Cutting Cosmos: Masculinity and Spectacular Events among the Bugkalot 9781785337710

Citation preview

CUTTING COSMOS

Ethnography, Theory, Experiment Series Editors: Martin Holbraad, Department of Anthropology, University College London Morten Axel Pedersen, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen Rane Willerslev, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo In recent years, ethnography has been increasingly recognized as a core method for generating qualitative data within the social sciences and humanities. This series explores a more radical, methodological potential of ethnography: its role as an arena of theoretical experimentation. It includes volumes that call for a rethinking of the relationship between ethnography and theory in order to question, and experimentally transform, existing understandings of the contemporary world. Volume 1 AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL TROMPE L’OEIL FOR A COMMON WORLD AN ESSAY ON THE ECONOMY OF KNOWLEDGE By Alberto Corsín Jiménez Volume 2 FIGURATIONS OF THE FUTURE FORMS AND TEMPORALITIES OF LEFT RADICAL POLITICS IN NORTHERN EUROPE By Stine Krøijer Volume 3 WATERWORLDS ANTHROPOLOGY IN FLUID ENVIRONMENTS Edited by Kirsten Hastrup and Frida Hastrup Volume 4 VIOLENT BECOMINGS STATE FORMATION, SOCIALITY, AND POWER IN MOZAMBIQUE By Bjørn Enge Bertelsen Volume 5 VITAL DIPLOMACY THE RITUAL EVERYDAY ON A DAMMED RIVER IN AMAZONIA By Chloe Nahum-Claudel Volume 6 CUTTING COSMOS MASCULINITY AND SPECTACULAR EVENTS AMONG THE BUGKALOT By Henrik Hvenegaard Mikkelsen

CUTTING COSMOS Masculinity and Spectacular Events among the Bugkalot Henrik Hvenegaard Mikkelsen

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2018 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2018 Henrik Hvenegaard Mikkelsen

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mikkelsen, Henrik Hvenegaard, author. Title: Cutting cosmos : masculinity and spectacular events among the Bugkalot / by Henrik Hvenegaard Mikkelsen. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, [2018] | Series: Ethnography, theory, experiment ; volume 6 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017051627 (print) | LCCN 2017052846 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785337710 (eBook) | ISBN 9781785337703 Subjects: LCSH: Ilongot (Philippine people)--Social life and customs. | Ethnology--Philippines--Sierra Madre Mountains. | Masculinity--Philippines--Sierra Madre Mountains. | Social structure--Philippines--Sierra Madre Mountains. Classification: LCC DS666.I4 (ebook) | LCC DS666.I4 M54 2018 (print) | DDC 305.899/21--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051627

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78533-770-3 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-78533-771-0 (ebook)

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgementsix Introduction1 Chapter 1. Of Mist and Men

15

Chapter 2. Impartial Man

44

Chapter 3. Chaosmology

68

Chapter 4. Ngayó96 Chapter 5. Power without Chief

130

Bibliography159 Index165

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1.1. Reverse Pyramid of Power

33

Figure 1.2. Reverse Pyramid of Power and the Performance of Beya

35

Figure 3.1. “Children can sleep in their own filth!”

69

Figure 3.2. Denuded hillsides in Kabugkalotan.

81

Figure 3.3. “There is a grass, we call it ga’ek, that you eat. It can make you act with bravery.”

87

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In April 2009 I came to Kabugkalotan for the first time and was received with immense generosity and kindness. While many people showed me hospitality during my various periods of residence in the Philippines, I am especially indebted to my host parents in the village that I call Ki-tegen. This book is a result of their openness, patience, and intelligence. Though I had far fuller access to male than to female areas of social life during my fieldwork, there were some women who qualified my research by offering me their insights and theories regarding Bugkalot masculinity—and society at large. By including their accounts and opinions, I hope to provide a much needed counterpart to the males whose voices dominate this book and with whom this book is concerned. The women’s view of male interaction rarely harmonized with that of the men and, generally speaking, my female informants were critical of what they saw as childish games that took place among men. The women complained to me that while the men were busy socializing with each other, their wives, mothers, and daughters had to do much of the hard work in the gardens. The men were also criticized for only showing “braveness” when it did not entail any risk; that is, the men would tell stories and sing songs during drinking sessions or perform the traditional Bugkalot dance known as the ta’gem; yet, it was noticed, they would rarely take initiatives that effected any significant, positive changes in the village. Generally speaking, the women’s disapproval of male excesses was not directed so much at the male activities themselves as at the way that the men, through these activities, came to appear as “real men,” while they in fact achieved nothing. The women thereby not only blamed the men for being unproductive but also detected something inauthentic in

viiiAcknowledgments

the male domains of society. Such scorn, however, was never expressed openly by the women, and thus a strongly androcentric ideology was left unchallenged. These critical utterances became an invaluable resource in my research. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the women in Ki-tegen who offered me their insights. Their names—along with other names in this book—have been carefully altered in order to ensure their privacy. This book is based on my Ph.D. research at the University of Aarhus, and as such the ideas presented in these chapters have been through a long process of evolution. I am greatly indebted to Morten Nielsen for opening up my eyes to new areas of anthropology and for uncovering surprising connections in the material. I would like to thank the publisher’s reviewers for their comments on the book. Also, I would like to thank Lars Kofoed Rømer for commenting on the manuscript at its final stage. I am especially grateful to Majbritt Lerche Madsen—her encouragements, critical comments, and insightfulness have enriched all parts of this book—and Johanne—who came along and gave me the final motivation to finish the manuscript. Moesgård, this magnificent institution where generations have struggled to interchangeably distill and deconstruct culture itself, laid the true foundation for this book. We—Jørgen Skrubbeltrang, Marie Bræmer, Nina Holm Vohnsen, Rane Willerslev, and I—have often been convinced that we were gazing at a new horizon of scholarly work, where unrestricted thinking and aesthetics would go hand in hand as we penetrated deep into the human condition. While we are today scattered, we are still tied together in this ambition. I have attempted to write this book in the spirit of our “magic circle,” the weirdly creative society where my passion for anthropology developed among some of the best and most brilliant people I will ever have the privilege of getting to know. I dedicate this book to you. Parts of this book have appeared in the following: 2016 “Chaosmology: Shamanism and Personhood among the Bugkalot,” Hau: Journal of Ethographic Theory 6(1):189–205. 2016 “Violent Potentials: Exploring the Intersection of Violence and Masculinity among the Bugkalot,” in Masculinity, War and Violence, ed. Ann-Dorthe Christensen (London: Routledge), 281– 94. Co-author: Thomas Friis Søgaard. 2013 “Defacing Death: Commencing Time and the Materiality of the Man among the Bugkalot,” in Death, Materiality and the Origin of

Acknowledgments

Time, vol. 1 ed. Rane Willerslev and Dorthe Refslund (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing). I am grateful to the publishers for permission to reprint these works here.

