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The Beliefs of the Manobos of Maguling

Maguling, one of the farthest barangays of the Munipality of Maitum, province of South  Cotabato was the area of this study. This barangay is fourteen kilometers away from the poblacion and is accessible by land and water transportation. It is composed of nine sitios namely Sebeng, Mondan, Matolan, Takal, Fenayong, Tungeon, Lihik, Luan and Batel. The Manobos occupy the first seven sitios while the Christians and Muslims occupy Luan and Batel respectively.

The origin of the name Maguling may be traced back to the name of the big trees which grew abundantly in the place when it was still uncultivated. The first occupants of the place, the Muslims and the Manobos, called the said trees, Maguling. Maguling trees have pointed leaves about 7-8 inches long and 4 inches wide. They make good firewod for, even when newly-cut they burn long and brightly.

The boundaries of barangay Maguling are the Luan river on the east, barangay Pinol on the west, the
Celebes Sea on the South and barangay Ticulab on the north.

Maguling is inhabited predominantly by Ilocanos for whom farming is the chief means of livelihood. Other ethnic groups which reside in this barangay include the Ilonggos, Cebuanos, Maguindanaoans, Joloanos and Sangils. The cultural groups do menial jobs for the landed Ilocanos for their living. Some, like the Muslims who live near the sea, engage in fishing while other tribal groups, like the Manobos, plant corn and other root crops.

Maitum was formerly a part of the municipality of Kiamba. In 1928, homesteaders streamed into the place. During this time, Maitum was a virgin hinterland plagued by malaria. Nevertheless, migrants continued to settle in Maitum. Eventually, the people led by Francisco Gacal petitioned for an independent and separated municipality. By virtue of Republic Act No. 2189 enacted on May 7, 1959, the municipality of Maitum was created.

Beliefs About Marriage

The location of a sunem (mole on a Manobo woman’s body plays a vital role in determining her future, i.e., whether she will live in poverty and misery, or be rich and live happily. One of the reasons why a Manobo male is heavily indebted to others until he dies is the dowry that he gives to the woman he marries.

Having seen signs of good luck, as in the presence of a mole, a Manobo male will no longer work hard to earn a living for his family, for he firmly believes something good awaits his family. This is one reason why a Manobo man will carefully look for a woman with sunem in lucky places in the body, no matter what the circumstances may be.

Manobo society recognizes polygamous marriages. Any Manobo male with sufficient wealth to pay for the bride all at one time or by installment, may have more than one wife. While the Manobos practice polygamy, they cling to and practice the following beliefs on marriages gathered from them through oral testimonies.

The Manobo belief that going out of the house before the wedding day will make one sick means that the betrothed couple must stay inside the house most of the time. The woman is not to help in weeding the rice and cornfields. She is only allowed to do ordinary household chores such as cooking, washing dishes and occasionally cleaning the house. This practice makes the Manobos idle. From early in the morning till late in the afternoon, the betrothed Manobo male or female simply sleeps or plays cards.

Agadong bulan (full moon) is always the best time for marriage to take place. The size of the moon and its round shape signify good health for the prospective couple’s future children. The Manobos believe that wedding rites and rituals should be done very early in the morning (magtosimag) so that the couple will always understand each other and will seldom quarrel. This is related to the fact that early in the morning, atmosphere is still cool and refreshing hence, the newly-married couple will tend to have “cool heads”. If wedding rites are performed at kabusang (noon time), the couple will always quarrel. They believe this is so because the sun’s heat at noontime will make the couple hot-tempered.

The wedding day is postponed if there is udan lafos (heavy rain), fumulow (reddish sky in the afternoon), inog (earthquake), nilafay kayo (fallen tree), mifasa binangga (broken pot), and dumo agogfa (death in the neighborhood). To them, rain signifies tears so that a scheduled wedding day should be postponed if rain falls. The reddish color of the sky means sickness to the Manobos as this color suggests boldness and war. Earthquake means that a deity holding the universe got mad, hence the movement. So, the couple will get sick if they go on with the scheduled wedding because the wrath of the god will be upon them. A big fallen tree is a sign of bad luck for it stands for the groom a she is the stronger sex while a small tree that falls stands for the woman as she is smaller and weaker. A broken pot means that the prospective bride and groom will separate.

The Manobo wedding rites and rituals, no matter how simple they may be, entail significant expenses since the groom’s parents have to prepare a feast to entertain visitors. The postponement of it due to the occurrence of rain, earthquake, reddish sky, fall tree, broken pot, or death in the neighborhood would therefore mean many more expenses on the groom’s part since he would have to prepare the same things all over again. It is because of this that the Manobos would at times resort to carabao-rustling or stealing to meet wedding expenses. The rampant carabao-rustling and hold-ups in Maguling have been attributed to Manobos.

On Conception and Pregnancy

The conceiving or pregnant Manobo woman does not sleep during the day for fear that the placenta will stick to the uterus and she will have a difficult delivery. This because when one sleeps, one’s body seems to be glued to the floor or be. Cassava tubers which have not uniformly developed and in which the middle part has bulged may result to difficult delivery; therefore these should not be eaten by pregnant women. It is believed bad for Manobo women to be sitting or tarrying on stairs or in doorways because the baby will also tarry during childbirth. Rubbing things, like the first egg of hen or leaves wet with dewdrops, on the belly of a pregnant woman insures easy delivery. Eggs and stones roll; so when they are rubbed on the belly of a pregnant Manobo woman, this is taken to mean that the baby inside the womb will also be induced to roll or move smoothly during childbirth. The dewdrops on leaves signify lubrication, or again, an easy childbirth.

Rain, according to the Manobos are tears from God, so that if a pregnant woman gets wet with it, the baby inside the womb will get sick. The spider has a sticky saliva. If a pregnant woman happens to touch one she will have a difficult delivery as the baby will stick to the uterus during childbirth. A black fish signifies death, therefore a pregnant woman should not eat it as she and her baby will die. The Manobos believe that contract with a deer causes harelip because deers have cloven feet so pregnant women should not eat venison. A pregnant Manobo woman is not allowed to lie down on her back, for this will cause her to bear twins. The Manobos believe that there is a force inside the pregnant woman’s womb which could divide the baby into two. So pregnant women always have to lie down on their sides to prevent its occurrence. Because of the many beliefs of Manobos about pregnancy, pregnant women do not undergo prenatal check-up which accounts for the high mortality rate among them.

A Manobo husband with a pregnant wife is not allowed to cut trees for building a home. For them, the trees signifies life, therefore cutting it down will bring a curse. (Husbands of expectant mothers tend to be idle as building a house is taboo for them. They just stay with their in-laws or with relatives and be dependent on them.)

Childbirth

The umbilical cord of a newborn child determines its future. It is in the umbilical cord that life begins therefore the Manobos give meaning to its position and appearance. The Manobos believe that venison, tuna fish, eggs, bongolan (a banana specie), salmon, and eel contain powerful substances which can cause a relapse if eaten by a mother who has just given birth. On the other hand, the monkey’s meat is good for the mother who has just given birth because the female monkey recovers strength immediately after it has given birth.

When drunk, the water which dripped from the hair of Manobo woman after her first bath is believed to stop bleeding because it is considered sacred. The placenta of a newborn baby is to be buried where rain falls heavily. During heavy rains the buried placenta is released by the doft earth. This is like releasing the spirit of the child so that it will always be near its parents.

Death and Burial

When a Manobo who has killed someone dies, a bolo is place in his coffin so that he will have a weapon to defend himself when he meets the person he killed in baya (heaven). This implies that the physical body will still be present after death.

During a vigil for a dead person, kasila, (red pepper) timos (salt) and a bottle of water are carried by persons when they want to leave the house where the dead is lying in state because they believe that the busaw (evil spirits) is afraid of these.

Small pieces of mirror are placed in the coffins of Manobos to drive away busaw (evil spirits). Mirrors reflect light. The Manobos believe that the busaw, follower of Satan who walks in darkness, is afraid of the light which is reflected by the mirror. Rice is scattered right after the burial to prevent blagblags (nightmare). To the Manobos, rice serves as a magic charm that prevents nightmare. Placing the kalowen (stoven) at the door after coming from the burial grounds pervents the occurence of another death in that house. The Manobos believe that the stove is the “heart of the house “, where food is cooked; therefore, when placed at the door, it would prevent death. The Manobos also believe that there is life after death but they are not certain as to where one’s soul goes after death.

They recognize a myriad of other spirits whose influence controls every aspect of their society. Serious illness is a state one gets into due to a broken taboo or to the desire of the spirit or soul of an ancestor to communicate a need to a living person. The Manobos have a group of religious specialists called baylan. The function of the baylan is to communicate with the unseen world by means of a familiar spirit in order to interpret the message intended. Animal sacrifice is the usual remedy for a serious illness as well as the means for obtaining favors from the gods, such as for planting and marriage.

Work Ethic

The practice of stretching oneself (agfangalag) very early in the morning shows that Manobos are aware that a person should be physically conditioned in order to be fit of a tikos (vine) around the knees of a child to make him sturdy on his first visit to a relative’s house is supposed to enable him to do hard work later in life. The Manobos believe that going out of the house immediately after waking up in the morning makes one industrious while failure to go out of the house makes one lazy. This belief is the counterpart of the saying “early birds catch the worms”. This suggests that the Manobos are also aware that an industrious man is time conscious.

Sowing and Harvest

The Manobos have a way of determining a fertile ground for planting corn and palay. They choose a site with many earthworm wastes and black soil. Having found one, they will start clearing it by cutting down big and small trees. The Manobos wait for the trees to dry before they are burned. This takes about two weeks. After they have been thoroughly burned, the site is readied for planting.

During the planting, all the Manobos in the community are present to help, as they deem it a responsibility to bear one another’s burden. Before planting, an offering in the form of mama, composed of betel nut (buyo), betel leaves (kawed) and tobacco leaf is placed on a high pole at the planting site as offering to the god of the harvest.

Planting for the Manobos is fun. They do it in pairs. The Manobo man digs holes while standing using a long round piece of pointed wood while the female partner places about 3-4 grains of corn in the hole. If it is palay that it is being  planted, about 10-12 grains are placed in a hole. The pair who finishes their given parts first teases the slow ones who are left behind. There is shouting and boisterous laughter while this scene is taking place. In selecting ears of corn for planting, the Manobos select those with straight grains. As for the palay, they see to it that no chaff is mixed with the grains. The palay seedlings are preserved in containers made of barks of big trees whose ends have been sewed together.

Harvesting palay among the Manobos is a time of festivity as Manobos near and far gather to help one another, staying together until the work is over. After the harvest, only the palay for next year’s seedling is left, because much of the harvest is allocate for the food of those who helped, so that little is left to the owner. This is one reason why there are no rich Manobos as they share what they have to others, especially food.

The Manobos believe that the physical aspects of the environment, as well as the weather, are controlled by the spirits. They believe that rains will fall after the planting of palay because they think that it is sent by the god of agriculture. Signs in the sky like arrow-like clouds, dark clouds and reddish sky are all interpreted by Manobos as bringing rains, earthquake or drought respectively. They believe that a powerful spirit its present in an earthquake which explains why they have to waken all those who are sleeping and stand up to give reverence to that spirit.

Ancestral Domain: Concepts and Applications

Up until now, the rights of indigenous people or cultural communities have remained largely in the domain of preserving a quaint cultural heritage, something that the mainstream, i.e. Christian and westernized culture, has graciously accorded recognition to. But, as competitors for socio-political and economic rights, the Philippine indigenous cultures have yet to extricate themselves from the status of a marginalized minority in order to be counted among the rest of the society whose rights are guaranteed and protected by existing Philippine laws. In this paper, the right of the ancestral domain is treated as a focal point at which all other rights of indigenous peoples find convergence and context. The recognition and legislation of this most ancient human right translate to recognition and acknowledgement of the right to life and, more importantly, of the right to the means to sustain life.

The term “indigenous peoples and cultures” refers to the pre-colonial inhabitants of the Philipines and their descendants whose cultures have survived acculturation, remaining more or less intact despite unceasing and prolonged contact with westernized Filipino culture and Christianization over the last 400 years. On the island of Luzon, they are the inhabitants of the Cordilleras, a prominent chain of mountains that bisect the island into an east-west division. At the turn of the century, this whole region was known as Mountain Province.

On the smaller island of Luzon and in the Visayas there live various types of Pygmy peoples known as Agta, Aeta or Negritos who are considered as the oldest aboriginal race in the Philippines. In Mindanao and Sulu, the indigenous populations are the Islamized Maranaos, Tausug, Maguindanao, Sangil, etc. and the animist highlanders of Davao, Cotabato, Agusan, Misamis and Bukidnon Provinces. Although intermarriages among the different indigenous groups and, to a lesser degree, with Visayan, Ilocano, and other Christian groups have been observed over the last four centuries , each group has been able to preserve a distinct cultural identity, mainly through the preservation of its native language. Thus, they are commonly referred to as ethnolinguistic groups or cultural communities, to distinguish them from the mainstream Christianized and westernized Filipino cultures.

The Indigenous Peoples of the Cordilleras

Filipinos born on the Gran Cordillera Central were popularly and collectively known as “Igorots” ( Scott 1977:2). There were, however, six main ethnolinguistic groups: the Isneg, Kalinga, Bontoc, Ifugao, Kankanay, and Ibaloy. The Spaniards made use of the native word tingues or tinguianes, meaning high or elevated as in a mountain, and indiscriminately applied this word to all peoples who dwelt in the mountainous regions of Luzon, particularly the Cordilleras, synonymously with the word “Igorrotes” from where the popular term Igorot, came. This was done to distinguish them from the lowland- dwelling and Christianized Filipinos who were called “Indios”, as the rest of the colonized peoples and nations of the vast Spanish colonial’ empire, España en Ultramar were known. It was also during this time that the word “tribe”, tribus independientes, was appropriately applied to these groups who paid no taxes to the Spanish King, did not attend masses or wore trousers, etc. Although in 1839 the Comandancias Politico- Militares were organized for the Cordillera region, very little was known of its success or failure, since the whole Spanish’ colonial government in the Philippines came to an end in 1898 ( Ibid:2- 4).

From the start, Spaniards were drawn to the famed gold in the Cordilleras, although their efforts to exploit and control the gold trade were on the whole, unsuccessful. The succeeding American colonization period might have done better work in this regard. American prospectors staked mining claims all over the Benguet area. The imposition of new land laws–including mining— finally ended the Ibaloy monopoly on the gold trade (Brett 1989:9). Moreover, Ibaloys lost their lands through sale, non-registration, expropriation, and donations as in the case of Mateo Carifio ‘s donation of an extensive area, beginning with the present site of Burnham Park up to the Baguio City Hall. However, Carifio a native Ibaloy, won a landmark decision from the US Supreme Court over the expropriation of his pasture lands—totalling 174 hectares—by the American government. The US Supreme Court’s decision to recognize Cariiio’s ownership of these lands was based on the now famous legal doctrine that, “land which has been occupied since time immemorial is presumed never to have been public” (Ibid.). Eventually, all mining activities in Bontoc and Kalinga were ordered to cease by American administrators because of the intensive opposition of the natives who considered the area as their heritage and patrimony.

The Aetas

Of the few true Negrito groups still surviving in the country today, the Aetas of Zambales or Pinatubo Aytas ( Shimizu 1989: 6-19) are an example of an indigenous ethnic group that has persisted despite centuries of being a marginalized population. Unlike the Ifugaos, the Kalingas or Bontocs of the Cordilleras who became cultural minorities as a consequence of colonization- the Aetas from the very beginning of Spanish colonial history were already a cultural and racial minority. The rest of their kind, such as the Palawan Aetas, the Dumagats of Quezon, and the Bataks of Palawan Islands may already be on the verge of extinction. The same may be said of the Mamanua of Mindanao who have intermarried with other indigenous groups such as the Manobo to the extent that many Mamanua are no longer recognizable as Negritos.

On the other hand, the Aetas of Zambales or Pinatubo Aytas, although no longer speaking their original language, have managed to preserve the rest of their culture as evidenced by 20th century ethnographic documentation by modern scholars. It seems that of all the Negrito groups presently surviving in the Philippines, the Pinatubo Aytas have evinced a high degree of resilience, as reflected in marked increases in their present population.

The collective experience of the Aetas may not be very different from other non-Christian Filipinos. Their relationships ,1 with neighboring lowlanders, such as the Kapampangans and Sambals, were characteristically blighted by landgrabbing and other forms of despoliation. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Kapampangan drove them away from their settlements and planted these with rice and sugarcane. The  Sambals, were wont to kidnap Aetas for slavery. On their part, the Aetas made economic forays to the lowlands for cattle and other food. This state of affairs persisted well into the American regime and even into the present times (Larkin in Shimizu 1989:12).

The Indigenous Peoples of Mindanao and Sulu

Most of the indigenous peoples of Mindanao, who lived in the vast interiors of the second biggest island in the Philippines, were not known to the Spaniards until the nineteenth century. The Spaniards were more acquainted with the Muslim groups who lived in the Sulu Archipelago and western part of Mindanao. In many parts of the island their mode of occupation and settlement more or less followed a certain distinct pattern. They were mostly coastal and riverine dwellers who controlled strategic points of trade such as the mouths of rivers of the various bays along the indented coastline of Mindanao. The forests and mountainous interiors, on the other hand, were home to several animist groups, beginning with the Manobos, who might have been the largest cultural group in Mindanao at this time. It was this group which appeared everywhere in the Spanish historical accounts. There were Manobos in all four directions of the compass, in contrast to other groups which appeared to be localized in certain areas, such as the Bagobo of Davao, the Tiruray of Northern Cotabato, the B’laan of Sarangani Bay, etc.

The modus vivendi obtaining in the nineteenth century among these different indigenous groups could be best described as an economic one; the animist peoples were mostly swidden farmers who cultivated rice as their main crop. In excess of subsisitence needs, rice and forest products were traded with the Muslims for articles such as iron, beads, and other ornamental products. The Muslims appeared to play a middlemen’s role in this seagoing export trade; forest products from Mindanao were traded with goods from other islands, such as the Malay Archipelago, and particularly, Singapore.

The preponderance of the Spanish terms infieles (pagans) and asesinos ( assasins) in Mindanao accounts betrayed, in many ways, the failure of the missionaries’ efforts to Christianize and “reduce”, i.e. subjugate the natives of Mindanao and Sulu. This is a historical fact, which to many native groups, particularly the Muslim Tausug, Maguindanao, Maranao, etc., is a source of “national “pride. Today, it is most unfortunate that this same source of pride among those who were not effectively colonized and Christianized is, at the same time, the source of their cultural alienation from the present mainstream culture of Christianized and Westernized Filipinos. Even more unfortunate is the fact that the history of the Philippine indigenous cultural communities has been one of despoliation, first by the foreign colonizers and now, by some of their own countrymen.

A Brief Historical Background of the Ancestral Lands Question

In a review of legal and juridical precedents of land .tenure cases involving indigenous cultural communities, authors Angeles and Gloria arrived at some portentous findings: legal decisions affecting the tenurial rights of indigenous cultural communities appeared to diminish rather than enhance these rights. “It would seem that the present legal system operates to divest the indigenous peoples of such titles through laws and doctrines which are either manifestly inadequate or are in utter disregard of such rights” ( Angeles and Gloria 1993:4). The landmark decision on the Carifio case in 1909 was persistently attenuated by succeeding laws, beginning with the Public Land Act of 1936, which limited applications for land titles to “alienable or disposable lands of the public domain”.

In 1964, this right was extended to lands of the public domain, suitable to agriculture, whether disposable or not, for as long as such lands have been in “open”, continuous, exclusive and notorious occupation”by members of the national cultural communities, i.e. indigenous communities, under a bona fide claim of ownership for at least thirty years. Then, in 1974, the Ancestral Lands Decree, which defined ancestral lands for the first time, was promulgated by the then President Ferdinand Marcos:

[Ancestral lands are] lands of the public domain that have been in open, continuous, exclusive and notorious occupation and possession by a national cultural community by themselves or through their ancestors , under a bona fide claim of acquisition of ownership according to their customs and traditions for a period of at least thirty (30) years before the date of approval of this decree. (Ibid:14)

This decree covered all appropriated agricultural lands of the public domain occupied and cultivated by indigenous Filipinos .The following year, the Revised Forestry Code of the Philippines declared that lands with slopes of 18% or more were not to be classified as alienable or disposable and even those which had earlier been classified as such were to be reverted to forest lands. By this law, almost all indigenous communities being the predominant occupants of uplands, were legally prevented from claiming ownership of the lands they had occupy and cultivated since the time of their ancestors.

Thus, the vagaries of the concept of aboriginal title are such that, presently, no legal pronouncement recognizes it. “… the presumption [ is] that lands occupied and cultivated by the tribal Filipinos by themselves or through their ancestors, where no certificate of title has been issued… form part of the public domain and are converted into private lands only upon the award by the government with such lands to them.”(Ibid:21)

A definition of ancestral lands that embodies the concert of aboriginal title, has been pending in the Philippine Congress since 1988 in two versions: Senate Bill Nos. 152(1988) and 909 (1989) and House Bill No. 33881 (1990). The Senate Bull recognizes the “historic rights of indigenous communities and the principle of communal ownership of land. House Bill Not 33881, on the other hand, would recognize tenurial rights adz already existing, regardless of whether the lands in question were alienable or disposable.”

More recently, the implementing guidelines for the identification, delineation, and recognition of Ancestral Domain claims were provided for by Department Administration Order No.2 (DAO No.2) of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. The Administrative Order reaffirmed the definition of Ancestral Lands and Ancestral Domain contained in House Bill No. 33881. Moreover, the composition of Ancestral Domain has been extended to residences, farms, and burial grounds irrespective of their present classification and utilization. As of this writing, however, this Administrative  Order has not been applied to any indigenous cultural community.

Land As Property and Wealth

The concept of real property in regard to land has no counterpart in the indigenous categories. This is not to say that land. and the “ownership” of it, holds no significance to the indigenous peoples who directly and exclusively derive their subsistence from the land. Not a few native myths and legends trace the origins of the world and mankind to the soil. The creation myths of the T’ boli of South Cotabato and the Tagakaulo of Davao del Sur, among others, tell of how the world was created from bits of soil that clung to a bird’s claws. Mankind itself could only be sustained after the world was moulded from bits of the mythical soil.

The primacy of land ownership as an index of wealth or property has been sufficiently established in agricultural societies such as the Philippines. Among the indigenous communities, however, land is not regarded as a material possession that could make one rich. On the other hand, the number of horses, wives, and the number of relatives and other people one could afford to feed at any given time are signs of wealth. As for land, there was more than enough of it for everybody, at least in the past, and if one did not like one’s neighbors, one simply moved out to look for another kaingin where one could enjoy his home and his work in tranquility. Few desired to become rich; the acquisition of material possessions, such as horses or number of wives, was not the aspiration of the ordinary individual. Indeed, even a bountiful harvest was not really desirable, since it would only attract hordes of relatives and friends to one’s table.

In order to appreciate the indigenous concept of land meaningfully, it is necessary to contextualize it in the ecological relationship that exists between the people and their land. Within the ecological purview, the people owe their existence to the land, much as the land is nurtured by the people. This bondedness between land and people is explicit in the culture. which in more ways than one truly represents the aggregate of adaptations that the people have made to the land and the rest of the physical environment. The land bears the unmistakable imprints, (e.g. kaingin farms, gravesites, houses, etc.) of those who live off its various resources.

Territorial boundaries are difficult to delineate because these are frequently crossed by intercommunal marriages and the attitude of openness in regard to living space. Swidden practises are sustained by field rotations which require families and households to constantly move around in search of new swidden plots. This openness, rather than exclusiveness, of settlements complements the sparseness of upland populations. On the other hand, the extensive requirements of land use is a stark contrast to the limited notion of possesory rights, especially in regard to land. Yet, the geographic distribution of native settlements, as described in historical documents of more than a hundred years ago, corresponds with amazing accuracy to present day accounts. Necessarily, this implies a more or less stable geographic occupation, by each ethnolinguistic group, of its turf.

The notion of exclusiveness of turf or territory is applied only on certain occasions, such as during a wake in the community. The norms of silence and proper decorum are strictly observed during funerals and burials. The exclusion of strangers and other outsiders, who are ignorant of the local norms in respect of the dead, is necessary to prevent the violation of these norms. For the same reason, gravesites are tabooed places
and among the same people great effort is exerted in making gravesites secret and their locations hidden from public knowledge.

Among the Ata of Kapalong, Davao Province, a previously agreed upon schedule for radiotaping songs and dances in the community had to be canceled because someone had died, and the local datu or chieftain, who was supposed to lead the other native performers, refused to proceed for fear of offending his own people.

The Dulangan Manobo of Sultan Kudarat Province practice secondary burial. The primary burial of their dead is made in the same house where the living relatives also stay. The tree coffin, sealed with almaciga resin and ashes from the family hearth, allows no tell-tale bad odors to escape and the coffin itself may look like a piece of furniture to outsiders. After a good harvest, which may be two or three years after the primary burial, the coffin is removed from the house, to be transferred to its secondary, and final, resting place in the forest. The exact place of burial is known only to a few relatives and friends who helped carry the coffin.

The true value of the land is usufruct. The land must be worked to make it yield the fruits of the earth. In this way, the fruits of one’s labor on the land become the true model of the concept of personal and real properties. Clothes, weapons, personal ornaments, especially those fashioned and crafted by one’s own hand through the use of one’s skills, are regarded as personal properties. Those which are highly valued by their owners are buried with them at death and may not be transferred to someone else.

It is apparent that wealth brings with it the responsibility,e.g. the obligation to feed visitors who flock to the datu’s table during festivals. A model for a rich man is the datu, the local chieftain, who has several horses, wives/children and can afford to provide not only for his big family but also fora number of warriors, who are attached to his household. As an institution, however, the datu is significant, not so much as the repository of wealth and power, as one who is known for his wisdom in settling disputes and resolving conflicts. Hence, another kind of wealth is prestige, which derives from the attributes of the datu’s personality. As for land, it is not a commodity that may be possessed with a legal title to be sold, traded, or preserved under anyone’s rights in perpetuity.

Law and Order

Transgressions of customary law are settled by the payment of fines – to avert bloodshed. Violence, as in many pre-modern societies, is the inevitable outcome of heinous behavior and other social aberrations, such as murder or homicide. Retaliation and vengeance for such crimes are exacted through vendetta or private wars, which can easily involve a great number of people from other communities, since the desire to avenge oneself is inflicted indiscriminately, costing the lives of many innocent people. This is the notorious pangayao, a customary form of warfare, still practiced by many native groups in Mindanao.

In the town of Lebak, in Sultan Kudarat, a Dulangan Manobo boy was accidentally killed by a bayatik, a local trap for wildboars. The boy’s family was so aggrieved by his death that two male relatives were designated to “avenge” it. These two killed a young B ‘laan boy whom they chanced upon along the trail. He was alone on his way home from school.

…mediately, the B’ laan boy’s relatives made ready to retaliate. But for the timely intervention of the school authorities and local police, who rounded up the Dulangan Manobo killers, together with their relatives who attempted to stand off the authorities in a cave in the forests, the incident would have easily escalated into a full blown pangayao.

Sometimes, a violent crime such as murder would be punished only by banishment. In 1992, among the same people, a jealous man killed his wife, who was a relative of the datu. The cause of the husband’s jealousy was well-known to the community – a man already known for past indiscretions and an inability to keep his affairs secret. The police arrested the husband for the murder, but the community’s rage at the man who was the cause of it all was implacable. This man, knowing his precarious situation in the community, vanished after the incident and his act, according to the people, was just the right thing to do. It was equivalent to voluntary banishment – he may never return to the same community whose dignity he had sullied. The datu confiscated his crops, house, and animals.

Resource Utilization

Indigenous communities derive their livelihood directly from the land, forest, mountains, and streams found in the environment. The physical environment is likened to an indigenous” supermarket” where many, if not all, of their needs are satisfied. The main difference is that one does not have to pay for the commodities that one secures from this indigenous supermarket. One simply helps oneself to the trees for construction and fuel needs, the fruits and wild animals for food, and the secret herbs for medicine and rituals.

Swidden farmers are partly food collectors and gatherers
who regard the environment as a communal resources Occasionally, they would “gather food” from other people’s farms, if these happen to live in the same vicinity. and deny that they were stealing, for the forest is for everybody. The bigger problem is resource utilization where the uplands and forest have ceased to be communally owned because portions of them have been leased by big industrial companies, or worse titled and owned by migrant and non-indigenous farmers. Until now, the influx of migrant farmers to the Mindanao upland continues to displace hundreds of families of indigenous peoples and to drive them to much higher slopes, where they are accused of being the immediate cause of soil erosion because of their farming methods, forest denudation. due to the unauthorised cutting of trees or illegal logging, and other environmental offenses.

Ironically, the indigenous concepts and methods of resource utilization preclude the dangers of abuse and depredation of nature. Unlike commercial users, indigenous communities take only what they need. They only clear what they can cultivate in the forest; plant and hunt only what they can consume, etc. Until now, their wants and needs seldom exceed subsistence requirements for themselves and their families. The field rotation methods employed in kaingin or-swidden farming are extensive rather than intensive cultivation. thus allowing the land and the soil to lie fallow and regenerate The native upland farmers say that, in the past, fields were planted only once. Today they say that if the same piece of land were planted more than twice in succession, it would he offended and would not allow the plants to grow. A further deterrent to the abuse or overuse of nature’s resources is inherent in their belief system, which is polytheistic and animistic. Plants and animals, rocks, caves, rivers, and streams, etc. are each believed to have an owner or a resident spirit which acts as its

guardian and protector. To appropriate or use any of these I One must first ask the permission of the spirit-guardian some cases, perform the necessary ritual.

The Individual and Society

The “community-ness- of swidden farmers is not easily apprehended. As a correlate of the extensive method of agriculture, swidden dwellings are rarely found in compact settlements. Habitations are widely dispersed along mountain slopes or hilltops, each household preferring to live as far away from its neighbor as wisely possible. However, it is not as if they have little wish for human company. A generation or two native of the Mindanao highlands would go without personal adornments of beads and bangles. A ubiquitous ornament was the tiny, brass belts, armlets, and anklets so that the tiniest movement of the body produced the tinkling of numerous hells. It would he impossible to hide one’s presence in the forest because of these bells hut, as a matter of fact, as a native woman said, the tinkling of the bells was meant to announce the presence of another human being and an invitation to make a new acquaintance.

Despite sporadic contacts with one another, each indigenous cultural group is held together by a common language, an evidence of active communication among members of the same group and across different ethnolinguistic groups, since one can he understood in another indigenous community which has a different language. Besides language, the little that left of the socioeconomic, religious, and aesthetic institutions hold the native communities together. Myths and legends have ants everywhere, while characteristics of the material culture c. exhibited in various forms by different communities. This is true of weaving, dresses and ornaments, musical instruments. tools and weapons, etc.

A problem that arises from a highly stable culture is ethnocentrism. Small cultural groups are often prone to this. The native perspective is frequently shackled to its own perception of reality and may regard the larger society and the state as not only extraneous but irrelevant to this reality. Rarely do indigenous communities regard themselves as part of the nation-state, with rights as well as corresponding obligations.

The most salient political institution is the datu, who is a local funtionary and, at best, an informal leader. The datu wields no real political power in the western sense, but as an arbitrator, his job is to settle disputes through the use of good counsel and wise directions. When peaceful counsellings fails, the datu usually takes recourse in the exercise of the power to punish violently. He bids his warrior – followers to kill and eliminate recalcitrant elements.

The ordinary individual in the community takes care of his/her own problems on a personal level, seldom bringing any of them to the datu. This is because the customs governing social interaction usually are enough to prevent conflict. For instance, the mode of settlement pattern which favors scattered as against compact settlements fortuitously reduces interpersonal contact between and among households thereby minimizing potential conflicts at their source. In the relative isolation of dwellings and households, individual problems are those that revolve around prosaic activities in the family kaingin and for most of these the agency of the various spirits and gods in the indigenous belief system is sufficient to deal with a wide range of problems.

