Agriculture
The Negrito can not by any stretch of imagination be called a worker. His life for generations has not been such as to teach habits of industry. But for the fact that he has to do some work or starve, he would spend all his days in idleness except that time which he devoted to the chase. Yet when under pressure or urged on by anticipation of gain from the white man, whose wealth and munificence appear boundless, he is tireless. He will clear ground for a camp, cut and split bamboo, and make tables and sleeping platforms, which he would never think of doing for himself. He can get along without such things, and why waste the time? Yet when the camp is abandoned he will carry these things to his house. Most Negritos have seen the better style of living followed by the more civilized Filipinos in the outlying barrios; yet they seem to have no desire to emulate it, and I believe that the lack of such desire is due to a disinclination to perform the necessary manual labor.
By far the greater part of the Negrito’s energies are directed to the growing of tobacco, maize, and vegetables. He does not plant rice to any extent. All planting is done in cleared spots in the forest, because the soil is loose and needs no plowing as in the case of the lowland. The small trees and underbrush are cut away and burned and the large trees are killed, for the Negrito has learned the two important things in primitive farming—first, that the crops will not thrive in the shade, and second, that a tree too large to cut may be killed by cutting a ring around it to prevent the flow of sap. The clearings are never large.
Usually each family has its clearing in a separate place, though sometimes two or more families may cultivate adjoining clearings. The places are selected with a view to richness of soil and ease in clearing. In addition to preparing the ground it is necessary to build a fence around the clearing in order to keep out wild hogs. A brush fence is constructed by thrusting sticks in the ground a few inches apart and twining brush between them.
All work of digging up the soil, planting, and cultivating is done with sharpened sticks of hard wood, sometimes, but not always, pointed with iron, for iron is scarce. This instrument is called “ti-ad′,” the only other tool they possess being the bolo, with which they do all the cutting.
Men, women, and children work in these clearings, but I did not see any division of labor, except that the men, being more adept with the bolo, do whatever cutting there is to be done. Once planted, the weeding and care of the crops falls largely on the women and children, while the men take their ease or hunt and fish.
The piece of ground for planting is regarded as the personal property of the head of the family which cleared it, and he can sell it or otherwise dispose of it at his pleasure. No one else would think of planting on it even though the owner has abandoned it, unless he declared that he had no more use for it, then it could be occupied by anyone else.
An instance of the respect which the Negritos have for the property rights of others was given me by a native of the town of Botolan. His grandfather had acquired a piece of land near Mount Pinatubo from a Negrito who had committed some crime in his rancheria and fled to the pueblo to escape death. In return for protection the Negrito had given him the land. This fact became known to the other Negritos, but although the new owner made no use of the land whatever, and never even visited it, it has never been molested or cultivated by others. Now two generations later they have sent down to the grandson of the first Filipino owner asking permission to buy the land. Land may be sold to others, but of course there exists no record of such transactions other than that of memory.