ix

  Introduction

“Someday I will go to the forest. Maybe I will go and I just stay there. I don’t come back.” Tóse exhaled these words through cigarette smoke. He was squatting on the damp ground, hungover. The young man was barefoot, dressed only in shorts and a large, red basketball t-shirt that hung from his skinny shoulders like a tent canvas after a storm. “It’s like sitting next to a loud noise, sleeping next to a big truck. I just want to hold my ears,” he said while covering his ears with his dirty hands. “I want to close my eyes.” Tóse moved his hands to his eyes and held them there quietly. Apparently, he did not notice the cold morning drizzle that was coming in from the valley. With his hands over his eyes he could not see me, yet I nodded, agreeing with him. I too was still drunk though it was quickly wearing off and I was starting to feel the well-known pressure of two fat thumbs on my temples. The wedding we had attended in the neighboring village had been a “no alcohol wedding.” Yet bottles of cheap synthetic gin—the liquor that were flooding the mountains—had been passed around in every shadow. Tóse had been drinking twice as much as I had, and he had been loud, aggressive, embarrassing. Though I could not explain exactly why at that exact moment, somehow I found the image of the loud truck to encapsulate the life of Tóse perfectly. The foundation for this book is an ethnographic study of a group of men that I came to know in the southern Sierra Madre Mountains of Luzon in 2009. “Bugkalot” is the endonym most commonly used among

2

Cutting Cosmos

the around 20,000 people who have traditionally inhabited this area. I was repeatedly told during my stay that what men aspire to is, above all beya. This Bugkalot term can perhaps best be translated as “knowledgeautonomy,” that is, the establishing and maintaining of a strong imperviousness to the world through accumulated experience. Yet, such autonomy cannot be converted into prestige or actual, assertive power, but rather entails the privilege of sameness—of being like other men and entering into egalitarian relations. Being exposed as not autonomous, on the other hand, entails daily mockery—a circumstance that befell the young men in the community where I stayed. Though under normal circumstances men in the Sierra Madre Mountains attempt not to challenge each other, self-assertion and dominance are ritually performed in acts that have, historically, taken the form of violent killings. Even today these performances may be trans­ gressive as set against the ordinary conduct of daily life. My goal in this book is to place such acts in relation to masculinity and egalitarianism at large. How are such seemingly opposed characteristics of male life—the egalitarianism and the assertive performances—interwoven, and what are the wider effects of these conjunctions in relation to social life in the mountain communities? These are the questions that will be pursued in the following chapters. By exploring the interplay between masculinity and cosmology, I set out to clarify how a particular form of egalitarianism is socially produced. While, as we will learn, this type of egalitarianism manifests itself as individual composure and sameness among men, it is paradoxically tied to assertive acts that seem radically juxtaposed against the men’s behavior in everyday life. What this book depicts, then, is a society in which egalitarian relations between men are an empirical reality, though the social values that buttress the egalitarian ideal appear to go directly against egalitarianism. By not belonging to a moral domain per se, this form of egalitarianism upturns certain widely held anthropological understandings of egalitarianism. Furthermore, as we will learn, the assertive individualism, which is an ideal, is socially subversive and demonic, and much effort is put into harnessing such individualism. Thus, while leadership, dominance, and assertiveness are key masculine values, paradoxically egalitarianism is the dominant form in which society manifests itself. The crux of the following chapters will thereby be to show that egalitarianism and hierarchy, rather than being oppositions, are intertwined as part of the same social or sociocosmological dynamics among the Bugkalot. I thereby depict a society that is its own potential other; it is a social form that can only be comprehended by including what it may, at any

Introduction

time, become. The “truth of society” thereby does not, as Vivieros de Castro claims to be the case among certain Amazonian peoples, lie “in the hands of others” (1992: 287), that is, in the hands of people beyond one’s immediate social group to which one has relations of animosity. Rather, this truth should be found in the not yet realized becoming of Bugkalot society itself.

Where Once Was a Forest . . . My fieldwork was set against the backdrop of a recent event: a road had been opened that allowed trucks to reach far into the mountain interior during the dry season. My interlocutors often recalled how the mountains had until recently been covered in moist forest, only interrupted by fast-flowing streams, scattered villages, and the adjacent vegetable gardens. At the time of my fieldwork it was only in the more secluded areas of the mountain interior that slash-and-burn methods of subsistence farming were still being used. While for the most part the Bugkalot were still pursuing near-subsistence agriculture focused on wet rice at the time, the traditional forms of living in the forests were yielding to modern forms of specialized, agricultural production. A patchwork of farmland was expanding since the road enabled rice and vegetables to be distributed to the Philippine market. The drone of powerful diesel engines could now be heard in remote communities and became a premonition of the rapid, discernable changes that would soon take place. The road was the foundation for the extensive agricultural industry that was being developed throughout the mountains. Property was changing hands as people from other provinces—referred to with the Tagalog word kaingineros or the Bugkalot word beninyagen—bought up local land rights from the Bugkalot and the settlers turned the primary forest into farmland so quickly that one could detect the changes from week to week. By making the transportation between the mountain villages and to the lowland much easier, the new road caused immigration to escalate dramatically. Also cheap building materials could now be transported to the villages, and the traditional huts with thatched roofs were quickly giving way to lowland-type houses that required a minimum of maintenance: roofs made of galvanized iron sheets and walls made from hollow blocks. Several families were considering using gas rather than open fires for cooking. The incursion of lowlanders into the area quickened the pace of the deforestation and caused pollution in the rivers, which severely threatened the traditional livelihood of the families in the villages. Until a few

3

4

Cutting Cosmos

years earlier, the families had relied on hunting, gathering, and fishing most of the year. However, around the villages there was no wildlife left, and though most men still went on hunting trips they had to walk for hours to reach areas of the mountains that were still untouched by loggers where lizards, snakes, different types of deer and monkeys, large rodents, and, preferably, wild boar could still be seen. Traditional forms of horticulture changed to an economy based on specialized agriculture that was closely tied up with the wider Philippine economy. As a result, hunting—and rural subsistence in general—suffered a swift and perhaps irreversible decline. Instead, with the expansion of the monetary economy, a large number of intermittent sari-sari stores were cobbled together and offered a limited range of products, including rice, unrefrigerated soft drinks, instant coffee, sugar, soap, gin, and cigarettes. Since all families had increasing access to money and decreasing access to foodstuff from the forest, different types of candy and cookies made their entry into the Bugkalot diet. Such was the current situation in the village where I carried out a large part of my fieldwork. This village, which I call “Ki-tegen,” consisted of forty-two households and had achieved barangay status in 1982, which meant that the state now recognized it as an administrative division or a district in the Philippines. With the institution of the barangay, the position of punong barangay—the official head of the district—was also introduced. This position is up for election every three years. Curiously, whereas anthropologists have often noted that the state and its administrative techniques are widely regarded as alien impositions among other rural communities around the world, this was not the case in a Bugkalot context in any straightforward way. They found no difficulties in adapting the political forms of the state in village life. But when viewed through local ideas of authority, such forms were little more than performances; the men that I came to know who held or had previously held the position of punong barangay admitted that this position had entailed only a minimum of authority. Even after the introduction of the barangay structure the de facto largest political unit was the individual household, referred to as ten tengeng, one trunk. Most of the households in Ki-tegen consisted of four generations of family members. It was difficult to establish exactly how many individuals lived in any given household since couples, especially the younger ones, tended to move a lot. Not only did men go down to the lowlands to work, but they also tended to spend periods of time in their home village. While the Bugkalot identify themselves patrilineally by decent through the male line, they have traditionally practiced a matrilocal form of postmarital residence: the man was expected to move in with his in-