It would seem that, in this case, the ordinary individual in an indigenous community has little need of the society or the state and conversely, the larger society and state must be hard put to find a measure of pertinence for the indigenous communities, except that they exist. But for the fact that they co-exist in the same geographic, social, and historical context, these two entities – the indigenous communities and the nation-state-would probably be better off without each other.

Stewardship vs. Ownership: The Application of Ancestral Domain

The implementation of Ancestral Domain has been the responsibility of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), the government agency which exercises jurisdiction over the management and disposition of lands of the public domain. This department is also the implementing agency for Republic Act No. 7586, which provides for the due recognition of Ancestral Domain and other customary rights of indigenous peoples under the program, National Integrated Protected Areas System (NIPAS). Under the DENR’s National Forestry Program and, in particular, of the Integrated Social Forestry Program (ISFP), the interpretation and application of Ancestral Domain has been one of the stewardship and not ownership. The ISFP allows members of indigenous communities and the communities themselves to apply for a certificate of stewardship of forest land for a period of 25 years, renewable for another 25 years.

At best, the ISFP provides indigenous communities a maximum tenure of fifty years for purposes of farming and agriculture in the uplands. However, unlike ownership, stewardship is conceivably limited by the objectives of the Program which are the development of the uplands and maintaining ecological balance. Although the improvement of socio-economic conditions and alleviation of poverty of peoples who derive their livelihood from forest lands are also cited as part of the Program concerns, clearly, the more paramount interest is the rehabilitation of the upland watersheds through reforestation, among other means.

The idea of stewardship, rather than ownership, must have been derived from the very same economic and cultural characteristics of the indigenous communities who do not regard land as property and do not consider the ownership of it as wealth. However, apart from the fact that stewardship is a circumvention of the concept of Ancestral Domain, the application of stewardship is fraught with numerous impositions that serve to attenuate even the indigenous concept of usufruct.

The size of stewardship areas is limited to five hectares for individuals and families, whereas the indigenous land use and the requirements of field rotation for extensive cultivation in kaingin practices would easily cover a couple of square kilometers or 200 hectares for any two generations of indigenous communities. The best evidence for this is the geographic spread of indigenous communities which has remained virtually unchanged over the last one hundred years.

The ISFP is open to “Individuals, families, or forest communities/associations including indigenous cultural communities…” (TheISFP : A primer, 1982: 12 underscoring supplied). The inclusion of indigenous communities is somewhat an afterthought and clearly indicates that the Program was not designed for the special case of the indigenous groups. It is a recognition of the presence of farmers, other than the indigenous cultivators in the Philippine uplands. Wittingly or unwittingly, the Program is an inducement for more migrant settlers to populate the ancestral lands of the indigenous peoples.

In fact, the thrust of the whole National Forestry Program (DENR„ 1991) is the economic development of forest plantations and agro-forestry estates by upland communities, government (GOs), and non-government organization (NGOs), and other enterpreneurs. The development and well-being of human communities who live in the uplands are expected to automatically follow the economic growth that will result from large-scale commercial activities in the heretofore unproductive and denuded uplands.

In this enterprise, man appears as a secondary, if not incidental, factor in the main goal, which is redressing the ecological imbalance between ” man vs. nature”. That man is seen as an antagonist of nature is a further indication of an underlying orientation of man as nature’s adversary. Certainly, the indigenous perception of nature is quite contrary to this.

The 50- year limitation on stewardship might have been based on a prognosis that in two generations the indigenous cultural communities would have been completely acculturated and transformed into Westernized and Christianized communities, living sedentarily in compact upland hamlets, using intensive rather than extensive farming methods, and planting trees instead of rice as their main crop. A hindsight of more than 100 years however, tells us that such a prognosis is far-fetched. It would take more carefully designed methods of intervention other than community organization and transfer technology, to induce and catalyze the acculturation process.

On the other hand, ownership of land under Ancestral Domain would be a recognition not only of the indigenous
right to lands that they have been tilling “since time immemorial” but also of the right to sustain a culture different from the rest of the nation. Entitlement, in the aboriginal sense, would enable the indigenous communities not only to assert their right on the land but to manage forest and other natural resources in their respective domains. Even if the exercise of this right were to be interpreted in a limited sense,i.e. the DENR reserves the right to regulate the cutting of forest timber, it would nevertheless serve as an ample protection of the interest of the indigenous communities from the encroachments of outsiders.

The most critical problem facing the indigenous communities at present is land despoliation, which opens the door to the other deprivations currently suffered by them. Without lands, they are forced to seek subsistence from dubious sources, such as mendicancy, or through some illegal means like cattle rustling and illegal logging. In the 1980s, a number of indigenous communities were driven to throw in their lot with the Communist New People’s Army. In South Cotabato, the B’laan, who have leased their land to DOLE Philippines for as low as $135 a year per hectare, are encouraged to plant their crops along the margins of pineapple plots. Landless B’laan and other indigenous communities, who have been forced to leave the uplands, are the most destitute. They have been clustered in makeshift lowland dwellings and earn a living as hired laborers in Christian – owned farms for a wage of $1.50 a day. To all appearances, these indigenous groups are a captive labor force for other Filipinos.

Conclusion

The concept of Ancestral Domain has long been fettered with westernized and legalist notions of land ownership, a state of affairs that places the indigenous communities at a severe disadvantage. The requirements of procedure and compliance have been made from assumptions that native peoples think and behave appropriately whenever mandated by lawful authority. These assumptions fail to consider the point that the indigenous peoples perceive law and authority from an altogether different standpoint.

Thus, while the indigenous valuation of land is usufruct, to say that stewardship, rather than ownership, is the equivalent of the concept is treading on precarious grounds. Indigenous communities regard the continuous utilization of the land as an aboriginal right. It is the right that the diwata or spirits have given to them and their ancestors at the beginning of time for as long as the use of land is necessary to sustain their existence on this earth. It is a birthright that no legal title can proscribe or diminish. This right is inextricably intertwined with the kaingin or swidden economy and, ultimately, the whole of the indigenous culture. Without land, their cultures cannot be sustained. Without a cultural equipment, indigenous communities cannot long survive in their struggle for existence.

The Philippine Revolution in Mindanao 1896-1900

Many are just wondering why Mindanao is not given so much mileage in the history of our country during the revolution. Is it due to the complacency of the people in the region or because of their loyalty to the mother country, Spain?

This paper aims to bring into the limelight the status of Mindanao when the flame of the revolution engulfed the whole Archipelago. Based on the reports of the Jesuit and Benedictine Missions in Mindanao, there were some symptomatic signs of turbulence in Eastern, Southern and Northern Mindanao during this period.

In Eastern Mindanao, Surigao and Davao, in particular, were mentioned to be among those on the watchlist.

In Surigao, the Gonzales brothers, Simon and Wenceslao were active in the revolutionary movement. They were present in the Malolos Congress and participated in the drafting of the Malolos Constitution. President Aguinaldo commissioned Simon as Commanding General, with the rank of Lieutenant General, of Mindanao and Wenceslao as Governor of Surigao, with the rank of Colonel.

Their government in Surigao was short lived, as they alienated the feelings of the people when they acted with impunity against the Catholic church. They arrested and imprisoned all the priests and brothers and impounded the properties of the church. For this act of abuse of authority, the people of Surigao sought the help of Don Prudencio Garcia, the strong man of Baganga, who caused their downfall from power.

In Davao, the uprising in Baganga on September 23,1898 had no connection with the national upheaval in Luzon. It was a protest against the government but not against Spain. Don Prudencio Garcia, Captain of the Civil Infantry, was outspoken in condemning the manner of collecting taxes and forced labor. He deposed all the Spanish officers and installed himself as head of the local government. In the midst of this uprising, the national government ordered the Commander of the Civil Infantry in Mati, Teniente Manuel Garcia y Neilla to suppress the revolt. Fr. Gisbert, of Baganga, mediated and prevailed on Don Prudencio to lay down his arms. The latter agreed on condition that the superior government would grant him and his men general amnesty. His request was granted. Once again peace and order reigned in Baganga.

In Northern Mindanao, on September 27,1896, more than a month after Andres Bonifacio raised his battle cry, “Long live Philippine Independence”, about 350 deportees in the Military Fort of Marawi rose in mutiny against the Spanish officers. All the Spanish officers were killed, except one medical officer who managed to escape.

From Marawi, the mutineers proceeded to Ca an de gay Oro but, on the way, they were ambushed and routed by government troops that were dispatched from Iligan. They new members retreated and fled to the nearby forest. There they recruited , mostly from the unbaptized tribesmen. Armed with rifles, they were frighteningly strong. This time they had a new leader, a native datu named Suba. The band was seen pillaging Odiungan, a coastal settlement near  Gingoog,Medina. Upper Agusan and vangoog, Medina, various   points   in Surigao. They had proven their   worth as cattle and   horse rustlers. Their targets were Chinese traders,  priests and Spaniards. Practically all  economic actives  in northern Mindanao  were on a standstill. By   the year  1898, peace again returned   to Northern  Mindanao when the new district   governor of Misamis   was able   to   convince Data Suba and his followers to be   baptized as Christians.

In Central Mindanao, according to the accounts of Fr. Mariano Suarez S.J., dated September 21,1896, the natives of Cotabato never dreamed of any movement against Spain. They reacted negatively to the uprising in Luzon. The principalia and the rest of the populace denounced the revolution in a public Manifesto and offered to take up arms on behalf of Spain.

This, in a nut shell, is a picture of Mindanao during the Revolutionary Period.

Spanish sovereignty in the Philippines lasted for 333 years, from 1565-1898. This long span of time, however, was not a reflection that the Filipinos welcomed and accepted Spanish rule willingly. Historical records show that there were no less than 100 revolts that occurred, with at least one revolt for every two or three years. These early revolts failed because obviously, national unity was still lacking and there was no strong leader to lead a national political upheaval.

In the latter part of the 19th century, with the blossoming of the Reform Movement at home and abroad, the nationalistic fervor was aroused with the founding of the La Liga Filipina by Dr. Jose P. Rizal. It died a natural death when he was deported to Dapitan on July 7, 1892. From its dying embers, Andres Bonifacio founded the Katipunan. Bonifacio. who was revolutionary in spirit, believed more in the use of force in his libertian struggle against Spain. On August 23, 1898, he unfurled the Katipunan flag in PugadLawin and began the revolution. It spread like wildfire in Luzon and the Visayas and the battle cry for independence echoed and re-echoed everywhere.

How about in Mindanao? As the revolution spread, Mindanao was in the limbo of the national upheaval. This dissertation hopes to bring to light some events and developments in Mindanao while the revolution was gaining momentum in Luzon and Visayas.

Surigao

The people of Surigao were indubitably peaceful. There were no revolutionary elements and neither was there a feeling of animosity against the Spaniards. According to them, there were same Tagalogs who were deported to the region and who were secretly inciting the people to join the separatist movement from Spain.

Among those who were recruited and became active in the movement were the Gonzales brothers, Simon and Wenceslao. The district governor, Don Bernardo Viseo, was wary wary of their activities and had them deported to Manila in April 1898. Overtaken by the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, they were detained in Iloilo. While peace was being negotiated between Spain and the U.S., they were able to get an authorization to go to Hongkong. They stayed there for three to four days and then returned to Manila. It was at this time that the two brothers became associated with the leaders of the revolution. They were present in the Malolos Congress and took part in the drafting of the Malolos Constitution. They conferred with General Emilio Aguinaldo and, as a result, a committee for Mindanao was organized. Appointed officers were the following:

President                                       –        Julio Ruiz
Vice-President                        –        Simon Gonzales
Member of the Board       –        Wenceslao Gonzales

When the Spanish-American War broke out, Surigao was isolated and was cut-off from communication. Though it was the center of the Spanish community there was no military detachment to protect it from outside forces. There were 60 muskets, but there was no one to handle them.

By the end of October, 1898, the Spaniards in Surigao learned about the war in Luzon, the disaster in Cavite, the fall of Manila to the Americans, and the establish of the Philippine the in Malolos. This news was contrary to what Don Viseo, District Governor of Surigao, was proclaiming before. Now that the truth surfaced, their hearts sank and they you of leaving the place.

On the night of December 22. 1898, an official communication was received ordering the governor to turn over his authority to the gobernadorcillo of the town or to the provincial board. Following orders, Governor Viseo turned over his authority to Don Ballori and Surigao was left in incompetent hands. Don Manuel Ballori, to whom Governor Viseo turned over his authority soon gave up his position. As a result. the provincial board was convened. By a majority vote, the old man, Juan- Gonzales, father of Simon and Wenceslao, was chosen to succeed Don Manuel Ballori. Being an old man, he was not able to get the cooperation of the local officials in the town.

Days after. the steamer, Melliza, decorated with buntings and flags, appeared in the bay and docked. The Surigaueflos had the feeling that this was the authority to take over the reign of the government. Disembarking were the two brothers, Simon and Wenceslao, in military uniform. They walked with dignity and were highly respected by the crew. Simon addressed the crowd that met them and urged them to unite and join the cause against the enemy of the Philippine Republic. He talked of the success of the revolution and announced to his listeners the appointment, by President Emilio Aguinaldo, of Simon Gonzales as Military Commander of Mindanao and his brother Wenceslao as Governor of Surigao.

The Government of the Gonzales Brothers

The Gonzales brothers directed an open campaign against the Catholic Church. The parish priest of the town was summoned to the casa real and Simon told him that he was a prisoner of war. Wenceslao, accompanied by a long retinue walked to the convento and made an inventory of the money and furniture of the church. When he left, he stationed two guards at the entrance to the convento.

The following day, Governor Wenceslao went to Butuan while General Simon proceeded to the nearby town of Taganaan. Governor Wenceslao entered the town of Butuan with the Philippine Flag, town band, and a retinue of administrative staff. He was met by the parish priest, Fr. Nebot, amidst the cheers of the crowd. He met all the padres and the brothers in the convento and announced that they were all Prisoners of war by authority given him by President Aguinaldo. He asked for the books of the sanctorum, inspected the safe, and noted the money inside. Don Wenceslao announced they were all Prisoners of war and would be brought to Surigao the following day.

General Simon who was in the town of Taganaan, also went to the convento and announced to all the priests and brothers there that they were prisoners of war of General Aguinaldo’s troops and that they would also be brought to Surigao. The money in the safe was impounded and the whole of the convento was searched and an inventory of the furniture was made. Addressing the crowd that gathered, he told them to unite and that the Spaniards were already defeated. He told them to resist the Americans, who wanted to reduce them to a condition of slavery.

There was a total of  28 priests and brothers, and some Benedictine monks who were placed under house arrest. General Simon was frequently y asked by the padres about their fate. His answer was simply telling them to wait for higher orders from President Aguinaldo.

Conditions had gone from bad to worse. The Gonzales brothers had alienated the populace by their shabby treatment of the priests. Unspoken accusations charged them with exceeding the authority given them by President Emilio Aguinaldo. In desperation, a group of Surigauetios went to Baganga to seek the help of Don Prudencio Garcia. The latter gave his approval and assured the group of his assistance.

The Fall of the Gonzales Brothers

Don Prudencio Garcia communicated with General Simon about his coming to Surigao to confer with him on some important matters. On his way, he was already making his plan of a bloodless take over. Just before entering Surigao, he contacted the leaders of the coup and presented his plan to them.

Garcia contacted and conferred first with Governor Wenceslao in Tago before proceeding to Surigao to meet General Simon. In the conference. Garcia requested for the release of the imprisoned padres and asked that he be given a part of the district to control. Unable to get anything from Governor Wenceslao, Garcia proceeded to Surigao to see General Simon.

Garcia arrived in Vilan-Vilan on March 24,1899. He was given a royal welcome, with a banquet held in his honor by General Simon. The plan of a takeover was carried out the following day. At about 12:00 noon, the soldiers of Garcia occupied the town hall, with their muskets aimed toward the street. At that time, the men of General Simon were in the street in front of the building.

Their leaders never knew of the plot of Don Prudencio to enter the town Garcia’s men. , ordering him to present believing that it was m unthinkable for him to obey an order coming from a subordinate. Going to the town hall and after sizing up the situation, he finally surrendered. Garcia ordered him to remove his uniform and to dress up in civilian clothes.

General Simon was investigated and was ordered to produce the document to establish the truth that he was appointed Li General and Commanding Officer of Mindanao. On the basis of the finding, it turned out that he was only appointed by President Aguinaldo as Commanding Officer of Mindanao, with the authority to recruit forces and collect resources for the revolution. On the part of Wenceslao, President Aguinaldo entrusted upon him the authority to preside over the election in the district, with the rank of colonel and governor.

To the question why they placed the missionaries under house question why they place from the missionaries under h arrest, the answer was that they acted on secret f om a source which they refused to reveal. It came out later that the  advice came from the aged Juan  Gonzales, their father.

After the investigation, Simon was ordered to be isarmed and degraded. He was compelled to give up the government in the district. Those present were also asked to speak out any grievances against the accused.

Simon and Wenceslao were imprisoned in the cabecera. Later, they were placed in a separate boat to be deported, and, upon arrival at the anchor point, the death sentence was read to them. Simon and Wenceslao were told to get out of the boat and, a few hours later, they were seen kneeling down. At close range they were executed. With the Gonzales brothers out of the way, Don Prudencio Garcia was acknowledged commander of the 3rd District of Mindanao. The imprisoned missionaries were immediately released from house arrest. The Jesuits were the last to leave the island of Mindanao after Spanish sovereignty was overthrown, in accordance with the provision of the Treaty of Paris, 1898. On January 4.1899, the government ordered all Spanish subjects to leave the Philippines.

Cotabato

According to the accounts of Fr. Mariano Suarez of the Jesuit Mission dated September 21, 1896 the news about the Manila uprising was not felt in Cotabato. The Indios did not understand what it meant nor had they ever dreamed of such a thing. The principalia, and the rest of the populace, denounced the revolution in a manifesto which they forwarded to the Governor General in Manila.

Davao 1896-1900

While in and around Manila the revolution was catching fire, the idea of an anti-Spanish movement did r the hang not ente minds of the people in Southern Mindanao. Based on the report of the Jesuit mission in Surigao, there was no appreciable reaction from the people. The reaction could be attributed to a lack of attention as the people were not yet as politicalized as those from Luzon and the Visayas.

The Uprising in Baganga,1898

The uprising in Baganga, on September 23, 1898, had no connection with the revolution- of 1896. It was led by Don Prudencio Garcia, Captain of the Civil Infantry of the Baganga Police. The revolt was a protest against the government and not against Spain. He only wanted the mother Country, Spain, to send honest and honorable men to administer the Islands. He was against the manner of collecting taxes and the imposition of personal services.

Armed with 150 rifles and two mounted cannons, he led a lightning raid on the undermanned detachment on the Baganga-Cateel line facing the Pacific. After deposing the Spanish officer and other government officials, he installed himself as the head of a new local government.

In the second half of 1898, Garcia, assisted y Don Manuel of September Sanchez, a Spanish deportee from Cuba, surprised the military station at Caraga Pueblo without bloodshed and took over the district government. On order of Garcia, Sanchez was sent to seize the steamer, Bilbao, and its crew south of Caraga. Instead of following orders, he arrested and imprisoned the Jesuit Priest, Fr. Manuel Valles, stationed at Caraga, giving the steamer, Bilbao time to escape. Angered by the act of Sanchez, some of the soldiers returned to Baganga ahead and reported his wrongdoing to Garcia. Infuriated by the escape of the steamer. Bilbao, and the disrespect to the dignity of the priest. Garcia ordered Sanchez shot.

Fr. Gisbert, of the Baganga Mission. tried to convince Garcia to lay down his arms for the sake of the people who could not concentrate on working in their farms, but Garcia was adamant. He told Fr. Gisbert he had nothing against Spain but he was simply demanding reforms in the imposition of taxes and personal services and that he would only lay down his arms when his demands were resolved by the superior government in Manila and if they will be granted general amnesty.

The people of Caraga and Cateel did not follow the example of Baganga. Many of them went to the mountains to avoid compromising themselves. The Manila government finally responded to end the uprising by ordering the commander of the Mati Civil Infantry. Teniente Manuel Garcia Neilla to take charge of the operation. He wished Garcia would surrender his arms, in as much as he was asking for amnesty. Fr. Gisbert moved into action by presenting himself as go-between. The request met the approval of the two groups. Fr. Gisbert assured Garcia that the commander meant no harm and that, his only wish was for him and his men to lay down their arms. He volunteered to go to Mati to meet the mail that would grant them amnesty. Incidentally, in the afternoon of February 21st, 1898, the commander and assessor of Mati arrived in Manay, bringing with them the amnesty papers. The official communication was sent to Baganga and they waited for Garcia’s reply. Frs. Gisbert and Valles moved to negotiate peace. Happily, they succeeded and Teniente Neilla and Don Prudencio Garcia embraced each other. Once again, there was peace in Baganga.

With the signing of the Treaty of Paris, on December  10, 1898, Spain ceded the Philippines to the U.S. Lt. Neilla Garcia, who remained in Mati in command of the Civil Infantry, did not find it difficult to share the command with Don Prudencio Garcia. Later, together with the other Spaniards, he boarded the ship bound for Manila. In his place was Don Prudencio Garcia, who made use of his power to release all the Jesuit priests and brothers in the District of Surigao.

The Spaniards Leave Davao, January 15,1899

The Treaty of Paris, on December 10,1898, ended the Spanish-American War. In accordance with the Treaty, the Philippines was placed under U.S. sovereignty. All Spaniards in the islands were recalled to Manila where, in due time, they would be sent to Spain.

Due to the problem of communication, the Spaniards in Davao had to stay for more than a year. It was not until a steamer, the Churruca, was sent from Manila to Davao to evacuate them on that historic day of January 15,1899, that Commandant Bartolome Garcia and his command  boarded the Churruca and left, marking the end of Spanish rule in the District  of Davao.

Davaweños Take a Shot at Self-Government

During the interim period of eleven months from the time Spaniards left, the Christian Davaoeños took a shot at self-government. They held a consultative meeting and established a government junta. The junta  was composed of a president, vice-president, treasurer, secretary and three councilors. Don Antonio Matute, a Spanish merchant, was elected president.

The Tercio Civil de Policia was placed under the command of Bonifacio Quidato, who was highly respected and loved by the people. He took charge of the 70 rifles which Governor Garcia left behind and selected 25 men to maintain peace and order. For a while the people were pleased and satisfied with the new government. Later, there were some recalcitrants questioning the legality of the government. They claimed that since the Spanish government did not exist anymore, they were free to do as they pleased, with no one to order them. Quidato, faithful to his duty, kept watch on the activities of these people. Sensing that they could never achieve their objectives with Quidato around, they finally decided to eliminate him. They bribed the policemen and finally they succeeded in their sinister plot by treacherously hacking to death Quidato, and his wife and brother-in-law, while they were asleep. This was consummated on February 6,1899. The perpetrators were led by Juan Reyes, Basilio Bautista and Lucas Auting. They took possession of all the firearms and ammunitions and carried them to the opposite bank of the river. They continued firing shots in the air until daybreak, sowing fear everywhere.

The provisional government was overthrown. Matute, the President, escaped in a sailboat and all the Spaniards and prominent natives sought refuge in different directions. There was anarchy and a reign of terror as marauders robbed the stores and empty houses. To make matters worse, the t y go g, “Kill all drunk on stolen liquor and ran in the streets shouting who know anything! Kill all the rich!”

As the orgy subsided, Fr. Saturnino Urios, a Jesuit missionary, succeeded in bringing sanity to the insurgents in through the use of tact and diplomacy. He was not only able to effect peace, but he was also able to retrieve the arms and ammunitions of the insurgents.

This time, a new president was elected in the person of Antonio Joven. The new government functioned satisfactorily until August 1,1899. A new group of recalcitrants appeared again, led by Samuel Navarro, a Moro-Visayan mestizo, who was assisted by the Moros. The local government was toppled down and a new set of officers took over.

Navarro became Chief of Police and Estanislao Palma Gil, President. Their administration was unpopular as they were criticized for their tyrannical conduct. Navarro, who suspected that the Visa would rise against him, sought the help of the Moros in retaliation. He plotted the massacre of the Visayans on the eve of Christmas and to expel the rest. The arrival of the American occupation forces on December 14,1899 aborted the plot.

The American Forces Occupy Davao

On December 14. 1899, the steamer, Manila, docked south of the Davao River, with General JC Bates. U.S. Commanding Officer of Mindanao and Jolo. aboard. A delegation of town officials, composed of Samuel Navarro, Jefe Provincial, Bonifacio Casada, Primero Teniente,Cipriano Bustamante, Segundo Teniente, and Teodoro Palma Gil, Maestro de Niños, welcomed the general. The welcome given him was a far contrast to that of Uyanguren in 1848. “Not a single injury had ever been done by the inhabitants to an American.” They invited General Bates to come ashore. On shore, the general, with his staff, stayed just long enough to inspect the town. He left on the same day that he arrived.

Davao at this time was described as a well-laid out town, with long avenues bordered with palms. There was a good-sized church, with a convento that needed repair. Private houses were neat and the health of the community was good.

Six days after the visit of General Bates, the first group of American occupation forces arrived aboard the steamer, Brutus, under the command of Major Hunter B. Ligett. They were met by the Presidente Local and his staff who piloted the steamer to the nearest safe anchorage.

The sub-district of Davao embraced the military stations of Davao town and vicinity. Mati, Caraga, Baganga, Dapnan, and other points that fell under their protection and influence. Major Ligett was in command until September 30, 1901, when Major C.D. Cowles arrived and assumed command.

The Mutiny of the Deportees in Marawi, Lanao del Sur, 1896

It was the practice and policy of the Spanish government to deport the natives who espoused the separatist movement inimical to the interest of the mother country, Spain. Between 300 to 400 had been deported and were serving their term in the Spanish military fort of Marawi. On September 17, 1896. a month after the outbreak of the revolution, the deportees mutinied against the Spanish military officers. Armed with Remingtons and 200 rounds of ammunition, they killed all the Spanish officers except one medical officer who escaped.

The mutineers proceeded on foot to Cagayan, threatening from the to kill all the Spaniards in the district capital. A short distance provincial capitol, they were ambushed by a small government force composed of native Filipino soldiers who were dispatched from Iligan under Spanish military officers. The mutineers were routed which forced them to retreat up to the Tagolan River.

Data Sub; New Leader of the Fugitive Rebels

On January 10, 1987, the rebel fugitives appeared in Odiongan, a coastal settlement near the town of Gingoog.

Armed with rifles, the rebels reorganized themselves under a new leader, a native datu named Suba. There was a great number of unbaptized tribesmen who joined the group. In Odiongan, they killed two Chinese resident merchants and a Christian, who refused to give light to Suba. They burned the victim’s houses, butchered their cows, and celebrated the traditional pagan victory. The following day, they moved to the town of Medina and repeated the same orgy. They were sighted in upper Agusan and in various parts of Surigao. Their number was swelled by the other escapees from other detention points, who had no desire but to topple down the Spanish government. All armed with rifles, they were frighteningly strong. They proved their worth as cattle and horse rustlers to provide themselves with food and transport.

In many ways, their activities affected life in Mindanao. The Chinese traders refused to transport abaca and other merchandise, as they were scared of the marauders. In the summer of 1897, a new district governor of Misamis was appointed and he tactfully dealt with the fugitives. In 1898, the mutineers ceased to be a problem. Datu Suba and his followers presented themselves to the Jesuit mission and asked to be baptized.

50 Years of Philippine- American Relations*

When the organizers of this symposium invited me to speak about the political aspect of “50 Years of Philippine-American Relations – A Filipino’s Perspective,” my first reaction was panic. Among other reasons was panic. Among other reasons, I find the subject too sensitive. While a mere mention of it can produce a profound euphoria in some, it can incite a murderous rage in others. Indeed, it is one of the ironies of history that while the half-century of Philippine – American relations was supposed to be an experiment in international partnership, the issue has divided Filipinos deeply.

In the course of my preparations, however, I have come to believe that it is necessary that we discuss the subject. It is said that to be a nation, we must have a common history. And having a common history does not only mean that we have shared the joys and pains of the journey from the past. It also means that we have a unified understanding of the past. Otherwise, we are building the future on a shaky foundation.

Let me now warn you that I will address the issue from a narrow perspective. I speak as a Filipino who has no memories of the bloody battlefields of Bataan, the cold caves of Corrigidor, or the landing at Lingayen or Leyte. Mine is the perspective of somebody who was born in the 60’s , quietly grew up during the repression of the 70’s, and participated in the street marches of the 80’s. It may not be the view of the majority of the Filipinos, as recent surveys seem to indicate, but it is shared by many of those who belong to my generation.

Our retrospection this afternoon should bring us back to July 4, 1946, when the Philippines, as promised by the United States government in the Tydings-MacDuffies Act of 1934, proclaimed its independence. Symbolically, as was re-enacted a few days ago at the Luneta, the American flag was lowered and the Philippine flag was raised. The event, President Ramos would say, marked the dismantling of the United States colonial machinery even as it ushered in the birth of a new Democracy.

As soon as the Philippine flag started flying, the new State began entering into agreements with its former colonial master. These agreements would not only ensure the continued political relations of the two countries after independence but would also intertwine their destinies for the next 50 years. Among these accords was the United States-Philippines Trade Agreement of 1946 which provided for free trade relations between the two countries for 8 years and required the amendment of the Philippine Constitution of 1935 to give parity rights to United States citizens in engaging in business in the Philippines/

In the succeeding years, three other agreements would be concluded between the two governments. The first was the Military Bases Agreement of 1947 which, to promote the security of the two countries, granted the United States rent-free access to 16 bases in the Philippines for a period of 99 years. The second was the Military Assistance Agreement of 1947 which committed the United States to supply arms, ammunitions and military supplies and equipment, and provided for a military advisory group for the Philippines. And the third was the Mutual Defense Agreement of 1951 where the United States and the Philippines agreed to consider an armed attack in the Pacific area on either as dangerous to its own safety and declared that it would act to meet the common dangers “in accordance with its constitutional processes.”

While we all know that some of these agreements have been renegotiated, amended and abrogated, none of them would outlive the controversy, the resentment or rancor that they had generated. The main cause was the perception that they were disadvantages to the Philippines and were forced upon it in the aftermath of the war when our fields were unplanted and  our cities were in ruins. Another came from realization that the United States had treaties with less friendly governments on containing more favorable concessions. In the end, rather than being seen as expressions of independence and friendship, these agreements were viewed as manifestations of dependence and continued domination.

Now, I do not share the view that the military agreements were the results of a desire to keep the Philippines in perpetual colonial bondage. Rather, I believe that they were the logical consequences of the foreign policies adopted by the two countries which at that time could have made sense. So that you understand my position, let me proceed with the following review.

United States foreign policy was forged was forged at the end of World War II and it remained unchanged for almost 50 years. It started with the assumption that the Communists, as aggressively represented by the Soviet Union, wanted to bring the world under their dominion. According to this thinking, it was not possible to have a rational dialogue with the Communists. The goal of United States foreign policy was therefore to contain the spread of Communism. The strategy was to win allies, and set up as many barriers as possible. Since this was done without military hostilities, this state of things came to be known as the Cold War.

On the other hand, Philippine foreign policy was first outlined by President Roxas in his inaugural address on July 4, 1946. As he expressed it, is called for “the closest cooperation with the United States in all matters concerning our common defense and security.” In practice, this was extended to fields other than security. As pointed out by critics, the policy assumed an identity of interests between the two governments. Subsequent administrations, including that of President Marcos who opened relations with socialist countries, preserved both the appearance and reality of close ties and goodwill with the United States.

That the United States would hammer out defense and security arrangements with the Philippines was inevitable. That the United States bolstered regimes in the Philippines friendly to it was understood by all. That the United States influenced the outcome of local elections in the Philippines any meaningful change in the political and social structure of the country was conceded by others.

