The Hanunó’o

Mindoro is the seventh largest island in the Philippines, located south of the largest island Luzon and around 160 km south of Manila.¹ Along its coastline and in the lowlands live Christian permanent-field farmers, who are mainly Tagalog or Bisayan ethnolinguistic groups. In the mountain areas, however, live groups of non-Christian subsistence farmers referred to collectively as Mangyan. These groups practice integral shifting cultivation, which emphasizes swidden farming and crop rotation. Beginning in the 1950s, Conklin spent time conducting detailed field research with one of these Mangyan groups, the Hanuno’o.