Introduction

laws until he had paid the bridewealth (lango). This often entailed the man moving to a community where he had a limited social network. My younger informants wanted to avoid the traditional conjugal procedures that they saw as outmoded and frustrating. Prior to the wedding it was, for instance, expected that the future husband would work for the wife’s family, a practice known as tognod, which could sometimes last for several years. Thus, “going home” to one’s natal village to visit family and friends was given high priority and was looked forward to with joy by all men. These marriage customs had become less common in the past few decades. I encountered several young men who claimed that they would rather remain unmarried than marry a Bugkalot girl. Accordingly, out of the six weddings I attended, only three were between men and women who were both Bugkalot, and only in two of these cases did the marriage involve tognod. This new tendency of young people marrying nonBugkalots was not frowned upon. On the contrary, many adolescents were directly encouraged by their parents to marry non-Bugkalot Filipinos, who were considered harder working and better off. The threat that this development poses to Bugkalot customs, identity, and language attracted little attention from my interlocutors and friends. Other aspects of the current changes received more attention. In some villages, the migrants had started to outnumber the Bugkalot, and migrant communities were rapidly evolving throughout the mountains. For instance, Pinagá, a two-hour hike from Ki-tegen, was a valley that housed a growing community of migrant workers. At the end of the 1990s the valley was still covered in primary forest, but only ten years later it had been completely deforested. Now the valley was creased with the path of an almost dried-out stream, its slopes were covered with brown grass and bushes, and strips of rock broke through the thin layer of soil. This change had happened exponentially as the number of settlers from the neighboring Ifugao Province had increased around the turn of the millennium. But rather than seeing this as a threat, my interlocutors were pleased that immigration was stimulating the economy in the area. By buying up idle land, the settlers provided the Bugkalot families with much-needed cash.

Shadows in the State Ki-tegen began to be gradually drawn into the administrative nexus of the Philippine state only by the early 1980s. Yet it was not until the turn of the millennium, with the development of the first highland roads in

5

6

Cutting Cosmos

the area, that this development intensified and started to have any real significance to the villagers. As the road was gradually improved, the inhabitants of the area gained easier access to the lowland. On a brief visit back to Ki-tegen in 2011, it was possible for me to reach Ki-tegen by truck even during the rainy season; this had been unthinkable only a few years earlier. The villagers had started to ride down to the lowland on a monthly basis on the vegetable trucks to visit relatives, buy consumer goods, visit health clinics, pick up medicine, and so on. Due to the devastating effects these developments had on the forests, I was at first surprised to learn that almost all the Bugkalot considered this progress. As I asked my Bugkalot informants how they expected the new road to affect the mountains, they did not answer the way I expected them to. They empathetically argued for, rather than against, the road, claiming a need for better access to the lowland vegetable markets. My consternation when confronted with these views reflected my initial commitment to the pervasive myth that indigenous people live in harmony with nature or are somehow closer to nature than modern Europeans. Certainly, my Bugkalot friends did not feel tied in any affectionate way to “nature.” Though a few of my Bugkalot friends expressed the concern that they were starting to feel like strangers on the land where they used to hunt, this was mostly seen as a minor drawback, considering the immense gains and improvements that they expected would follow this development. In this hope lay their awareness that their history was unusual compared to other indigenous peoples in Luzon. Most notably, the Bugkalot managed, by and large, to avoid the process of pacification and colonization that was initiated by the Spaniards and later taken over by the Americans after the Spanish-American War in 1898. For this reason, unlike most other tribes in the northern Philippines (see Finin 2005: 107), there were no significant changes in their form of territorial and social organization until the 1980s. The forest was also left largely untouched until the late 1970s, which was quite extraordinary when compared to the rapid deforestation in the rest of the country: more than half of the forest in the Philippines was lost in the post-World War II period due to industrial logging. However, the numbers are, in fact, much more startling, since at the end of the nineteenth century, 70 percent of the total land area was covered with forest; this was reduced to 20 percent in less than a hundred years (Lasco et al. 2001). Moreover, while in 1934 the country had more than 10 million hectares of old-growth, dipterocarp forest, in 2000 less than 3 million hectares remained (van den Top 2003: 49).

Introduction

Simultaneously, following World War II, the Philippines experienced an immense population growth. But, unlike other regions of northern Luzon, the southern areas of the Sierra Madre Mountains did not experience the population pressure that caused interregional migration in all the neighboring provinces. This isolation was caused by several factors. In general, the Sierra Madre mountain range was known as an unsafe place. After the declaration of martial law in 1972, the communist guerrilla group, the New People’s Army (NPA), established a stronghold in the mountains from which they carried out raids against institutions and individuals associated with the political and military establishment in the lowland (van den Top 2003: 47). However, the NPA stayed in the mountains throughout the 1980s and became especially infamous in the area after carrying out a series of random executions in the Bugkalot villages. Though this conflict made the mountains an unappealing area for migrant farmers, the Bugkalot themselves ascribe their relative isolation to their reputation for engaging in headhunting. The Bugkalot continued these ritual killings long after all other mountain peoples in Luzon had abandoned the practice. Gerard Finin (2005) explains the decline of headhunting among the other highlanders in the region with reference to the interference of the American colonial officials. In the first decades of the twentieth century, a U.S. army base was established in the Cordillera Mountains west of the Bugkalot territory. This military presence, Finin argues, changed the spatial and social relations between the ethnic groups in the area through active attempts by the Americans to establish diplomatic relations between various groups. Thus, a shared ethnoregional consciousness was established among people who had earlier fought each other. The Cordilleras underwent rapid modernization, with the establishment of infrastructure, towns, and schools. A growing mining and logging industry attracted further development to the area. However, while this was taking place in the Cordillera mountain region to the west, where the Americans had their primary focus, the Bugkalot who lived in the eastern regions of Luzon, in the Sierra Madre Mountains, had few encounters with American officials. The distance between the colonial administration and the Bugkalot was, in fact, actively enforced through the bureaucratic categorization of Christians and non-Christians in Eastern Luzon: an act in the early American rule declared that non-Christian tribes in the Sierra Madres were exempted from paying tax (40). No attempts were made to “pacify” or integrate the Bugkalot into state bureaucracy as was done with the Igorot tribes, who lived in the mountainous areas of Luzon where the

7

8

Cutting Cosmos

United States had financial interests. In effect, the Bugkalot continued to be shadows in the Philippine state.