The last proposition became the conviction and concern of many during the darkest days of the Marcos regime. Even when it had become apparent that President Marcos was sweeping away the structures of democracy that took 75 years to build, the United States government stood by him and provided him both moral and material aid to crush those who opposed him. Of course, most Filipinos are willing to forget the episode because in the end it was the United States which pressured President Marcos to resign and hastened his departure to Hawaii.

At this point, let me emphasize two matters. First, that it is not my position that the United States should have forsaken its own interests in dealing with the Philippines. That would be naive, if not entirely insane. The United States is neither a church nor a charitable institution. It has the primary responsibility of promoting the security and prosperity of its own people. The fault was with the Philippines, which failed to take care of itself by assuming that  the relations mechanically would.

Second, that it is not my position that the 50 years of our political relations with the United States brought nothing to the Philippines but injustice and misery. On the contrary, at the time when we just emerged from the alleys of colonialism, the relations gave us prestige, secured us recognition, and provided us advantages, in the international associations created after World War II. In addition, all throughout the last 50 years, the Philippines has continued to reap material benefits and sometimes derived a feeling of security that enabled it to concentrate on other problems demanding attention.

It is easy to see however that most of the benefits were short-term. In the end, they fostered dependence, rather than promote independence. No less than President Nixon understood this. While in the Philippines in 1969, the United States President declared that he hoped to initiate a new era of Philippine-American relations, not returning to the “old special relationship,” but “building a new one based on mutual trust, on mutual confidence, on mutual cooperation.”

President Nixon’s hope, however, would not easily translate into reality. In 1989, twenty years after he articulated it, President Aquino would still be asking for help to quell a military uprising, just as president Roxas begged for money to rebuild the war-torn economy, or President Magsaysay for guns and advisers to fight the Huks. While the Philippines is economically and politically unable to stand on its own, a relationship of dependence could not be avoided, and mutual cooperation could hardly be possible.

But the last few years appear to have brought new reasons for hope. With the end of the Cold War, and as a new world order begins to unfold, the struggle of the Philippines for economic and political independence continues. What can make us proud of the process is that public opinion is unwilling to reach the elusive goal by sacrificing democracy to dictatorship. The seeds of democracy sown on July 4, 1946, have taken roots and I consider this to be the most enduring legacy of the 50 years of Philippine – American relations.

As I end this, let me recall the words of Ernest Renan, the 19th century French historian who said that “Nations are built on the basis of great remembering and great forgetting.” And to sum up my position, let me say that his statement applies as well to the 50 years of Philippine – American relations: There are things to forget, and things to remember.

The Sulu Sultanate: A Historical Encounter of Islam and Malay Culture

The Moros, known in the academe as the Muslim Filipinos, are going through an identity crisis. Once again they are challenged to define who they are as a people. Are they a people apart from the Philippine nation? Or, are they Malay just like most Filipinos?

Today, the Moros’ Malayness is gradually being eroded as they try to uncritically imitate the Arabs. It is almost as if in their minds, to be a Muslim is to be an Arab. They are doing away with Malay clothes and replacing them with Arab garb. The kopiya, an oval shaped hat similar to that worn in two other Malay nations, Indonesia and Malaysia, was at one point the trademark of the Muslims of Mindanao. Now, it is gradually being replaced by the taqiyah, a Muslim hat worn in Egypt, Sudan, and other African countries. A growing number of Moro women are now wearing the ingab, a black dress worn by Muslim women of the Middle East that completely covers the body, leaving only a small opening for the eyes. The niqab is slowly replacing the malong and patadjong, the traditional Moro dress. The kopiya and the patadjong are, to some extent, the remaining symbols of Moro or Muslim Filipino identity that indicates that they are Malay and definitely’ not Arab.

It is important to understand that Islam can be lived out in different ways in different cultures, and cannot therefore be reduced to one cultural expression. A Malay expression of Islam is as valid as the Arab expression of Islam. One does not have to be Arab to be Muslim. If the Moros are not careful and assertive enough they will easily be over-run by Arab cultural imperialism. The Moros must learn to distinguish the cultural from the religious elements in Islam. The Moro people should strictly follow the main tenets of Islam, e.g., Tawheed (Unity or Oneness of God) and the fire pillars, but at the same time be able to discern which expressions are culturally Arab and which can have an equivalent expression in the Moro-Malay culture.

The Moros have in their tradition a rich cultural heritage. Their indigenous expression of Islam in Mindanao is their soul. This makes them distinct from other Muslim tribes and defines their identity as Muslim Filipinos. The challenge now is to revisit and reexamine the age-old practices, a product of an encounter between Islam and the Moro’s Malay culture.

Islam is established in Sulu

Centuries before the arrival of Islam and Christianity, the Philippines was part of the greater Malay Archipelago that was under the influence of the Hindu-Buddhist traditions in the nineteenth century. The process of Indianization would take deep root in the mainland areas of Southeast Asia through the Srivijaya and Madjapahit Empires. The shift to Islam can be traced back to the Arab trade with South China that expanded during the Sung times [Sing Dynasty] (960-128( CF). As a result of increased contacts between Chinese merchants’ and Arab and Persian traders, the Hindu-Buddhist influence in Southeast Asia gradually shifted to Islam.’ The expansion of trade in Southeast Asia consequently led to the coming of more Arab and Persian traders to Malaysia and Indonesia, North Sumatra, and the Moluccas. The former Hindu-Buddhist Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia would turn Islamic by the thirteenth century (Evangelista 1970). It was via Malaysia, Borneo, and Sumatra that traders and Muslim missionaries finally reached Sulu.

In 1275-1310 CE (710 A H), Tuhan Masha’ika arrived in jolo. In 1380 CE, Karim ul-Makhdum and his companions arrived and converted a large number of Taosugs to Islam. Karim Makhdum was responsible for the founding of the first mosque in the Philippines at Tubig-Indangan on Simunul Island near job. Najeeb Saleeby (33) recounts from one tarsila as follows: “Some time after there came Karimul Makdum. He crossed the sea in a vase or pot of iron and was called Sarip (Sharif). l le settled at Buwansa, the place where the Tagimaha nobles lived. There the people flocked to him from all directions, and he built a house of worship.” So by the late fourteenth century there were already Muslim settlements in Sulu.

The next important figure to arrive in Sulu was Rajah Baguinda, a prince from Sumatra, who reached Sulu in the early fifteenth century with a group of men knowledgeable about Islam. They settled in Buwansa, which eventually became the first capital of the Sultanate of Sulu.

The Moros needed a sultan who could establish an Islamic state where God’s law and justice would be upheld. That crucial period in Sulu’s history would be realized in 1450 CE with the arrival of Abu Bakr. In the annals of Malacca, it is recorded that Sayyid’ Abu Bakr was regarded as a famous authority on law and religion. His origins, however, remain steeped in mystery. One version of the story claims that he came from Mecca. The other theory states that it was his father, Zaynul Abidin, who came from Mecca and that he was, in fact, born in Malacca. “It is the common belief that Abu Bakr was born in Mecca and that he lived some time at Juhur (or Malacca). Others state that it was his father, Zaynul Abidin, who came from Mecca and that Abu Bakr was born of the daughter of the Sultan of Juhur at Malacca. lie came to Pangutaran first, the narrative continues, then to Zamboanga and Basilan… He remained at Basilan for a short while. Having heard of Abu Bakr, the people of Sulu sent Orankaya Su’il to Basilan to invite him to Buwansa to rule over them. This invitation Was accepted” (Saleeby, 45-46). Abu Bakr settled in Sulu to establish a sultanate, an Islamic system of government, that would help the Moros practice Islam more faithfully. It is through this that the Taosugs (through contacts they made with Muslims from China, India, and Malay Archipelago) attribute their origins as Muslims to the Arabs. Sayyid Abu Bakr was most probably Malay, yet Mows claimed that he was from Arabia and a descendant of Muhammad, thus legitimizing his status as sultan.

As one would expect, the Moros welcomed him with little resistance and invited him to become their sultan. Majul noted that the “majority of traditional accounts precisely suggest that Muslims and not pagans had invited Abu Bakr to come over to Buansa’ and that it was the Islamic consciousness of the people that inclined them to realize the need for a sultan” (383). The smooth transition from the indigenous family-oriented barangay system to a sultanate was possible because even before Abu Bakr arrived in Sulu, the Sulu society had already been transformed into an Islamic society to a certain degree (6). Abu Bakr married Paramisuli, the daughter of Rajah Baguinda, the reigning Rajah of Sulu. When Rajah Baguinda chose Abu Bakr to be his successor, Abu Bakr took the name 20 Sharif ul-Hashim and became the first Sultan of Sulu. The shift of titles and names from Sanskrit to Arabic among the succeeding sultans and Moro constituents of Sulu signifies the gradual process of Islamization from a Hindu-Buddhist culture mixed with the Malay culture. A.C. Milner (1981, 6) has argued that

“… the usage of Arabic titulature in the Malay context is more an aspect of the harmonization of the Islamic regal tradition than the translation of its forms and erasure of existing local structures. All such titles were most likely adopted by the Southeast Asian rulers as part of the continuing process of adhesion to Islam.”

Because the Sulu sultanate was distant from the Islamic heartland, the Taosug political ideology of the sultanate was “interwoven and syncretized both with notions unique to the Taosug, as well as conceptions of state and kingship common to Southeast Asia” (Kiefer, 33). The notions had understandably filtered through Malay in influence. Nonetheless, of the sultanates in Mindanao, the Sulu Sultanate had political institutions which were relatively the most centralized. The Moros of Sulu and the succeeding sultans tried to see to it that these institutions would reflect the Tawheed, their belief in one God, and uphold God’s law, the Shariah.

Pre-Islamic barangay system

Before Islam first reached Lupah Sug (Land of Sulu) in the thirteenth century and established a sultanate in the fifteenth century, the people in Sulu, as in the rest of the Philippine archipelago, developed basic units of settlements called banna or barangay. The generally accepted theory is that the Sulu Sultanate appears to have developed from the indigenous barangay system, a native social and political organization based on kinship that expanded loosely beyond family relationships, and was ruled by a datu (Malay) or a rajah (Hindu). These datus ruled as feudal lords of fortified kuta scattered throughout the Sulu archipelago.

A Moro’s primary allegiance was loyalty to his sultan and his immediate dam. William Henry Scott pointed out that loyalty to the leader was a priority, and the number of followers was the primary determination of the datu’s strength: “Generally, society was constituted by the commoners who were joined to the dam, and the slaves” (l.arousse 2001, 32). The primary basis for interpersonal and social relations in the Moro society was the datu-sakop“‘ relationship. What contributed to its strength was that it was mutually beneficial for both sides. A form of mutual obligation developed between the data, who had authority, social status, and wealth and the sakop, who gained a sense of security from his datu’s protection and sustenance. In exchange for his sakops’ loyalty and service, the datu’s primary interest was their economic welfare. The datu-sakop relations may be likened to that of a patron-client. Both benefited economically and politically.

This loyalty to their data was a significant factor of the mass conversion of Moms to Islam. Once the data was converted to Islam, practically everyone in his barangay also converted. Considering the advantages of being a Muslim in a commerce dominated by Muslim Arabs, the data himself may have been motivated by the economic and political reasons to opt for conversion. The sakop followed their datu’s shift in religion out of loyalty and allegiance to him and trust in his goodwill. The introduction of Islam further deepened the bond between the data and sakop by giving it a religious and transcendent dimension. As a consequence, enduring Islamic bonds bound the flatus and their sakop to one another, with the sakop’s loyalty to his data now seen as a religious obligation.

Islam had raised the status of the sultan, the leading data of all flatus, to the level of God’s deputy who was worthy of submission. In fact, Moms were led to believe that the blood of the Prophet Muhammad ran in the sultan’s veins. This inspired the sakop to work and fight for him: “If he was insulted, belittled or injured, so were they—and they would not rest until he was avenged” (Gowing 1988, 48).

This identification of the sultan’s divine entitlement explained the willingness of the Moms to do parrang sabil” to defend their sultan and data. In a situation of war, giving up one’s life for the sultan to gain paradise became more valued. Saleeby was aware of this when he recommended to the American colonial authorities in Sulu that “Islam should be encouraged by colonial authorities because it is which binds the Muslim populace most indelibly to their leaders” (McKenna 1998, 106). Religion now provided the Moros a new motive that far surpassed economic benefits.

One cannot stress enough the powerful and lasting influence that the traditional barangay system of datu-sakop relations had upon the sultanate that replaced it. The Islamization of the barangay system had further consolidated local datus and facilitated political centralization. The datus ruled as feudal pirate lords who formed fortified kutas scattered throughout the Sulu archipelago. Through the establishment of the sultanate, the local datus of various barangays who ruled as feudal lords throughout the Sulu archipelago were united under the sultan and were represented by select datus who comprised a council, the ruma bichara, to advise the sultan on the affairs of the sultanate.

The idea of representation may pass for a democratic system, except that the members of the ruma bichara were not elected but were ex-officio, included by virtue of their status as royal datus. An account of a traveler in Sulu during the late eighteenth century (Forrest 1779, 326) describes how a ruma bichara operates:

“About fifteen Datoos … make the greater part of the legislature … They sit in council with the Sultan. The sultan has two votes in this assembly, and each datu has one. The rajah muda,  …if he sides with the sultan, has two votes; but, if against him, only one. There are two representatives of the people, called mantiris, like the military tribunes of the Romans. The common people of Sooloos… enjoy much real freedom, owing to the above representation.”

From the beginning, the sultan had never acquired absolute power over the datus. When Abu Bakr established the sultanate, he wanted to bring the whole land under his name, or at least subject to his authority. The local datus opposed this because it meant they would lose their authority, since one of their bases of power was actual control of a territory. Abu Bakr and the datus arrived at an agreement, the tartib, which continued the influence of local datus over their respective territories and communities. The tartib indicates that the sultan, however, may send his panglimas (representatives) all over Sulu, thus ensuring links and promoting unity throughout the sultanate.

Segmentary state

According to Kiefer, the segmentary state is the model that best describes the traditional Taosug polity. He understands the segmentary state to be “composed of sub-units which are structurally and functionally equivalent at every level of the political system” (Warren 1998, xxiv). In the case of the Sultanate of Sulu, the sub-units would be the barangays ruled by individual datus. The barangays existed independently of each other, but they were linked to each other to organize trade under the leadership of the sultan.

“In a traditional segmentary state, territorial sovereignty waxed at the centre and waned at the periphery” (Warren, xxiv). The Sulu sultanate was a centralized political system which territorial sovereignty was centered in the Sultan who was based in job. The Moros were loyal to the Sultan as well as to their datus as expression of their fidelity to Allah. Kiefer stressed the importance of seeing the sultan and datus, particularly the royal claws, as mirror images of each other. In fact, the Taosug generally believe that the blood of the Prophet Muhammad ran in their veins.

As for the sakops, who were mostly the datu’s kinsmen, their primary loyalty was to their immediate datu, rather than to the sultan. If their datu was loyal to the sultan, then they too ought to be loyal to the sultan, according to the degree of loyalty their data had for the sultan. However, some datus were loyal only to gain more prestige and win more concessions from the sultan.” Power remained diffuse within the sultanate as factional politics revolved around the more powerful claws. “[I]t was not uncommon for strong leaders to use raw power in the appropriation of rights theoretically attached to the sultan in order to further their personal interests and prestige” (Warren, xxv). A datu’s power and prestige was based on his personal wealth, the number of sakop who rallied around his leadership, and the number of slaves he owned. The common words for slave in Taosug were Bisaya and banyaga, a proper noun referring to a person from the Visayan islands in central Philippines where most slave raids were carried out. The banyaga or Bisaya not only labored in his house and fields, adding to the datu’s prestige and economic strength, but they sometimes augmented his military force as well (Gowing, 48). The datu’s power depends on how he wielded his authority over his people, and how he could mobilize them for work or war at any given moment.

The Sultanate of Sulu was pyramidal in structure. As one moves from the apex toward the base, one sees the sultan’s power and influence diminish and the datus take over. The Sultan’s power and influence waned as it got farther from the center, and datus at the periphery had more influence and control on the Moros. if the Sultan departs from the ideals of Islam, then a datu or claws would take the responsibility to uphold and defend Islam. The pre-eminent position of the sultan at the apex of this political system was emphasized by certain rites and symbols which validated his authority (Warren, xxvi).

In gatherings, his seat would always be higher than the rest of the datus, symbolizing the dignity of his office. The court ritual was highly elaborate(xxvii): “…all letters, official dispatches, and verbal requests were addressed to the sultan in a special court vocabulary through an interpreter. Richly textured clothing, ceremonial paraphernalia such as umbrellas and weapons, especially ornate kris bronze and brass domestic utensils, and household ornaments were additional evidence of the sultan’s symbolic strength and sacred character.”

Tawheed: Sacralizing the sultan

For the Taosug, the leadership of the community was symbolized in the sultan… Without the sultan, there could be no community, nor men properly claim to be Muslims, for in order to acknowledge the sovereignty and unity of God, it was necessary to give a similar acknowledgement to the sultan.

Thomas Kiefer, 1972

The Qur’an repeatedly emphasizes the Oneness or Divine Unity of God, and this is mirrored in the Islamic doctrine of the Tawheed. The Tawheed is the central article of faith in Islam. As with most Muslims, the Tawheed is central to the Moros.

The Qur’an also explicitly describes God as Ai-Malik. meaning sovereign, and Al-Malik-u/-Mulk, the eternal possessor of sovereignty. These two adjectives are also among the ninety-nine names of God. The Qur’an (51:58) makes it clear beyond any doubt that all power lies in God who is Al-Muqtadir—possessor of all power.

Moros believe that God had exercised his sovereignty by delegating it in the form of human agency, and that this human agent was the sultan. If God is sovereign, then His representative on earth ought to be sovereign, too. In the early Muslim community in Medina, the prophet Muhammad was regarded as God’s human agent. For the Moros, within the context of the Sultanate of Sulu, that human agent was their sultan, who was “the shadow of Allah on Earth” (as-sultan zill Allah fi al-ard), an expression that goes back to the Abbasids (132/749 CE- 656/1258 CE). This approximates the title “vice-regent or deputy of God (khalifat ul-Allah)” on Earth, used by the Umayyad caliphs (41/661 CE-132/749 CE). The sultan as a ruler, however, was a humbler version of the actual Caliph of Islam. Over time, the Moro sultan claimed to be God’s khalifah or local representative. As God’s khalifah, the sultan executed God’s will and sovereignty by implementing what was prescribed in the Shariah.

Furthermore, the Moros also identified their sultan as halip tul rasul (successor of the messenger/prophet). Saleeby (17) observed that the Moros believed that their sultan was of noble birth and the Prophet’s blood runs through his veins. The Moros celebrated this status of the sultan through an annual religious ceremony during Maulud-al-Nabi (birthday of the Prophet). On that day they pay homage to their sultan by kissing his forehead which for them is like kissing the nabi (Kiefer, 34). The participant of this rite was believed to receive the barakat, God’s blessing or grace, because God’s charismatic grace surrounds the person of the sultan.

Kiefer has argued that Sufism contributed to raising the religious status of the sultan to an awe-inspiring level by sacralizing it. Sufism preached that the office of the sultan was shrouded with barakat, a state of religious blessing or grace. When a man was appointed sultan, he was said to acquire more barakat from God, empowering him to embody the ideals of Islam and be the ultimate interpreter of the law. However, the sultan’s judgments were not infallible. He could commit sins and go to hell like any man. Only when he was acting in the ideal manner was God’s will manifested through him (53-54). This was why he consulted with his ruma bichara, his wazir (prime minister), and a kudi (qadi or judge), a judicial advisor trained in the canon law of al-Shafii, who more often than not was a foreigner: Arab, Malay, or Bugis (37).

As Allah’s deputy and as one who replaced the prophet Muhammad, the person of the sultan was so sacred that no man can do him bodily harm without incurring God’s wrath and terrible punishment in this life and in the life to come (Saleeby, 17). His wrath (mulka) was similar to the wrath of God (Kiefer, 35). Moros also believed that at the end of every Moro’s lifetime, the sultan “was said to witness in the afterlife and at the day of judgment to his subjects’ faith in Islam; without the sultan there would be no intermediary between God and man” (35).

The rise of the sultanate: The Sino-Sulu trade

Although Sulu appears in Chinese sources only during the Yuan dynasty (1278-1368 CE) and the subsequent Ming dynasty (1368-1644 CE), the Chinese recorded that as early as 982 CE, Mayi ships were repeatedly seen in trading ports in southern China. Quoting Manguin’s Catalogues raissone’ De Loeuvre Peint (1980). Ututalum and Hedjazi also noted that this description fits the boats built in Butuan in northern Mindanao, migrating to Sulu only in the eleventh century, it can be safety surmised that Taosugs owned the trading ships.

By the eighteenth century, the Sultanate of Sulu was one of the most powerful in the Malay region. It was described as the mart of all Moorish kingdoms, strategically located between Mindanao and Borneo, and at the center of trade in the Sulu zone. But what catapulted the sultanate to such glory was its reaction to the growing capitalist economy and rapid advancement of colonialism in Southeast Asia by the end of the eighth century. It would be the Chinese tea trade that demanded a significant labor force. The Sulu Sultanate was in a position to respond to this demand.

Slave raiding was practiced by the Moros long before the 1768 Sulu Sino trade boom in the Sulu zone. In fact, slave raiding even per dated the arrival of the Spanish. Sulu was not densely populated during this period, and capturing people and bringing them to Sulu was a strategy that was often used to augment the population and increase its labor force. Since the power of the Sultan or a datu depended a great deal on the number of his followers, who were comprised of the sakop and the captured banyaga, the datus took their fleet to the northern islands to find slaves to bring back to Sulu province. The sultans also made marital and political alliances with the Iranun tribes that specialized in slave raiding.

Things in Sulu would significantly change in the eighteenth century when tea as a commodity drove the world’s capitalist economy. The fascination for tea, which was cultivated by Chinese peasants int he mountains of Fujian, swept Europe by the late seventeenth century

“Such that by 1700, tea had become, along with coffee and cocoa, one of the ‘great non-alcoholic drinks’ for all those Europeans with a sound grasp of epidemiological principles and fear of water-borne diseases and pestilence” (Hobhouse in Warren, 25). The belief in the medical benefits of tea contributed to the surge in demand for tea in the British Isles and in many parts of the Western world. “By 1820, it is estimated that probably thirty million pounds of the company’s tea was consumed in Britain alone… In 1801, at retail, tea cost importers about two million pounds in China.”

In response to the great European demand for tea, the British discovered that it was more profitable to trade with China for Chinese tea by using products from Southeast Asia as their trading commodity.’ They recognized that the Sulu zone had a seemingly inexhaustible source of marine and forest products that China would be willing to trade for its tea. To cut into the China-Sulu trade, the British opened a new port on the island of Balambangan between Borneo and Palawan. As the middlemen between the Chinese-Sulu trade, the British became part of the profitable trade triangle. By 1772-1775, through the East India Company, the British rapidly gained control of the market in the region by using North Borneo as a springboard.

The British supplied the demand for tea in Europe by trading their modern firearms for the Moms’ tripang and birds’ nest, and they in turn traded these products for China’s tea. This triangular sea trade provided exotic food to satisfy the new eating habits and styles of Chinese cooling, satisfied the desire of the Moros for the latest European firearms, and supplied the demand for tea in Europe. In addition, the British came up with a more sinister plan of using opium to trade with the Moros. But the adverse effect of this new trade triangle which James Warren called the Sulu zone was the resulting demand for a labor force that could harvest the marine and forest products in Sulu.

Thus there was a rising demand for tea in Europe and a concomitant increase in regional-wide slave raiding in Southeast Asia. Taosug claws partially re-patterned the life of particular marine groups to meet the soaring European and Chinese demand, and to gain direct access to western technology and Chinese trade goods. The efforts of ambitious datus to participate in this burgeoning world-capitalist economy, with its extraordinary profits and makers of differential status and prestige, forced the demand for additional labour up and swelled the How of global regional trade. The need for a reliable source of labour power was met by the Iranun and SamalBalangingi, the slave raiders of the Sulu zone (Warren, 39).

Sulu’s entry into the world trade market required bigger prabus to hold more products, and at the same time accomodate more slaves who would provide the much needed labor to harvest the exotic products of Sulu. Mallari (1989) argued that the Moros of Sulu began building bigger prahu ‘because of the increased demand for captives in the slave markets down south.” This coincided with the report of Captain Thomas Forrest, an Englishman, who visited Jolo in 1774 and who wrote that the prahus of Sulu could carry six to forty tons burden, and could still sail well. Another explorer, Henry Keppel (1853, 31) who visited Borneo in 1843, described the prahus to

“… measure ninety feet in length, with a proportionate beam. The usual armament of such a vessel would be one gun- from a six to twelve- pounder- in the bow; … besides about twenty or thirty rifles or muskets. Such boats would pull from sixty to eighty oars, in two  tiers; and her complement of men would be from eighty to one hundred. Over the pullers , and extending the whole length of the vessel, is a light but strong flat roof made of thin strips of bamboo, and covered with matting. This protects their ammunition and provisions from the rain, and serves as a platform on which they mount to fight and from which they fire their muskets or hurl their spears with great precision. The rowers sit cross-legged on a shelf projecting outwards from the bends of the vessel.

The British’s search for commodities to trade with China brought with it significant shifts in trading systems. Along with the rising demand for tea came a parallel demand for labor to work in the fisheries and forests of the Sulu zone. All these powerful economic forces pushed the Moro datus in the direction of acquiring increasing numbers of slaves. It can be said that the success of the trade triangle of China, Britain, and the Sultanate of Sulu was made possible primarily by slave labor.

Land was abundant in Southeast Asia and was therefore not the basis of power. With an economy that was labor intensive, slaves provided the index of wealth and power. In the Philippines, as early as the sixteenth century, Spaniard A. de Morga (trans. Cummins 1971, 274) observed.

“[T] hese slaves constitute the main capital and wealth of the natives of these islands, since they are both very useful and necessary for the workers of the farms. Thus, they are sold, exchanged and traded, just like other article of merchandise, from village to village, from province to province, and indeed from island to island.”

Slave trading was practiced not only in the Philippines but throughout Southeast Asia. In fact, the Moros already practiced slave raiding way before 1768 when the British cut in on the Sulu-Chinese trade.

In the Sulu society, it was not the vast amount of land that determined the strength of the datu. The number of followers was the primary determinant of the datu’s strength. Increasing the population through slave raiding was an accepted practice among the datus. This practice would eventually conflict with the Americans when they established their sovereignty in Sulu at the turn of the twentieth century.

When the Americans landed in Sulu in 1898, they encountered a sultanate that had been in existence for nearly four centuries. However, the Sultanate of Sulu was in decline. It had been losing its prestige as an economic and political force in Asia since 1848 when Spain introduced more powerful steamboats to control the Sulu Sea, effectively blocking the sultanate’s lucrative economic trade with the Dutch, British, and the Chinese (Larousse, 82). By the turn of the twentieth century, the weakened sultanate was vulnerable to the American occupying forces.

It was not an easy transition for the Moros. The sultanate had governed them for three centuries, and the dismantling of this traditional structure brought about a political vacuum in Sulu. As the disarmed Moros were left in their most vulnerable state, the United States transferred the responsibility of governing the Moro people in the hands of the inexperienced Christian Filipinos. Despite protects from the Moro people, the United States declared Philippine Independence in 1946 and annexed Mindanao and Sulu to the new republic. From then on, the integration of the Moros into the national polity has constantly failed. This became severe in the 1960s when fierce political disputes with the Republic of the Philippines became a struggle for an independent Bangsamoro (Moro Nation). As one can see, the failed American policies in Sulu are partly to be blamed for the ongoing Moro Problem today.

At the turn of the twenty-first century the decline of law and order in Sulu has led to its status as the poorest region in the Philippines. There have been many proposals from various sectors to redeem Sulu from its impoverished state. One of these comes from the traditional “royal families” or the claimants to the sultanate. They point to Sulu’s glorious past when Sulu was one of most powerful sultanates in the region. They then propose that through the reestablishment of the sultanate, the Moros can redeem themselves from poverty.

‘What are We in Fieldwork for?’ Ethics and Politics of Ethnographic Research

The practice of ethnographic fieldwork is first experienced as a social intervention before it is transformed into a textual invention.   Fieldworkers do not only work in the field, however the field is understood; they also work it. In the process of inserting themselves into a community or accompanying a group in their movement they also encounter, delight in, collide with, adjust to, miss or misunderstand other people’s actions and reactions. They impact on the lives of the people involved in their study perhaps as much as those people transform the researchers’ views of things. Fieldworkers then move almost inevitably from the already complex participant observation to an even more entangled, often multistranded, partisan participation (Gupta & Ferguson 1997; Marcus 1995). This seems especially true in studying nascent social movements in the context of contested development projects (Gardner & Lewis 1996; Albert 1997) as the following reflection on a Philippine case wishes to show.

From Narmada to Apo Sandawa

This reflection on the political and practical dimensions of fieldwork started when I met Medha Patkar who was the leader of the Narmada Bachao Andolan in India. From London, I took a short one-month visit between July and August in 1994 to the area of the Bhils who were among those affected by the Narmada Dam Project. Medha Patkar’s position posed a challenge to me. Exploring her Hindu and Gandhian tradition, she moved among the tribal groups as speaker and chanter, sometimes as cook and counsellor, as trainer and translator. Among those supporting the movement were book writers, some of whom were themselves vending their own books on top of cars during rallies.

I thought that there must be a way of doing research without always having to draw a very sharp line between academic rigor and social relevance, and that if pressed to make a preference, one could go further by considering a legitimate people’s movement more important than one’s research. As Medha Patkar argues, “general writing on paradigms of development, even alternative development…would not change the world and the exploited systems.” The necessary thing to do was to commit oneself to a real community, “like staking a territory as your own by planting your flag there, by capturing a symbol and shaking it for all its worth” (Patkar 1992, 278).

In the Philippines, Virgilio Enriquez pioneered a search for an ethical, relevant and culturally appropriate approach to social science research (1994b). One can argue that his call for a “liberating” research practice (Enriquez 1992 and 1994a) ran the risk of equating the social with the national project (Pertierra 1997, 11-12.20; 1992, 43). But I resonate with the way he stretched the meaning of “indigenous facilitation research.” Whereas participatory research assumes equality between the researcher and the researched, indigenous facilitation research “goes farther by recognising the superior role of the participant or the culture bearer as the one who determines the articulated and implied limits of the research enterprise”. In this framework, the facilitative researcher becomes more of a “morale booster, networker, or at most a consultant who confers about the research problem with the community who are, in this case, the real researchers” (Enriquez 1994b, 59).

And just before going to the Philippines to start my fieldwork in 1995, I visited a Dutch anthropologist in Chiang Mai. Leo Alting von Geusau has built up a library on the Akha. In the short weeks that I was with him, I learned how, along the way, his scholarly work became inseparable from his commitment to the people he studied. He explained, “I discovered on the one hand, a wealthy, enormous complexity of the Akha culture. On the other hand, I discovered the many problems they have. I felt committed, ‘very involved’ (Alting von Geusau 1985, 44).

This involvement resonates with the words of Dell Hymes, who recognized that “by virtue of its subject matter, anthropology is unavoidably a political and ethical discipline, not merely an empirical specialty” (1974, 48). Our simply being there among the people we study already has consequences, over and above the textual production which results from that experience. Nancy Schepher-Hughes puts it more emphatically: “We cannot delude ourselves into believing that our presence leaves no trace, no impact on those whose lives we dare intrude” (1992, 25; 1995). So, for better or for worse, wittingly or unwittingly, the practice of fieldwork places the ethnographer in a relative position of power, the handling of which calls for an ethical and disciplinal reflection (Gledhill 1994, 217; cf. Kahn et al 1998).

