Mountain people in the Philippines: Ethnographic contributions to upland development

A crisis of deforestation and consequent soil erosion looms in many southeast Asian upland ecosystems. Blame for this problem has been attributed to both slash and burn agriculturalists or timber extraction industries. To the extent that the actions of uplanders rather than legal and illegal logging are seen as being responsible for diminishing forest reserves, a growing demand exists among policy-makers and foresters for a more holistic, interdisciplinary approach to appropriate intervention strategies. Anthropologists are now frequently incorporated into technical programs and are given a growing recognition that economic change cannot be understood adequately in isolation from the social institutional framework. Recent efforts in social forestry, for example, suggest that anthropological perspectives have direct practical applicability to development programs.