Egalitarianism and Dominance While “Bugkalot” is the term most commonly used among my friends in Ki-tegen, this indigenous group has become famous in the ethnographic literature under the name “Ilongot” due to the seminal body of works written by the anthropologists Michelle and Renato Rosaldo. They carried out the main part of their fieldwork in the early 1970s in the village of Kakidugen, a day’s walk from Ki-tegen. The Rosaldos drew attention to how cultural conceptions of personhood and emotions among the Bugkalot could be studied through the cultural institution of headhunting, ngayó. In the ethnographic record headhunting tends to be used as a generic term referring to organized ritual killings, in which the severed head of the victim is given a specific ritual meaning (Hoskins 1996: 2; McKinley 1976). This particular form of ritual killing among the Bugkalot was gradually abandoned—or at least diluted—alongside the emerging evangelization of the 1960s. Although the Rosaldos admitted that ngayó had already ended as a common practice years before their most extensive fieldwork in Kakidugen in the early 1970s, they continued to study the men in the village through the prism of headhunting. While several diverse attempts were made to explain what had prompted men to engage in these ritual killings, one account is presented more persistently than the others. In this explanation, ngayó appears as an act carried out from time immemorial—an act that was, ostensibly, fueled by the desire of men to be like those among their peers who had previously taken a head. Envy (avet) was thereby conceptualized as a social engine that continually created “sameness” among peers (M. Rosaldo 1980: 140).  Thus, a striking general point about this loosely prescribed procedure was that it was carried out without at any point invoking any spirits, gods, or ancestors. Rather, the Rosaldos claimed, the Bugkalot referred to their individual desire, that is, a craving after accomplishing the same as their peers, whereby they could cast off feelings of despair and shame that caused anger and unrest. Like the Rosaldos’ informants in the village of Kakidugen, people in Ki-tegen recalled a heritage of headhunting. And as the Rosaldos realized, headhunting was closely and strangely tied to the production of “sameness” among men. In this book, however, ngayó will offer an ethnographic context for a wider discussion of egalitarianism as a political reality.

Introduction

Recent anthropological discussions have their beginning in the idea that egalitarianism may be manifest as one of two principal types. The first, which is encountered especially in certain areas of the Western world and in the “big man” systems of Papua New Guinea, refers to “egalitarianism of opportunity.” This implies that, initially, people have equivalent access to resources and power, though inequality will gradually evolve in the societies. The second, which is particularly present among hunter-gatherers, is called “egalitarianism of outcome” (Riches 2000: 671). In this book, I particularly focus on this second form of egalitarianism, which refers to societies of near equals and, more specifically, a flat power structure. As a societal form, egalitarianism of outcome implies that there are few or no formal methods of giving authority or power to certain individuals or groups; thus all (male) members of such societies have an equal right to speak, and all members can choose not to follow an order. Morgan Fried (1967) defined egalitarian society as a society containing as many positions of prestige as there are members. This, in fact, captures the dynamics of Bugkalot society. For instance, the historian William Henry Scott (1979) excludes the Bugkalot from the other highland warrior societies based on the argument that headhunting did not have any significant influence on the social status of the killer. He further noted that there were no class terms for esteemed warriors with special privileges among the Bugkalot: they did not “practice coup counting which might produce a warrior elite” (156). The classical ethnographic record is brimming with examples of egalitarian social formations, which is most commonly associated with groups of hunter-gatherers. The egalitarian power structure is often explained as arising from the automatic restraints placed on the accumulation of property in such groups; material goods cannot readily be carried from camp to camp, and one individual is therefore not able to gain more wealth than others. Further, due to the paucity of material goods, no instructions or sanctions are even required to reinforce sharing; egalitarianism is, so to speak, the natural, primordial foundation of human society: “the baseline upon which stratification develops” (Cashdan 1980: 116). It is, however, clear that egalitarianism cannot be explained only on a material basis. For instance, the Bugkalot are not nomads and have been living in permanent settlements for hundreds of years. Yet, they organize themselves with an absolute minimum of leadership. James Woodburn (1982) has observed that egalitarian forms of organization primarily pertain to hunters and gathers and tend to erode as social groups move away from hunting economies. Among the Bugkalot, however, egalitarianism was still deeply rooted after they had be-

9

10

Cutting Cosmos

come integrated under the Philippine state and the market economy. In this sense there are significant parallels between the Bugkalot and other peoples of Luzon. Famously, among the neighboring Ifugaos, social organization is sustained without a government and without courts, judges, or statutory law. Leaders, the kadangyang, have no authority or assertive power but act as go-betweens in disputes. The kadangyang are the elite among the Ifugao, and admittance to this stratum is achieved by acquiring sufficient wealth to sponsor feasts (Comfort 1990: 76). The Bugkalot equivalent of the kadangyang is called the purun. There are, however, important differences between the two that will help us gain a better understanding of Bugkalot society. While the purun—like the kadangyang—attempts to settle conflicts, the role of the purun does not belong to a certain category of people. Rather, the purun is a role that can be occupied by any well-liked person with acknowledged powers of oratory. Thus purunship is not ascribed to an elite over time. It is a common assumption in the anthropological literature that egalitarianism will always, eventually, be corrupted by sociopolitical reality (see Robbins 1994). In this sense, hierarchy is conceptualized as a fundamental, cross-cultural, and inexorable condition of social life, while egalitarianism is merely part of the superficial appearance and idealized but seldom achieved form of society. This skepticism about any claims of egalitarianism was especially caused by the emergence of the poststructuralist and Marxist-inspired feminist critique of the 1970s. The feminist critique began in the attempt to show the various ways in which women were “subordinated to men in all known societies” (Ortner 1972: 8). From such critical perspectives it seemed fundamentally flawed to characterize a society as egalitarian when approximately half the population, that is, the women, held little authority: the egalitarianism of egalitarian society was an egalitarianism of men (Flanagan 1989). These new interests of anthropology undoubtedly sharpened the general anthropological ability to detect inequalities in all domains of social life and drew the attention of anthropologists to forms of power and domination that had largely been ignored in the literature up to then. This is reflected in Anthony Cohen’s assertion that the attribution of egalitarianism to a society “generally results from mistaking the absence of structures of differentiation—say, class, or formal hierarchies of power and authority—for the apparent absence of differentiation as such” (Cohen 1985: 33). Rather, he states, a society’s putative egalitarianism should be treated as exactly that: “It is the presentation to the outside world of the common interests of the members of the community” (35).