Anthropological reflections in the 1980s promised to provide insights on this notion of practice (Ortner 1984; Marcus & Clifford 1986, etc.). This project unfortunately narrowed down its focus on the poetics of representation (cf. Fardon 1990; Pels & Salemink 1994, 5.16ff; cf. Denzin 1996). Apparently, the new ethnography neglected the “social and political processes almost completely, riot necessarily by denying them salience, but by backgrounding them to questions of representations, construction and deconstruction” (Gledhill 1994, 225; also Scheper-Hughes 1992, 24). The concept of practice as a set of activities, strategies and social intervention was “relegated to the back burner” despite its relevance to issues of development and social movements (Gardner & Lewis 1996, 40).

The more recent studies call for flexibility in diversifying our knowledge from different field positions (Gid 1998; Gupta & Ferguson 1997; Clifford 1997; Hastrup & Fog Olwig 1997). They call, too, for reflexivity and ‘self-awareness’ (Pels & Salemink 1994) in the ways we as fieldworkers “follow” our subjects and their movements (Marcus 1995), or ‘tame’ them to become good informants (Hobart 1996). Finally, they call for “reflection” on how our “fieldwork relationship meant to our research subjects” (Paine 1998, 134; Ginsburg 1997, 140, 123).3 All this suggests that anthropology stands to gain by seeking to combine reflexivity and relevance in making fieldwork itself as a time, space, and infrastructure for people’s self-assessment and empowerment.

I carried similar ideas and models of solidarity during my own fieldwork in Mount Apo Sandawa, site of the geothermal power plant which was constructed by the Philippine government and was opposed by environmentalists and advocates for the indigenous people’s rights. Although I was in contact with the protesters as well as the government, I found myself studying and working with a small Manobo social movement that was critical of both camps. My Manobo hosts became key figures of this new indigenous movement. The group, called Tuddok, wanted cultural regeneration and ancestral domain claim. And for this aim, they saw my research as a possible ally. Without formal contract, but with constant assessment of our roles, a partnership developed between my cultural research and their cultural movement. My research then served as a resource for the movement just as the movement provided substance for my research. To understand this, we need a general background on how the Mount Apo environment has been politicized.

Geothermal Project and Political Protest

Burdened with debts and wanting to catch up with Asian tiger economies, the Philippine government decided to speed up the exploration of its indigenous sources of energy. In 1987 the government-owned Philippine National Oil Company (PNOC) drilled two exploratory wells for the 250 MWe Geothermal Project at the heart of the remaining rainforest of Mt. Apo, the highest mountain in the Philippines. This home of the endangered Philippine Eagle is included in the 1982 United Nations List of National Parks and Equivalent Reserves, and is listed as one of the heritage sites of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. More importantly, perhaps, Mt. Apo is considered the ancestral territory of the Manobos and the Bagobos.

A wave of protest emerged, starting from a small tribal organization and individual government officials. The protest intensified with the participation of big environmentalist groups and Catholic and mainstream Protestant church activists, supported by advocates not only in Manila but also in Britain, the Netherlands, Japan, and the United States. This led to a decade of debate on issues ranging from the legal status of the project to its environmental consequences and its cultural impact on the resident tribes who claim Mt. Apo as their ancestral domain (Broad & Cavanagh 1993, Mincher 1992).

In 1989, twenty-one datus from nine tribal communities around Mt. Apo performed a Dyandi, a historic blood pact, vowing to “defend Mt. Apo to the last drop of our blood.” This was followed by a counter-ritual called Pamaas, sponsored this time by PNOC, to dispel the cosmic effect of the Dyandi curse. This conflict of rituals dramatized the violent exchange between the government military and the Communist New People’s Army, which claimed lives from both camps. A huge multisectoral coalition, called Task Force Apo Sandawa (TFAS), spearheaded the fight against the PNOC’s “development aggression” and coordinated the local and international opposition (Rodil 1993, Broad & Cavanagh 1993, Durning 1992, 5, Tabak 1990)

As a result, PNOC operation was temporarily suspended. The World Bank and the ExIm Bank of Japan withdrew their funding commitment. PNOC’s Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) had to be redone. Its staff had to reexamine the company’s policy and improve its technology.

But in 1991, PNOC submitted a comprehensive 10-volume Environmental Impact Study which included a module on the sociocultural dimension of the project and its response to the legal and environmental complaints of the opposition. This won for the company the much-coveted Environmental Compliance Certificate (ECC) from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). Other factors also led to the granting of the ECC. Extreme droughts rendered the existing hydroelectric power plants incapable of supplying enough energy. The result was long months of daily 8-hour power outages. The Gulf War also triggered insecurity on the part of government planners who warned against too much dependence on the Arab oil-producing countries (Lamberte & Yap 1991).

Appeals against the granting of the ECC were dismissed by the Supreme Court. A special Presidential Proclamation carved out from the 72,000-hectare national park the 701 hectares of the project as geothermal reservation. In 1992, President Ramos signed the Memorandum of Agreement between the government and the representative organizations of the affected communities thus sealing the legal status of the project.

Meanwhile, PNOC was winning the battle of representation. It had succeeded in presenting itself as a “nature-friendly” company. It even received environmental awards from government and private sectors for its Environmental Impact Study. In terms of policy, the company moved from simply providing mitigating measures to winning social acceptability and even championing environmental and social sustainability (De Jesus 1996).

But national and international advocacy against the power project, especially in London and the Netherlands, continued even up to the mid-1990s (e.g., PRC 1994, Broeckman, et al 1996). In Mindanao, the local Catholic clergy kept the fight by continuing to denounce the project in its pastoral messages and radio homilies. The annual commemoration of the Dyandi blood pact dwindled in attendance, but a significant number of protest groups still maintained the hardline stance of “no compromise” with the power company.

Existing researches and documents tended to reduce the actors in the field into two: the project proponent and its loyal opponent. The former was learning from and winning over, but not quite beating, the latter. Those who did not fall within these categories were not considered actors. This was clear, for example, in the thesis written by a PNOC manager who studied in Britain. Castro, who helped create the PNOC office for “dealing with public opposition,” did not discuss those who were in between “since we do not expect severe complications” from them (Castro 1996, 11). Castro’s analysis is valuable for the understanding of the company’s discourse and practice. Her lack of fieldwork, however, prevented her from seeing other contextual actors who might not be as disturbing as the project protesters, but would later become quite crucial in their emergent roles.

(En)Countering Culturelessness

From initial readings, I reckoned that the controversy surrounding the Mt. Apo Geothermal Project would make it difficult for me to enter the village. So armed with permits from the Provincial Governor, the Office of Southern Cultural Communities, the Municipal Mayor, and the Chief of Police, I approached the Barangay Captain. While he appreciated my research, he asked me to explain to the Barangay Council the following week. The Barangay Council expressed fears regarding my stay in the village. It asked me to come back the following week to explain my research project to the Tribal Council. The Tribal Council, which included the resident Protestant pastors and the paramilitary personnel, also raised a number of issues attendant to my proposed residence in their area. From the open discussion and from the informal conversations that followed, the following arguments led the Council to suspend its decision and to call instead a special session of the Tribal Assembly:

First, being a priest, I was automatically identified with the activist local clergy that had been in the forefront of protest against the State-owned power project. Since the protest movement was associated with the Communists, they feared that if I stayed in the area, the place might get militarized again.

Secondly, being a Catholic priest, my presence could be divisive of the village that was predominantly under evangelical Protestant churches. The stigma of being a harbinger of the fatal “666” from the Book of Revelation had never been totally erased even up to this time.

Thirdly, being a Tagalog from Manila, I could also end up getting their lands, as the settlers from the north had supposedly done since the war. The fact that I was born in the same island of Mindanao did not help.

Finally, what do people get from researchers, anyway? They take pictures, interview old men, and report about them to faraway places. Apparently, they had bitter experiences with researchers both from the supporters of the project as well as from its opponents who used them only for their own agenda.

Later, the Tribal Assembly was convened. They decided that I could visit but not reside in the village. In the process, I got to learn about their political institutions and practices. Their questions revealed their fears, which in turn gave hints about their history.

It dawned on me that within this Protestant Manobo village penetrated by a government project and hurt by the consequences of political and environmental activism, this dual identity of being a Catholic priest and anthropologist also meant double access to both knowledge and power which these people had all the right to be cautious about. Looking back, the rejection of my stay in the village was the people’s way of establishing some kind of a damage control to my potential for harm (cf. Hobart 1996).

The most disturbing question, however, came from the sidelines. “But Father,” asked Apo Ambolugan, a gentle elder in the village, “why do you still want to study us? We have no more culture here.” This question really hit me hard. It betrayed the state of collective low self-esteem of the tribe.

He continued. “Why us? Why not the T’bolis of Lake Sebu? Or the NIatigsalugs of Bukidnon? They still have agongs there. They still dance. And they still wear our native clothes. We have nothing left here.” This avowal of what may be called “culturelessness” (cf. Rosaldo 1989, 197; 1988) haunted me for the rest of my fieldwork James Eder (1993, 131), working among the Bataks, also found a parallel “deculturation” “the single most vexing problem” he encountered in his own research in the field.

Apo Ambolugan’s statement could just be an oblique way of driving me away. But he was not alone in harboring this feeling. There was, indeed, a prevailing feeling of kahiubos or collective low self-esteem among the Manobos, not simply in relation to the Visayan settlers but to other tribes as well.

Part of this feeling marginalized is due to the marginality of the land itself, The terrain is mostly steep and sloping. The climate is too cold for the lucrative fruit crops like durian and marang. Bananas are plagued by many kinds of diseases. Other possibilities like strawberry and cut flowers are still at the experimental stage. The only regular source of income is soft broom production using tiger grass or tabiti. Coffee would have been good if they had not been abandoned in favor of PNOC employment. The PNOC road promised access to big markets for the natives’ products; unfortunately more goods come up to the village than go downtown.

The original center of the tribal community, an open space that served as a basketball court and cultural arena, was abandoned when the new PNOC road was constructed. Many houses transferred to the side of the new road, thus symbolically and literally splitting the village to give way to the huge trucks that connect the geothermal plant to Kidapawan poblacion.

In the genealogy of the Apao, the first ancestor remembered by the local people was himself a poor man. He was so poor he had to borrow garden tools from the Tagabawas on the Davao side of Mt. Apo. The name Apao itself means a tiny flea. Apao left no legacy of handicrafts or huge dwellings. But Apao had at least five wives and many descendants. And they like talking together, and they have dreams. For at least two people, these were enough to start with in regenerating their culture. And for academic as well as personal reasons, I decided to share my research with their project.

Simple Steps, Complex Moves

I had the courage to say to Apo Ambolugan that I knew they had springs of energy because on 5 October 1995, on my very first visit to Sayaban, I met the two would-be leaders of a gentle cultural regeneration of the tribe. They were the cousins Beting Umpan Colmo and Pastor Tano Umpan Bayawan. Even before I arrived, they had already dreamt of “regenerating” their culture.

“We start with a family reunion,” Tano and Beting explained. “We envision a lively tribal culture. But since we are not in any influential position to do so—we are not the barangay, we are not datus, we are not wealthy—we will start with our family or clan. The Umpan clan. If we could bind ourselves together, and then later play the agong, and dance as a family, then we can perhaps be the model for the rest of the clans to follow”

It sounded extremely modest. But considering the entropic situation as I was beginning to understand it, it made realistic sense.

My instinct told me that this was the kind of movement I was looking for. In the midst of a general social paralysis, here was a source of energy. They told me they did not want to become involved with and be manipulated by NGOs who present themselves as alternative to the powerful government and development projects. They wanted a movement of their own, addressing the tribal situation according to their own analysis and interpretation. Theirs would not be an action directly or primarily against PNOC, although it might have to reach that point later. It would have something to do with their dignity as a people. It would touch on the land issue, but the first priority was culture.

Tano and Bering came from slightly different backgrounds. Tano Bayawan, in his late thirties, was a pastor of the Church of Christ. His work as a Bible translator under the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) was for him a spiritual devotion and a service to his tribe. But SIL was not addressing the development of their culture to which he was equally committed. He wanted a book written about their tribe.

Like Tano, Bering was also in her thirties. But unlike her cousin, Beting had been away from the tribe for many years. Her Visayan father already had children when he settled in the nearby Muaan. Her Manobo mother died when she was six. She was reared by her Visayan half-sisters who, aside from inheriting more lands, attempted to instil in her a disgust for her tribe. Her other sister by her native mother, who had more experience with the tribals, later became an outspoken opposition of PNOC. Beting worked with a human rights law office and with a foundation for young victims of war. She received a German scholarship for a college degree in psychology which, for some reason, she did not complete. After seeing the ways of NGOs, and the situation of her fellow natives, she decided to go back to her tribe. It was just in time that I met her accidentally in my first jeepney ride to their place. She was very articulate in Visayan, Tagalog and English. But she needed to brush up on her Manobo.

When the Tribal Assembly rejected my stay, I decided to concentrate on their movement. They welcomed my research as possible assistance to their cause. In what follows, I shall offer some instances illustrative of the overlapping projects of research and movement during fieldwork. Like Ginsberg (1997, 140), I want to present this “not as self-justification but as part of perennial discussion of the role of scholarship in processes of social transformation.”

1. Family, Movement, and Ironies of Fieldwork . From the time we decided on a kind of partnership, Bering and Tano started listing down their relatives. The process so excited their relatives that, to their surprise, the planned clan reunion was held in three months’ time rather than in two years’ time.

There was one problem during the preparation. Since they had no single percussion left, I was asked if I knew anyone who could lend them an agong and a set of kulintang (brass drums). Because I was not allowed to live in the village, I had to stay in the parish at the town center. Through my new contacts in the parish church, I was able to convince a Manobo family, already residing in the lowland, to lend their heirloom.

On 5-7 January 1996, the whole clan of Ayon Umpan gathered in Muaan, the legendary origin-center of migration among the tribal communities in Kidapawan. It broke the ice of lethargic existence. They revived an old ritual called Pakaa’t Kallo, which literally meant feeding the tools of the farm. A number of young Manobos recited their poems in the vernacular. These poems were created during a poetry workshop we held a few days before the reunion. The family marked the grave of two relatives who drowned in the river. They also invented a new ritual of giving native names to those who had only “Christian” names. A guest prietess improvised the naming ritual out of traditional elements like bamboo, water, flower and comb. And where did they get their native name? From our unfinished genealogy that Beting presented on the table. The presence of the musical instruments spelled a big difference. They were surprised to recall the many tunes they feared they had forgotten. There was joy in being able to dance again. Then the children took over the drums when their elders got tired.

Towards the end of the Kalivungan (celebration) they selected officers for the new organization, called Tuddok to Kalubbaran ni Apo Ayon Umpan (Pillars of the Descendants of Elder Ayon Umpan). Beting, my research partner, was appointed leader of the Tuddok. Then they formed committees to handle concerns like financing marriages, assisting the sick members of the family, establishing communal farm, and sending children to school.

They also created a special committee to work on their ancestral domain claim. The committee reflected a recent concern. They argued that regenerating their culture meant, among other things, the revival of dancing. But how could they continue to dance if they were not secure in their land?

Legally, there was an opening for this plan. They had heard of the Department Administrative Order No. 2 (DAO No. 2), which provides a detailed procedure whereby a tribal community could present a claim to their ancestral domain. Once the claim was validated, the government could grant a certificate of its recognition. Tuddok started working for this recognition.

Some leaders of the protest groups dismissed the Tuddok initiative for being clannish. They wanted to help them so that their narrow vision of the Mt. Apo problem could expand to include the bigger issues of development aggression, biodiversity, and ethnocide.

Tuddok leaders argued, however, that the issue-based protest campaign against the powerful geothermal project had done nothing to stop it. That type of movement had not improved the lives of the affected tribal community. They wanted to assert their self-determination not only in the face of the PNOC geothermal company, but also of the NGO community. In her written reflection, Beting said that Tuddok aimed to explore a path of development that was an “alternative to the alternative”.

At this point, it was clear how the new group was opening up a new space for their participation in the making of their contribution to history. The consolidation of the clan, the marking of places for the living and the dead, the invention of a naming ritual, the resourcing of their genealogy for the new generation, the re-playing of the agong and the re-animation of the body in dancing- these were all micro-processes charged with the Manobo agency.

In this light, would the fieldworker’s facilitation in the loan of musical instruments be considered a breach of professional standard of objectivity or a form of militant interventionism? If in earlier fieldwork, extracting artefacts- by buying or borrowing or simply receiving as gifts- was considered part of fieldwork practice, does working the other way around that problematic?

2. Mobilizing Bloodlines. The movement that chose to start from the family and the body had to encounter the trial precisely there- in the weak family attending to a sick body. Ettok, the seventeen-year-old poet-artist, was sick. He worked part time with the geothermal company to earn his allowance for is secondary education. But he came home one day with infected marrow in his left thigh. After the long discernment whether it was caused by mountain spirits or by company chemicals, they finally decided to bring him to the hospital- in the faraway Davao City.

Ettok’s case became complicated. Ettok had to undergo two operations. His daily antibiotics and food alone cost the equivalent of the family income in one week. Ettok’s father thought of selling a piece of land. In the midst of their struggle to claim their ancestral domain, they were sometimes pressured to do what they hated most in their forefathers’ mistakes.

My fieldwork identity also had to be reshaped. At one point, the PNOC Community Relations Officer needed a priest to bless their new office building inside the power plant. Most of the employees, he argued, were Catholics. The parish priest found different alibis to evade it. The task fell on me because, as a researcher, I was supposed to be in a more neutral position. But what could blessing the PNOC premises mean to NG0s, to activist clergy, and to Tuddok members themselves? With the consent of my Tuddok friends, however, I agreed to perform the rite and even managed to drop a line during my homily which, according to some employees, disturbed some company personnel. After presiding at the liturgy, I brought the collected money to Ettok. The managers assured me that the money did not come from the company but from the Catholic employees themselves. The gesture was to save me from possible rumors.

At another instance, Bering and I decided to approach the manager of Oxbow, the Canadian company constructing the power plant for the PNOC. The Canadian manager twice visited me in the parish church and I remembered that he offered to help the tribal people in the area. Bering knew that the opposition groups, her sister included, would not have approved of asking help from the “enemy”. But the donation of the Oxbow manager—who said he had 25 percent Indian blood—supplied Ettok’s medicine for a precious few days.

Ettok’s importance to the new cultural movement could not be measured. Although he would not normally be considered a movement entrepreneur, his attitude towards his sickness, not to mention his artistic gift itself, inspired its leaders. Bering, for example, almost left the Tuddok movement during one of her deliberations on the value of their cultural struggle. “Was it worth her sacrifice of personal search for a stable relationship?” During one telephone conversation, she confessed that the sight of Ettok sketching Manobo scenes in the Davao hospital energized her. Ettok once borrowed a wheelchair and started roaming around the hospital, talking to fellow patients and their nurses. People flocked to his drawings. Among his drawings stood out Manobo old folks playing the traditional musical instruments. Bering realized “how silly of her to brood over petty things”. There was Ettok, the supposedly lame man, arousing in people new reasons to go on.

Ettok’s hospitalization had certainly sharpened the Manohos’ sense of financial poverty, but at the same time it dramatized their capacity for cultural integrity.

I had scanty notes on these episodes because I was not certain during fieldwork whether they were just time-consuming, altruistic, emotionally-draining distractions from the “real” research (Gardner & Lewis 1996; Gledhill 1994, 218). I include these details, however, to point that social movements or, better still, cultural struggles in face of development, involve not only big mass rallies, but also minute practices and processes of almost invisible self-assertion, improvisation and production of meanings (Melucci 1989; Escobar 1992). In these micro-processes and micro-spaces, even the “non-entrepreneurs” (cf. Hilhorst, forthcoming) of the movement play significant roles. They also reveal that neither disciplinary distancing nor principled militancy suffice to explain the formation of the research relationship or the direction, meaning, intensity or pacing of a movement. Strategies and principles, agency and passivity, objectivity and militancy are all constantly renegotiated in face of unforeseen episodes.

3. Roonvorks and Paperworks . The more visible struggle of claiming ancestral domain made Tuddok busy during most of the succeeding months. In claiming a portion of Mt. Apo National Park, Tuddok, and later Apao, had to contend with a rival Manobo claimant from a neighboring village. The contest on the rightful land claim required Tuddok to present a more convincing local history and ethnographic evidence that had been submitted by the other data. The rudimentary history and fragmentary genealogy of the resident clan taken so far from individual interviews had many “gaps”. They were worried that the stories of the elders would not be coherent when the time for public hearing came.

Remembering what I had picked up from the Obo-Manobo Phrasebook published by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, I explored the use of the word kodpotongkooy (SIL 1994, 30-31). Kodpotongkooy simply means talking to one another. This informal discussion could range from visiting kin to sharing itulan (history which is true) to ponguman (legends and therefore not necessarily true) and to kalivungan. I asked whether it could also used to check genealogies and collate historical accounts. That discussion itself became a kodpotongkooy. They then thought of gathering all the elders who have been interviewed already, plus others who have not been consulted. But to attract as many participants as possible, they called Apo Salumay, via the provincial radio station public service, to lead their series of kodpotongkooy. Apo Salumay, a highly respected former village chieftain of Savaban, but who had been away for the past 27 years, became the primary historian of the group.

It had since then become customary to call kodpotongkooy whenever the group wanted to discuSs a problem or make any decision. This to my mind was one of the most important sequences during the research-movement partnership. Not that kodpotongkooy was not there before. As a matter of fact, this informal way of discussion constituted the most common way of exchanging views and making collective decisions. But its new application in what could be called a ‘discourse formation’ was, according to Datu Arawan, a source of konokkaan or strength. From the casual conversations with people on the road, to visiting relatives and feeling deeply for them, to very formal caucus of elders, people could get strength. They can speak, they can discuss, they can debate, they can argue. Somehow the planning for family reunion and the listing down of the genealogy saved the way for the formation of a local discourse, an alternative to the government rhetoric and especially to the silent transcripts of the tribal people themselves.

In kodpotongkooy, as in other oral history exercise (e.g., Mace 1998), speaking out and talking together, in opening spaces for a new discourse to develop, the tribe comes to life again. This is where the old men are given importance. This is where dreams are accepted as a source of knowledge. This is where plans are made real. This is also occasion for bodily performances as well as the school for audienceship. This is where the tribe is very much itself (Racelis 1999).

In contrast, so much in the process of development conspires to silence them. Authentic assistance, it appears to me now will have to touch on the multiplication of space for the blossoming of their local discourse “facilitating in finding their voices, rather than speaking on behalf of them” (Gardner & Lewis 1996, 47-48). To some extent, this ethnography shares in the search for konokkan (strength, energy) by entering into intimate kodpotongkooy with the actors in the field as well as in this text.

This upbeat assessment of collective discourse formation, however, should be tempered by the complexity of local politics. When the Tuddok land claim was gaining momentum, some local managers of the power company called the village officials to a secret meeting on village leadership in ancestral domain claim. As a result, a local leader took some of our documents without permission. Tuddok had to send a formal complaint to the PNOC office in Manila to stop the secret company intervention in the legal process.

4. Towards an Alternative to the Alternative Movement . Tuddok’s assertion of self-determination was put to the test when it expanded in numbers as well as in activities. Their meager finances, reinforced only by my tight research budget, could not cope with their growing needs, even just to provide coffee for meetings which have become more frequent. I broached the idea of opening their movement to some potential supporters. Their initial vehemence to the idea made me feel guilty for introducing the topic. They did not want to have anything to do with NGOs and other funding agencies.

Beting explained this stance in an abridged article sarcastically entitled “Our Simple Story,” which she published ironically in the newsletter of the protest. “We were considered and looked upon as powerless beings. The people in the alternative movements, therefore, saw that we were in need of their liberating development plans, strategies and projects. Ironically, in this move, we were not viewed as partners but plain `beneficiaries.’ …We may want to correct the misrepresentation of our voices but how can we offend our saviors?” (Colmo, cited in Alejo 2000).

These sharp words find kindred spirit in contemporary literature articulating similar sentiments both at home (cf. Tauli-Corpuz 1993) and abroad (cf. Warren 1997, Benda-Beckmann 1997). Upon serious consideration of the actual predicament, however, the group picked up the suggestion of accepting assistance from outsiders, but only under certain conditions. I summarize these conditions here based on Tuddok documents and practice:

First, donors should not give huge amounts of money. Tribal leaders had been corrupted by money. They believed they were not exempt from this weakness.

Second, donors should not visit them in the area unless they are formally invited. The presence of outside donors in the area triggers the suspicion that the leaders of the movement are getting a lot of money.

Third, donors should not give them seminars. The Tuddok leaders insisted that they were yet trying to discover what they know. Seminars generally created the impression that the speakers knew what was best for the group. It would be difficult to reject the teachings of the seminar teachers if they happened to be their aid-givers, too.

Fourth, donors should not invite them to join coalition groups. These big coalitions generally tended to be dominated by strong groups with political or ideological agenda. The whole network then would be forced to agree to big statements which the likes of Tuddok could not maintain or understand.

Fifth, Tuddok did not want to use or be used by media. They wanted to have control of the representations made of them. Since the media had its own priorities, they refused to accept being objects of advocacy using TV or radio broadcast, or even print media. Along this line, Tuddok also harbored deep suspicion against researchers who needed the people only for data-gathering but had no place for them in doing analysis.

They admitted that these were extremely stringent rules. They beg, however, for a genuine trust in their capacity to discern what they could do by themselves with some help from friends.

Fortunately, an enterprising NGO accepted the challenge. A friend of mine, working for a research NGO, came for a visit. Her visit coincided with celebration for the return of the tribal culture through their newly bought agong. When she returned to the city, she recommended to her NGO to consider assisting Tuddok in its continuing cultural movement and research, but under Tuddok’s own terms. Her NGO, the Alternate Forum for Research in Mindanao (AFRIM), adjusted its policies and practices to absorb the conditions of the Tuddok movement seriously. In time, Tuddok also appreciated AFRIM’s assistance and formally welcomed it in the community through a simple ritual.

From January 1997 up to the present, AFRIM and Tuddok have been experimenting on this new type of relationship between an extremely sensitive people’s movement and an understanding NGO. The result seems good so far. In November 1997, Tuddok, in the name of Apao, filed its petition for their ancestral domain claim covering some 20,000 hectares of forest and farmlands within the Mt. Apo National Park and including the 701 hectares already occupied by the PNOC. While the PNOC project remains in the area, Tuddok now has achieved, in less than three years, a better bargaining position for the people most directly affected by the project—something the protest intervention never quite achieved in a decade.

5. Fieldwork and The Uneasiness Of Research Practice. The following sequence reveals other aspects of the researcher’s positionality in the field and how learning from the field could be applied to fieldwork itself.

The geothermal company, in its desire to understand the indigenous culture around the project and its future sites, commissioned a multi-disciplinary sociocultural study of ten indigenous cultural communities around Mt. Apo (Gloria 1997). A group of consultants from different universities gathered together, but the contract was signed by the president of the Davao University run by my fellow Jesuits. The research team leader invited me to attend the presentation of the initial result. The venue was the most luxurious island resort in Davao City. I was grateful for being asked to join the privileged group of government policy makers and academic consultants. But I also had to ask whether they invited any one from the ten communities who were the subject of the multimillion-peso study. They did not. I was told that the research result was strictly for those who would make use of it in policy and planning. The consequent plans would be echoed to the communities later.

Beting and Tano did all they could to be given a place during the consultation. They even sent a fax message to the Manila office of the PNOC. Frustrated, they just had to rely on me to tell them about the controversial conclusions and methodology of the commissioned research. The controversy reached the formal and informal forums of the National Association of Anthropologists in the Philippines (UGAT). The ironic twist was that Tuddok leaders also implicated me in the PNOC research because I was associated with the Jesuit university that conducted the research.

Several months later, in October 1996, it was my turn to present a paper about my ongoing fieldwork to the annual conference of UGAT. Learning from the PNOC experience, I requested the conference organizer to allow Bering and Tano to attend the discussion which was focused, propitiously, on Indigenous Peoples: Knowledge, Power and Struggles. At the very opening session, Bering grabbed the microphone, and after introducing herself she said, “I come here to study how you study us.” From then on, almost no discussion was closed without Beting’s views being heard. Bering stayed behind after the conference to visit the northern tribes. That experience and exposure led to future contacts and networking which proved useful to the succeeding steps undertaken by Tuddok (cf. Tauli-Corpuz 1993; Warren 1997).

More than a year after I left the field, I felt a consultation session with Tuddok was in order. In April-May 1998, I went back to the Philippines aiming to meet not only the Tuddok leaders but also those who initially had problems with my stay in Mt. Apo. Contrary to my expectations, my Tuddok partners felt very awkward with my presence. They also had to meet me in Davao City and not in Mt. Apo because the old accusation of a priest being behind their movement reemerged together with the formation of a new faction within the village. The NGO partner, however, was already accepted in the village. It would not be helpful to the movement if the NGO becomes associated with the priest. The group also had serious division within. I came out of the whole exercise with a more pragmatic, but still realistically hopeful view of the ethics and politics of social research on social movements.

Between and Beyond Objectivity and Militancy

In the beginning of this essay, I referred to the researchers in the field as fieldworkers. The “largely ignored,” “overstretched and under-resourced” field worker, Eric Dudley observes, “must juggle the issues and strike pragmatic compromises between policies which tend to come to the field in the form of contradictory messages” (1993, 11). To see the researcher in the field not just as ethnographer but also as de facto “field worker” might help us understand more fully the significance of focusing on fieldwork practice in its own right.

As such, fieldworkers play different roles, including some not often associated With professional practice. They shift positions at the risk of being haunted by “methodological anxieties” in producing knowledge based on “varying intensities and qualities” (Marcus 1995, 100; cf. Clifford 1997, 219n3; Gupta & Ferguson 1997, 37).

So it is not a matter of choosing between being objective or being militant. To say that we should as much as possible eschew conflictive situations is untenable. This leaves anthropology superficial, not able to confront the basic human predicament that includes hunger, suffering as well as struggle and hope (Hastrup 1993; Kleinman 1997; Gledhill 1994, 217). On the other hand, “too much engagement could be problematic as too little” (Gledhill 1994, 221).

As already noted, it could be time-consuming and emotionally draining such that as Hobart wisely notes, “students who forgot their disciplinary background for a moment and actually got on with the people studied often have terrible trouble textualizing what happened” (1996, 22).

I hasten to iterate some clarificatory points. First, it is important not to reduce this line of action purely as a work of advocacy. One temptation is to steal the show from the movement actors (cf. Gledhill 1994, 219). Another temptation is to be fixated with addressing only the outsiders when conveying the result of the research. “What these approaches fail to explore”, Burdick laments “is the extent to which certain kinds of claims to ethnographic knowledge may be able to help refine debates and self-critiques within social movements” (Burdick 1995, 363). Even reflexivity could be fruitfully shared between the researcher and the researched (Rudie 1993). Fieldwork should have some internal, both critical and creative, function to the host community.

Secondly, this thrust should not be associated necessarily with political or ethical militantism. Marcus calls it circumstantial activism (1995). But Bruce Albert (1997) supplies a more experiential clarification. In the process of studying the people’s struggle for ethnogenesis and access to resources, the researchers also get recruited to serve in various other activities like mediation, documentation, action-oriented research, and didactic ethnography. In this context, the anthropologist’s “observation” is no longer merely “participant”; his social participation has become both the condition and the framework of his field research. (Albert 1997, 57-58). That is how they could go on doing their research especially within a community that has grown more sensitive to the politics and ethics of being researched.

Both Burdick and Albert are careful enough not to totally conflate the project of the researcher and that of people they study. Burdick stresses the critical function of the fieldworker within the movement. He also includes in the practice the “relativization of the ethnographers’ voice” (Burdick 1995, 374). Albert advocates a kind of “critical solidarity” that does not limit professional practice to “a mere reproduction” of the host’s “ethnic discourse” (Albert 1997, 58-59). Overlapping of projects does not mean a total congruence of concerns and interests.

