the opposite is usually true,
i.e. in pursuit of self-interest, peasants in new contexts will alter customs
and traditions in the process.

An immediate comparative advantage of departing from these assumptions in

explaining rebellious behavior, contends Popkin, is that unlike Scott’s (who
tends to see collective action largely as a reactive response to assaults on
traditional subsistence rights), the model more adequately captures cases
wherein resistance is levelled not so much against disruptive external forces
(like growing commercialisation and other similar variables noted earlier on) as
against notably unpopular traditional village institutions.

However, the model is not entirely unproblematic, since it has to deal with
Mancur Olson’s proverbial free-rider problem attached to rational choice
assumptions. Free-riders ought as it were to make such movements rare since
they aim for public goods! To adequately understand these problems, Popkin
connects the explanation of peasant political behavior to an analysis of the
incentives and disincentives that confront the individual decision-maker (on
rank-and-file and leadership levels alike) at any given point in time. The
rationality of resistance will thus depend on the types of mobilisable
organisational resources available to peasant movements, those reducing the
risks, costs, and uncertainties of non-compliance. A crucial resource is the
presence of what Popkin calls ”political entrepreneurs”— the rational and self-
interested leader with a personal stake in founding and maintaining collective
activity.

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Striking a Middle-Way: Little’s Intermediate Village Model &
Morally Responding Rational Peasant

David Little’s critical evaluation of the Scott-Popkin dispute issues in sum the
verdict of a deadlock: ”Scott and Popkin use their motivational assumptions to
explain many social phenomena – the character of village institutions, the
dynamics of peasant political action, and peasant response to modernisation.
Neither offers direct evidence at the individual level to uphold his analysis of
peasant motivation, instead each supports his position by referring to the
predicted aggregate consequences that these analyses generate.” (ibid: 38)

By integrating seemingly antagonistic assumptions undergirding contesting

paradigms into an intermediate model of a village economy and collective
peasant behavior, and then specifying the critical operative conditions under
which respective assumptions will work or not, Little attempts to resolve the
stalemate.

He begins by modifying Popkin’s all-too rigid assertion that cooperative village

norms and institutions will, insofar as they show the vital signs of public goods,
inherently not emerge on account of free-rider problems. In fact, as recent
scholarship on collective action reveals, Olson’s free-rider maxim may and can
be neutralised by a set of circumstances ands that cooperative ventures rather
than competition in these situations make more rational sense.

To the extent that there may indeed be rational pay-offs in cooperative behavior
to acquire collective goods, there is nothing logically inconsistent in the assump-
tion that rational peasant decisions and behavior will occur in the context of
Scott’s traditional peasant village, where cooperation, collective action, and
communitarian practices do operate. The obverse may also be posited against
Scott such that under conditions of village institutional disintegration competi-
tive behavior may ride roughshod over and even alter shared moral conventions,
traditional institutions, and local welfare systems in favor of new ones.

On these premises, Little constructs and abstracts an intermediate village model

located between the opposite extremes represented by Scott and Popkin. He
argues that insofar as traditional villages approximate the typical features
described by this intermediate model, collective action will be easier to achieve
than Popkin predicts. Underpinning this are the following assumptions:

♦ the model village is a relatively stable society where institutional, social,

ecological, and technological relations change gradually. Like in a repeti-
tive game theory of choice, environmental stability implies that the
outcomes of any decision to join in collective projects in the future are

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 relatively predictable;
♦ the village is relatively insulated from external economic and political
intervention. This insularity implies that the preceding conditions of
predictabily which enter into the choice equation is further heightened on
the basis of guaranteed continuous interaction and social exchange among
villagers;
♦ the village members have access to information about past and present
activities of others due to the relatively small size of the village.
Transactions among them occur on a face-to-face basis;
♦ the village embodies many shared values (familial, moral, political, reli-
gious) as well as organisations corresponding to these values, which
although tendering no guarantee of success, may facilitate collective
action in terms of sanctioning free-rider problems, motivating individuals
toward collective welfare, etc;
♦ social relations in this village are multi-stranded.

In sum, stated conditions (stability, isolation, richness of information, shared

values, and multi-strandedness) generally support mechanisms (reciprocity,
cohesive community values, convention, group size considerations, the role of
local politics and organisations) that operate to override the operation of narrow
individual rationality and the free-rider syndrome.

The above ideal conditions and mechanisms may solve some problems of
collective action, but certainly not all. As Little instructively argues, different
collective projects require varying sets of conditions to succeed. Projects with
”positively stratified” benefits will be easiest to achieve; ”equal benefit” projects
supported by strong values and diffuse coercion will be possible, and ”reversed
stratified” (i,e, redistributive practices) benefits will be difficult to achieve
without strong support from widely shared commitments against individual
rationality.

