The Challenging Issue of Ethnicity and Culture in Ecotourism

Ethnicity and culture may be seen as invisible fences that separates people from each other, and the implications of these to the relationship between people and environment is explicitly defined by areas of interaction resulting to different roles and varying levels of social exchanges.  However, in studying people and the culture that gives them their identity, distances separating areas of interaction is expressed in sociological terms referred to as "social distances".  The obstacles presented by social distances is that they are not manifested by visible fences and therefore, require more methods to be able to discern.  This is one of the reasons why ethnicity poses many difficult problems of theory in the field of anthropology and environment and has, more often than not, been the root cause of many environmental woes.

Much of the social distances that divided the Philippines is attributed to being an archipelago.  Dividing the archipelago was done by politically demarcating them into regions, provinces, cities, municipalities, barangays and sitios defining the jurisdication of political leaders while real properties of individuals have been segregated by cadastral surveys.  Thus, in the context of land , the country has been more or less clearly partitioned, staked and claimed and titled.  However, the division of land has no direct correspondence to the people living in these areas and therefore the defined boundaries and territories does not necessarily translate to ethnic boundaries too.  For example, Benguet which is the province generally identified with the Ibaloi is also inhabited by the Ikalahan, I'wak, Kankana-ey, Bontok and Ifugao.  The reason is plain and simple.  People are not contained and isolated and are generally mobile and in spite of varying conditions and niches in every place one can go, inherent biological traits enable one to adapt and adjust to different situations.  Mobility allows them to cross political boundaries for these do not constitute impregnable sociological barriers.  There is no such rule that a political area such as a province could be a specific ethnic locality.

Consider an old village where inhabitants are of different ethnic groups.  All these groups exploit the same resources, benefit from the same technology and a quick appraisal composes a homogeneous population.  So how does an ethnographer distinguish one ethnic group from another?  Even in an urban situation such as Metro Manila there is probably no ethnic group that is not represented in this huge metropolis.  Until one identifies himself as belonging to a group, no one will know any better. Identification can either be by self-ascription or ascription by others, i.e. that one identifies himself or others identify him to belong to a particular group.   

As an ethnographer, I would begin to isolate one group from the others through a process of description.  Description however, can be initiated from different points of references.  These take-off points would require utilizing inductive procedures, where gathering of base data will be the foundation of more generalized statements about the group being studied.  Since there are many variables that make the character of particular communities different from other, the approach to the study will also vary in the same manner that a particular approach must be selected when one contends with individuals of different personalities.  Only in the field can an ethnographer best gauge the approach to use especially since the encounter with the group would be more in an up-close and personal sort of interaction.