What most of these discussions miss, I believe, is the glaring reality that the personality of the researcher matters a lot during fieldwork. I do not mean to talk about gender or class or geopolitical origin, hybridity of identity, threshold for trauma, sexual orientation, technical skills, wealth, and political or religious affiliation per se. While they may all be potential sources of tension, creativity, and involvement, it remains to be discovered and negotiated which of these aspects of the fieldworker’s subjectivity would be contextually  relevant within a particular research situation.

I was supposed to be going smoothly in my fieldwork because I was “at home” in my country. But I was not allowed to reside in that Protestant tribal village partly because of my being a Catholic priest. “Wherever there is a priest, there is conflict,” many would say. The fact that I was also a Christian or that I was born in the same island did not matter in that particular milieu. My positionality as a priest, however, provided my “host family” with external contacts which facilitated the hospitalization of a young tribal artist who, in turn, inspired the depressed leaders of the new social movement by the way he produced painting, poetry, and pottery despite his sickness.

This sensitivity to the ground level complexity of the fieldwork identity of the researcher challenges the traditional notion of professional anthropological practice. In the field, professional anthropologists cannot and are not only professional anthropologists. Robert Paine realizes its importance to the discipline. “It surely matters personally to most of us what ‘they’ think of us (and that likely influences our research and it’s `objectivity’)” (Paine 1998, 134).

Once in a while, too, anthropologists are called to respond to life situations according to their temper and even passion. This is not bad news to the discipline. Being human in the field should not be considered as a hazard to the study of fellow human beings. In fact anthropology-should include in its ragbag repertoire even the human failings of the researcher. Rosaldo argues, quite passionately, that “human feelings and human failings provide as much insight for social analysis as subjecting oneself to the ‘manly’ ordeals of self-discipline that constitute science as a vocation…Why not use a wider spectrum of less heroic, but equally insightful, analytical positions?” (1989, 173).

My title “What are we in fieldwork for?” alludes to a common idiom “What are we in power for?” I assume here that doing fieldwork is, to some extent, an exercise of power. The ethnographer qua ethnographer is not a powerful political actor. But it remains true that in some cases, in the field, prior to the packaging of the research result, the fieldworker might have some power—if only the capacity to do harm. It remains equally true, however, that we can take the opportunity of fieldwork to give due recognition of each other as persons, that is, as non-unitary and complex beings, who are each grappling with very different life circumstances’ and dislocations (Hobart 1996, 32). Hobart, however, should expand the notion of recognition to include the actual practices of fieldwork which he tends to lump into the penal gerund “disciplining”. But “seeing, listening, recording,” as Scheper-Hughes (1992) asserts, “can be, if done with care and sensitivity, acts of fraternity and sisterhood, acts of solidarity. Above all, they are the work of recognition. Not to look, not to touch, not to record, can be the hostile act of indifference”.

To this struggle for mutuality and solidarity, anthropology itself as a discipline is called upon to participate and its practice changed. As Dell Hymes appealed a couple of decades ago, “anthropology must lose itself to find itself, must become as fully as possible a possession of the people of the world” for otherwise, “our work will drift backward into the service of domination” (Hymes 1974, 54).

This witnessing is not without critical function. But its practice of criticism is not so much to denounce but to announce the emergence of what Foucault calls new signs of existence. Far from the narrowly conceived deconstructive criticism that he had been associated with, Foucault’s dream is for the generation of life:

I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would not try to judge, but bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply, not judgments, but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. (Foucault 1988, 326)

In the same vein, I can’t help but wish—perhaps dreamt also by Medha Patkar, Virgilio Enriquez, Alting von Geusau, and my Tuddok friends—a kind of fieldwork practice that would not try to manipulate people just to prove, improve, disprove or develop a theory or fill a gap in academic narratives; one that would not aim simply at constructing or deconstructing a discourse; one that does not reserve flexibility and reflexivity only for future textualization of experience; one that would not be tightly trapped within the demands of mutual disciplining and self-disciplining of researcher and researched, but would co-create new spaces from which new practices of freedom could emerge. I dream of a fieldwork practice that, though not without opportunistic pretensions, recognizes persons and generates energies. This obviously would involve an “ethics of thought,” as well as action, that is accompanied by “a trembling that is contained only with difficulty.”

Science, Spirits, and Common Sense: The Espiritistas of Upi

The time is the summer of 1961. In the dim light of three kerosene lamps., augmented by the glow of numerous candles, an elderly woman lays her hand on a young man’s head, anoints him with a bit of menthol paste and prays for his bad back. She speaks of the magnetic fluid which is being transmitted through her hands from St. Francis and of the need of the young man to correct his ways. The twenty – some persons gathered in this rural house, neighbors all except –  for the parish priest who watches but does not actively participate, around the healer and her patient and praying silently. Earlier standing another woman, having made contact with the world of the spirit, has been the channel for a short moral homily, urging the young women of the m Community to dress modestly and to avoid cosmetics. There will be a few more moments of prayer following the anointing, and the little group will disperse. “This has been a regular Thursday evening meeting of a spiritist cult which had been quietly, even clandestinely, formed in thriving f a Upi valley of the midst , of Episcopal mission in the remote U what was then Cotabato province.

During the latter part of 1960 and until 1963, when I was a priest at the Episcopal Mission of St. Francis of Assisi in Upi, I had of watching a number of Ilocano homesteaders of opportunity mindanao, all of whom I knew well, -the form themselves into a local cult, loosely based upon the Union Espiritista Cristiana Filipinas (UECF), otionull spiritist movement. Like their counterparts in many other a r  rural Filipino barrios, these neophyte epiritistas had virtually no formal contact with that little national organization the movement possessed. Yet within a year and a half more than thirty persons were meeting twice each week for spiritist sessions. A local espiritista ministry had emerged within the group, a body of (from the Episcopal viewpoint) heterodox belief had been accepted among them, and several individuals had won esteem as successful healers and mediums. I was fascinated by this group and watched them for several years. I made no effort to use my own position to contradict or expose them, wishing only to observe and learn what I could from their emergence. However, pressure from other members of the local church leadership and, indeed, from other parishioners uninclined to the spiritist way of looking at and doing things eventually led to the decline and dissolution of the espiritista group, most of whom were then reabsorbed into mainstream Mission ways.

The women and men who elaborated this local cult with such considerable initial speed and energy were by no means malcontents in the local parish church. On the contrary, they had been and continued to be enthusiastic and active parishioners, were devout in their personal religious observations, regular in weekly attendance at mass, and even avid in their participation in parish groups and activities. They understood and verbalized their spirit-communication and faith-healing activities as being science, not religion. As they saw it, espiritista rituals and beliefs harmonized with, supported, and actually assisted the Christian faith, just as their medium’s healing power supported and made common cause with the pharmacy, the clinic, and the doctor.

The following account is based upon what I was able to see during the period, upon what I could learn from many enjoyable conversations with the Upi espiritistas, and upon the few publications of the movement which have found their way into the Upi valley. In this essay, I will briefly describe the cult and attempt to account for its rapid development by placing it into a larger context of Filipino folk spirit belief on the one hand, and the Upi religious and medical institutions of its day on the other.

Elements of preconquest belief

Of all aspects of preconquest Filipino culture, those that most aroused the curiosity of the Spaniards were their spiritual and religious beliefs. Some of the early friars and civil servants left richly detailed surveys of pre-Spanish culture in the lowland areas. From these early ethnographies, one is able to draw a clear impression of native beliefs.

The principal ritual practices of the Filipinos, prior to the coming of . the Spanish, were based on belief in environmental spirits, soul spirits, and a hierarchy of deities. The high ranking deity, Bathala in Tagalog, was the “maker of all things,” and in honorific address, “the ruler of humans.” He was remote, however, and was generally relegated to the background by a pantheon of goddesses and gods, each having specific and independent functions. These deities controlled the weather, the success of the harvest, and other phenomena important to society. They were associated with various skyworlds or underworlds and were known less through daily encounters than through elaborate myths and ritual epics which placed into a vivid cosmography the origins and destiny of humanity.

The spirits, however, were far from remote and were encountered everywhere. The spirit world of the Filipino was the everyday world, and it was densely populated. Environmental spirits lived in the water of fishponds, seas, and rivers; in the ground of the hills and fields, in caves, in stones, in trees. Some were mischievous or malevolent by nature, but most were considered benign or evil, depending on one’s daily social relations with them. If a person, for example, should accidentally chop down a tree which was the abode of a spirit, it would become angry and cause the person to be sick.

Similarly, everyday existence involved interaction with the spirits of the dead, most often recently deceased relatives. These spirits. demanded respect and attention, not unlike the deference due them when still alive. If such were not shown in conversation, or if food and intoxicants were not shared during rituals, the soul spirits would become offended and would inflict illness. Rituals and healing seances were frequent family activities. Spanish sources arc full of extended accounts of these ceremonies.

There were several specialized classes of priestly office, with ritual, spirit-medium, and healing roles. The religious functionaries were usually elder women or transvestites. They were called upon to interpret dreams and omens, auspicious occasions for marriage, planting, battle, or hunting. They knew and recited the myths and ritual epics, linking them with social values and applying them to customary laws. More than any other person, they were wise in the ways of the “other people,” the omnipresent spirits.

It has long been a virtual truism that the encounter of Spanish and Filipino culture was not a one-sided process, in which the conqueror. remade the conquered society into an Hispanic image; many beliefs and practices survived the conquest and continued to thrive until the present time. The Spanish friars Christianized much of the Philippines, but their converts Filipinized the Christianity they adopted. Some of the old beliefs and practices, such as ritual drinking, were swept away by vigorous and occasionally draconian opposition by the Spanish missionaries and most traditional rituals were finally overwhelmed by the elaborate ceremonies of the Spanish Church. Certain other aspects of preconquest religion simply blended into folk Catholicism and eventually lost their original identity. Faith in the efficacy of charms remained as strong as ever, but rosaries, medallions, and images replaced these traditional items. Patron saints took over the guardian duties of the ancient lesser deities.

The densely populated spirit world was, in many ways, the least affected. To be sure, some superficial renaming took place but Filipino Catholics still knew the environmental and soul spirits to be everywhere around them. Writing in the mid-eighteenth century, Friar Tomas Ortiz noted:

When they are obliged to cut any tree, or not to observe the things or ceremonies which they imagine not to be pleasing to the genii or the monos, they ask pardon of them and excuse themselves to those beings by saying among many other things that the Father (the parish priest) commanded them to do it, and that they are not willingly lacking in respect to the genii or that they do not willingly oppose their “will” (Ortiz 1731).

His observation could have been made in the twentieth century. Nurge observed identical behavior in a small fishing village of Leyte, and I have seen countless similar instances in the Upi valley.

Father Ortiz not only recognized his parishioners’ continuing belief in environmental spirits; his observations on syncretism included a vivid description of their efforts to behave correctly, as they saw it, toward the soul spirits:

… the Indians very generally believe that the souls of the dead return to their” houses the third day after their death in order to visit the people…they conceal and hide that by saying that they are assembling in the house of the deceased to recite the Rosary for him…They light candles in order to wait for the soul of the deceased. They spread a mat on which they scatter ashes, so that the tracks or footsteps of the souls may be impressed thereupon; and by that means they are able to ascertain whether the soul came or not.

Anyone who has participated in the familial gatherings of rural peasant Filipinos following the death of a relative would recognize in this description ideas which continue, virtually unaltered, to the present day.

The tenacity and influence  of the old beliefs and practices, especially among rural Filipinos, is nowhere more marked than with regard to illness. The spirits nor only still inhabit the proximate environment—the trees, the streams, the mountains—but their aroused anger is, as it always has been, the principal source of sickness. Some illnesses, of course, are attributed to natural causes, such as indigestible food or sudden changes in the weather, but most sicknesses must be dealt with by a folk practitioner versed in the ways of the spirits and expert in the rituals and potions which are believed to appease their hostility. Since the turn of the twentieth century, when the American emphasis on rural education and medical service began, most of the Philippine lowland areas have been the scene of concerted efforts to introduce modern sanitation, modern concepts of disease, and modern medical treatment. Nonetheless, although injections and drugs have won widespread acceptance, the germ theory of disease remains largely foreign. Most rural Filipinos do not claim to have actually seen a tree spirit or a soul spirit, but like the millions of Westerners who have never seen germs, their belief in them is profound and unquestioned.

Nuro in the Upi valley

At the time of these observations, Upi was a municipality in the province of Cotabato. Except for its western boundary on the Moro Gulf, the municipality was almost entirely steep mountains and deep gorges, with a central fertile valley. The municipal poblacion, its only town of any size, was called Nuro and was located at the northern end of the valley, close to the center of the district. Today, a mostly dirt road runs through Nuro from Cotabato City, some forty winding kilometers to the northwest, and this road is Upi’s only connecting surface link to the outside world. The valley itself is well adapted to both wet and dry cultivation to rice and corn.

Like many areas of Mindanao, Upi is marked by considerable ethnic diversity. Its mountains, valleys, and forests comprise the ancient homeland of the animist Teduray and, in the twentieth century, of a branch of the Muslim Maguindanaon. In the last years of the nineteenth century, Spanish Jesuits had a small mission effort among the Teduray, centered at Tamantaka near Cotabato City but they never penetrated as far as Nuro. The greatest change in the Upi valley came with the arrival of the Americans, and proceeded rapidly after 1916 when an American Constabulary captain married a Teduray woman and began efforts to “modernize” the Teduray. In the same year. the first elementary school was built at the foot of the mountains; three years later, the road was built to Nuro and an agricultural school established there. Very soon Ilocano homesteaders from Luzon began to homestead the Upi followed by Ilongo homesteaders from the Visayas. By the 1930s, Nuro had become a predominantly lowlander Christian community and remained so to the present.

Although political power has generally remained in the hands of the Maguindanaon, they and the Teduray farmers have tended to stay in the surrounding forests and hills, leaving the valley to the Ilocanos and Ilongos. These two groups, despite coming from different parts of the archipelago and speaking similar but distinct languages, both knew almost 400 years of Spanish influence and were similar in many ways. They have, nevertheless, tenaciously preserved their own identities and mingled very little. The Ilocanos settled to the southeast of town, where they have homesteaded out on both sides of the provincial road; while the Ilongos have established themselves to the west and southwest. Representatives of both communities participate in the municipal council and persons of both communities shop together at the Saturday market. In Nuro, on the whole, the Ilocanos and the Ilongos get along well enough with one another, but do not mix much.

Following the completion of the provincial road to Nuro, a wide variety of governmental and commercial enterprises were extended into the valley, bringing to an end its relative cultural isolation from the mainstream of lowland life. Except for the government offices and Chinese stores located at the heart of the poblacion, each of these enterprises tended to serve one or the other ethnic community; certain rice mills, for example, were operated by and for Ilongos, others by and for Ilocanos. Exactly the same pattern
characterized the development of both religious and medical institutions in the valley. There were two parish churches in Nuro, one Roman Catholic and the other Episcopal. Both were large and had great influence in community affairs. Like most other valley institutions, they reflected the ethnic dichotomy of Ilocano and Ilongo.

The Episcopal Mission, the first Christian body to establish itselfin the valley, was founded by American missionaries in the early 1920s, primarily to evangelize the Teduray. Over the years, more than forty Teduray village congregations had developed in the surrounding area, but the central Upi parish church became overwhelmingly Ilocano in its membership. The pioneer Ilocano homesteaders in the valley were not Roman Catholics but members of the Iglesia Filipinista Independiente—followers of Msgr. Gregorio Aglipay who had severed his allegiance to the Roman Catholic hierarchy at the turn of the century and had led several millions of people into a Philippine Independent Catholic Church.  Lacking a priest of their own, they attached themselves to the Episcopal parish, where they found the Anglo-Catholic ceremonial and discipline familiar and congenial. The Mission, as it is called, has continued to be the parish church for almost all of the valley’s Ilocano settlers.

Ilongo homesteaders began to settle in the valley some years after the Ilocanos. In contrast to the latter, the Ilongos were Roman Catholics, who soon established their own chapel in the poblacion along the road which led to their settlement area. Newcomers aligned themselves : Ilocanos loeanos who were born and raised in the Roman Catholic accordingly Church tended to become Episcopalians when they settled in Upi; Ilongos, including those of Aglipavan background (as followers of Aglipay came to be known) were quickly absorbed into the Roman Catholic parish. A fter all, the images and ceremonials were almost identical in the two churches. People worshipped with their kinsmen and provincemates and left the subtleties of hierarchical dispute to the priests who understood them.

Two modern medical facilities served Upi. The government maintained a rural health unit (RHU) in the poblacion, staffed by a doctor, a nurse, and two midwives. The doctor who served in the early 1960s was sophisticated, a Tagalog, and graduate of one of the country’s better medical schools, and his clinic was modern and clean. His wife, an Ilonga from the local community, was a registered pharmacist and operated a well-stocked botica next door. The other clinic was established by the Mission before the war and greatly expanded by 1962 when it came under the oversight of Brent Hospital, an Episcopal institution in Zamboanga City across the Moro Gulf. No doctor was a permanent resident, but a Brent staff physician spent a week there each month, supplementing a highly competent and popular resident nurse.

As with the two parish churches, so with the two clinics. Ilocanos and Teduray saw the Mission clinic as their own, and tended to distrust the government health unit. The Ilongo community, on the other hand, looked upon the public health doctor, through his wife, as one of their own; Ilongos almost never visited the Mission clinic. For both groups, of course, these modern facilities—with their crisp linen, their shiny porcelain, their mysterious but impressive microscopes and flasks, and their row upon row of little bottles filled with wonder-working contents—constituted only one aspect of Upi valley medicine. The Ilongos and the Ilocanos each had their own folk healers, their various traditional specialists who knew and understood the was of the spirits. These people were the first line of defense against most illnesses, for they were the ones who dealt not only with the sickness but with its underlying cause: The myriad spirits and demons, who, together with the homesteaders, inhabited the valley.

In sum, we have a background of two significant dimensions, against which we can now begin to place the spiritist cult of Upi. Their environment, on the one hand, was an ancient world of powerful saints and proximate spirits, of charms as well as of chalices; on the other hand, it was a changing world of increasing complexity and rapid modernization, where the traditional was being confronted daily by the radically new.

A local cult under the Episcopal mission

The group of people who call themselves espiritistas were Ilocano, mostly tenant farmers, and all active members of the Episcopal Mission. They did not see themselves as a separate sect, although they did have a meeting place, a home where they gathered twice a week for religious services, and they numbered among themselves several charismatic functionaries. Although the espiritistas had adopted a somewhat blurry belief in reincarnation, had redefined the Trinity, and communicated with departed souls, they did not consider themselves as unfaithful in any significant sense to the teachings of the Philippine Episcopal Church. Because of their unanimous conviction that they were loyal members of the Mission, and therefore participated in all the regular parish affairs, and believed in the notion that spiritism is science, not religion, I think they are best regarded as a cult and—as they would resolutely a t h rill —not a sect.

Although they had no institutional ties with the organization known as the the spiritists in Upi took the name and most of their distinctive ideas from this group. The UECF was founded at the turn of the century by luan Ortega, an attorney and avid disciple of the then internationally know spiritualist author, Alan Kardec.II The Union’s original center was in ‘tondo, Manila and later on spread to several provinces, establishing such major centers as Malabon, Rizal. Most rural espiritista groups seem to have begun in this manner. It had no salaried, professional clergy and no national machinery, although the beginnings of both could be observed around the older centers. Some literature was published, mostly in mimeographed form, but there were no funds for national distribution. The UECF had no program of missionary expansion. Individuals who had come .to know and accept the teachings of the Union were encouraged, should they move to another place, to gather and instruct all who would listen.

The cult began in the Upi valley in 1960. A young Ilocano tenant farmer’s wife had a dream experience in which the soul of her grand father advised her to follow the teachings of some espiritista pamphlets, which she had picked up when visiting relatives in Manila, and instructed her in the use of a healing oil. She was soon recognized among many families in the Ilocano district as an “anointer”—one of the traditional types of folk healers—and was credited with several cures. Regular meetings began a few months later when a near neighbor found, again through a dream, that she had the power to go into a trance and communicate with spirits. The pattern for the meetings was taken from that of a Union temple, the literature of which was soon regarded as a sort of manifesto to be studied avidly by all followers who are able to read.

By mid-1961, the spiritist meetings had been attended at one time or another by a great many of the Ilocano settlers, of which some thirty or so were regular and actually thought of themselves as espiritistas. All of the members were Ilocano and lived in the same general area. The majority were interrelated by blood or marriage, but not all. In fact, the cult—like the Mission as a whole—cut across many of the most conspicuous alliance and factional lines within the Ilocano community. Some of the group had attended the local agricultural school, but most had little or no education beyond the primary grades. Approximately two-thirds of the espiritista regulars were women and all were among the Mission’s most active and devout members.

The cult’s functionaries were of two basic types. Like other spiritist groups of the Union pattern, there were presiding officers who were not thought by the group to need supernatural validation. The other type of religious functionary, the medium, did require a specific charisma. Espiritistas, in general, recognize four possible medium activities, each of which is known by the particular gift which the medium has been granted with. The medio curandero is the healing medium, and has a key role in the sessions. Like the other mediums, the healer is usually a woman. The other three types of medium are not healers but have some power of verbal communication with the spirits. A medio ridente has the highest standing of them all, being able to see, hear, and speak with the spirits. The medio escribiente is used by the spirits as an amanuensis to write down its words. The medio parlante, the most common of these last three, is able to act as a vehicle through which the spirit can speak. The Upi group had no medio vidente or media escribiente. Several women expressed speaker abilities, and the original anointer was the group’s only medio curandero. Spiritist mediums and officers were strictly nonprofessional and received no offerings of any kind for their activities. Furthermore, they were forbidden by their beliefs to attempt to use their powers outside the specific context of spiritist sessions.

In Upi, sessions were held twice a week and generally lasted about two hours. One meeting was held on Thursday evenings, after the day’s activities are finished, and the other took place each Sunday morning following the seven o’clock main sung mass at the Mission. The cult met at the house of a member which they referred to as “like a temple.”

The ritual of a session was somewhat informal and followed a regular form. After a hymn, the presiding officer recited an invocation, asking God’s blessing on the session, then led the assembled group in the Lord’s Prayer and a general confession)? These opening exercises completed, he then called for a speaking medium to come to the table where he was seated. Other mediums present remained to the side. The people attending the ritual did not arrange themselves in rows, as in a church, but sat on benches along the walls, as they would at a social event.

After some minutes of intense concentration and silence, the medium would begin to mutter sentences. These were rarely audible to the group as a whole, but were recorded to be read aloud later. When the medium began to tremble, the gathering knew that the spirit had arrived and were able to tell, from her actions and message, whether a desirable or a “low” spirit had been contacted. Should it be the latter, the speaking medium was immediately recalled from her trance, so that the spirit was driven away. On occasion, no contact could be made with a “high” spirit, in which case the practice was to read a lengthy portion from the Ilocano translation of the Bible. When the medium, or the Bible reading, was concluded, the presiding officer would ask anyone who felt moved by the Holy Spirit to speak. Anyone present was free to stand up and speak at this time, although in practice only acknowledged mediums tended to do so.

Most of the spirit messages received, and most of the comments and additions by others present, consisted of exhortations to be good and to seek health and happiness by living a moral life, loving God and neighbor. It was very seldom that the spirits communicated anything other than the simple and straightforward folk moralism of proverbs and pulp magazines.

The scance part of the ritual, which was concerned mostly with moral teaching, was followed by the healing part. The sick were called to the center of the group, and the others present were bidden to pray for them silently. Meanwhile, the healing medium discussed the patient’s ailment with her or him, touched the person’s head or arm, and offered advice concerning a cure. An espiritista would then say that her touch was a channel for the curative “magnetic fluid”13 which flowed from the Holy Spirit or the Spirit Protector into the sick person. The healing medium usually suggested rest and invariably inquired whether the patient has been to the Mission clinic for medication. Not infrequently, she would apply some balm of her own, such as a menthol paste. The sick person was then dismissed with an injunction to be regular at her or his attendance at Sunday mass and at the bi-weekly spiritist sessions and to try to lead an exemplary life. No one seemed to expect a miraculous cure to occur at once, but it was expected that the cure would follow in due course if the patient was strong in belief and followed the medium’s advice. Another hymn and a closing thanksgiving prayer concluded the meetings.

To summarize, the spiritists in the Upi group tended to be neighbors and relatives, but they did not reflect any political or factional divisions within the Ilocano community. They had a quasi-organization, but it had no distinctive or special expression outside the group’s ritual meetings. Except at those sessions, their functionaries, both officers and mediums, had no role as such whatsoever. Their pastor was the Mission parish • priest, their center of formal worship was the Mission church, and their scripture was the Bible. The particular ideas which drew them together as spiritists were, they stoutly maintained, all sound Christian doctrines. Far from renouncing or departing from the Christian faith, they believed they were giving it actual empirical proof. While the spiritist group in Upi did, in fact, have some quite distinctive beliefs—to which we now turn—their primary corporate religious identification was, with the rest of the valley’s Ilocano homesteaders, to the Episcopal Mission. They operated very much like a prayer group within that church and not like a splinter group from it.

The espiritistas’ belief system

The particular beliefs of the Upi group of espiritistas were not highly defined and rationalized, but they were distinctive and diverged from the more traditional Christianity officially taught at the Mission along three important and closely related theological lines: Notions about spirits, ideas about the relationship of morality and physical health, and the somewhat inchoate belief in reincarnation.

The spiritist group conceived of the spirits as divided into two categories, the high and the low spirits. The high spirits were God and the saints of Christianity. The low spirits were held to be mostly the soul spirits of the recently deceased. Having been imperfect humans, the low spirits were not able to enlighten the believer regarding higher righteousness, nor were they helpful in combating illness, which, as we shall see, was related directly to sin. The presence of low spirits was thus unwelcome at the sessions and discouraged by the mediums. The high spirits, on the other hand, were extremely interested in the moral and physical well-being of the living, so they worked through the mediums to help them. They spoke wisdom through the speaking medium and sent their healing magnetic fluid through the curing medium. The Spirit Protector, who was the Mission’s patron saint (Francis of Assisi) aided in repelling the undesirable spirits. This was important to the mediums, as the low spirits were said to leave a medium weak and tired after the session, while the high spirits gave her strength and a feeling of elation. Mediums were strictly warned not to attempt spirit possession outside of the regular group sessions where the low spirits would be encouraged to manifest themselves. To do so was considered tantamount to paganism and would displease the Spirit Protector, who could not then be expected to render any assistance.

The espiritistas considered that there was no distinction between God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, while Jesus was considered to have been an ordinary mortal who achieved perfection, over several reincarnations, and became Christ through his moral goodness and his strict obedience to God’s commands. Having overcome all sin, he had been fused into Dios. This formulation seems to have been found in the UECF pamphlets to which the group had access, and it apparently seemed reasonable and unexceptional to them.

God and the other high spirits were thought to be greatly concerned about the moral goodness of persons during their life, so that all the messages which they communicated through the medium had the flavor of the everyday morality of the rural pulpit, the political platform, and the editorial page. A typical spirit-communication would exhort the group to social and personal responsibility, to conduct becoming of a Christian such as avoiding graft and corruption and eschewing loose living. It would likely conclude with an assessment of all these problems being caused by lack of moral earnestness and a recommendation that the community prays for the enlightenment of those who perpetuate the evils.

On the healing side, the espiritistas believed illness to be the direct cause of evil deeds and bad thoughts. God was thought to help sinners, but God also demanded that they must suffer the effects of their evil ways to the exact degree that they have committed it. Sickness was considered due to God’s justice.

Since the cause of illness was understood to be sin, the cure was quite logically linked to reform—sick people needed to amend their ways. They could then bring their sicknesses to the group sessions, where the spirits not only warned against immorality through the speaking medium but assisted in its cure by sending their magnetic fluid through the curing medium.

God’s punishment for sin was regarded as inevitable, but not necessarily immediate. This present life is only one of many incarnations, and the Upi spiritists believed that their present life not only reflected unremembered previous lives, but set the stage for future ones. A good Christian who was afflicted with misery was not necessarily suspected of harboring secret wickedness, but rather was thought to be paying for sins committed in past life. So, too, it was held that while evil may go unpunished in this life, she or he would have to pay the debt of sin in one’s subsequent existence.

The espiritistas recognized that these ideas were not explicitly elaborated in the sermons or masses at the Mission church. They did not, however, see any conflict between them and the Christian doctrine taught; these beliefs, in fact, were held to positively support the validity of the Christian truths. Members of the spiritist group were really not very concerned about these beliefs in themselves. When they referred to them at all, they saw them as science, not religion, and they dealt with their ideas not as esoteric variations of the Christian religion but as common sense insights into how it operated.

Espiritistas’ “scientific” worldview

I have repeatedly made the point that neither in their image of themselves nor in their general behavior did the Upi spiritists act as outside the membership and thought-world of the Mission church. Furthermore, as priest-in-charge of the Mission in those days, I remained a bit wary and watchful but did not choose to declare them heretical or excommunicated, and so did not force them into any separatist attitudes. I took very seriously their contention that they were engaged not in religious activities but in scientific ones and wanted to learn what they meant. It is with this assertion that I believe we need to begin an analysis of the [pi espiritista phenomenon.

In the modern Western world, from which the prestige-laden word “science” has made its way into Upi valley parlance, the term has a distinct meaning and represents a very special sort of perspective on the world. But the characteristic marks of modern science—formalized doubt, systematic experimentation, conceptual abstraction—remained as foreign to these Upi peasants and their thought as did the equally characteristic mark of the scientific worldview: A closed natural universe in which natural event follows a continuum of cause and effect, uninterrupted by supernatural agents of any sort. It soon became clear to me, in talking with my peasant Ilocano parishioners, that “science” generally meant something quite different to them. It concrete referred to consideration of the surrounding world not abstractly but in a highly concrete way. It evoked an attitude toward reality which was not experimental or tentative but pragmatic and prudent.

“Be scientific,” I once heard the bus driver urge. “Take the late trip to the coast when the bus is not so crowded.” “Science” only when the was to plant stage, so that the crop would get a good start. It was to ground was well prepared and the weather at its proper follow tried and tested advice of those who knew when deciding how far apart to plant coconuts. In short, this rural, peasant use of “science” was far more akin to that point of view which philosophers and social scientists refer to as “Common sense:” It evoked a simple acceptance of the world as being just the way it seems to be and a desire to deal with its given realities practically and sensibly.

The given realities which comprise one’s common sense world i are, of course, not universal; they are modeled by the person’s cultural heritage. Concepts of practical wisdom and prudent realism are handed down from generation to generation, just as are concepts of right and wrong and all the many other components of a social entity’s worldview. ‘When the Upi spiritists spoke of high and low spirits, and when they looked to these spirits for help or blame in time of sickness, they were concerning themselves with beings which have since time immemorial been a “given reality” of their world and which no sensible person would, or could, attempt to ignore. It was precisely this element of the prudent and the pragmatic—this common sense acceptance of the nature of things as they were “known to be”—which was what the espiritistas meant when they described their activities and thought as “science.”

When they spoke of “religion” they meant Christianity, specifically’ the complexity of the doctrines and practices taught and nurtured at the Mission by its clergy and nuns. Despite the local Anglican-Roman Catholic divisions, which most parishioners considered esoteric and technical at best, they all believed themselves to be, along with most other non-Muslim Filipinos they knew, participants in the worldwide Catholic Church which they never doubted to be God’s true and personally established religion. In a very real way, to belong to the Church was itself a part of fitting into the common sense reality of things.

But the viability and the vitality of their religious commitment to Christianity did not merely lie in its being a part of their common sense world of practical reality. It also rested in its ability to profoundly ground that world in ultimate meaning. Religious systems classically inform their followers about what the world is like and how they should live in such a world. It is only when a religion supports its moral imperatives by grounding them in the fundamental nature of reality,. as that reality is understood, can it invest its ethical precepts not only with a sacred aura but one of practical good sense.” Mission teaching, in the hands of foreign and foreign-trained teachers, was virtually silent and uncomprehending regarding the popularly understood world of spirits. By itself, in those days and under those conditions, it simply failed to connect with the lived environment of the I locano homesteaders. This was the significance, I would argue, of the espiritista conviction that their “science” supported and proved Christianity.