On the obverse side, what conditions may countervail the positive operation of
noted assumptions, i.e. undermine cooperation and collective action in village
society in favor of peasant free-riders? One crucial factor is incremental group
size which, according to Little, progressively impinges on conditional recipro-
cities. Traditional patterns of village interaction may be disrupted by the de-
routinizing impact of demographic crises (famine, drought) or banditry,
intruding market or extra-village (state) politics, which in different ways ups the
uncertainty of current decisions and choices based on calculations of expected
future gains.

De-isolating trends and increasing exposure to ”outsider” to a national economy

and culture may be expected to undermine collective and communitarian

8
practices and shared values within village society. These countervailing forces
tangent those summoned in Scott’s earlier discussions.

What Little’s intermediate models appears to convey is essentially that given

underlying conditions Popkin’s free-riding peasants may be overriden even as
narrow individual rationality to be extended to account for a wider repertoire of
collective action within the context of Scott’s traditional village solidarities and
institutions than hintherto permitted. While certain Scottian postulates on
communcal redistributive properties are in turn overriden by the logic of
individual rationality, a point which escapes capture even in Little’s extended
version.

By and large, the dispute between Scott and Popkin centres on theoretically
different accounts of the collective aggeregation of either morally and institu-
tionally determined or respectively independent self-interested individual
peasant choices and behavior. However, Popkin more than Scott, braves into the
dynamics of collective action (e.g. rebellion) as it is channelled through distinct
organisations and movements, as well as how individual peasants within these
organisations behave.

With Scott, one gets the image of peasants as constructed actors, captive
subjects if you like of moral and ethical structures and institutions. In this
regard, Popkin takes a more offensive and avant-garde position, putting a
premium on the resource-mobilising and capabilities of ”political entrepreneurs”
(self-interested organising leaders) and peasant political organisations and
movements. In this sense, Popkin more than Scott has the makings of a theory of
(protest) movements.

Other Theories of Peasant Rebellion

What insights radiate from the available literature on Southeast Asian collective
protest movements and peasant rebellion? What other questions beside those
already raised by preceding writers come to the fore there? Although banditry as
a distinct form of social and political protest may perhaps at best approximate
small scale insurgencies, it may still be fecund to swiftly pursue three popular
approaches to large-scale peasant rebellion with the view of filtering out
theoretical points relevant to banditry. The red thread in these theories is again
given by the question as to what causes peasants to rebel; what prominent
variables figure in these different accounts, and how do they empirically design
research?

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Millenarian Theory

This approach identifies a culturally specific world view and ideology as central
to the explanation of rebellion. A pioneer in this genre is none other than Eric
Hobsbawm. His early inquiry into popular movements in traditional European
societies (1959) distinguishes between ”pure political” revolutionary and mille-
narian movements.

Hallmarks of the former are explicit programs of social, political and economic
reform, rank.and-file organisation revolving around a set of shared interests, and
the pursuit of a developed strategy of revolutionary politics. None of these are
present in millenarian movements, rather the latter tend to evolve and cohere
around a shared religious ideology based on a apocalyptic concept of historical
change. The crucial message delivered by Hobsbawm’s classic study is that
millenarian inspired movements do not depend on shared material interests, nor
do they work through the rational political calculations of their practicioners.

Susan Nanquin’s treatment of several White Lotus movements in early 20th

century China adapts this approach to Southeast Asian material. Thus she sets
out to describe the motivational origins and organisational resources available to
the religious sects under study. One potential lacuna in this model is the heavy
emphasis on the religious bases of rebellious motivations. Moreover, it tends to
ignore significant immediate political and economic factors and motives of self-
interest.

Class Conflict Theory

As prime cause this model singles out class interests. By this token, rebellions
are seen as political responses to exploitation and class conflict between
superordinate and subordinate groups (e.g. landlords versus tenants). Thus
central to the explanatory agenda are: the social relations of production that
define objective material interests of affected groups; political and social
arrangements shaping political consciousness and motivations of participants;
the political resources available for development in collective political action.

In other words, this approach explains peasant rebellions as a function of social

tensions contained in peasant society and the class consciousness of the peasant
rebels. Marks (1984) studies of rebellious peasant activity in Southern China in
the recent two centuries is a typical specimen of this approach. However,
analytical hang-ups in the genre have been noted from different quarters: the
straightforward correlation posited between exploitative social conditions and

10
class consciousness coupled with the voluntaristic propensity to rebel, may in
fact be mitigated by other non-economic, institutional, and religious factors.

