A forest of dreams: Ontological multiplicity and the fantasies of environmental government in the Philippines

Background

The southwestern Philippines' Palawan Island has seen an expansion of conservation enclosures coinciding with Indigenous rights recognition. The Palawan people, traditionally swidden agriculturalists, hunters, fishers, and traders, are now a minority in southern municipalities due to migration and socioeconomic changes. Aiming to reconcile conservation with Indigenous territorial rights, the Philippine government has policies that often expect Indigenous values to align with bureaucratically managed conservation areas, like the Mt. Mantalingahan Protected Landscape (MMPL).

Goals and Methods

The central goal of this research is to examine how "supernatural" or "metaphysical" forms of agency produce and contest environmental government in Palawan Island. The author employs ethnographic fieldwork conducted over eighteen months in a Palawan-majority hamlet within the MMPL to achieve this goal, using methods such as participant observation; semi-structured interviews with government and NGO officials, and Palawan residents; collection of relevant documents; and open-ended life-history interviews. The research applies a posthumanist perspective and a radical-empiricist pursuit of more-than-human ontological analysis to move beyond Eurocentric dualisms and engage with Indigenous philosophies and ontological practices.

Conclusions and Takeaways

This study finds that social relationships with unseen beings who communicate through mediums or dreams shape land and resource use decisions in Palawan. This often complicates and undermines the goals of bureaucratic conservation. The concept of lihyen (taboo areas) and the flexible negotiations around it further demonstrate how relationships with unseen beings influence Palawan spatial practices, and how these differ from the rigid spatial categories of environmental governance. The study suggests that recognizing diverse ontologies reveals politics not just as struggles over resources but also as encounters between different ways of creating worlds, allowing space for Indigenous world-making practices to challenge ongoing colonization. Future research could explore the practical implications of incorporating these ontological understandings into policy and conservation efforts. Practitioners should be mindful of the limitations of imposing uniform, bureaucratic frameworks onto diverse ontological contexts.