They knew that the world was filled with spirits and that their religion must take them into account. In spelling out a difference between the high and low spirits, the spiritists classified the Trinity and the saints into a different category from the soul spirits, and they specified the former as ultimately significant and rejected all traffic with the latter. This and other similar espiritista scientific notions made the clearest good sense; they vindicated the fundamental tenet of their faith and their worldview.

In showing how it was that, in terms of that worldview, God was related at the deepest level to the moral code which they were on all sides challenged to make their own, they brought both God and that moral code into a cognitive and behavioral harmony which was both existentially convincing and ethically coercive. By explicating a relationship on the level of ultimate reality between moralism and illness, they placed the problem of suffering and pain into a religious setting and, at the same time, equipped their religion with a capacity to give them meaning. And, in their somewhat vague acknowledgment of a notion of reincarnation. the espiritistas were able to set into a religious framework the perennial problem of evil; they enabled their religion to demonstrate “scientifically” how it is that the good so often suffer while the wicked flourish.

The Upi spiritist group had not attempted a wholesale incorporation of the spirit population into the Christian scheme. They were silent about the encantos, the flying witches, and the like—all of which they simply dismissed as varieties of low spirits to be shunned. But they had brought into their understanding of the Christian system the ancient worldview in which such spirits are myriad and ever near. Whether or not they were justified in believing themselves to be orthodox Christians, they had indeed adapted the faith as they knew it to actuality as they perceived it, and in so doing had given their faith the possibility of making that everyday world a context for life that was religiously and ethically meaningful.

To the espiritistas, therefore, their “science” made explicit—and thereby ritually demonstrable—what must somehow be made at least implicit to all Christians if the Church is to have force and vitality. It established the coherence of their religious lives in terms of their world—and of their world in terms of their faith.

Sickness and restoration of health

I f a theory of disease and its treatment is to be equally comprehensible, whether it be a “modern” or a “folk” theory, it must at the very least conform with ideas of what illness is and does, and ideas about how it is caused. “There was probably no arena where the science of the modern West and the “science” of the [pi peasant’s commonsensical world came into more dramatic confrontation than they did in matters of sickness and health. More than fifty years of rural education and health activities on the part of both government and Mission agencies had secured a place for injections and antibiotic tablets: They had, however, produced very little comprehension of germs, diet deficiencies, or glandular imbalances.

As centers of modern medical theory and practice, the rural clinics in Upi had come to be regarded with respect, even awe, for their proven ability to deal with symptoms. But, despite all their devices and drugs, they seemed in the popular mind to be thoroughly unrelated to cause. To the vast majority of these rural folks, the cause of illness was still to be sought in the world of the spirits. Sickness for them was essentially a religious phenomenon.

According to traditional spirit lore, one became sick because of some particular spirit’s mischief, malevolence, or anger. As the espiritista group saw it, the proximate cause of illness was sin; its ultimate cause was God’s justice. Whereas in the ancient scheme, restoration of health required some appeasement of the spirit’s hostility, in the spiritists’ system restoration of health followed repentance and moral amendment. To be sure, the cause of sickness here had been considerably intellectualized and had been placed in an ethical frame, but illness and recovery were still grounded on the causal level in the spirit world, and the connecting mechanism had been unambiguously clarified. Sickness and health were functions of personal morality. Earlier, I have argued that espiritista beliefs and rituals served to make explicit the coherence of Mission religion by adapting it meaningfully to the rural Ilocano worldview. So, too, their ideas and sessions rendered explicit the coherence of Mission medicine by integrating it meaningfully with religion, where their worldview required that it be understood as such.

As powerful adjuncts to the curing medium and her magnetic fluid, the drugs and injections which characterized scientific medicine could find a place in the Upi common sense world. Modern medicine, for espiritistas, was stripped of its mystery and magic simply because it was placed into a context of pragmatic realism and prudent wisdom and into a context of -ethical verities which sprang from the very structure of reality.

Conclusion

From what has been described of the Upi espiritistas’ organization, such as it is, and of their distinctive notions, one striking conclusion seems clear. If the coming to being of the group is to be analyzed in terms of its functionality, the social system in which it was embedded offers little promise as a fruitful context for the analysis.

The Upi valley was definitely divided into ethnic camps, but insofar as this was reflected in religion—as indeed it was, and markedly so—it was a division between Anglican and Roman, delineating Ilocano from Ilongo. The espiritista cult was completely within the Ilocano group, and completely within the Episcopal Mission. Among the Ilocanos of the valley, all the factional alliances and divisions which typify barrio life were to be found, and yet these lines were as cross-cut by the cult as they were by the Mission as a whole. Even within the specifically ecclesiastical setting of parish affairs, one can hardly propose that the spiritist group underlined some social reality. Church politics abounded in the Mission as they do in all rural parishes of size and influence—between clergy, between clergy and people, between laypeople—but in three years I saw no instance of espiritistas grouping themselves over against others on the basis, explicit or implicit, of being espiritistas. That they did not is, I believe, not just a curious fact but one of analytical importance. Whatever the attraction of the movement was, it did not lie in its reinforcement of some traditional social tie.

On the other hand, the movement was indeed attractive, as the rapidity with which it took hold and was locally elaborated testified. I would argue that the key to this attraction was to be found not in the social dimension of the group, but in its cultural dimension; not in the part it played in the organization of community roles and collectivities through which the spiritists interacted socially, but in the integration of beliefs and values in terms of which they interpreted their experience and oriented their social behavior.

The Mission church taught about and dealt with sin and salvation; the clinic taught about and dealt with sickness and health. What espiritista “science” showed was the connection between the two. It interpreted each in terms of the other and it demonstrated that both reflected the very nature of existence. These are accomplishments which the Mission was not achieving on its own. Espiritistas were clearly able to be loyal members of the Mission and regular patients at its clinic, because the role of their cult was neither to displace Christianity nor to rival modern medicine. Its role was to make both of them relevant and workable.

“Yang Mangngagaw” : An Epic of the Mandaya of Caraga, Davao Oriental

    Introduction

Although several studies and researches have been made on Philippine folk literature, a vast treasury of tribal literature still remains untapped and unrecorded. There is an urgent need to preserve these materials before they are completely lost. One of these valuable pieces of literature is the epic of the Mandaya in Caraga, Davao Oriental.

The purpose of this study is to record, translate, analyze, and preserve this Mandayan epic. It further seeks to answer the following questions:

1) What are the qualities of “Yang Mangngagaw” as an epic?
2) What tribal values and traditions are revealed in the epic?

The study is guided by the following basic assumptions:

1) The epic “Yang Mangngagaw” possesses the elements of a Philippine epic.
2) Values as well as timeless tribal customs and traditions are portrayed in “Yang Mangngagaw”.

The study is limited to a recording, analysis, and preservation of one Mandaya epic from Caraga, Davao Oriental, entitled “Yang Mangngagaw”. Two magdadawot (epic singers) Madugilay Madanlo and Beniang Punto chanted the dawot (epic), while two other natives, Laurencio Madenancil and Josefa Piamonte, transcribed it and translated it into Visayan. Three other native informants, namely Romeo Banaball Banugan, Inambuya Felix Lanus, and Arlenda Tomanggong, related their own versions of the epic as they heard it from their parents and grandparents. This helped establish the five-version test.

The epic was translated into English for study purposes. For the analysis, the researcher hewed to Prof. Manuel’s methodologies, which include specificity, subject coverage, documentation, and follc.loricity. She also took note of the essential elements of a Philippine epic (in Manuel. 1965)

The Mandaya of Caraga, Davao Oriental

That the Mandaya is a product of interracial marriages in the past is evident in their facial and physical features: Valderrama (1987) states that “the ancestors of the Mandaya are Malay-Indonesian-Chinese and Mandaya-Portuguese-Spanish.”

The Mandaya are always in their bare feet, although many of them, influenced by their contemporaries in town, have started wearing slippers and shoes. As part of their adornment, they wear colorful and embroidered blouses and vests, with native jewelry. The typical Mandaya female wears handcrafted jewelry from her hair down to her ankles. The male wears a necklace of crocodile teeth. He also carries with him a bolo (knife) with a scabbard belt around his waist. A symbol of courage and masculinity, the bolo also serves as protection against adversaries or wild animals that may cross his path.The Mandaya woman expects to be protected by the male, which is why he has to be prepared to do such duty.

The tribe still performs traditional rituals to mark significant occasions, such as birth, wedding, harvest, or death. These rituals, which are characterized by chants, songs, and prayers, are presided over by priestesses known as the balyan, or any respected leader, especially during wedding ceremonies.

The Mandaya family is patriarchal. The members of a family look up to the husband or the eldest male member as the head of the clan. The wife is subservient to the husband. In a group, the Mandaya turn to a particular leader, as in the old days when they had the likad, maniklad, and the bagani (warrior). (Valderrama, 1987)

The Mandaya are a social people, especially within their group. They celebrate feasts with dancing, singing, playing music, and—though infrequently now—by recounting ancient myths, tales, legends, and epics. The Mandaya from the far barrios interact freely with their relatives and acquaintances in town. They participate in the social and political affairs of the town. They are endlessly wooed, and often won ()Niel., by persistent politicians.

Tourism has paved the way for the Mandaya’s awareness of their own socioeconomic potentials. Their exquisite arts and crafts, exotic dances and songs, even their native costumes are indeed assets to the industry. The idea of being exploited has made many of the natives wary and cautious of visitors from the outside. This is also one reason why the Caraguenos do not easily welcome investors from outside Caraga. This explains why Caraga has very few business establishments. The existing commercial outlets are generally operated and owned by Caragueflos. It takes a lot of persuasion and explanation to gain their confidence. One needs even to learn how to speak their dialect before they open up to a visitor. But once their confidence and trust are won, they become naturally amiable and hospitable. As Valderrama (1987) puts it, “the Mandayas are generally shy only to people who do not speak their tongue.”

                     The Epic

The verse form of the epic consists of 2,020 lines subdivided into ten (10) episodes based on the narrative flow of the epic and likewise in the change of setting.

Episode I, “Sabong” deals with Sabong’s agitation over his love for Sadya. Episode 2, “Sadya” describes Sadya and her sisters. Episode 3, “Yang Pagpangandam” (The Preparations) describes Sabong’s preparations for his journey to Ullaynun to court Sadya. Episode 4, “Yang Panaw” (The Journey) describes Sabong and his brothers’ journey towards Ullaynun. Episode 5, “Ullaynun” narrates their arrival in Ullaynun. Episode 6, “Syulingan ni Makaway” (The Wine of Makaway) describes the reception at Dyuyan’s (Sadya’s brother) house. Episode 7, “Ing Sukat” (The Dowry) presents the marriage customs of the Mandaya and the tasks undertaken by Sabong to win Sadya. Episode 8, “Pagpangagawkang Sadya” (The Abduction of Sadya) describes Sabong’s ravishment of Sadya. Episode 9 “Yang
Pagdindin” (The Battle) describes the fight waged by Tibay against Sabong. Episode 10, “Maglipig Mal-langitnin” describes the role of Lipig, the god of peace, in putting an end to the war between the brothers from Byadbadan and Kadigi.

Episode I. “Sabong”

Sabong of Kadigi works on an attractive garment, “beautiful as the moonlight,” sewn with the brightness of reds, yellows, and oranges. But for yet unknown reasons, the garment “misbehaves,” making it impossible to finish. Sabong who is in a troubled state of mind, finally loses his patience, takes a sharp bolo and rips the garment into shreds. The ruined dress then bursts into flame. Sabong then sulks and refuses to talk to anyone.

Lanus curiously observes the proceedings but refrains from inquiring about the outburst, afraid as he was of the bagani’s temper. So he calls Mal-lumuntad Diwata, the eldest brother, and persuades him to go and ask Sabong what the matter is. Lumuntad approaches Sabong and asks why he is in such a fighting mood. Sabong confesses his desire to get married, which Lumuntad lauds. But when Sabong adds that the woman he wishes to marry is the bride-to-be of another man, Lumuntad feels equally troubled. He tries to convince Sabong of the foolishness of his decision, but Sabong will not be dissuaded. The woman he wants to many is Sadya, the maiden of Ullaynun and sister of Dyuyan. She is the bride-to-be of Ombang, the younger brother of Tibay who is the leader of Byadbadan.

Lumuntad summons all his brothers and their sister Malimbungon na Panday and holds a conference regarding Sabong’s decision.

Episode II “Sadya”

The women of Ullaynun get ready for Sadya’s betrothal. After dressing up and combing their hair, the sisters, Inung Masadyang Kilat, Omallag sa Maglimbay, and Magallowaing Samtan, head for the room where Sadya is to stay while the negotiations are underway between her elder brother, Dyuyan, and Ombang’s brothers. The corridor leading towards Sadya’s room is blocked with so many partitions and obstacles that it would take a long time for anyone to enter or leave the room. The virgin’s room is filled with golden ornaments, draperies and carpets of different shades of brown.

Inside the room Makailaw sa Baybay, Ombang’s sister, and Al-lag, Sadya’s sister watch over Sadya. While the discussions are going on outside, the door opens and closes as the women  try to listen in. Al-lag stays at the doorway lest Sadya attempts to leave the room.

Episode III. “Yang Pagpangandam” (The Preparations)

In Kadigi, Sabong prepares to depart for Ullaynun. Linimbong, his sister, takes over the difficult task of combing his hair. Sabong’s tresses are “as thick as bamboo [poles], its length reaching the floor”. Only a flute can take out the tangles in the bagani’s hair.

Malimbungon na Panday likewise applies oil to the hair until it shines “like gold, dazzlingly beautiful like the moon.” The hair is arranged into seven braids and trimmed with a small knife so sharp it almost injures Linimbong. Malimbungon na Panday then proceeds to heed Luntad’s summons. When she is seated on a dagmay mat, Luntad reveals to her their brother’s wish to marry Sadya. Everyone disapproves of Sabong’s plan, but Sabong’s insistence on marrying no one else but Sadya even if he had to abduct her finally subdues their protests.

Sabong then prepares himself for the courtship in the faraway land of Ullaynun. He adorns himself with every piece of jewelry he owns—rings, necklaces that hang down his back and shine as brightly as the stars and the full moon. The women adore Sabong’s magnificence.

Linimbong then takes out the golden chest that contains the bagani’s innumerable clothes. Sabong takes his time in choosing his clothes. He finally decides on a vest that emphasizes his strength and masculinity and a dazzling golden belt. The bagani then steps out with his spear and shield, and leads the way.

Episode IV “Im Panaw” (The Journey)

All of Sabong’s brothers accompany him on his journey to Ullaynun. Like Sabong, they wear their most attractive clothes. Sabong alone rows and steers the boat through raging rivers. They sail through seven seas and eight rivers and hurdle numerous obstacles that only a boatman as strong and powerful as Sabong can tackle.

The boat sails on at great speed, gliding by places so beautiful the brothers would have wanted to go ashore. The bagani, however, does not tarry even briefly until he sees the brightness of Ullaynun.

From afar, the exquisite beauty of Ullaynun and its amazing treasures can already be discerned. Beautiful garments, sharp bolos and shields, colorful threads, and jewelry float in the sea. The fragrance of its flowers and trees likewise hovers in the air. As the travelers approach the shore, a fog creeps in, lightning flashes and thunder rolls like drums. Aboard the boat, everyone strains to see through the fog as priceless treasures bob in the sea.

Episode V Ullaynun/Bullawanun

As they step ashore, Lanus hears Sabong wondering about the famed place, which was revealed to him in a dream. Soon they begin their trek inland where many more of Bullawanun’s treasures abound — beautiful flowers, enchanted trees and plants decked with jewelry to secure them against the storms of Lintawun and the strong winds of Lingayin.

In the flower garden of Sadya, Sabong picks one blossom and whispers to it as if to Sadya, “You’re the only flower I shall wed and possess. If need be, I shall crawl under the house, and you shall be mine and no one else’s.”

Meanwhile, Mandagyo Mal-liyognon, Sadya’s brother, entertains his guests Tibay of Byadbadan and his brothers. They discuss the coming wedding of Sadya and Ombang in voices so loud the new arrivals could hear them out in the yard. Dagyo’s slave who chances to look out the window sees Sabong and his brothers arrive. She tells a slightly intoxicated Dagyo about the visitors. A disbelieving Dagyo orders his brother, Maungat, to find out what is happening. Maungat then heads for the yard where he meets Mal-lumuntad Diwata. He asks him aboutthe purpose of their visit, and Lumuntad vaguely responds that they seek either war or fortune. Maungat invites them to come up and rest, and to witness the coming out of his sister, Sadya.

Lanus patiently watches as Sabong ascends the stairs, hesitate at the doorway before peremptorily sitting beside Mallapog, one of Sadya’s brothers. Sadya’s elder brother, Dyuyan, seems suspicious of Sabong. Dyuyan is as strong and handsome and courageous as the bagani Sabong. Sabong’s brother Luntad waits at the doorway and politely requests to be allowed to enter. Dagyo then directs him to sit, and the inquiry about their journey to Ullaynun begins.

Episode VI “Syulingan ni Makaway” (The Wine of Makaway)

As the guests make themselves comfortable, the women are summoned. Inung Masadyang Kilat, Omal-lag sa Maglimbay, and Magallowaing Samtan are allowed to come out for a time being to meet the visitors. They proceed to the living room, spread out dagmay mats, and ask questions one after the other.

Sadya is the last to ask. Sabong tells her that it is the wind that has brought him to Ullaynun. Soon after, the women leave to prepare the betel nut chew, choosing only the best for the visitors.

Then Dyuyan tells Dagyo to fetch the best wine. Dagyo carries the jar and throws it against the wall. Dyuyan somehow catches it. Because most of the wine spilled over, Dagyo fetches another jar. He offers wine to the women, who decline. The visitors, however, partake of the delicious wine.

After a while Dagyo proposes a toast to the women of Byadbadan and offers them wine. The eldest, Ballobaynun nam Bullan, refuses, but Salingkugon sa Baybay, the youngest sister, takes some. Dagyo urges Ballobaynun nam Bullan to drink. She finally yields, afraid that her refusal might bring down a curse on Byadbadan. Salingkugon sa Baybay asks for another glass of wine and offers this to Luntad and to the bagani. Luntad holds the hand of Salingkugon sa Baybay, and her ornate gold necklace falls. This incident elicits the furious attention of Tibay.

All this time, Sadya is cooped up in her room. Her sister, Omallag, arranges Sadya’s hair and dresses her up with jewelry. Al-lag tells the bride-to-be she bears the name of Ullaynun when she goes to Byadbadan and advises her not to dishonor Ullaynun. Soon, Inung Masadyang Kilat is ready to come out of the room.

Episode VII. “Ing Sukat” (The Dowry)

On her way out, Sadya is forestalled by Dyumabok Manginsawan, her would-be brother-in-law, because she has yet to ask for her dowry. She goes back to her room and promises to come out only after the suitor has passed the test.

The bagani gives Dyuyan the seven necklaces that he wears. Sadya once more attempts to leave the room but Ballobaynun nam Bullan, her would-be sister-in-law, holds on to her skirt, fearful that misfortune might befall Sadya if she slips.

Unaware of the events, Dallmun, Sadya’s elder brother, heads for his room. With her elder brother fast asleep, Sadya slowly walks out of the room. Her progress is very slow since she will only step over every block on her way out if gold is laid at her feet. But the doorway is barred by a huge jar of wine. If the jar breaks, misfortune is said to befall the bride. Suddenly Dyumabok Manginsawan takes the jar, drinks the wine and flings the empty jar on the floor. It breaks into many pieces. The women are outraged. Sadya declares that she will only proceed if Manggob’s sister, Makailaw sa Baybay, offers her necklace, but the latter refuses. Sabong then declares his intentions and promises Sadya lots of priceless jewelry lovelier than those of her sisters.

Sadya finally leaves the room. She sits on the red dagmay mat and is warned not to face west, lest misfortune befalls her. Ballobaynun nam Bullan glances at her brother Taga-ombang Kilat and wonders why he doesn’t sit beside Sadya. She tells him to heed her advice.

Episode VIII “Pagpangagaw Kang Sadya” (The Abduction of Sadya)

Sabong begins to speak in earnest in an attempt to attract Sadya’s attention. Hoping that she will speak to him, he talks about the precious ornaments and the fragrance of the beautiful flowers that float on the river. He describes the enchanted boat that has arrived in the port of Ullaynun. Designed like a crocodile, the boat looks like a huge dragon with exquisite carvings. Sadya is fascinated but feels that something terrible is about to happen as the port fills up with many good-looking men who “look like warriors.”

Everyone in the house stands up and looks towards the port. The house trembles in anticipation and its posts shake. While everyone’s attention is focused on the men at the port, Sabong quickly grabs Sadya. She struggles against Sabong but the he holds her tightly and then kisses her. Dazed, Sadya cries out. Her cries are loud enough to waken the dead, frightening her brothers into thinking she might be bringing down a curse on Ullaynun.

Still holding Sadya, Sabong leaves as the alarmed women scurry away in different directions. Ballobaynun nam Bullan watches helplessly as Sabong abducts her sister-in-law to-be.

Ombang declares that he will still marry Sadya regardless of the abduction.

Episode IX “Yang Pagdindin” (The Battle)

In extreme anger, Tibay takes his spear and thrusts it at Sabong who skillfully parries it with a laugh. Sabong jeers at Tibay, telling him that this is no way to treat a guest. This fuels Tibay’s anger. He grabs Sabong by the hair and pushes him against Sadya. The bagani simply laughs. The house then speaks up and begs the men not to fight inside the house. To show the house some respect, the men descend the stairs and proceed to the fields to continue the battle.

Lanus tells Mal-lumuntad Diwata that they must go and fight with their brother since the enemies outnumber him. But Luntad refuses to leave Salingkugon sa Baybay. In an attempt to stop the fight, Luntad brings Salingkugon sa Baybay to the battlefield. At the top of his voice, he then declares his desire to marry her. The warriors stare at Luntad and Salingkugon sa Baybay in amazement. An outraged Tibay grabs his sister from Luntad and tells her to sit with Aybay, her sister.

Meanwhile Obang, Sabong’s brother, sits beside Aybay who is deeply agitated over the battle. Obang holds her hands and reassures her that he does not intend to take part in the fight, it being his brother Sabong’s fault. He then, brings Aybay to the battlefield. As the couple approaches, the fighting stops long enough to give Obang a chance to announce his intentions toward Aybay. The brothers from Kadigi stare at the Aybay’s beauty.

Tibay trembles in anger upon seeing the enemy take one more sister. But there is not much he can do since the damage has been done. The warriors rest awhile to contemplate the sudden turn of events, but soon they resume the battle.

Episode X “Maglipig Mal-langitnin”

Meanwhile in the skyworld Sabang, the goddess Biya Dyomallaiyak rouses her brother Maglipig Mal-langitnin, the god of peace. She tells him to hurry and stop the battle in Ullaynun.

Lipig leaves for Ullaynun in great haste. He hears the sounds of battle as he draws near. Spears whiz past him then break into pieces when he steps on them. Lipig surveys the battleground and feels sorry for the crushed plants and flowers. He raises his voice and prays to heaven. His voice reaches the sky even before he stops talking.

Lipig looks on as the water rushes to the shores of Ullaynun and hits the rocks. The warriors hear the noise and stop fighting momentarily when they see Lipig and Biya Dyomallaiyak.

Because the god of peace has personally come, Tibay decides to stop fighting. Sabong’s brother, Lanus, however, is incredulous, saying, “Although it is true that we have decided to end the battle, what will we do if there is still anger in the mind?” To this Sabong replies, “Once we decide on it, the agreement shall hold true and binding.”

Sabong then turns to Lipig and asks him who he is: The god reveals that they are brothers, born of the same father, Dyabongan, who threw the ugly Lipig into the ocean to drown him. Lipig was washed ashore into the land of the gods where he has lived since then.

Maglipig Mal-langitnin then calls all the warriors to him and declares that the war is over. He tells them to, “exchange and share betel nut, for there is no more war. Let there be peace.”

 Analysis and Discussion

Dilam and Sabong

According to Fr. Emmanuel Nabayra, there are seven Mandaya epics still extant. He translated “Yangagaw si Dilam,” (Dilam Takes Tibay’s Betrothed by Force) said to be the second of these epics. The researcher failed to to find a copy of the epic. The title “Yangagaw si Dilam” and Madugilay Madanlo’s version of the epic, however, are enough bases for comparing the epic with “Yang Mangngagaw.”

Indeed, the plots of “Yangagaw si Dilam” and “Yang Mangngagaw,” are basically the same. The theme of abduction is also common. Character names hold similarity only with Tibay. But it is also here where the differences begin.

In the Nabayra translation, Dilam in “Yangagaw si Dilam” is the abductor of Tibay’s bride. In “Yang Mangngagaw,” Tibay is the eldest brother of Taga-ombang Kilat, Sadya’s betrothed, the one who arranges their marriage. It is Dilam who abducts Sadya in “Yangagaw si Dilam,” but in “Yang Mangngagaw,” the abductor is Sabong. The heroes’ names may be different, but it may well be concluded that they refer to the same person.

In an interview, Manay Gilay of Pantuyan and Beniang Punto of Lobganon stated that the name of the hero of the epic changes depending on the place where it is chanted. Manay Gilay said that in Pantuyan the hero is called Dilam. On the other hand, Beniang Punto explained that in Lobganon the hero’s name is Sabong. When asked which of the names is the hero’s real name, nobody can say, inasmuch as the present singers and storytellers use what those before hem used.

As Fr. Nabayra stated, the dawot is handed down to the magdadawot by word of mouth, so its origins are not known. The Mandaya who have taken it as their own give the epic an important status in their cultural tradition.

“Yang Mangngagaw” as an Epic

In analyzing the characteristics of “Yang Mangngagaw” as an epic, the researcher used Prof Manuel’s criteria (1965), namely, “sustained length, based on oral tradition, heroic deeds, supernatural events, in the form of verse, either chanted or sung, with a certain seriousness of purpose, embodying or validating beliefs, customs, ideals, or life values of the people.”
Sustained length. According to Prof Manuel, an oral tradition can qualify as an epic if the song involves more than 1,000 lines. “Yang Mangngagaw” contains 2,020 lines, qualifying it as a mesoepic.

Based on oral tradition, either chanted or sung. Two epic singers, namely, Madugilay Madanlo and Beniang Punto, both natives of Caraga, sang the dawot in the presence of the researcher. Parts of the epic were chanted, although the bulk of it was sung. According to the singers and translators, their parents and grandparents passed the dawot to them by word of mouth. No written record of the epic existed prior to this study. This study also produced the first actual recording ever made of the epic.

Heroic deeds. The hero in most epics is endowed with extraordinary prowess and supernatural powers that aid him as he sets out to fulfill a difficult task or to achieve an ultimate goal. He possesses virtues, such as nobility, strength of character, and physical beauty. A character analysis of Sabong, the hero of “Yang Mangngagaw,” shows that his qualities as an epic hero are not those of a conventional epic hero’s.

In the first place, Sabong’s major intent is to abduct someone else’s bride, an act that is ignoble. His action triggers the battle between the brothers from Byadbadan and those from Kadigi. Sabong becomes an offender rather than a defender of a noble cause, as he places the rest of the characters in grave danger by instigating the chaos.

But this doesn’t place Sabong into an entirely negative light. In the first part of the epic, Sabong is seen as an agitated man, suffering from a troubled state of mind, obviously weighing the pros and cons of his intention to marry Sadya. Feared by many because of his temper, Sabong vents his anger on a piece of garment and not on the people around him.

His extraordinary strength and prowess as well as strength of character are revealed in Episode IV, “The Journey to Ullaynun.” Lines 396 to 412 recount how Sabong takes full charge of the whole expedition, steering the boat through raging rivers and dangerous passes.

395 Maynabong nal Layag, hands on hips,
sat and leaned
took and held the paddle,
sat holding the paddle.

400 Mal-lumuntad Diwata
sat in the middle, in the middle of the boat.
Maynabong nal Layag
steered and paddled,

405 firmly steered the boat
through dangerous whirlpools,
struggled against the currents.
Look, the journey has begun

410 Maynabong nal Layag
maneuvered skillfully,
paddled and steered well,

A significant event in the epic is Sabong’s abduction of Sadya. True, passion is the major reason for the abduction, but the act itself is not completely antagonistic. In lines 1418 to 1426, Ballobaynun nam Bullan wonders why her brother Taga-ombang Kilat, Sadya’s betrothed, does not sit beside Sadya when he is expected to. Is this an indication of his indifference towards the bride? Lines 1545 to 1546 show Sadya’s obvious attraction to Sabong.

1545 the newcomer is handsome,
very good-looking.

but not a single line in the epic mentions her thoughts or reactions towards Ombang.

Sabong, on the other hand, expresses his passionate love for Sadya in many parts of the epic, such as lines 595 to 600, where he picks a flower from Sadya’s garden and lovingly whispers to it.

595 “You’re the only flower,
the flower I picked,
I shall wed,
shall possess
Flower I wouldn’t give [away],

600 [I] would even crawl under,
crawl under the house,

then in lines 1153 to 1155 where he promises to give everything to Sadya,

1153 “I shall give everything.
I shall offer all my jewels
to Inung Masadyang Kilat.”

Sabong’s abduction of Sadya, which is considered ignoble,  may now be viewed in a positive light. The elder brothers and not Ombang and Sadya arrange the marriage of Ombang and Sadya. It seems as if there is no passion involved as observed in the indifference of both parties towards each other. A marriage sans love and passion may prove to be disastrous, even if it serves a function. Thus, although his act may be primarily seen as self-serving, Sabong’s purpose is not necessarily to disrupt the arrangements, but to save Sadya from a life of misery. This is clearly noble and heroic.

When Tibay, in anger, thrusts Sabong with his spear, Sabong parries it with the extraordinary agility expected of a hero. In lines 1738 to 1761, Sabong once more acts nobly as he and Tibay respect the house’s request that they do battle in the fields and not inside the house.

1738 Due to the fight,
the house spoke,

1740 “Do have mercy,
It is better [to fight] down there,
out there in the yard.
[It is] not good to fight and kill each other
here inside the house.”

Upon hearing this,
sat and leaned,
took and held the paddle,
sat holding the paddle.

Sabong and Tibay,
though very angry,
began to realize [it].
1750 “Why involve the house?
Why harm the house?
It didn’t approve
of the abduction
the abduction of the woman,”
[they] thought [hard] and agreed.
“Let us go down
away from the house
there to continue the fight.”

Both decided —
1760 there in the fields
[to] continue the battle.

Finally, with the intervention of Maglipig Mal-langitnin, the god of peace and Sabong’s long-lost brother, both Tibay and Sabong immediately agree upon ending the battle despite the obvious anger they still feel against one another. In lines 1988 to 1990, Sabong says, “If we have decided, the agreement holds true,” when his brother Lanus expresses his doubts over the settlement. This is another revelation of Sabong’s noble character as he sets aside his warrior’s temper for a noble cause, which is peace. This is a heroic intention.

Supernatural events. Listeners and audiences love extraordinary happenings in stories. These supernatural events add color and excitement to a narrative as lengthy as the epic. They break the monotony of commonplace incidents. The folk epic abounds with supernatural events that surround the adventures of the hero and the other characters. These magical events account for the epic’s appeal to native audiences who always look forward to the continuation of the narrative, which takes several days and nights to complete. Some of these supernatural events include: the gods, goddesses and spirits, as characters in the epic; the major characters possessing supernatural powers; and natural elements, plants and animals, and inanimate objects taking active part in the action.

“Yang Mangngagaw” contains several supernatural events. The epic begins with Sabong, the hero, working on a garment. As he tries to sew and embroider the cloth, it somehow “misbehaves,” an act that is not expected of an ordinary inanimate object. The cloth’s “misbehavior” prevents Sabong from completing it. When he loses his temper, he hacks the dress into pieces, which scatter on the ground. The pieces then “shone brightly,” as if enflamed.

