Is the Bucolic Really Idyllic?

 (In reaction to this photo posted in Herencia Filipinas)

Is the Bucolic Really Idyllic?

Imagine a world without electricity, home appliances, electronic gadgets, cars and buses, nor even running water and basic plumbing, concrete pavements, and landline telephone.

It may sound too primitive today and even unthinkable, but that was the reality of the Philippine barrio even well into the 1980s.

The socioeconomic divide between the población or town center and the barrios is almost a world apart then that upper-class Filipinos, deeply rooted as they are in social status-consciousness (think maginoo, maharlika, timawa, alipin, aliping namamahay, aliping saguiguilid, etc.), could not help but underline it in their day-to-day collision with the “plebeian” and “the great unwashed.”

Maybe it is human nature, after all, for city rats to feel superior over, and thus to look down on, their countryside counterpart.

In Bayambang of old, people at the center, when routinely offended by the rough, unsophisticated ways of barrio folk, used to call them “taga-uuh,” according to Dr. Nicolas Miguel, a term derived from “taga-uma” or “from the barrio.” This eventually evolved into the equally pejorative “barriotic,” which was synonymous to unsophisticated, “un-cool,” and all the other telling attributes used for someone economically downtrodden and of lower social standing. Tagalogs used the term “bakya” (wooden clogs), while other ethnic groups surely had other handy equivalents.

The reaction is hardly surprising, even understandable. To illustrate pre-Internet realities, barrio folk of the olden days travelled to población in carabao- or cow-driven carts and carretelas (horse-drawn carriages), if not on foot, and arrived with their feet and slippers covered in thick dust during the dry season or else splattered with mud during the rainy season. To the well-off, this offending sight drew a mix of pity, contempt, disdain, and a sense of superiority. Such treatment received by the “taga-libis ng nayon” was, of course, not helpful in building up their self-confidence.

This is not to say that there was not an opposite way of seeing things back then. An opposing view of the bucolic scene was seeing it as something pure and pristine, whether referring to nature per se or human nature brought up in such an environment, untouched by worldly ways. In contrast to the views of philosophers like Rousseau, and the implications of such novels as “Lord of the Flies” and the hyper-violent Japanese movie “Battle Royale,” the barrio is where you find genuinely good because guileless folk, unspoilt nature, and thus relaxing, stress-free environment, innocent to the evil and pollutive ways of the industrial world.

This was certainly the vision of realist painter Fernando Amorsolo and fellow jaded urbanites and the theme of neo-folk songs such as “Sa Libis ng Nayon,” “Kalesa,” and “Tayo na Antipolo.”

“Kung ang hanap mo ay ligaya sa buhay
Sa libis ng nayon doon manirahan
Taga-bukid man may gintong kalooban,
Kayamanan at dangal ng kabukiran.”

Indeed, in "halcyon days of yore" in Bayambang, for example, there was the unsung beauty in the old ways of life in such farming communal practices as tagnawa and gamal and the local version of bayanihan. Local student ulture mappers also recently discovered this practice of panagturtor or foraging for free but healthy (organic) things to eat from the neighborhood gardens and farms in the context of a tightly knit community with such porousness of home spaces. Surely this was a way of getting by for almost nothing despite of (or maybe because of) the hardship of countryside life.

The reality, however, is not a simplistic city vs country dichotomy, but a mixture of both. While it is true that nature left to its own devices, or human nature nurtured minus the sophistry, has its own virtues, life in the barrios then also meant poverty, deprivation, physical hardship, discomfort, disease, malnutrition, lack of livelihood opportunities, lack of access to basic government services… Such burdens arising from the unequal and inequitable access to socioeconomic ‘upliftment’ leads to lack of education, gross ignorance, illiteracy, and superstitious beliefs – factors that ensure a vicious cycle of underdevelopment. This set of factors can easily imbue the barrio folk with a fatalistic view of life and a self-deprecatory sense of identity.

I believe this great divide in Philippine society is no doubt a function of poverty and lies at the root of the many self-rejecting ways and decisions of most Filipinos today, especially its leaders. The association of so many folkways with poverty and low social status leads to the loss of prestige of these features of the culture, and we can just imagine the huge consequences of this belief system.

This great divide also leaves you wondering as you are confronted with the question, “Is man made for nature or is nature made for man?”

Today, however, thanks to such innovations as the Local Government Code of 1991, 20% Countryside Development Fund, and the Department of the Interior and Local Government’s monitoring of implementation of local government projects, the Mandanas-Garcia ruling leading to the devolution of political power from the national to the local level, the yawning gap is beginning to get bridged, and the tags that used to underline social divisions have gone extinct with it.