Clean and Green: Agricultural knowledge and cultural models in a Philippine community

The following is an attempt to show how the study of local agricultural knowledge can be enhanced through the application of models from cognitive anthropology. The empirical setting is a community of small-scale farmers on the Philippine island of Bohol, where, I argue, much agricultural knowledge is organized in a model built around a concept of cleanliness. After a brief theoretical excursion into existing literature relevant to an analysis of agricultural knowledge, and to the theories of schema and cultural models of cognitive anthropology, the main part of this essay is concerned with analyzing the symbolic model of cleanliness from Bohol. I shall examine how this model is applied within agriculture as well as in other spheres, its moral and esthetic dimensions, and how it can be said to embody a cosmological vision of the nature-culture opposition.