This article aims to understand how state power is localized, and how an upland minority group, the Bugkalot, conceptualize and construct their relationship with the powerful others in the process of political incorporation. It shows that the historical relationship between the Bugkalot and the state has taken various forms ranging from state evasion to violent confrontation to political containment. The state-centric discourse of civilization that assumes its own cultural superiority and magnetism did not gain much purchase in the Spanish and American colonial periods, as the Bugkalot distanced themselves from state powers by taking refuge in the hills. However, the postcolonial state has succeeded in projecting its power to its outermost territorial borders, and a new way of regulating relations with the surrounding fields of power has emerged in the uplands. Now the Bugkalot have entered into patron-client relationships with the lowland politicians; moreover, they see it as socially desirable and actively attempt to cultivate such a relationship through compadrazgo (ritual kinship) ties. The introduction of electoral politics at the local level in the 1980s has played a centrally important role in instituting such a relationship. This paper emphasizes how the Bugkalot’s agency shape the state by paying special attentions to the ways in which the Bugkalot use the dispute over provincial boundaries and the electoral system for their own purposes, and how they deploy corruption as an idiom through which they make sense of and comment on the political world they inhabit.
