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Philippine Pagans: The Autobiographies of Three Ifugaos
271 pages, Hardcover
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December 25, 2019
Getting a head among the Ifugao
If you ever try to read the original of Ibn Batuta’s voyages, you will soon realize that people in the 14th century had different concerns and interests than we do. That famous Muslim traveler went from Morocco all the way to China, serving as judge and jurist in many parts of the world. He also traveled to Mali across the Sahara. He was interested in minutiae of sharia observance, in interpretations of different Islamic laws, and so forth. While you may wonder what he saw, what he ate and how people behaved, what kind of life people had in all those places, etc., he only writes about such things occasionally. This is not very odd. People’s attention is drawn by cultural preferences. So, when R.F. Barton decided to record the life stories of three Ifugao, a people who live in the mountainous highlands of Luzon in the Philippines, he had to be aware that their concerns and what they wanted to tell, would be bounded by their cultural horizons and their preferences. Two men and a woman told their tales. He may have encouraged them to tell about their teenage sex lives in the agamang (mixed “dorms” where sex life began)---so different and interesting to Westerners---and also to recall episodes of headhunting and raids on rival clans. It’s hard to know what his questions were. He lived among the Ifugao for many years up to 1937 or so and knew their language. But what interested Ifugao people was more the rituals for innumerable occasions, myths full of characters with unpronounceable names, acquiring pigs and chickens for paying debts and for sacrifice, trading or raiding expeditions, the drunken fights that sometimes broke out, or reading omens from the bile of chicken gall bladders. Like mountain people from Albania to Papua New Guinea, the lack of a state meant that disputes were settled by feuds, i.e. group vengeance. Bloody feuds occupied their full attention until the Americans stopped the fighting in the first decade of the 20th century. Ifugao marriage and divorce involved many gifts, ending feuds involved the same, as did preventing feuds from beginning. They could remember in precise detail what had been given many years later. Their daily lives were monotonous rounds of agricultural labor, so what came to mind were those events which stood out. Taking heads of enemies killed in feuds was such an event, though how often it really occurred is not clear because these were among the strongest memories. Whether you will be interested in all of this is the question.
There are a number of interesting black and white photographs and a strange section at the end in which the author tries to administer a test to you, the reader, to see if you can divine how Ifugao would react in a certain situation. All in all, while there is certainly a lot to interest a modern reader, much would have been more interesting to the Ifugao or to a keen anthropologist than to us today. As the lives related took place from roughly 1875 to 1935, we can assume that we are reading social history. Everything must have changed totally by now.
If you ever try to read the original of Ibn Batuta’s voyages, you will soon realize that people in the 14th century had different concerns and interests than we do. That famous Muslim traveler went from Morocco all the way to China, serving as judge and jurist in many parts of the world. He also traveled to Mali across the Sahara. He was interested in minutiae of sharia observance, in interpretations of different Islamic laws, and so forth. While you may wonder what he saw, what he ate and how people behaved, what kind of life people had in all those places, etc., he only writes about such things occasionally. This is not very odd. People’s attention is drawn by cultural preferences. So, when R.F. Barton decided to record the life stories of three Ifugao, a people who live in the mountainous highlands of Luzon in the Philippines, he had to be aware that their concerns and what they wanted to tell, would be bounded by their cultural horizons and their preferences. Two men and a woman told their tales. He may have encouraged them to tell about their teenage sex lives in the agamang (mixed “dorms” where sex life began)---so different and interesting to Westerners---and also to recall episodes of headhunting and raids on rival clans. It’s hard to know what his questions were. He lived among the Ifugao for many years up to 1937 or so and knew their language. But what interested Ifugao people was more the rituals for innumerable occasions, myths full of characters with unpronounceable names, acquiring pigs and chickens for paying debts and for sacrifice, trading or raiding expeditions, the drunken fights that sometimes broke out, or reading omens from the bile of chicken gall bladders. Like mountain people from Albania to Papua New Guinea, the lack of a state meant that disputes were settled by feuds, i.e. group vengeance. Bloody feuds occupied their full attention until the Americans stopped the fighting in the first decade of the 20th century. Ifugao marriage and divorce involved many gifts, ending feuds involved the same, as did preventing feuds from beginning. They could remember in precise detail what had been given many years later. Their daily lives were monotonous rounds of agricultural labor, so what came to mind were those events which stood out. Taking heads of enemies killed in feuds was such an event, though how often it really occurred is not clear because these were among the strongest memories. Whether you will be interested in all of this is the question.
There are a number of interesting black and white photographs and a strange section at the end in which the author tries to administer a test to you, the reader, to see if you can divine how Ifugao would react in a certain situation. All in all, while there is certainly a lot to interest a modern reader, much would have been more interesting to the Ifugao or to a keen anthropologist than to us today. As the lives related took place from roughly 1875 to 1935, we can assume that we are reading social history. Everything must have changed totally by now.
Displaying 1 of 1 review