The main thesis of this essay is that being recognized as traditional or indigenous requires the employment of modern means. A form of ‘Bureaucratic Orientalism’ has been devised, constructing and reaffirming ‘the Other’ through the minutiae of administrative procedures and contemporary representational processes. These procedures exist for the twin purposes of establishing the right to act as an indigenous group, and of circumscribing the obligations of the state, and possibly of other institutions of governance. The entire debate is the expression of a dilemma that has no solution but is actually an expression of modernity. The three pillars upon which indigeneity is affirmed are a national (internationally legitimized) legal system, the contemporary world of NGOs, and the institutions of local government. Thus, through the very process of being recognized as ‘indigenous’, these groups enter the realms of modernity. The Philippines provide a case study for these explorations.

This article argues that the persistence of non-capitalist dimensions within land relations in the Philippines is basic to rural livelihood strategies, and has been a major but widely-neglected factor in the failure of land reform programmes. Addressing the issue of non-capitalist relationships brings into focus the indigenous or`customary' land tenure relationships that exist in lowland land tenure arrangements, with the result that the conventional dichotomy between lowland and upland`cultural minority' land relations becomes spurious. The article oers some suggestions as to why, for the major part of this century, the indigenous norms of lowlanders have been overlooked, with a discussion which links up to issues of national identity and nation building.In spite of identi®able dierences amongst them, policies and studies of Philippine agrarian reform, especially its land reform component, deal almost exclusively with the concept of redistribution of land and issues of general national interests. Only scant reference is made in the literature to indigenous land use practices that might be prevalent in areas which are, or should be, subject to land reform. This article claims that these local practices in fact de®ne the content of real property as understood locally. After opening with an overview of the general themes of agrarian reform, two empirical accounts from the Philippines will be introduced to highlight the argument that recognition of local forms of land use practices has a strong in¯uence on the attitudes and performance of farmers in a typical land reform area. In essence, these operations manifest the localized social embeddedness of economic decisions among agrarian reform bene®ciaries who are dependent in their precarious living situation on intricate social networks. If in fact this constitutes an oversight of policy making and research, as I suggest, then one needs to ask why there has been both lack of interest in scholarly discourse and neglect in the policy sphere. The ®nal part of this article introduces three interlinked, yet dierent, sets of arguments to explain this neglect. The ®rst is I wish to thank Wolf, and three anonymous reviewers for their critical readings of and assistance in cleaning up earlier drafts.

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