Introduction

In Cohen’s view, egalitarianism is communicated across the boundaries between communities in order to accentuate differences. A community’s members may “denigrate the disparities of wealth and power, or the competitiveness which they perceive elsewhere, to justify and give value to their espousal of equality” (35–36). Thus, what ethnographers have been (superficially) describing is a contrasting identity rather than a social structure. The skeptical stance toward egalitarianism, however, is not new. Marshall Sahlins argued as early as 1958 that truly egalitarian societies cannot exist: “Theoretically, an egalitarian society would be one in which every individual is of equal status, a society in which no one outranks anyone. But even the most primitive societies could not be described as egalitarian in this sense” (1958: 1). Sahlins thereby made himself an advocate for the idea that egalitarianism and related terms should be discarded. His reasons for doing so, however, emerged from a very particular understanding of egalitarianism; one might say that in this approach, any form of inequality in a society disqualified any attempts of viewing this society through an egalitarian, ethnographic lens. Though such understandings of egalitarian versus hierarchical society have, in turn, been subjected to various forms of anthropological critique in recent decades, I particularly find Joel Robbins (1994) contribution to the debate productive. Joel Robbins argues that the presence of hierarchies is not in itself a valid reason for abandoning “egalitarianism” as an ethnographic term. In fact, he states, equality has become such an empirical nonstarter in Western thought that it has caused blindness among social scientists: in our overwhelming attention to inequalities, we have become unable to see equality as an important feature of social life. He suggests that we draw on Dumont’s (1970) understanding of egalitarianism as a society’s paramount value, which serves to structure the relation between other values. But this does not exclude empirical inequalities. A society can have equality as its key value or ideology while in fact being marked by hierarchy. For instance, according to Dumont, Scandinavia provides an example for this form of egalitarianism as a paramount value in spite of its “manifold network of inequalities” (1970: 265). In the Scandinavian countries, egalitarianism is a value in the sense that social hierarchies are considered morally wrong, as unnatural to the world’s order and, therefore, as something that must be warded off. This does not mean that hierarchies do not saturate social reality—but such hierarchies are downplayed through various social practices. As Richard Jenkins has recently observed, in Denmark, there is a harsh “repertoire and vocabulary for ensuring that individuals do not

11

12

Cutting Cosmos

get above themselves” (2012: 95). Yet the widespread resentment about social status and differentiation is the very foundation of the continuing popularity of the Danish royal family. This institution is rendered abstract through the combination of the sacred aura of the monarchy with the media depiction of the royal family as completely ordinary people who go shopping, smoke, marry commoners, and get speeding tickets. In other words, the position of the monarchy is “independent of its successive incumbents. Persisting outside time, the monarchy is consecrated in a way that individual monarchs are not” (128). The ordinariness of the individual family members is what allows for the institution to stand out in its perceived grandeur. This example suggests that egalitarianism as a cultural value may be contingent on and sustained by a reality marked by powerful hierarchies. The Bugkalot society urges us to pursue this idea, while in fact placing the model on its head. Although in most recent ethnographic cases equality is believed to be continuously undermined by hierarchies, I set out to depict the situation whereby egalitarianism as social force undermines power. In itself this is not a novel idea, but I seek to push it further. I argue that it is not egalitarian values but ideals of hierarchy that structure and reproduce the social, egalitarian reality in Ki-tegen. I thereby urge you, the reader, to imagine a society with empirical equality that is based on an ideological charter for hierarchy. What I present is from the outset a society of paradoxes, which compels us to reconsider certain anthropological ways of understanding egalitarianism. Egalitarianism is not an ideal as such, yet it is an empirical fact. On the other hand, assertive leadership, which is an ideal, is never actualized. Paradoxically, we will see, the ideals among the Bugkalot men should not be realized.

A Final Comment In the following chapters, I attempt to explore the world of a group of Bugkalot men and the everyday events and critical junctures that shaped their lives in a time of transition. By disclosing what is at stake for these men and examining the concerns and fears that occupied their consciousness, I argue that they are haunted by the specter of their own inner being—a specter made up of both the ideals and potentials that are prowling at the core of masculinity. In doing this, I am not attempting to relate the particulars of their situations to the Bugkalot in general; many differences are encountered between villages and families across the Sierra Madre Mountains.

Introduction

Among the Bugkalot—as among people in all societies—social groups constantly spring up and dissolve, which makes it impossible to make an exhaustive study of the Bugkalot people in all its particulars. Therefore, when I use the term “Bugkalot,” I am resorting to ethnographic shorthand for those individuals that I came to know and who informed my research. I also do not claim that what follows is representative of all Bugkalot men: idiosyncrasies, oddities, and caprice dominated the characters of my closest informants to such an extent that it often made me doubt whether an ethnography of the Bugkalot could be made. Yet, while this book contains paradoxes of its own, it is an attempt to do exactly that. In order to do so I have found it necessary to disregard important current initiatives that are being made in various communities. For instance, during my fieldwork, a group of Bugkalot living in the lowland cities attempted to raise awareness of cultural heritage. Most notably, through government grants the group, which consists mainly of pastors and individuals considered to be professionals, managed to establish “schools of living traditions” in accessible areas of the mountains. Here various elders were paid to teach traditional forms of dance, cooking, and the making of artifacts to younger generations. While I recognize such initiatives to be crucial to preserving Bugkalot cultural legacy, my informants in Ki-tegen showed only little—if any—interest in such developments. Here, then, I attempt to provide insights into the lives of certain men who, due to a generous willingness to participate in my work, have come to constitute and inform the following chapters. By drawing on their stories—combined with the indispensable critical reflections offered to me by key female informants—I lay out the argument that to understand Bugkalot society one must be sensitive to the ways in which the egalitarian and the hierarchical are intertwined, rather than seeing them as mutually exclusive. I will argue that to understand egalitarianism among the Bugkalot, one must look into how masculinity is performed through transgressive acts, which will draw our attention to the fact that rather than egalitarianism, leadership, assertion, and power are the key values. However, paradoxically, sameness continues to be an empirical fact. Thus, by taking paradoxes in social life as a central focus, I point to the way that life among the men, rather than being organized coherently, is, in fact, lived as a paradox. I emphasize the importance of the arbitrary in human life. The ordered, the ultimately predictable, the fulfillment of potentials, on the other hand, is dangerous, as it entails a demonic form of detachedness. I thereby point to open-endedness as an important aspect of social life, which, I will argue, is especially critical among Bugkalot men. As

13

14

Cutting Cosmos

we will learn, the socially subversive among the Bugkalot is brought about when potentialities are actualized. While the mountains underwent rapid changes the paradoxes in the lives of Bugkalot men endured. Perhaps more than ever, their world was guided by demonic ideals that threatened to subvert society and disconnect the individual from the whole.

