Chapter Seven considers local folk explanations for wealth and poverty, development and underdevelopment, on Siquijor, probing the often tacit socio-economic ideals which underlie them. The chapter is divided into two overlapping sections: explanations for inequalities between people and explanations for (larger scale) inequalities between places. On Siquijor, these are different in important ways. The former incorporate luck, fate and hard work. However, the latter explanations, focusing on cooperation and its locally perceived opposites—“crab mentality,” politicking and corruption. On Siquijor, local discourses of development have it that widespread poverty in the Philippines demonstrates a failing of Filipinos to live up to supposedly universal norms of ethical socio-economic conduct. However, I argue that attention to local norms of moral economy reveal the ambivalence underlying these notions of development, particularly in relation to the roles of individualism and reciprocity in socio-economic organization.
Migration infrastructure, moral economy, and intergenerational injustice in mother-and-child migration from the Philippines to Japan
