Every October, Filipino media celebrate Peasant Month by turning rice fields rich with harvests into a spectacle. Tourism to the Philippines heavily relies on natural wonders such as mountains, beaches, and, most importantly, rice fields, as attractions and must-see spectacles for the West. Yet behind these pastoral images, the real struggles of farmers, primarily landlessness, displacement, and state violence,  remain largely unseen. For context, the Philippines is the result of joint forces of colonialism, feudalism, and imperialism, and more often than not, the land we live on is either owned by these colonial forces or national figures who are infamously puppets to these higher powers. These forces have most impacted peasants, who make up over 75% of the population in the Philippines and constitute the poorest class in the nation (Canada-Philippines Solidarity Organization). Peasants include those in the agricultural sector, such as farmers and fisherfolk, and are widely regarded as the backbone of the agricultural and archipelagic country (Dela Pena). However, they have continuously struggled to reclaim this land, as they are currently only tenants of the land and farms they handle. A bigger surprise as well is that the Philippines is one of the world’s largest rice importers, importing rice from Thailand and Vietnam, rather than taking advantage of the rich agriculture internally (Lagare). Despite the efforts of peasants, they are not rewarded or aided by the government; rather, they are redtagged, refused their right to their land, and denied basic human rights (ICHRP). Therefore, I want to use the concept of media and making as a dynamic process in Tim Ingold’s book, Making, to explain how rice, and the process of making rice by peasant farmers in the Philippines, have played an active role in shaping the lives, movements, and knowledge systems of Filipinos.

Despite it being a staple in every meal, the majority of Filipino dishes are served and eaten with imported rice. Households make an effort to continue to buy these imported rice crops, even holding a stigma around locally produced rice by conspiring that the crops are combined with plastic grains, or that the taste is off or panis (spoiled). This exact perception of local grain is why our farmers are unable to sustain themselves with the cheaper rice imports and lack of attention to their livelihoods. While it may seem like a minuscule problem for those at home who are able to cook an abundance of fluffy rice easily, many overlook the cultural, historical, and economic impact rice has had on Filipinos and the country as a whole. Looking at rice through Ingold’s metaphysical framework, as a thing rather than an object, rice has been a vessel that holds other markers of Filipino culture through food and nature. Ingold adopts French philosopher Gilbert Simondon’s understanding of things being made as a dynamic process, where form and matter co-emerge (Ingold, 25). Through this framework of thinking of objects as things that we exist with and record their own process of formation (Ingold, 81), it is clear that rice has afforded Filipinos more than sustenance. I also want to refer to Ingold’s model corresponding to the person with air and kite to better explain the affordances and correspondences of rice. In my own diagram, I place rice as a central item that mediates a Filipino person (farmer or consumer) to the Filipino land and the Filipino culture. Firstly, rice has mediated the body with the land, where rice farmers directly engage with the soil, crops, and the surrounding environment. Eating the rice continues this correspondence; the grain grown by their labour becomes part of their bodies and the bodies of other Filipinos. The body, then, becomes a mirror of the landscape. However, because consumers often eat imported rice, this cycle often breaks after Filipino rice farmers produce local grain. Consumers of imported rice, therefore, lack awareness and understanding of the persistence and hard work that goes into agricultural production. 

While there is an aspect that lacks affordance in rice, it has also mediated Filipinos with their culture, as it was previously barely eaten in diets, and rather primarily used for spiritual rituals and cultural practises, as it often represents prosperity and good luck (National Nutrition Council). Every New Year’s, my family would display a large bowl of bigas, or milled rice, with coins placed on top of the rice to symbolise bringing in good luck and fortune. Besides eating it at meals, rice has evolved in Filipino culture to represent more than just a staple on the dining table. Rice has further mediated the Filipino identity through language, where there are over 10 different ways to refer to rice in Tagalog based on context and type of rice, such as palay (rice with husk), bigas (rice without the husk), and kanin (cooked rice). The word kanin can also be found at the root of the term to eat, kain. Tagalog, therefore, strengthens the relationship between rice and cultural identity, where its many versions to refer to it and the placement of rice as an origin in the term ‘to eat,’ reflect how deeply intertwined rice is with Filipino identity outside of its physical presence. Yet, in the media presenting the celebration of Peasants Month, this correspondence is often severed. Mainstream images view rice as an object, packed and ready for consumption, where the labour gone into its production is commodified and reduced to a mere spectacle and beautiful nature views. Ingold’s notion of making asks us to reject this way of thinking, offering us to follow the line of correspondences that tie rice, land, farmers, and what it means to be Filipino, and to see visibility as something made through these dynamic material relations.