1 Of Mist and Men

One evening in November 2009 a group of young men held a drinking session, a jammin, that extended into the early morning. Most often the jammins were held outside of Ki-tegen, beyond the condemnatory eyes and ears of the village elders. But on this particular night the young men had settled around a fire at the outskirts of the community on the rocky hillside that sloped down to the river. The loud voices and outbursts kept people awake and the dozens of village dogs were barking furiously. At one point an agonized, frantic cry from a man was heard above the other sounds, and from the agitated voices that joined in, I could discern that fighting had broken out. Fighting was common during jammins, and it always gave rise to gossip among the villagers. Drinking, it was said, “heats the minds of young men.” And given the fact that most men carried large bush knives at all times, innocent fighting could easily deteriorate into a more critical scenario. During my stay in Ki-tegen, knifes were drawn during drinking sessions on two occasions that I know of. Though no one got killed during these encounters, on one occasion a man—an Ifugao who had settled down and worked as a wood-carver close to Ki-tegen—had his abdomen cut up and had to be rushed to a lowland hospital on the back of a motorcycle in the middle of the night. He returned a few days later. Remarkably, no antagonism could subsequently be detected between him and the attacker.

16

Cutting Cosmos

Such events among the young men were widely debated by the other villagers. But as the drinking sessions normally took place in remote places, the insights of most people relied heavily on hearsay. Thus, in November it attracted extra attention, since fighting had broken out almost within the village. Everyone had been able to hear the loud shouting, and the events thereby became a public drama. The next morning Wagsal, my host, was talking to his wife, Evelyn, when I came out from the house. “It’s the alcohol,” he said, “there’s too much of it now.” He turned toward me and said: You should be very vigilant! Those youngsters are your friends one moment, but then the next moment—you’ve seen it yourself. They fight! They shout! You never know what will happen. And maybe, because they think, “Hey, this man is white, he thinks he is somehow better than us”— yes, that’s how their minds work—they will fight you, they don’t think of the consequences.

I had heard these warnings many times before and let it pass. Instead I asked about the angry man. Wagsal replied that it was Tóse, a young farmer. Tóse tended to talk in a slow and excessively monotonous voice—which, he later explained to me, had been passed on to him from his father, who in turn had inherited it from his father. During drinking sessions people tended to single out and mock Tóse, as they found his style of speech hilarious. Apparently the teasing had gotten out of control. Throughout my stay in Ki-tegen Wagsal warned me against drinking with the youth. This morning he used Tóse’s transgressions as an occasion for launching into yet another rant: “They are too young; they cannot take the liquor. It is the alcohol speaking through the mouth. That is why Tóse should not drink. It is like the old men say: Tóse has no beya.” My interlocutors usually translated beya as “knowledge.” However, the significance of beya went far beyond what we would normally associate with knowledge, as a set of assumptions about the world or a practical and theoretical understanding of a subject. Rather, beya indicated, in the most general sense, the transformation from chaos (gongot) to order and, more specifically, the obtaining of individual autonomy with age, which was exemplified through the trope of the hardening of the body and the person’s growing capacity for independent thinking. Yet, while it was frequently emphasized that the increase of a man’s autonomy should be considered a highly valued masculine ideal, the growth in autonomy simultaneously posed a threat. A man, I was told,

Of Mist and Men

could reach a level of autonomy where all the threads that connect him to the surrounding world, that twine from person to person, to all his kinships—not only family but also pets and game, even the fish in the river and birds of the sky—all, all, had dissolved. He was severed from all social ties. At that moment beya flipped over and assumed a demonic form, referred to by some of my informants as mansasadile. Thereby, Bugkalot masculinity was based upon an ideal, which one was not supposed to reach. But what does masculinity amount to in a society where its ideal state is acknowledged as undesirable? And, in a broader sense, how is it possible to structure a society that is somehow based on its own negation? The overall aim of this first part of the book is fairly modest. I wish to examine beya in relation to masculinity. To understand beya it becomes helpful to approach it through its opposition, which is in fact also how beya crystalizes itself in social settings: it manifests itself through juxtapositions. When I asked my informants what beya was they would almost without exception talk about what it was not—most commonly, acts carried out by men who were under the influence of alcohol and, less frequently, by men who made use of magic. While beya had to do with men contracting themselves as persons in social space, the consumption of alcohol and engagement with spirits and magic had the opposite effect; rather than allowing the person to emerge, alcohol and magic caused a loss of autonomy. Talking about other people’s use of alcohol and magic offered a language to expose them as inferior and, indirectly, to draw attention to one’s own beya.

Tóse For almost two months, I had struggled to somehow become propelled into the social world of the youth. Being unmarried, this was the social category I belonged to. Yet, communication was hindered due to the sheer discomfort and embarrassment I seemed to bring about among the young men—and thus the interaction so far had been limited to a few awkward encounters on the paths in the forest or when we found ourselves jam-packed in the back of a truck on the way to the lowland vegetable market in the city of Bambang. When I asked the other villagers where the young men went when they were gone for days at a time, I was often met with resigned sighs. On other occasions, I was told, often mockingly, about incidents that involved the handful of young men who were roaming the village and

17

18

Cutting Cosmos

who, more often, marked the village with conspicuous silence due to their absence. In other words, even the villagers had a limited idea of what the young men did and where they went. Around noon the valley held its breath and the stale air made everyone drowsy. Often three or four neighbors—those who had not devoted their day to hunting or garden work—spent these slow hours in the yard in front of our house, where fruit trees offered generous shade. Wagsal’s three puppies often played tag around the yard, crushed together, growling and whining, in mocking fights that always seemed to be on the brink of turning serious. We laughed as the small dogs quickly got tired from the fight and tumbled over side by side, panting in the warm grass. It was on such a drowsy occasion that I realized that Tóse had showed up and had placed himself on a plastic chair next to me. I still do not know what made Tóse look me up. I remembered that I had talked to his mother, Maria, a few weeks earlier. On the day that her son and a few of his friends had left the village, I had followed her to her garden. I asked her where Tóse had gone, to which she replied: Who knows such things? He is maybe already drunk with his friends. They go to shoot a wild pig and then they go to another village to drink, to visit their cousins. And then my son will come back to ask me for more money to buy wine. And again he will be gone. It is like that. You should ask him when he comes back: “Where have you been!?”

Perhaps Tóse had talked to his mother and had become curious about why I was asking questions about him. In any case, he was sitting next to me in the shade of Wagsal’s yard and stretched out his hand toward me, offering a betel nut. I accepted and reciprocated with a cigarette. I noticed that he did not speak much Bugkalot. Like so many other people in the area he had adopted the dialect Ilocano, which is the lingua franca of northern Luzon. As one of the few boys in the village, he had attended the local school. Though he had dropped out during the first year of high school, he had benefited from the school policy that stated that all teaching should be done in English. Impressively, though he had never had the opportunity to practice outside of the classroom, his English was almost fluent. Also, like his mother, Tóse proved willing to engage in discussion and utter his opinion. As I explained my work to him and told him that I especially wanted to learn about how it was to be a man among the Bugkalot, he said to me matter-of-factly:

Of Mist and Men

Men are strong—we call that o’avet. You see that those people who come up here from other provinces, they are not strong. But we can live a long time out there, in the forest. Men travel, men see the world, men go to many provinces. Women just stay here; they have fears. Men can think. That’s why when a man speaks, everyone listens.