Non-class factors seem to have played a significant role in shaping social

conflict in village economies. Moreover, there is scant direct evidence of
explicit class consciousness among followers and leaders in 19th century
Chinese rebellions. There are also prof proper levels of aggregation (class
interests may be viewed from perspectives that range from local to global, or
elsewhere, the tendency to consider class interests on too high a level – regional,
national, or local. Not to mention empirical problems of separating horizontal
from vertical non-class interests (sometimes local non-class may mask extra-
local class interests). In fact one may argue that class conflict models could very
well approximate more modern 20th century than pre-modern conditions (i.e.,
when the masking capabilities of vertical village solidarities and interests
operate more prominently).

Local Politics Theory

This theory assigns a variety of local interests and organisational forms as the
fundamental determinant of the occurence and course of rebellion. The main
benchmark for this disparate set of works, is the view that rebellion is a form of
deliberate collective action that originates from the local interests of the
individuals, who participate and are facilitated by local political processes
available to potential rebels.

A distinctive feature here is the observation that large-scale rebellions are often
unintended, unforseen consequences of essentially local processes. The local
political process is intentional and rational, while the global process is uninten-
tional. This is particularly intersting for the purposes of banditry, not least in
relation to sundry attempts – like Eizabeth Perry’s study of the Nian Rebellion
in Northern China at a juncture (1851-63) which incidentally coincides with our
Philippine investigation – to apply this model to historically reconstruct the
gradual transformation of local bandit gangs into loosely coordinated regional
forces capable of defeating the regular armed forces of the state.

Perry’s account emphasises the ecological circumstances that surrounded pea-

sant life in Northern China. Critical ecological, technological, and material
conditions in this area set the stage for the emergence of alternating predatory
(banditry) and protective (militia activity to protect crops) survival strategies
(both individual and collective) among poor peasants. An important intervening
factor in this transformation were the roles of outside actors: the central
government and disciplined Taipeng rebels. These externalforces merged pre-

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dators and protectors in common antagonism toward the state.

Is the Tulisan a Rational or Moral Peasant? Is H(Sh)e a

Class, Millenarian or Ecological Invention?

The first question incited by the Scott-Popkin dispute may just have been
conditionally qualified by Little’s middle-way modification of the basic assump-
tions built into the conflicting accounts of the nature and dynamics of peasant
village economy, motivation and behavioral patterns. His extended individual
rationality model specifies in a more sophisticated manner the hypothetical
workings of countervailing factors and mechanismstp both narrow rational and
over-commanding moral/institutional premises of peasant motives and behavior.

One may reasonably expect the frequency and nature of banditry as a distinct
moce of peasant behavior to vary, as Little’s model suggests, according to
differences in levels of cohesion of traditional village institutions, demographic
density, etc. Not until these differences have been explored can the peasant
bandit be ”accused” with just cause for acting basically either on moral or
rational grounds.

Intuitively, as the scan information on banditry indicates, there are reasons to

take seriously those variable highlighted respectively by millenarian, class
conflict, and local politics theories.

One may, for instance, assess the connection between comparative tenancy rates
and probably transparent degrees of iniquitous landlord-peasant relations
marking colonial friar estates and the frequency of banditry in these areas.

At the same time, available material indicates off-hand that peasant banditry
may be a misnomer – quite a few appear to have belonged to a group of
disgruntled colonial civil servants and could thus hardly be classified as
peasants, along with the class-related gripes usually associated with them.

Filipino historian, Reynaldo Ileto (1979), an acknowledged expert in millenarian

movements in the Philippines, suggests a certain connection between some of
the tulisanes or bandits and certain millenarian ritual practices prevalent among
them.

Finally, ecological premises and the local institutions (political and non-
political) they tend to partially shape, and their contributory influence in
explaining the frequency of banditry in certain areas should certainly not be

12
dismissed.

References

Hobsbawm, Eric (1965) Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social

Movements in the 19th and 20th Centuries. New York: Norton.

Ileto, Reynaldo (1989) Pasyon and Revolution. Popular Movements in the

Philippines. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press.

Little, David (1989) Understanding Peasant China. Case Studies in the

Philosophy of Social Science. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Medina, Isagani (1994) Cavite Before the Revolution, 1571-1896. University

of the Philippines: CSSP Publications.

Popkin, Samuel L (1979) The Rational Peasant. Berkely: University of

California Press.

Rule, James (1988) Theories of Civil Violence. Berkely: University of California

Press.

Scott, James C (1976) The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Subsistence and
Rebellion in Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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i
This correlation had been suggested by one of the leading pundits on banditry in the Philippines,
historian Isagani Medina, in his recent dissertation, Cavite Before the Revolution, 1571-1896
(1994), CSSP Publications, University of the Philippines. But while he makes a direct connection
between the geographical frequency and specificity of tulisanismo and the relatively high intensity
of colonial ressetlement policies in the Southern Tagalog province of Cavite, he does not submit
systematic evidence to that effect.
ii
Little, David (1989); Rule, James (1988).