Seating in a plateau 1400 ft. atop Sierra Madre Mountains is the town of Luisiana in Laguna, Philippines. The town embraces weaving as a way of life.

During weaving, people create social networks. It is the time when they talk about their day to day experiences, discuss what is going on in their town, and share their problems with one another. Locally, they call this habit “ustingan.”

In Luisiana, the townswomen use “pandan” (Pandanus tectorius), a non-timber forest resource to make wonderfully woven products such as hats, baskets, mats, and many others. These plants naturally grow in the area and believed to be associated with Luisianahin life.

In a typical community where the men work, weaving also serves as leisure (libangan) for the women. It is a leisure that brings income to their families since woven products are marketable at a good selling price. The Luisianahin women consider weaving as something that they can always depend on. When there is poor harvest of crops, people can always go back to weaving. The industry has never failed to help them during crisis.

However, another growing concern is the decline in the number of pandan in the area. The resource is slowly diminishing due to continuous usage. The Luisianahin women play a key role in addressing these problems; they must consider both the economic processes and the environment where they extract and transform resources to preserve the cultural economy that their ancestors started a long time ago.

As the Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva said: “rural, indigenous women are the original givers of life; therefore, the rightful caretakers of nature.” (Ranell Martin M. Dedicatoria, KMU)

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Paper presented by Dr. Helen F. Dayo, Anthropologist, University of the Philippines Los Baños during the Agriculture and Development Seminar Series (ADSS) titled The Cultural Economy of Weaving, 11 March 2008