I wanted to ask Tóse if he, then, saw himself as a man. I had noticed that though he sometimes had brief exchanges of words with Wagsal, he never spoke in larger groups of people. I decided that the time was not yet ripe for this type of question. Tóse started visiting me to chat, smoke, and chew betel nuts several times a week. Evelyn and Wagsal seemed to enjoy Tóse’s company when he came by to talk to me in the yard or over a cup of coffee in Evelyn’s kitchen. Yet, while recognizing Tóse as “very funny,” Evelyn and Wagsal also sometimes dismissed him as “no good.” Wagsal, particularly, attempted to discourage me from spending time with Tóse by suggesting other and more suitable people—good people—whom I should visit instead so I could learn about magic and headhunting, rather than having the unfocused dialogues I had with Tóse about everything from mobile phones and fashion choices to more existential questions of love and despair. Or rather, when discussing such matters with Tóse, everything seemed to lead to an existential question. Evelyn and Wagsal were not the only ones to comment on my engagement with Tóse. In fact, the opportunity was seldom missed among the villagers to discuss his flaws. Tóse, it was widely agreed, was “very weak”: he was unable to “control himself.” Yet, in spite of this slander, on several occasions I saw Wagsal and Tóse talking to each other, showing no signs of dislike between them. Though Wagsal often spoke to me about Tóse in harsh words, it was clear that he had some sympathy for Tóse. Also, though I initially thought that Tóse had a special role as the village outcast, I discovered that over the months this role was not exclusively tied to one person but was attributed in turn to various young men who made themselves noticed in unfavorable ways.

Wagsal’s Authority On the morning after the furious eruption, Wagsal took it upon himself to look up Tóse. Since he was not to be found in the house or anywhere else in the village, Wagsal instead talked to Tóse’s sister and explained to her that this kind of behavior could not be tolerated. He

19

20

Cutting Cosmos

added to her that, in fact, her brother would be expelled from the village if he continued to drink and behave in an “uncivilized” manner. Wagsal made it clear to the sister that he would personally summon the elders if this happened again. This was how Wagsal presented their conversation to two of his neighbors, Tebdey and Ronny, later that day. They agreed that even though all the young men were “uncivilized” and “very angry”—oli’ligét ta too—Tóse was the worst of them all. I asked Wagsal how he could be sure that Tóse was actually the one to blame. “Well,” Wagsal said, “He is gone now, right? He ran away. He could just tell me if it wasn’t his fault. He wants to look brave, but he just ran away. The young ones are like that. They run around and they want to look brave! They really, really try. But they cannot even think for themselves.” I wondered what bravery had to do with this. Further, what was it about the young men “running around” and making an effort to “look brave” that attracted the scorn of their seniors? In any case, Tóse had indeed left for the forest that same morning and Wagsal saw the absence as tantamount to an admission of guilt. How should Wagsal’s threat be understood? Expelling people from the village due to misconduct had not previously been practiced. At least, no one could remember such an occurrence ever having taken place. And further, it seemed unclear who in the village had the mandate to authorize and carry out such an act. Yet, the prospect of being expelled was severe. Tóse was beginning to establish himself as a farmer in Ki-tegen and had invested much time in clearing fields and tending gardens. Being expelled from Ki-tegen would mean that he would have to begin anew in a new area of the mountains, and, not having any money, he would have to rely on his family for support. Numerous times I had heard derogatory remarks about young men who were dependent on their families “due to laziness.”1 Though this labeling of the young men as slackers was widespread, it was in fact unwarranted. All the unmarried men I met contributed to their parents’ households with money earned from short-term employment on the vegetable trucks. At other times they would occupy themselves with carabao logging. This backbreaking and dangerous work was carried out by groups of young men and consisted in—illegally—cutting down trees and hauling the timber with the help of domesticated buffalos, carabaos, to the nearest waterway. Subsequently, the group of men would raft the boards to the lowland sawmills.2 Though this type of work offered the highest returns on labor of all the income-generating options in the mountains,

Of Mist and Men

it was looked down upon by most of my informants, simply for being a type of work associated only with the youth. Tóse’s aspiration to grow his own vegetables was thereby one that he shared with most of his peers. Besides being a safe (and legal) way to earn money, gardening was a way to earn respect; in the eyes of many adults the ability of a man to grow vegetables was a sign that he also had the unremitting determination required to take care of a family. Wagsal was one of the few people in the village who, from time to time, took upon themselves an authority that exceeded the boundaries of their households. At least once every month he was asked to participate in community meetings, pogon, to mediate in cases of land disputes or conflicts between families or to soothe the hostilities among the young men after fights had broken out. On those occasions, he remained humble; he repeatedly made it clear to everyone present that he had been requested to participate and that he did not intend to tell the disputing parties what to do. In this way, he did not openly claim leadership. Rather, he tried to settle the conflict by appealing to reason and to the good intentions of the opposing parties and by referring incessantly to whatever kinship ties and other relations there might be between the families. The villagers often expected Wagsal to assume this mantle of community responsibility—a responsibility that carried with it substantial moral prestige. Wagsal was frequently called in to help the barangay officials write documents and decipher the official laws, which were all written in dense English. Almost all officials were illiterate and, having assisted Western missionaries for several decades, Wagsal had become fluent in English and was, moreover, much liked by the other villagers. Though never being openly praised, he assumed a form of charismatic leadership (Weber 1958) due to his ability to defuse tense situations by humor and wit. Thus, rather than being a formal leader in any conventional sense, he acted as a facilitator—or even as a servant to the community. The Bugkalot term for this type of facilitator was purun. The position of the purun did not tie itself to any person in particular and thus Wagsal was not referred to as a purun outside of the meetings. The purun was not able to affect the actions of other people assertively through his authority alone. Rather, purun-ship was a responsibility bestowed temporarily on a person of beya, which in this context meant that he was known for his ability to think independently and that he could persuade other people through his oratory skills. However, the purun thereby ran the risk of becoming suspected of manipulating people’s minds. Therefore, it was important for the purun to stand out as a modest person with