Similarly to how Ingold discusses how mounds are living, shaped forms, rice paddies have long served the same purpose in the Philippines. To Ingold, the mounds we see today are ‘the cumulative by-product of all kinds of activities, carried on over long periods of time and not only by human beings.” (Ingold, 78) By continuing Simondon’s theoretical view of metaphysical ‘things,’ Ingold claims that mounds are growing and becoming earth, rather than existing on it (Ingold, 77) and are temporal in nature. Rice paddies in the Philippines especially embody this principle, as they are constantly changing due to human and non-human forces. These landforms are continually constructed and remade, and hold history and memory from each process. Ingold uses historian Mary Carruthers’ term ‘memory-work’ (Ingold, 80) to describe the traces of memory and history found at pilgrimage and event sites attributes the same characteristics to mounds. Through walking, cultivating rice, building nipa huts, and sustaining families on the land, rice fields store histories of agriculture, family, and ecology. Like the rice that is harvested from it, landscapes in the Philippines are cultivated with every gesture and care by their farmers and settlers. The lack of media visibility and acceptance for farmers’ struggles to reclaim their land resonates with Ingold’s reflection that “in the very process of trying to find things, or alternatively of trying to get rid of them, that mounds were formed.” (Ingold, 80) In the same way, Philippine rice fields are formed through many layers of cultivation and renewal; traces of lives that are continually refused and erased. Philippine landscapes become a mound of social, cultural, and historical memory, accumulating the unseen struggles of those who work the land yet remain invisible to the mainstream.

To see rice and the fields it grows in through Ingold’s framework of thinking, we can recognise that they are not merely backdrops and tourist destinations, but living gatherings of relations. Like Ingold’s mounds, rice paddies in the Philippines hold sediments of human interaction, representing and recording the past and present memories, histories that are consistently being erased by semi-feudalist and semi-imperialist powers. Bringing Ingold’s concept of making into dialogue with peasant visibility allows us to understand that visibility itself is a kind of making, since it is a growing process of attending to what has been buried, layered, or rendered unseen. To make peasants visible means engaging in the ongoing work of Ingold’s process of correspondence: to listen, to belong in, and to recognise the living mound of relations that sustains both body and nation. 

Works Cited

Canada-Philippines Solidarity Organization. “Commemorating Peasant Month.” CPSO, 20 Oct. 2023, cpso.pw/commemorating-peasant-month/. 

Dela Pena, Kurt. “When Those Who Feed the Nation Are the Poorest: Farmers, Fisherfolk in Deepest Poverty Pit | Inquirer News.” Inquirer, newsinfo.inquirer.net/1748786/when-those-who-feed-the-nation-are-the-poorest-farmers-fisherfolk-in-deepest-poverty-pit. Accessed 20 Oct. 2025. 

ICHRP Secretariat. “ICHRP Secretariat.” International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines, 20 Oct. 2024, ichrp.net/peasantprimer/. 

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art & Architecture. Routledge.

Lagare, Jordene  B. “When Those Who Feed the Nation Are the Poorest: Farmers, Fisherfolk in Deepest Poverty Pit | Inquirer News.” Inquirer, newsinfo.inquirer.net/1748786/when-those-who-feed-the-nation-are-the-poorest-farmers-fisherfolk-in-deepest-poverty-pit. Accessed 20 Oct. 2025.

The Importance of Rice to Filipinos’ Lives | National Nutrition Council (NNC), Republic of the Philippines, nnc.gov.ph/mindanao-region/the-importance-of-rice-to-filipinos-lives/. Accessed 20 Oct. 2025.

Cover image from https://philippinerevolution.nu/2023/10/21/peasant-month-commemorated/