These photographs were taken on Palawan Island in the southern Philippines in the early 1980s. At the time, my wife and I lived in a village on the west coast of the island for 18 months while doing our graduate research in anthropology. I hope the photos give a sense of what the island was like and how people lived in some very remote rural areas with few roads and little in the way of a government presence. Though some people sold small quantities of crops, fish, or forest products on the market, this was largely a self-sufficient subsistence economy that was truly "off the grid". This isolated community on Palawan Island 30 years ago is not representative of the Philippines as a whole, and much has changed on Palawan over the past few decades.

In describing the community I typically use the present tense. This represents the 'ethnographic present', in this case 1980-81. The photos were taken with a SLR camera and slide film. The quality of the images, I know, is mixed. This is because I was new to photography at the time, many of the slides slowly deteriorated over the years (scratches, dust, mold), and also the difficulty of getting high quality scans. Still, I hope the pictures are interesting enough to warrant a gallery on Pbase.