35 The dress was mined,
the dress was no more,
scattered on the ground,
sown all over the yard,
sown all over the yard

40 until it shone.
The pieces brightened,

In Episode III, as Sabong prepares for the journey, his sister, Linimbong, is tasked with combing his hair, which is “as thick as the bamboo” that only a flute can tame it:

183 Linimbong combed and combed,
tried hard to comb.
[She] never dropped the comb,
held the comb firmly,
but [she] couldn’t comb [through],
was unable to comb
hair [so] like the bamboo,
190 so similar in thickness.
Only one thing can comb,
comb through his hair
a comb of flute.

When the brothers from Kadigi approach the shores of Ullaynun, they see precious ornaments, knives and shields, garments, pieces of jewelry floating on the river and the sea (lines 468 to 475).

468 From the water across [him],
red floated on the river.
Red garments cast afloat.
Bolos floated,
sharp knives floated away.
[He] looked across the river,
the shields floated,
475 brought by the current

No matter how heavy these things are, not a single piece sinks. As Sabong and his companions proceed inland, they see the flowers and plants tied securely to fences and trees with necklaces and pieces of jewelry. So securely are they fastened that even amidst the strongest winds and storms they never fall.

560 abundant with flowers.
Fences were made,

565 tied to the allumon tree,

567 secured with jewels,
tied with jewels,
strengthened by plants.

571 tightly secured by strands,
strong and steady,
even through a storm,
even [when hit] by [the] strong winds,

578 flowers buffeted by a storm
would not fall.
Flowers would not be ruined.

Another supernatural episode involves the talking house. After Sabong grabs and kisses Sadya, Tibay angrily pulls Sabong by the hair and shoves him. The fight begins. Then the house speaks, begging the two warriors to continue their fight in the fields. This same house trembles in anticipation in an earlier event where Sabong talks about their arrival to Ullaynun, and how the warriors gather in its port. Its posts move as though getting ready to bolt towards safety:

1575 The house trembled,
then began to shake.
The walls shook.

1578 The posts moved.

In Episode X, Maglipig Mal-langitnin, the spirit-brother of Sabong and the god of peace, goes down to Ullaynun to intervene and to stop the battle. His goddess-sister, Biya Dyomallaiyak, accompanies him. In lines 1939 to 1955, he calls on the spirits of the skyworld who send the ocean towards dry land to call the attention of the warriors.

1939 Lipig thought.
[He] prayed to heaven,

1948 Even before he stopped speaking,
his voice had reached,
reached the heavens.
Then [he] looked to the ocean,

1954 It came rushing forth
and hit the rocks.
All [these] could be seen,
seen by Tibay.
All watched,
wanting to continue
1960 the fight and the killings,
but couldn’t do more.

Lipig is unharmed by the spears that fly in his direction. They all break into pieces when the god steps on theni (lines 1925 to 1929)

1925 many times [was] almost hit
by the sharp spears.
[He] merely stepped over [them].
Pity the spears,
1929 broken into pieces.

In the form of verse. It is difficult to analyze the metrical elements of a folk epic when it is chanted. Analysis was only possible when the chanted version was transcribed. Still,’ the way the magdadawot chants the lines of the epic, however, is different from the way an ordinary reader would read them.

The magdadawot has a different pattern of scaling the epic’s verses. Her pitch level rises and falls depending on the emotional intensity attendant to the action in the narrative, and not according to metrical feet involving unaccented and accented syllables. Because the epic is mostly chanted, it lacks a regular tempo and rhythm. The researcher further observes that the magdadawot seems to have a hypnotic effect on the audience. As she chants the epic, she uses rhythmic gestures and utterances in place of poetic rhythm. With these the listeners are likewise driven to respond emotionally to each episode.

The whole epic is divided into ten (10) episodes based on the progression of the events in the narrative. Stanzas are used to separate the character’s dialogues from the descriptive or narrative lines. They are also used to distinguish a whole descriptive stanza from another stanza that describes or narrates a different scene or action. The written version of “Yang Mangngagaw” is in verse form. It adheres to certain mechanics of verse, such as stanza, rhyme, and figurative expression.

Most of the lines of “Yang Mangngagaw” are hepta- or octosyllabic, i.e., they contain seven (7) to eight (8) syllables, which render a definite poetic rhythm to the epic. Shorter lines, on the other hand, contain as few as two (2) to five (5) syllables.

The rhyming scheme is masculine, where the last syllables of certain words contained in certain lines rhyme. This principle is illustrated in lines 1, 4, 6, and 10, where the last words are “Sabong,” “ballugnon,” “pagkallayon,” and “pyapadayon,” respectively:

1 Ban mo agaw si Sabong

4 bangkaw guwall ballugnon

6 guwall ni pagkallayun
10 di magsalla pyapadayon

Lines 23, 24, 25, and 30 are also rhyming examples with their last words “dogokan,” “tyagnusan,” “kallandungan,” and “sabitan.”

23 syasakay kang dogokan
kang byagid tyagnusan

25 kang kallandungan

30 padullgi kang sabitan

Lines containing end rhymes do not come in succession, as in lines 1, 4, 6, and 10. Two or more lines usually come in between these lines. On the other hand, lines 23, 24, 25, and 30, which contain rhymes come successively. Both these rhyme structures occur throughout the epic.

Figurative language is an important element of verse. The Mandaya are a truly poetic people. The figurative expressions used in “Yang Mangngagaw” reveal this quality.

For instance, all the characters of the epic are given poetic names that embody their distinctive personal qualities. Tibay is Magliwodo ng Pudong (Peace-provider), and he exhibits this quality in the last part of the epic when he willingly decides to end the battle as a sign of respect to Lipig, the god of peace.

1967 Tibay replied,
“It is over.
In the mind there is peace,

1974 “My mind is at peace
because the god has come
whose name is Lipig.”

Ombang is Taga-ombang Kilat (Handsome Lightning), dazzlingly handsome, yet frightening like the lightning. Probably by coincidence, his bride-to-be, Sadyi, or Inung Masadyang Kilat (Beautiful Cheerful Lightning) is named after the same element, unpredictable, beautiful, and awesome. Sabong, on the other hand, is Maynabong nal Layag (Lucky Boat), a name that fits his adventurous spirit that is revealed when he sets out on an uncertain journey and conquered not only the ocean but also his beloved.

The women’s names express the Mandaya’s respect for and adoration of celestial bodies, such as the moon, -stars, and lightning, which are considered symbols of beauty and light: Ballobaynun nam Bullan (Light of the Moon), Makailaw sa Baybay (Light of the Shore), Omal-lag sa Maglimbay (Light for the Traveller), and Busngag nam Pagkallayun (Light of the New Moon).

Any beautiful sight is compared to the moon, such as the hands of the women of Ullaynun (lines 144 to 146),

144 Hands shone as they moved,
fingers shone as they moved,
like the shining moon.

Sabong’s hair anointed with oil (lines 214 to 218),

214 shiny braids of seven
beautifully arranged,
braided masterfully,
as beautiful as the moon

218 dazzlingly bright.

the necklace and other pieces of jewelry worn by Sabong (lines 291 to 298),

291 Do not forget the jewelry.
Do not leave the necklace.
A necklace is acceptable.
Only one [is] worn
beautiful as the moon,
bright as the stars,
shining like the full moon,

298 bright as the moon,

his belt (lines 345 to 347),

345 then [he] put on the belt,
the shining belt,
shiny like the moon.

and Sadya’s beauty (lines 1092 to 1094)

1092 [were] examined and admired.
Like gazing at the moon,
the beauty was admired.

Gold is another recurring image in the epic, symbolic of chastity, purity, and preciousness as in the name of Ullaynun (Chaste) which is also known as Bullawanun (Golden). To the Mandaya, a woman’s chastity is a priceless treasure that makes every woman as precious as gold.

Sabong, in lines 94 to 96, compares Sadya to gold. Like the imagery of the moon, gold also parallels beauty and worth.

94 One so good so beautiful,
gold so attractive,
she is whom I want to wed,

Lines 205 to 209 and 824 to 827 once again express the parallelism between beauty and gold,

205 the tangles of his hair,
shining like gold,
looked very shiny,

209 beautiful with oil.

825 offered the betel nut.
[They] had chosen the best [nuts]
as beautiful as gold,

Sadya’s room is described as filled with gold (lines 140 and 141), worthy for a chaste bride: “to the virgin’s room / [a] room filled with gold.”

Sadya’s house is likewise said to be a “house of gold / house of treasure,” (lines 601 — 603).

All their jewelry are made of gold, the Mandaya’s most precious metal. Symbolic of wealth, gold is clearly seen as worthy of respect and adoration.

Another figurative expression is illustrated in lines 600 — 603, which describe Sabong’s willingness to “crawl under the house,” which tells of a stealthy, secretive intent. Sabong does not literally “crawl under the house,” but he uses cunning when he grabs Sadya when everyone else’s attention is focused on another direction. He gets what he wants before anyone realizes what he is up to.

A very intimate and symbolic scene in the epic is expressed in lines 588 — 598, when Sabong picks a flower from Sadya’s garden. The act is actually a foreshadowing of the abduction of Sadya. The picking of the flower without the owner’s consent parallels that of the abduction of Sadya, who is another man’s bride-to-be.

588 Sabong began to pick
a flower of Masadya

without the owner’s consent,
but, he went ahead,
continued to do so.

Sabong smiled.
Bagani smiled.

595 “You’re the only flower,
the flower I picked,
I shall wed, 5
98 shall possess.

Prior to the taking of the flower, lines 581 — 585 symbolically describe the strong winds and the storms of Lingayin and Lintawanun in the flower garden, calamities that have come to test the strength and the security of the flowers. In lines 571 — 579, the flower garden is described as safe and secure; this invulnerability, however, is challenged by the coming of the strong winds. This again is symbolic of Sabong’s abduction of Sadya.

571 tightly secured by strands,
strong and steady,
even through a storm,
even [when hit] by [the] strong winds
of Lingayin [and the]
storms of Lintawanun.
Even if struck by a storm,
flowers buffeted by a storm
would not fall.
Flowers would not be ruined.
Strong winds of Lingayin,
storms of Lintawanun,
steadily approached,
are coming closer.
The flowers of Masadya,

The flowers in the garden symbolize Sadya. The jewels and strong strands that attach the flowers to the trees symbolize the security she is expected to gain from her marriage to Ombang. They symbolize the strength and safety she experiences with the authoritarian rule of her brothers and the support they provide her. This security and certainty is challenged, and soon broken, with the coming of Sabong, symbolized by the winds and the storms of Lingayin and Lintawanun that have come to ravage the flower garden.

Customs and Beliefs of the Mandaya

The epic contains vivid descriptions of the Mandayan tribal customs and beliefs. One of these is the ritual of sharing and offering betel nut as a sign of goodwill and hospitality. Lines 790 and 791 and 821 to 825 shomi how the women of Ullaynun prepare the betel nut chew to be offered to the guests from Kadigi. Though the hosts are not yet aware of their intent, Sabong and his brothers are welcomed warmly as visitors and invited to partake of the betel nut chew.

790 The women were summoned
“Go and fetch betel.”

821 the young women
fetched and offered
the bowl of betel nut,
offered the betel nut.

825 [They] had chosen the best [nuts]

In lines 2012 to 2020, Maglipig Mal-langitnin, the god of peace, calls the warriors together and as a symbol of the end of the battle, enjoins them to share and chew betel nut:

2012 [He] said, “It is good
because the war is over.
It is ended.
I wish to see
2016 you share betel nut,
[Let us] exchange betel nut
for there is no more war
in the mind.
2020 Let there be peace.”

This practice of showing goodwill is still observed by the Mandaya. But in consideration of non-Mandayan guests, the natives usually refrain from offering betel nut chew. They offer coffee, softdrinks, or cigarettes in its stead.

Another custom that signifies hospitality is the offering of wine, as revealed in Episode IV, where Dyuyan, the leader of Ullaynun, commands his brother Dagyu to fetch the best wine for the guests. Prior to the arrival of the brothers from Kadigi, Dyuyan has been entertaining the group of Tibay with the wine of Makaway.

A traditional wedding practice of the Mandaya involves the marriage dowry. Episode VII describes how Sadya is prevented from coming out of her room in the absence of a dowry. The bride’s room is built in such a way that the corridor leading to it is blocked with several partitions or walls low enough for a person to step over. Offerings of gold, jewelry, or whatever the bride demands must be laid at her feet before the bride crosses each block (lines 1177, 1179-1184, 1190-1191, 1197-1201).

1177 [She] must step over blocks,
1179 began to step over the blocks,
crossed the partitions,
passed the divisions,
then [she] returned to [her] bed[room]
“[I] must first give a test, [then]
1184 I promise to come out.”

1190 “Before I move [and]
place your payment [here],

1197 offer something beautiful
with the dowry,
you will have me.
Without the dowry,
1201 you couldn’t have me.”

Her brothers and relatives may likewise demand anything from the suitor (lines 1185-1189, 1202-1204).

1185 “Name the price.”
“Dyuyan, [you] must decide
the price of your sister,

1189 your sister’s worth.”

1202 Bagani gave Dyuyan
seven necklaces,

seven jewels,

The coming out of the bride is also considered a most awaited event when she reveals herself to the guests in full splendor and beauty (lines 1393-1400).

1393 Then [she] slowly came out,
came out of the room.
Look, Andi has come out
as if [she has] already [been] allowed to.
Woman of beauty,
woman so beautiful
went straight towards
1400 where the mat was,

One observable aspect of the epic is that only the elder siblings, as in the case of Tibay and Dyuyan, take charge of the arrangements. In lines 1606 to 1614, Sadya’s cry is described as “so loud that her brother feared it might reach the grave of their parents.” This fact explains Dyuyan’s role in the marriage arrangements of his sister, Sadya. With the parents gone, the eldest sibling takes charge of the family.

Although they are revered for their beauty and virtue, women in the Mandaya culture are ranked lower than men. They usually serve the men and rarely show aggressiveness or disobedience. One example of this is Sadya’s inability to protest against her coming marriage to Ombang, a man she obviously does not love. Another example is Malimbungon na Panday assisting her brother, Sabong in his preparations for the journey. She combs and fixes his hair (lines 180-184), and helps him dress up (lines 321-329).

180 sat with her back to the wall.
[She] combed the hair of Sabong,
combed then ruffled [it].
Linimbong combed and combed,
184 tried hard to comb.

321 The young girl stood,
the woman stood up,
took the chest,
the chest of gold,
chest made of gold.
[She] took out the clothes,
set aside
the ones [that were] not chosen,
329 the clothes of Bagani,

Furthermore, the Mandayan women could not leave their rooms unless they are summoned outside or given permission to do so by their elders (lines 241-245, 790, 1076, 1174-1176, and 1395-1396).

241 Malimbungon na Panday
slowly headed outside,
proceeded outside,
[She] seemed to have been permitted,
245 given permission,

790 The women were summoned,

1076 the sister was allowed, outside,
summoned through the doorway.

1174 that Dyuyan
would send his sister out
of her room.

1395 Look, Andi has come out
as if [she has] already [been] allowed to.

Despite this discrimination, a beautiful and chaste woman is always made to sit on a dagmay mat, a sign of respect and fondness, since the dagmay is considered as a special piece of cloth known for its exquisite designs (lines 251-253; 803-805, 1397-1402).

251 “You must sit here
on the red dagmay mat,
253 on the floor laid with red.”

803 The most beautiful maiden
went to the living room,
805 spread out a dagmay mat,

1398 woman so beautiful
went straight towards
where the mat was,
the red mat was laid.
1402 [She] then squatted, sat [down].

Superstition is another aspect of Mandaya customs and beliefs. The epic mentions the following superstitious beliefs: when a jar of wine is broken, this would bring bad luck (lines 1314-1319); a bride must sit facing east and not west to avoid misfortune (1404-1417); it is unfortunate if the bride slips on her way out (1220-1222); if a woman declines a glass of wine offered to her, this would bring a curse on her family (991-999). This is the reason, why Ballobaynun nam Bullan finally accepts the wine offered by Luntad; if a woman wails so loud, enough to waken the dead, this would bring a curse to her and her household (1603-1616). The limukon, a bird the Mandaya respects, has a cry which is rarely heard and is unlike other birds’ cries. To the Mandaya, its cry is a bad omen (682-683).

Values and Ideals

The Mandaya are a proud people who adhere to certain ideals and values, such as beauty, chastity, material wealth, close family ties, pride, determination, and respect for gods and spirits.

Because the Mandaya are ardent admirers of beauty, they always offer the best and most beautiful gifts to beautiful women.

They adore beauty not only in their women and their heroes, but in the things of nature as well. They love to dress up extravagantly. During special occasions, they adorn themselves with numerous pieces of jewelry, mostly gold, and wear their most beautiful and most attractive dresses. This reveals not only their love for beauty but also their vanity. They enjoy showing off their beauty and their material wealth evident in their extravagant display of golden jewelry and the expensive dowry.

The Mandaya give utmost importance to a woman’s chastity. A mere touch from a man is considered degrading and a violation of her virtue. Thus, when Sabong grabs and kisses Sadya, everyone feels sorry for her since she has somehow “lost her chastity,” making her the possession of the man who violates her.

When Sabong decides to journey to Ullaynun, his brothers, though somehow opposed to his purpose, accompany him. Although two of his brothers refuse to fight beside him, his other brother, Lanus and the rest come to fight with him.

the journey was on its way.

Bagani came out,
367 started to leave,
and the rest followed.

1763 Lanus called out
[to] his brother Luntad Diwata,

1769 [There are] too many enemies

This supportive attitude is also revealed in the way women take care of each other, especially the way they assist the bride and make sure that she looks her best for her wedding.

166 oh, how Al-lag
guarded the Beloved closely,
watched over the bride
169 who had been paid right.

1069 Sadya had long been
staying inside,

1074 Omal-lag sa Maglimbay,
1077 summoned through the doorway.
[She] sat down to rest,
sat with back turned.
[She] began combing her hair, combing.

1117 already decorated
with each piece of jewelry.
Arranged carefully [was]
every beautiful gem,

bejewelled all over.
1122 “Inung Masadyang Kilat,

1662 Ballobaynun nam Bullan,
sister-in-law, did not leave,
watched carefully.
The bride was guarded,
1666 watched with sympathy.

On the other hand, the women’s obedient and servile attitude to their brothers is a sign of respect for their authority. These instances reflect the closeness of the Mandaya family.

The Mandaya are proud. They are quick to defend and fight for their honor. They take what they deem is rightfully theirs, like the way Sabong fights for his love for Sadya, and the way Tibay and Ombang challenge Sabong to a fight for abducting Sadya, the woman engaged to Ombang, the woman whom he has rightfully served, and whose marriage dowry he has paid.

If Sabong had been a weakling, he wouldn’t have pushed through with his plan to go to Ullaynun, to try his luck and to abduct his beloved Sadya. He knows that the journey would be difficult and uncertain. But determination and strength of character prevailed, virtues that helped him achieve his goal.

Though it is nearly at the end of the epic that a god from the skyworld takes part in the action, the high regard and respect that the Mandayas give to gods and spirits is evident. Not one among the fighting men dares to disobey Maglipig Mal-langitnin. They humbly stop the battle just to please the god of peace. With this attitude, everything turns out well and the epic has a happy ending.
Their respect for gods and spirits enables the Mandaya warriors to swallow their pride and stop fighting. The intervention of Maglipig Mal-langitnin in the battle illustrates the critical role that gods and spirits play in the lives of the Mandaya.

The Mandaya believes that there are supernatural beings who monitor the affairs of humans. He acknowledges the power that these beings have over ordinary people. These supernatural beings who live in the skyworld and in nature greatly influence the decisions that humans make. To disobey the gods would elicit their anger and thus bring down a curse or a punishment on the errant person. On the other hand, obedience to their commands would mean good fortune and blessings. The gods are both feared and respected. That is why the Mandaya strive to please the gods and the spirits so that no ill-fortune would befall them. Thus, Sabong and Tibay know better than to continue their battle in the presence of Maglipig Mal-langitnin, the god of peace.

Conclusions

1) “Yang Mangngagaw” possesses all of the essential elements of a Philippine epic.

a. Sustained length — It contains 2,020 lines.

b. Based on oral tradition — The native informants learned the epic from their parents and grandparents who taught it to them by word of mouth.

c. Contains supernatural events, such as, a garment that misbehaves and shines brightly when thrown to the ground; knives, shields, jewelry and gold that float on the ocean and the river; a house that trembles in fear and begs the warriors to step down and continue their fight in the field; metal spears that break when the god Lipig steps on them; and the ocean which Lipig summons to stop the battle.

d. Heroic deeds — Sabong doesn’t allow his anger to cause him to hurt the people around him, but takes it out on a piece of cloth; Sabong maneuvers the boat alone through raging rivers and oceans; Sabong saves Sadya from an unhappy marriage; Tibay and Sabong respect the house’s request, and later, set aside their anger for the sake of peace.

e. Versified form— When chanted, the epic’s rhythm is totally derived from the singers’ rhythmic gestures and utterances. In its written form, the epic achieves its rhythm from the constancy of seven to eight syllables in each line, and two to five syllables in shorter lines. It also follows a masculine rhyming scheme, although the lines that contain final words that rhyme do not come in succession all the time. The epic is divided into ten parts based on the flow of events, and likewise into stanzas to emphasize the character’s dialogues and the descriptive as well as narrative stanzas. Figurative and poetic expressions are also used.

f. Customs and beliefs — Offering betel nut and wine for goodwill and hospitality; the marriage dowry; the authority of the elder siblings to arrange marriages; subservience of women; superstitious beliefs about misfortune related to a broken wine jar, the bride facing west, the bride slipping on her way out of the room, refusal of a proferred glass of wine, a loud cry, and the hearing of the limukon’s cry. All these are bad omens or curses.

g. Life-values and ideals — Values both desirable and undesirable are presented in the epic. Desirable values include: beauty, chastity, close family ties, pride, determination and respect for gods, spirits, and nature. Undesirable values include: vanity, love for material wealth, selfishness, and treachery.

2) “Yang Mangngagaw” is an epic that ends happily with the reconciliation of the warriors. There are no casualties in battle.

References Cited and Appendix A Referred to pdf file.

Worldview, Community and Lumad Poetics

Take note. Ehhrm. (Pause) Here we are gathered to talk about Philippine poetics, and my topic is about Lumad poetics. What/   will do is present some Lumad story-telling conventions, some myths and legends, and some new Lumad literary productions in order to show the relationship between literature, worldview and community. Finally, I will present the ethnokinship theory of literature and explore its implications to Philippine national literature.

You have probably noticed that I have just used a Lumad literary convention. This particular verbal convention comes from the Arumanen Manobos of North Cotabato. To catch the attention of listeners, the storyteller always opens with an obligatory “Hane” (Take note), followed by throat clearing and a pause.

Compare the Manobo verbal opening convention with modem storytelling convention. As we do not have the luxury of face-to-face storytelling, and we must compete for the attention of the literary editor, we have to do a lot textual acrobatics in our very first paragraph. Otherwise, our work will be thrown into the waste basket.

Another verbal convention involves the introduction to the setting of each scene. If the action occurs near, the phrase to use is “Here we are.” If far, the phrase to use is “There we are.” Here we are, talking about Lumad poetics.

The rest of the introductory paragraph above is pure Jesuit. It is Jesuit pedagogical convention for the speaker or writer to tell the audience what he is going to tell them, then he tells them, then he tells them that he has just told them.

But to go back to our topic. Because of the vast body of unrecorded Lumad oral literature, Dr. E. Arsenio Manuel’ had long ago advised folklore researchers to go on a collecting and archiving mission to preserve folkloristic materials, which include folk literature. Famous anthropologist H. Otley Beyer’ had made a similar suggestion. Fay-Cooper Cole who made ethnographic studies of Davao and Bukidnon tribes in the 1910s pioneered attempts to reconstruct past society and culture thru folklore, which involved a lot of literary materials. Dean Fansler who collected folktales from Christianized areas was interested in speculating about the origins of the tales and how they are diffused.

Indeed, apart from the verbal conventions, the study of folk literature of which Lumad literature is a part, can yield many other interesting information useful to sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, psychologists, historians and many others. Current interests, at least in our school, focus on the values embedded in Lumad poetics for use in values education.

Other interests seek to discover Lumad spirituality, or even systems of governance. Others yet again only seek inspiration from the oral narratives for story materials in theatre productions, including copying of music, chanting patterns, dance steps and costumes.

It is therefore appropriate to ask: Why does Lumad literature allow for such diverse approaches and provide fruitful results in various disciplines?

Folklorists will tell us that Lumad literature has several functions. It is entertainment; it is an educational and instructional tool; it serves to justify rituals and institutions; and it guides the members of the community to follow certain patterns of behavior.

In effect, take note. Ehhrm. (Pause.) Lumad literature embodies the Lumad’s worldview, and as such it is the very record of the life of the community, both its past and its present.

Let us recount a Lumad creation myth.

“When the world first began there were one man and one woman and they lived on Mt. Apo near Sibulan. The man was Tuglay and the woman Tuglibong The place had many fruits; the forest was filled with game, so it was easy for them to get food. After a while, they had many children, both boys and girls who, when they grew up, married.

“One day, Tuglay and Tuglibong told their oldest boy and girl to go far away across the ocean, for there was a good place for them. So the two left and were riot seen again. Later their descendants, the white people, would come back to Davao.

“When Tuglay and Tuglibong died, they went to the sky where they became spirits. Shortly after their death the country suffered a great drought. No rain fell for three years, so that there was no food in the land. The people said: ‘Manama is angry and is punishing us. We must go to a new place where there is food or we shall die’

“Two started on the way toward the sunset, carrying stones with them from the Sibulan river. They settled in a good land where there were water, plants, pigs and deer. Since then they have become Maguindanaos because of the stones which they carried with them when they left Sibulan.”

Let us quicken the story now, to use another convention…

“One pair brought a basket—biraan–and so the children are now called Blaans. Another pair brought a doll, and the children are now the Atas. The other pairs went in other directions. Finally, only one pair remained at Sibulan. They wanted to go away, but were so weak from hunger and thirst that they could not walk far. One day, the man crawled out onto the fields and saw a single stalk of tubo – sugar cane. He cut a piece and water began to flow so the couple finally had a drink. Because of this they called the place Bagobo (Bagong tubo) and the people have since borne that name.”

What do we have here? First I draw your attention to the fact that Tuglay and Tuglibong who were the ancestors of all human beings, but particularly of the Bagobos, became spirits, thus establishing the kinship between the said tribe and the spirit world. Another point is the abode of the ancestors, Mt. Apo, and the home of the tribe itself, Sibulan.

To us these are trivial literary matters, but to the Bagobos these constitute sacred literature that affirms their worldview and establishes their claim to their homeland. Anthropologists and other social scientists would probably be able to trace the origin of the Bagobos prior to reaching Davao. That would be interesting, but what is more important is that they have staked a claim on Mt. Apo and Sibulan. By naming these places, they came to own them. These places that didn’t have a meaning before acquired a meaning and entered Bagobo history.

The land, the spirits, the people and their worldview define and create the community. You cannot imagine the Bagobos without Mt. Apo, Sibulan and Tuglay and Tuglibong and Manama.

When the Spanish Jesuit missionaries encountered the Bagobos in the late 1860s, they were able to record an eight-level genealogy among these people. In 1911 American ethnographer Fay-Cooper Cole found that both the young and the old still knew Saling-olop who begat Bato who begat Boas who begat Basian who begat Lumbay who begat Banga who begat Panguilan who begat Manib who begat Tungkaling. Manib was contemporaneous with Jose Oyanguren who conquered Davao Gulf in 1848, while Tungkaling lived during the American colonial period.

Indeed, a teal community can and should trace its origins all the way back to its very first ancestors. It is what binds them together. The past continues to live and is continually relived. Storytelling in verse or in prose, whether chanted or narrated recreates and reaffirms this link. We will find many ,examples of origin myths and legends that mark out the parameters that define the community, drawn from a common worldview. Lumad poetics then not only performs a constitutive function, creating meaning and reality; but its retellling also recreates the meaning, and reestablishes and reaffirms a real sense of community.

Observe how this operates among the other Lumads in the simple act of naming places.

Places are usually named after certain landmarks, or they could be named to commemorate events or to memorialize an ancestor or hero or deity.

Mamacaw is a tree and is the name of several barangays located in Davao del Sur and Davao del Norte. Kadaatan refers to a place where there are many daats or the triangular-stem grass. Here is an example of a place named to commemorate an event:

“Once upon a time, there was a male giant named Agasi who terrorized the Arakan Manobos. He cooked his captives in a big kawa (wok). One day, Apo Agio one of the greatest Manobo ancestors, fought and killed Agasi by piercing him with a poisoned spear. This made Agasi stomp and dance in terrible pain. The earth shook as he fell to the ground. The place on which he danced is now called Sinayawan. One of his feet landed in Nassut (which means foot), and his palms fell in Mahapalad.”

Hane. Ehhrm. (Pause.) His penis and his balls fell in… guess where?

Among the Dulangan Manobos, there’s a barangay named Lagubang derived from the oldest resident of the area, while a nearby sitio bears the name of his wife, Kapatagan. Barangay Midpanga was named in honor of a certain datu who went hunting in the forest one morning and never returned. His family and relatives searched for him and found him dead under a big tree. Since then they have called the place Midpanga. Among the Blaans in South Cotabato, they have a sitio named Mali named after a creek called Malo which means diwata (or guardian spirit). They say the creek is like the diwata who is sometimes there and sometimes not there. The creek has water flowing in some portions, but has no water in other portions. But eventually the water emerges and empties into the Silway River.”

Another motif in place name legends is death by drowning of an important person in the community. The Tran River was named after Datu Tran of the Teduray”, and the Kulaman River was named after Datu Kulaman of the Dulangans.” These rivers are located in the province of Sultan Kudarat, itself named after a fierce Maguindanao sultan.

All of these legends have the function of making things around the community familiar to the members. They are in intimate relation with their surroundings. The land, the caves, the mountains, the rivers, the creeks, the forests — they belong to the community. The act of naming is an act of appropriation, an act of community ownership.

It is not only in the land that the naming occurs. Even the sky is “owned” by the community. We are familiar with the Greek zodiac signs and such legends as Castor and his twin Polydeuces17 forming Gemini. What are these but attempts to make sense of the cosmos by making the heavenly bodies familiar to the Greeks. Among the Bagobos, they will point out the Balatik, which is shaped like a trap in the sky. When it appears at a certain angle, it signals the planting season.” Among the Atas, there Is Dawa, a cluster of stars as plentiful as millet.19 The Tedurays will point out three bright stars that make up Seretar, the hunter, and two smaller ones nearby making up the jaw of a pig that Seretar had killed. There is another bright star identified as Fegeferafad, a man known as a brave defender of his family’s honor. With him are his three cousins.’ Lumad poetics then is an act of communitization whereby what is strange or alien becomes familiar to the community.” The earth, the sky, the water, the forest, the people, their ancestors, their heroes and the spirits all have a place in the community worldview and are understood intimately. All these establish, foster and strengthen distinct ethnokinship ties. By ethnokinship I mean the organization of people according to certain ethnic identifiers such as race, ancestry, language, traditions, beliefs, customs, rituals, practices and history. The more elements of identity people have in common, the stronger their bond and attachment to each other. The family, clan, tribe and nation constitute the levels of ethnokinship communities.

Hane. Ehhrm. (Pause). In an ethnokinship community there is no gap between storyteller and listeners because the storyteller draws his or her vocabulary, imagery, symbols, and themes from a worldview shared by the entire community. Or to borrow from Saussure,23 the storyteller and the listeners possess a common langue, so that the storyteller’s parole or individual utterance is immediately grasped by the listeners.

