The sugar industry has been a component of the Philippine economy for a long time, and it continues to play a significant, even if declining, role in the country today. Billig’s study is a skilled account of the industry from an anthropological perspective. Four elements are combined in this study. First, Billig analyzes the industry from the point of view of its elite players: planters, millers, traders, food exporters, and government officials. Second, he shows how Philippine culture is reflected in this elite. Third, he addresses the manner in which his own fieldwork highlights the conflict between the industry’s elite groups. Finally, the author argues that to understand the conflict between the elites, their respective cultural underpinnings—in term of meanings, values, and intentions—need to be uncovered. Billig is successful in the first three efforts; in the latter, I believe, he is less convincing.

The author begins by tracing the industry’s development from the early–19th century Spanish period into the American colonial phase during which it became dependent on access to the American market, a condition that has continued to today. Billig then discusses the inefficiencies currently existing in the industry, which are perpetuated by the U.S. quota system and uncertainties about the impact of land reform programs. Inefficiencies are also the result of a property system introduced during the American period when it made sense; that is, the quedan arrangement in which sugar milled by centrals continues to be owned and then sold by the planters. Nowadays, the resulting second-order trade sector drives transaction costs up. Billig describes the contrasting attitudes individuals in the elite groups have about this impediment to improve efficiency. He adopts a similar approach when turning to the question of whether sugar should be allowed to be imported into the Philippines. It is in this context that the author in the early 1990s became involved in the conflict between the elite groups. Pro- and especially anti-import groups asked for his help to lobby the government. This lead to Billig’s termination of his research in central Philippines—ethically his position had become compromised and an element of danger had entered. The author then turns to the manner in which the concept of “rationalization” is used by the different parties in the industry to support their own position—suggesting that the concept’s meaning is culturally relative—and he shows how groupism is an integral part of the industry. This involves the cultural tendency among Filipinos to form ever changing groups around personalized leaders whose main concern is to defend their leadership position, rather than to represent substantive issues. Groupism has not helped the effectiveness of the Filipino dominated industry versus other interests in the Philippines. Among these are local Chinese—culturally urban, commercial, and innovative—who are beginning to enter and transform the industry.

Billig adheres to a neo-Weberian economic anthropology, which emphasizes “causal eclecticism” and the study of “meaningful social action in order to understand what motivates people” (pp. 6–7). To him, culture is important even in utilitarian action, although he avoids culturology as an all-embracing explanation. Billig is moderate in his approach, but he does argue strongly against the “the apriorist, formalist, rationalist, nomothetic, universalistic approach” as represented by current economic thought (p. 269) that regards humans as “rational maximizers of utility” (p. 224). The problem I have is not so much with the author’s argument but, rather, with its applicability to the case under consideration. The underlying principle of classical economics, something that goes back to Adam Smith, is that people act according to their self-interest. When discussing the quedan and import issues, rather than seeing the various pro and con positions taken by the elite parties as expressions of different cultural orientations, as the author does, these positions can be considered more parsimoniously as expressions of the self-interest each group has because of its place in the industry. Planters, of course, are against sugar imports and for the quedan system because both protect their inefficient operations, even if the overall efficiency of the industry then suffers. The fact that they defend the quedan system, for instance, by invoking the cultural “idiom of masculinity” (p. 131) is interesting, but hardly the significant factor to understand their position. Similar points can be made with respect to the other elite groups. It is curious how the cultural orientation of each group—their interpretation of what is “rational” (p. 224)—tends to correspond with their economic/political self-interest. It would have been better for the author to have shown that “rational,” “self-interest” and similar etic concepts need to be culturally fleshed out, instead to imply that culture supersedes them. As it stands, the greatest utility of the culture concept in this study is when Billig deals with the Filipino penchant for groupism and describes the character of Chinese business ways. To add a final note, given that the culture/economy issue is a central theme of the study, it is surprising that the author does not mention economic anthropologists who have recently written about the issue, such as J. M. Acheson, S. Gudeman, R. H. Halperin, and R. R. Wilk.

Despite these critical remarks, anyone interested in the sugar industry, in general, and the one in the Philippines, in particular, will find Billig’s work an insightful, sensitive, and balanced study. It stands as a significant contribution to industrial and Philippine ethnography.