Greening honey: Producing the underground origins of a forest wonder

Abstract

Green honey is a substance reputedly made under the ground by a powerful bee endemic to Palawan Island. Stories of its mysterious origins have circulated for years across the Philippines. ‘Underground’ is a place on Palawan – a nationally significant subterranean river sometimes rumoured to be a source of green honey. But beyond this specific site, and in quite another sense, the underground can also refer to a space where production occurs through shared imaginings but remains unseen. This article explores how the circulation of green honey produced in this underground space has shaped the lived place of Underground. Multi-sited ethnography is used to investigate how the social lives of green honey across the Philippines, including their embedded politics, reorganize the value of ‘local’ honey on Palawan. Greening honey, the author argues, involves materializing the purported origins of substances through their forms as bottled objects.