The act of imagining is always a community act and has a recognizable community stamp or brand. This is what makes a specific Lumad poetics unique, helping define the identity of the community, as reinforced by rituals and other cultural and traditional practices.

But it should not be understood that Lumad poetics is fixed nor static. New materials are being created as the community members encounter new experiences and integrate them into their common langue. Most members can do extemporaneous compositions. A welcome chant created on the spot will greet visitors. They may use traditional forms, but the content will be new. New stories and their variants are created as new heroes are born, sometimes shared only in secret among themselves.

One such case involves the exploits of Mangunlayon, the Tagacaolo tribal ward assistant leader. He assassinated the first American politico-military governor of Davao District, Lt. Edward C. Bolton, in 1906 in the Malalag area, Davao del Sur. This was at the height of the Lumad unrest caused by the entry of American settlers who set up plantations in Davao in the early years of American occupation. While some Lumads can already talk about it, those closely associated with the assassination are not so open. The reason us that the Americans are still present — that is, their descendants still own some of the plantations in the area. As American hegemony prevailed in the entire country. Mangunlayon became villain instead of hero, and was lost in obscurity instead of becoming famous. However, underground heroic legends about Mangunlayon circulated among the Lumads of Davao del Sur.

As we all know, the Lumads today have been effectively minoritized, marginalized and excluded in mainstream Philippine society. Oftentimes, they are caught in the crossfire between government and insurgent forces, and there are reports of genocide perpetrated against them. It is the sad end of a once proud people who resisted foreign subjugation, only to find themselves subordinated in the present political set-up. In Lumad conferences therefore, we will usually hear Lumads lamenting their fate. The more politicized will speak with angry voices as they recall a bygone era when the community was whole and supreme in their own land.

If they say that Lumad literature is a record of community life itself, will we find this new situation of the Lumads reflected in their new artistic creations?

In 1989, the Development Education Media Services where I was executive director produced a song tape album if authentic Mandaya songs and music as part of our program to preserve Lumad culture. The four Mandaya artists, which included an old baylan (priestess), had a free hand in choosing their repertoire. What came out was a revelation, since it was the first time I noticed the theme of community lament in Lumad literary creation.

As you may be aware, an important aspect in the scholarly study of folk literature is establishing traditionally of folk materials by subjecting them to the so-called vertical and horizontal tests. Traditional means old, to put it simply. The vertical test or the three-generation test seeks to know if the informant has learned the material from his or her grandparent(s), as the very least. The further the genelogical line that is can be traced to, the better. The horizontal test meanwhile seeks to find several versions of the same tale, which would also attest its age. However, in the album production, the Mandaya artists chanted many materials that show their present plight as marginalized people. The theme of lament comes out very strongly. The baylan chants: “… Our situation as natives/ As Mandaya / We were all so soon forgotten / O we have become outcasts / Because of the evil ones / The rapacious exploiters / They told us / You will not improve / You will not progress / Just give them (arts/designs) to us / Give us your gold / Give us your most precious things.”

Another Mandaya chanter laments: “All our lands are gone / O, gone is out pristine world / O, caused by strangers / Those foreigners.”

The significance of the chants is that it affirms the view that literature is a community record, the community’s past and present life. Literature is ethnokinship worldview and record. While the traditionality of materials may be very important, and in fact it is being used as evidence for establishing ancestral domain claims of the Lumads, that should not make new Lumad literary productions less important, for these are the continuations of their life as a community.

Using Aristotelian mimetic, we can say that the object of imitation in these new literary outputs is the community’s lament of the loss of their land, and the threat of disappearance of their worldview and ultimately of their identity as a culture and as a people. This is not an imitation of an individual ‘s lament alone, but an imitation of the lament of the entire community.

Later I would also find echoes of the same theme among the Tbolis of South Cotabato. According to the legend, Lake Sebu was owned by Boi Henwu. When the goddess ascended to the sky, she decreed that only the Tbolis would be the stewards of the lake. But today, we hear this lament from The Dream Weavers-. “This lake of Sebu/ Other people claim it/ Other people lord over it/ The Thai have no place to go/ The outsiders have prevailed/ They rule over the Tboli/ Do you understand my song?/ There is nothing you can do/ We have lost everything that we had/ They are the only ones who benefit…”

It is lamentable indeed that the community of the Lumads is being threatened. It is not the scope of this paper to discuss the reasons for this, except to observe that the world of the Lumads is shrinking, and could be lost in another generation or so. While we, who belong to the majority have our own Bohol province, Tagalog region or Ilocano region that ensures our survival as a community, the Bagobos, the Tbolis, the Subanons, have no such secure home bases because of massive intrusions by foreigners.

With the subordination of their community to the majority community, their culture and worldview are also being subordinated to the majority culture and worldview. This situation has the effect of a double alienation. They are alienated from their own world, and they are alienated from the majority world. Hence the lament. Hence the anger. The theme of heroism of past heroic legends and epics has been replaced by the theme of despair. To be sure, some of the Lumads are not taking this passively and have began to assert themselves. Some have even launched occasional paggaws or wars to defend their land, but this is subject of another paper.29What interests us here for the moment is their literature and its place in their community.

Based on the discussion above, I now present the general features of the ethnokinship theory of literature. This theory advances the view that literature serves the entire community. The myths, epics, legends and other artistic creations are community acts of imagining and appropriating. They are entertainment, instruction, justifier of rituals, both sacred and secular history, social guide and control. That is, literature is the community worldview that unifies the community and strengthens community identity and loyalty. All aesthetic expressions are community-based and are therefore familiar and understood by the entire community. Literature seeks to build and rebuild community.

Now while we are witness to the marginalization and minoritization of Lumad culture and worldview, and even the possible extermination of the Lumads as a people, how do we, as the majority, fare? We have survived physically as a people, but how about our literature and worldview as a community?

First, an observation. After 100 years of existence as a country, we still talk of nation-building or forging a national identity as a task not only of literature, but also of the other arts and other cultural and political institutions. My theory as to why it is taking us so long to have a so-called national identity is that we are composed of many different communities, or ethnokinship identities. In effect, we are many nations, some big, some very small. These vertical ethnokinship splits practically make it impossible to create a single national identity.

Apart from the multiethnokinship character of the majority, we will find that our worldview is truncated as an effect of conquest and subjugation, so that the worldviews of our conquerors had been grafted into our very thought processes. Three hundred years in a Spanish convent, 50 years in Hollywood — this is the colorful description of our condition. As we all know, grafting is good practice in agriculture, but in social engineering this results in a monstrosity — the bifurcation not only of. personality but also of community. We have an educated elite heavily influenced by the conqueror’s worldviews and languages, and the vast masa with their own worldviews and languages. These horizontal splits within communities complete the fragmentation of the national community, which incidentally, makes us easy prey to other more powerful ethnokinship systems.

As a complex society with many communities, we will necessarily find many literatures in our country. Instead of reflecting the worldview of a single community, our fragmented literatures present many competing worldviews and loyalties. Within the context of Philippine society, literature has become a site of struggle because the processes of political and cultural integration and assimilation are also being resisted by counter processes of ethnokinship, as well as class, assertion. Instead of being a site of unity to fight external battles, literature has become a site of internal struggles. We are a national community continually at war with itself, which translate, at the political level, into a weak, unstable state.

This condition also afflicts many former colonies all over the world, offering many interesting challenges for poets and storytellers, nationalists or otherwise. Let us mention the responses of some of the better-known African writers.

Nigeria, like most former colonial countries, is composed of many nations which were forcibly brought together under one colonial rule, in their case, by the British. Since it became independent in 1963, it has experienced at least two secessionist attempts. The secessionist Biafran Republic was crushed in a brutal two-year civil war. Apart from this problem of multiethnic composition, there is also the question of an English-speaking elite. Within this context, Chinua Achebe, an Ibo acclaimed for his novel Things Fall Apart, asks: “Can a writer ever begin to know who his community is, let alone devise strategies for relating to it?”” Achebe has always problematized his use of the English language, but ends up justifying its use because of the “unassailable logic of its convenience.” But in his works he attempts to construct a new English by imitating the speech patterns of the Ibo community.

Wole Soyinka, the first African Nobel Laureate does not concern himself with the language issue. Writing in English, he worries more about how the African world can be understood in terms of African cultural concepts and categories. He does this by making “mythic or ritual concepts” relevant to modern Africa. For example, he identifies the Yoruba deity Ogun, god of iron and war, with electricity, thus combining Western culture with African traditions.

Meanwhile, Ngugi wa Thiongo of Kenya makes clear his decision with regard to the relationship between language and culture. He states that “the choice of language and the use to which it is put is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their social environments.”  Awarded a British Council Scholarship, he was the first African member of the University College in Nairobi, Kenya where he pushed for the study of African literatures at a time when they were virtually unheard of Having identified his community, Ngugi converted to the use of Gikuyu and has been writing in his own language ever since.

Ngugi’s complete return to his community actually reenacts the solution of some European countries confronted with the problems of fragmentation and identity. In the 18th century, Germany was a confusion of more than 20 independent states. As the Romantic Movement swept Europe, a new nationalist mood also began to rise, represented by the Sturm and Drang in literary circles of which Johannes Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) were the more prominent members.

Herder encouraged the study of folklore because it is “not only a view of the past, but a means to create a unique and characteristic formal literature of its own.” He pushed the idea of a “world of nations defined by vernacular and by folk culture.” He is credited with the adoption of the German language as the medium of literature in Germany which during his time was considered inferior to French and Latin.

Goethe, meanwhile “freed the German language from clumsiness and foreign literary domination in a vast output of easy, natural and personal lyrics …” His dramas, of which Faust is his masterpiece, and novels have influenced German literature for generations.

Folk literature likewise preserved and developed nationalism in Finland. Under Sweden for 700 years, and under Russia for 100 years, the Finns were perhaps more confused as a people than Filipinos are today because their subjugators were powerful neighboring colonizers. Their elite, and the entire reading public, were Swedish-speaking. But once the nationalists made a decision as to who their community was, there were no ifs and buts, no equivocation whatsoever, in their choice of language. Kalevala, the Finnish epic reconstructed by Elias Lonnrot from oral traditions of rural folks and published in 1849, helped spread the fire of nationalism, and the crude Finnish of peasants, servants and tradespeople, would later become the language of the entire community, elite and masa. And that was how the Finnish worldview and community were finally restored after almost a millennium of subjugation and marginalization.

Confronted by the plurality of traditional communities in our country our political and cultural leaders sought and continue to seek unificatior by trying to transform all the communities into a new community of English speakers in the image of the colonizers.” The subordinating processes to unite all the ethnokinship systems operated and continue to operate in all fields. After one hundred years, this new imagined community’s is still non-existent. What has been created instead is an intelligentsia whose members are recruited from all the communities, but who have become divorced from their very own communities. They have become a separate community whose borrowed worldviews have become dominant, but whose loyalties are suspect. Having identified themselves with the colonizers, they couldn’t care less about their own masa, their roots. Other well-intentioned elite seek to uproot the masa and reshape them into their own borrowed image. All political and cultural apparatuses, chiefly the educational system, have been used to achieve this end. And speaking in the parole of a foreign worldview, the chanters and storytellers of the elite are no longer understood in the ethnokinship langue. The symbols and the images are no longer familiar to the community.

What is tragic in all this is that the majority culture is the product of subjugation, and therefore it has a negative self image of itself While it has subordinated the Lumads, the majority culture is in turn subordinated by foreign cultures. Many analysts have already taken note of the tendency of the subjugated to efface the defeated self and put on the mask of the colonizer to hide the sense of national inferiority complex. Ashamed of themselves, many Filipinos, particularly the educated, would rather be Americans, or Japanese or British rather than be Filipinos, the worst form of colonial mentality.”

I suggest that a lot of us, myself included, belong to this new community which has no roots, and whose worldview is neither here nor there. I am sure a lot of us have asked ourselves this question: Who is my community? Well, who among us have gone the Achebe or Soyinka way? How many of us have gone the Ngugi way? And how many of us are simply lost on the way…?

Although our problems are complex, there is no need to lose hope. Our multiethnic and multireligious composition may be the source of our weakness now, but it can be the source of our strength if we reimagine a new community that will respect the differences and know how to give full play to the energies of the various ethnokinship systems in the country. Perhaps the bigger problematique is the horizontal split—how the disjointed elite and masa can reclaim each other and restore the community. For only then can the community become whole again and face up to the challenges of a highly competitive world.

In this regard, it may be appropriate to borrow the image from a Japanese animated TV series—the popular Voltes 5. This machine is composed of separate independent units, but when faced with a threat, they “volt in” to create an invincible superhero. It is my view that the Filipino elite and masa need to volt in to become an invincible ethnokinship unit.

In the meantime, in Lumad poetics there is no gap between poet or storyteller and his/her listeners. They speak the same language; they have common symbols drawn from the same worldview. The poet or storyteller is capable of new and fresh expressions, but these are always within the context of a familiar world. Threatened by more powerful forces, Lumad poetics has taken on a note of lament and of anger.

The Mandaya chanter issues this call: All those who can hear/ Ye all our friends/ Let us all awake/ Let us not sleep in unconcern/ Lest our race be gone/ Let us help each other/ Let us unite!”

Somewhere some war drums are being sounded, and the balyans are summoning the spirits for help in expelling the evil forces who are stealing their land, their gold, their arts and craft.

What will happen to the Lumads as a people and as a culture? Where will they go? Only the future can answer that, but for the Kulaman Manobos of Davao del Sur, they know where they want to go. To the skyworld, to paradise.

And when it was time to baloy (go to heaven), so a legend says, the tinayok or airship appeared and Lomabot gathered his seven wives, his son, and his rooster. His favorite wife and the most industrious among them, Wolispo, asked permission to gather camote for the trip. Lomabot said yes, but for her to hurry, instructing her to stop gathering camote when she reaches the part of the camote vine that has yellow leaves because it is the signal that the Tinayok is leaving And so Wolispo went to the camote patch. So intent was she about filling her buon (head basket) that she forgot his warning to stop after reaching the yellow leaves. She continued gathering camote, only stopping when her buon was filled. She hurriedly went to the tinayok, but it had taken off and was now cruising the sky She ran after it, calling Lomabot’s name. She stumbled and fell, and stood up and ran again. But the tinayok was already very far. And so she stopped by the river, sat on a stone and wept. Lomabot happened to look down and saw Wolispo. He took pity on her and transformed her into stone. Today, you will see a weeping stone figure in Lapuan, Don Marcelino, and people will tell you it is Wolispo who was left behind during the baby. Lomabot likewise saw his faithful dog Tuyang chasing a deer! He transformed both dog and deer into stone, and today you will see Tuyang chasing a deer in Caburan, Don Marcelino.

When the busaws (evil spirits) saw the tinayok, they were angry. They took a long bamboo pole and maneuvered it to hook and pull the tinayok down, but the tinayok was too far up they could not reach it anymore. One busaw blew his nose at the tinayok, and a huge glob of phlegm stuck to the back of the airboat, causing it to shake vigorously and to tilt precariously. Lomabot’s whetstone fell, and now you can see this giant whetstone in Santa Cruz, Davao del Sur. The rooster crowed, saying: “Scrape it off; scrape it off!” And Bengit, one of the wives, used the tuwg shell which is for mixing with betel chew, to scrape off the phlegm. The pieces fell on the busaws who ran in all directions. The tinayok regained its balance and went on.

In desperation, the busaws threw huge stones at the tinayok. One stone hit Mt. Apo, splitting its peak. Today you can see this huge scar on the east side of the mountain. The tinayok continued its flight northward to the skyworld without further incident. And so Lomabot and his family reached paradise. It is said Lomabot will come back again and bring his entire community with him to paradise.

Hane. Ehhrm. (Pause ) I know that our own journey in search of worldview and community will be as exciting and as perilous as Lomabot’s trip.

Toward a People-Centered Peace and Development Framework: Some Lessons from Conflict-Affected Communities in Mindanao

The peace and development nexus has often been invoked by government functionaries as a precondition for a stabilizing and rapidly growing economy and overall human development. Almost every government undertaking has reportedly been planned with a peace and development component. Even military campaigns are staged to “promote peace.” In many parts of Mindanao, this reason is invoked by the government when its armed forces conduct search and destroy operations in communities allegedly to “neutralize” so-called criminal or lawless elements or to quell every form of dissent from communities that have suffered long years of government neglect and poor governance from its local officials. But as we are all aware, far from making peace and promoting development, these have instead stoked the fires of discontent and pushed people to do desperate and violent acts. Continued militarization in many rural areas of Mindanao has withered rural economies, created more poor people, and made the poor even poorer.

Conflict-affected communities in Mindanao: An overview

The conflict-affected communities in Mindanao are concentrated in the provinces composing the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). These provinces are Maguindanao, Lanao del Sur, Basilan, Sulu, and Tawi-Tawi. In addition to these provinces, the city of Marawi in Lanao del Sur also opted to become a part of the ARNIM in the plebiscite conducted in 2001. The province of Basilan and the city of Marawi are “new” members of the controversial region. The four other provinces were the original component provinces of the ARMM during its creation in 1987.

In this paper, I am describing only two of these component provinces, as they are also the hardest hit by armed conflict from 2000 to 2003. These are Maguindanao and Lanao del Sur.

Maguindanao

Until its creation as a separate province on 23 November 1973, Maguindanao was part of what was once the biggest province in the country, the Empire Province of Cotabato. Presidential Decree No. 341 issued by the late President Ferdinand Marcos created three separate provinces from the Empire Province, namely; Maguindanao, Sultan Kudarat, and Cotabato. Subsequently, two more provinces were carved out: South Cotabato and Sarangani.

The province is bounded on the north by Lanao del Sur, on the east by Cotabato province, on the south by Sultan Kudarat, and on the west !237 the Moro Gulf. The province is accessible by air through the Awang ‘airport located in the municipality of Datu Odin Sinsuat and by sea through two ports in Parang town.

With a total land area of 547,410 hectares, Maguindanao has a predominantly flat terrain, with undulating hills and mountains. Its climate is highly suited for agriculture, and its main crops are rice, corn, and coconuts.

As of 2000, the province had a total of twenty-two municipalities and more than 600 mainly rural barangays with a total population of 801,102. The number of towns has increased to twenty-five in 2004 with the creation of three new towns: Datu Unsay (near Shariff Aguak and Datu Piang), Datu Saudi Ampatuan (formerly the barangay of Salbu, in Datu Piang) and Guindulungan (some barangays of the municipality of Talayan). Major dialects spoken in the province are Maguindanaon, Cebuano-Visayan, Tagalog, and Teduray. Sixty- eight percent of the population are Muslims, the rest are Christians of different denominations. Communities of indigenous peoples arc found in the mountain towns of North and South Upi as well as in Ampatuan. The capital town of the province used to be Sultan Kudarat during the administration of its former governor. At the time of this writing, the provincial governor is constructing a new provincial capitol in his hometown in Shariff Aguak (formerly named Maganoy).

Maguindanao is one of the twenty provinces included in the country’s “Club 20,” the popular euphemism for the country’s poorest provinces. All of its twenty-five towns are classified rural, with very low revenues. The dominant political families in the province are members of the Maguindanaon royal families which trace their ancestry to the sultans who ruled the once glorious Maguindanao and Buayan sultanates long before the coming of the Spanish and American colonizers. The 2002 Philippine Human Development Report (PHDR) done by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has Maguindanao ranking seventy-fifth among seventy-seven provinces in terms of its Human Development Index (HDI). The HDI is a composite measure that includes, among others, life expectancy, poverty rates, functional literacy rates, per capita income, and enrollment rates in the primary and secondary levels.

Aggravating the already pathetic situation of the province is its being one of the hardest hit by armed encounters from 1997 to 2003 between the forces of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP). From January to April of 2000, the Ecumenical Commission for Displaced Families and Communities (ECDFC) Monitor documented a total of 10,398 families that were displaced from the Maguindanao uplands due to heavy fighting between the AFP and the MILF. At an average of six members per family, this number roughly translates to 62,338 individuals. But most Maguindanaon families are extended. They are composed not only of immediate or nuclear family members, but also include relatives from either the husband’s or the wife’s side. This could mean that the average family size is higher, such that up to more than 100,000 people are affected by sporadic, intermittent armed conflict in the province.

In February of 2003, the AFP conducted massive ground and air assault of the so-called Buliok complex in Pagalungan town on the border of Pik it, Cotabato. The complex included the residence of the late chairman of the MILF, Ustadz Salamat Hashim. Once again, thousands of people were displaced. Some estimates of displaced individuals ranged from several hundreds of thousands to a million. What made the 2003 attack condemnable even in the eves of many Christian civil society groups was the timing of the incident. It was conducted while people were busy preparing for a very important feast in Islam—the Eid’l 1-lajj, or the Feast of Sacrifice, or the end of the Holy Month of the Hajj or Pilgrimage.

Many of the displaced families have not gone back to their places of origin. They have become the “new” squatters in relatively safer places within the adjacent municipalities in the neighboring province of Cotabato (like Pikit) and in the City of Cotabato. Some stay with their relatives and friends in these places.

Lanao del Sur

Lanao del Sur is the traditional homeland of the Meranaw ethnolinguistic group. The famous Lake Lanao, which is the main source of Mindanao’s hydroelectric power, nestles at the heart of the province. At only 385,00 hectares, Lanao del Sur is quite small in terms of land area. The seat of local government is the component city of Marawi.

The province is bounded on the north by its sister province, Lanao del Norte; on the east by Misamis Oriental; on the west by IIlana Bay; and on the south by upland towns belonging to either Maguindanao and Cotabato provinces. Generally, the province is mountainous and blessed with even rainfall and mild temperatures all throughout the year. It is naturally gifted with enormous rivers and lakes, the famous Lake Lanao as being the biggest and most scenic.

Among its major crops are rice, corn, and vegetables, especially those that thrive in cool climates. In addition, the province is known to hold vast mineral deposits including basalt, chromite, manganese, copper, pyrite ore, and coal deposits. Its people are skilled in brassware and handloom weaving.

As of 2000, the provincial population was 669,072. There are thirty-seven municipalities in this mostly mountainous province.

Despite the abundance of its natural resources, Lanao del Sur has been consistently among the poorest provinces in Mindanao and in the entire country. Like Maguindanao, Lanao del Sur ranks lowest in its HDI, ranking seventy-three among seventy-seven provinces in the year 2000 (UNDP PHDR 2002).

The increasing numbers of poor people in the province could be attributed to the deteriorating peace and order conditions in the province at the start of 2000, right after the declaration of President. Joseph Ejercito Estrada’s “all-out war” against the MILF. Like Maguindanao, I ,anao del Sur is host to a significant number of major MILF camps. Many of its upland towns are known lairs of-the group, and these were the target of heavy shelling and bombardment by the AFP. Consequently, thousands of families from the mountainous barangays and towns evacuated to “safer” grounds, like the cities of Marawi and Iligan (in Lanao del Norte).

Fighting between the NIILF and AFP was heavy in the towns of But ig, Kapatagan, Nlarogong, Lumbayanague, Tubaran, Kalanogas, and lialabagan (sec Cagoco-Guiam et al 2001). I visited Marawi Cit in late 200-1 and learned that there were ninety-nine families with members ranging from six to nine) still living in makeshift rooms inside the city gymnasium. The evacuees came from various upland Lanao del Sur and del Norte towns. They have repeatedly refused to go back to their places of origin for fear of renewed hostilities.

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As the table shows, the per capita income among families in both provinces arc way below what is considered to be the poverty line. It also shows that the people in the two provinces do not grow old – they die young.

Human security framework to a people-centered development

The Fifth Asian Development Forum (1995,8) provided a definition of development as:

A process by which members of a society increase their personal and institutional capacities to mobilize and manage resources to produce sustainable and justly distributed improvements in the quality of life consistent with their own aspirations.

When the process of development is centered on people rather than on increasing the Gross National Product (GNP) of a country, such development is just, sustainable, inclusive, and authentic.. According to this perspective, a people-centered development process” … envisions a redistribution of political and economic power, restoring environmental stewardship, and reducing wasteful consumption.”

Such a vision of development is empowering, rather than enslaving: It respects a people’s inherent capacities to make their own aspirations.

By necessity, people-centered development also has to maximize people participation at all phases in the development process. Fisher, et al (2001) identify four levels of people participation in development, thus:

• Informing- Development workers, especially government functionaries, simply inform the representatives of the people (like local elected officials) about new legislations, directives, circulars, and similar measures to be followed. There is no participation at all from the general public or from civil society groups.

• Meeting- Development agents and workers meet with various groups of people face to face, and inform them about their decisions directly. But participation is very low because decisions have already been made before the meeting.

•Consulting- Development agents and government functionaries or authorities meet with representatives of the people (both elected government officials and civil society groups) and get their views or feedback about proposed plans or programs.

•Dialoguing- People are directly given the chance to meet with government authorities and functionaries as well as with development agents and workers so they can share their views with the former before any decision could be made. Having constant dialogue with the people promotes high levels of trust thus leading to good governance, and eventually sustainable peace and development.

Respecting a people’s inherent capacities to develop themselves in their own way is central to the concept of human security. According to the United  Nations’ Commission on Human Security (UNCHS 2003), it is the mandate of governments” …to protect the vital core of all human lives in ways that enhance freedoms and human fulfillment. Human security means protecting fundamental freedoms… that are the essence of life… It means creating political, social, environmental, economic, military and cultural systems that together give people the building blocks of survival, livelihood and dignity…” When such systems are in place in a community, citizens live in freedom, peace and safety, and participate fully in the process of governance.

Recognizing that what people consider as “essential” or “vital” in their existence varies across individuals, societies, and cultures, the UNCHS notes that the concept of human security must be dynamic. Thus, while the concept of human security is universal for all peoples, it is nuanced in various ways among highly diverse communities. In other words, there is no monolithic interpretation of what constitutes human security for communities composed of widely divergent cultures and ways of life. What one community might consider the essence of its survival may be considered a peripheral need in another community.

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The above holistic definition presents an ideal situation for all human beings in a highly globalized world. Operationally, however, in the real day-to-day world of ordinary citizens especially those in impoverished, marginalized, and conflict-affected communities in Mindanao that I have just described, the concept of human security becomes an oxymoron: It does not mean anything. The concept is best seen in its glaring absence: Systems for the protection of ordinary citizens from threats of displacement due to armed conflict or natural calamities are simply not in place. Poor people have very limited options. This is an additional source of insecurity for them. Systems and mechanisms that are supposedly for the welfare of the poorest of the poor do not work in their favor. Instead, such systems work for the members of the middle and upper crust of society. But ideally, when the main building blocks of human security (as shown in the diagram in the next page) are provided, the dynamism that results from the interplay of these building blocks will lead to a people-centered sustainable peace and development.

Lessons on peace building in conflict-affected communities

Communities severely affected by long years of exposure to the ravages of armed conflict have expressed in various ways their state of war fatigue. There is now a growing constituency for peace not only among the conflict-affected communities themselves, but also among those villages that have hosted internally displaced persons (I DPs) or those who have fled to escape armed conflict or threats of armed conflict (Castles 2004).

Such constituency includes a variety of civil society organizations (CSOs) and informal groups whose efforts toward peace building are outside of the mainstream peace building activities and programs conducted by government and its functionaries.

In mainstream peace processes, people participation has not been maximized to the level of constant dialogue, as described in the previous section of this paper. The peace process that led to the signing of the 1996 Final Peace Agreement between the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) was, at best, only at the information level for the general public. This explains why, after the signing and the promulgation of an Executive Order from former President Fidel V. Ramos about the creation of a development agency for the MNLF, there was a huge public outcry against it. When government functionaries conducted an information tour about the creation of the Southern Philippines Council for Peace and Development (SPCPD), they were confronted with a largely angry public. Many people, especially among the majority Christian populations in Mindanao, perceived such an agreement to be bending over backwards to accommodate a troublesome group like the MNLF in particular and the Muslims in general. This is the perception of a public that is steeped in prejudice against Muslim groups that have taken up arms against the central Philippine government dominated by Christians and whose policies have largely excluded the Muslims and the indigenous Mindanao groups or Lumads.

Building the foundations for lasting peace is tedious and complicated. As such, it requires the collective efforts of all sectors in society — from the margins to the mainstream. Spaces for participation in various processes, activities, and programs that lead to sustainable peace must be widened, and voices toward long lasting solutions of intermittent armed conflict must be strengthened.

Waging peace involves a variety of strategies and techniques including those that are otherwise not designed for peace, although the cumulative effects of such strategies create the enabling environment to achieve peace. For civil society groups in Mindanao, these efforts include community organizing with the provision of sustainable livelihoods. The latter strategy is aimed to promote the overall welfare of their partner communities for them to be both economically and politically empowered (Cagoco-Guiam 2003).

For its part, the Philippine national government has passed various laws that promote the general welfare of its people. One of these is the Local Government Code of 1991. The Code provides for opportunities for citizen participation in local governance, as representatives of so-called local special bodies like the Local Development Council and the Local Peace and Order Council. In each municipality, a representative of an NGO or a CSO sits as a member of both these councils. Unfortunately, this provision is honored more in the breach than in observance. The opportunities for citizen participation are usually available only to more prominent or well-established CSOs or NGOs. Alternatively, the opportunities are made available to those who have either blood or marital ties to the Local Chief Executive (LCE, e.g., the mayor or governor) who signs the appointment of the CSO representative. Groups that have not established a legal identity (like a registration from a government accrediting body like the Securities and Exchange Commission) are automatically excluded from participating in the local special bodies because they are not accredited.

Compounding this problem is the fact that in many upland, hard -to-reach towns in the ARMM, the local special bodies are not yet functional. Even the local government units (LGLis) are also absent. In a recent field visit I conducted for a baseline study of IDPs in the ARMM provinces, I found out that some local government officials do not hold office in the towns where they got elected – they reside and hold office in the urban areas in non-ARMM provinces like Cotabato City (for Maguindanao local chief executives), Iligan City and Cagayan de Oro City (for Lanao del Sur officials). This governance deficit has virtually pushed the constituents to look for alternative sources of guidance and governance and, in some cases, these have been provided not only by CSOs but also by rebel groups like the MILF.

In Maguindanao Province, there are harsh realities that deter citizen activism in pushing for much needed reforms in governance, especially in making citizen participation truly operational and genuine. Foremost among these is the leadership of warlords and traditional local politicians who unfortunately, have enjoyed the support of the national government leadership up to the present. This local leadership has caused the creation of new towns without going through the process of genuine people participation at the dialogue level. It seems that the rationale for the creation for new towns was done to perpetuate the ruling family’s power– the newly elected mayors of the three new towns are blood relatives of the governor. In these new towns, there are only a few residents – even an impartial observer will wonder how it was possible to pass the laws to create the new political unit without fulfilling some basic requirements as provided for by Philippine law. The national government has so far just turned a blind eye – this is probably because the ruling political party won by a landslide in the province in the last presidential elections.

Concluding remarks

Despite all these problems and challenges confronting conflict-affected communities in Mindanao, a vibrant civil society in Mindanao provides hope. Various NGOs, both national and international, are filling the democracy deficits (Clark 2000). By implementing a wide range of programs and projects—from relief and rehabilitation work; organizing and capacity building; providing seed money for grassroots organizations and cooperatives; and community fund mobilization for self-reliance; and even trauma healing for those who have suffered war shock during armed conflict. These efforts might seem to be a cacophony of various agenda, strategies, and styles of working – but they arc all designed to promote sustainable peace and development in a region that has a long history of periodic armed conflict.

The problems confronting war-torn and impoverished communities in Central Mindanao are quite immense – everyone’s contribution is needed, whether this contribution is done individually or as organized initiatives.

“There can he no oversupply in CSO-led peace initiatives,” one informant said in one of my field visits. I agree. All these efforts that respect and honor capacities of people to develop themselves need to be replicated to achieve a truly people-centered sustainable peace and development that is anchored on the building blocks of human security. At least if government fails to attain this mandate, its subalterns (albeit unwilling) in the countryside – the NGOs, POs, and CSOs—are always available to help people attain genuine development.