21

22

Cutting Cosmos

no desire to gain authority. He had to gently coax people into doing what they, in a sense, already wanted to do. To be such a mediator was a position and a task usually the preserve of the elders, bengangat, who were well-respected men of age known for their prudence and composure. Many elders, however, never acted as mediators and generally did not have any clearly defined public role. Yet, they managed to always be present in the midst of village life. Becoming an elder did not require any form of insights, wealth, or influence. Rather, it required one to retain a high degree of self-possession and to be able—and willing—to talk in public. What set Wagsal apart from the elders was his ability to talk to a wide range of people. Children, adolescents, and adults of both genders found him entertaining and trustworthy. He could talk in public and move in and out of various groups with little effort. In spite of being relatively young—only forty-three years old—he had gained himself a good reputation due to this convivial disposition. But he also challenged the boundaries between male and female social spheres. He joked flirtatiously with the elderly women, who would sometimes slap him on his shoulders while laughing uncontrollably from one of his pranks (that often carried considerable amounts of sexual innuendo). This form of banter usually marked the interactions between Wagsal and other villagers. Furthermore, he was considered a well-off, modern person who had been among the first in the village to turn to wet rice cultivation. Often the other villagers came to Wagsal’s house, where Evelyn ran a sari-sari store—a simple outlet—from the kitchen. There the villagers could buy betel nut, tobacco, candy, and gin. A large portion of the income from the store was immediately redistributed among the other families in the village who occasionally worked in Wagsal’s paddy field. Wagsal subsequently offered the produce from his land to relatives and neighbors when they had little money or food. Evelyn and Wagsal were unusual in many ways compared to other people in the village. They had decided to have only one child, Ray, who was sixteen years old, to improve the chances of being able to send him to university. Evelyn often talked in an aggrieved voice about the many children that died from malnutrition in the area because their parents had more children than they could feed.

When Wine Takes Over . . . Tóse was the image of the tragic young man who could not live up to certain masculine ideals and whose life appeared as an unending se-

Of Mist and Men

quence of defeats. The previous year, Tóse had started courting Sofia, a woman in her early twenties who had a five-year-old son. A few years back her husband had died in an accident while working on one of the trucks transporting vegetables to the lowlands. I was told that Sofia had never liked Tóse. But Tóse had been persistent. It was not until it was made clear that Tóse was unable to live up to the tognod, the traditional, premarital demands of his father-in-law, that he had given up the courting. Tóse now lived most of the time with his sister’s family. Like many other young men in Ki’tegen, Tóse was considered a baak. This Ilocano word, which also means “old or unsold rice,” referred to young men who had not managed to find a spouse. The term also indicated that it became more difficult to get “sold” as one got older. Throughout my stay in Kabugkalotan, I found him more and more often drunk, and he appeared to be increasingly depressed. At one point, after having participated in a jammin, he looked up Sofia in the middle of the night and—according to rumor—attacked her. However, she managed to hit him unconscious with a bottle and left him on the ground in front of her house. In the Bugkalot communities one rarely heard about men beating women. However, when the opposite was the case it tended to attract much amused attention. So it came as no surprise that in the following days Tóse, again, took refuge in the forest. When he returned to the village, the left side of his face was still swollen. He came to me later that day. Tóse had no one to talk to besides me. It seemed that the devastating humiliation of the incident had completed Tóse’s marginalization in Ki-tegen. He was now, I feared, beyond reach. “I feel so stupid. So weak,” he mumbled as we sat in the sun-dappled shade of a tree at the outskirts of the village. The large, purple bruise across his cheekbone resembled the shadow of a bird’s wing. He slouched miserably against the rough tree trunk. Tóse knew now that Sofia did not like him. In fact, he added, she hated him. And he knew that she treated him with the disdain that he deserved. And that somehow made it more difficult for him not to visit her. I nodded and offered him a cigarette, which he accepted indifferently. “This is what happens when wine takes over,” he said. “It’s better that one doesn’t drink. Because it makes young men do things that they don’t remember and that they don’t want to do.” How often did I hear versions of the phrase “The alcohol did it!”? While this structure of disavowal was inherent to all acts that could, potentially, cause a conflict in the village, such acts were not only those that involved physical violent encounters; when the men talked loudly, sang, or in other ways behaved boastingly, one could be sure that someone in the group would mention that a lot of alcohol had been consumed that

23

24

Cutting Cosmos

evening. For the same reason, the conflicts that broke out during jammins rarely resumed the following day. On many occasions, I was told, one would see that men who had been fighting would be sharing betel nut the following day and making elaborate statements about brotherhood. In spite of the efforts of the missionaries in the area, alcohol continued to play a key role in male interaction. In fact, it was not uncommon that the local pastors in the Pentecostal Church also participated in the drinking sessions in spite of the Church’s unambiguous position against alcohol. One bottle of liquor cost less than a dollar. But even though it seemed inexpensive, drinking cut into family budgets. Since salary workers could make around three to five dollars a day from logging, farming, or transporting vegetables, there was little left for the family after alcohol, tobacco, and betel nuts had been paid for. Frequently, the drinking sessions, which in some periods took place up to four times a week, created conflicts in the households, and at times the men had to seek refuge among their relatives after having been scolded by their wives. Then why did Bugkalot men drink? In answering this question it is tempting to enter the pitfalls of monocausal explanations. Like people elsewhere in the world, the Bugkalot men drank in different ways, for different reasons and were guided by dissimilar values. Nevertheless, one can reasonably claim that one of the features of alcohol use common across cultures is that it provides a way of separating oneself from everyday life and entering into an altered state of consciousness (Harris 1994). It is worthy of note the extent to which men in Ki-tegen would become loud, persistent, and even violently aggressive in ways that contrasted greatly with their more gentle, sober dispositions when alcohol was not involved. By turning the men into talkative extroverts, alcohol acted as an agent that expunged the discrepancy between the actual and the ideal. Thus, the same young men who made my fieldwork difficult by going to great lengths to avoid me during the day were more than willing to talk to me during drinking sessions. With support from alcohol the men emerged as brave and autonomous. Furthermore, while alcohol was a catalyst for many of the conflicts that erupted in Ki-tegen, it simultaneously ascribed a particular status to these conflicts: fights that broke out were confined to the context of the drinking session, and no resentment would be traceable the following day. To understand what confined these acts to the context in which they were carried out, one will have to look at the way alcohol was perceived as an agent taking over the person. Though at first the person drinking alcohol came to embody key masculine ideals—for instance, the ability to speak in front of others—this autonomy, evoked through alcohol, was seen as deeply inauthentic. The women, especially, openly laughed

Of Mist and Men

at the men who were bragging or singing and challenged the men to be equally “courageous” the next day. They mockingly remarked that the drunk, boisterous men would never be capable of exercising the same degree of spirit and self-confidence without the influence of alcohol. As Wagsal and Tóse said, it was “the alcohol talking.” A village elder explained to Wagsal and me that there were two types of young men: some were like children, pathetic (kade-degi). These youngsters could not take care of themselves but relied heavily on support from their parents. Other young men had been lucky to find work. But a problem arose since they had no beya; they had no knowledge: they might be earning their own money but would subsequently spend it on alcohol in the lowland towns. Wagsal and this elder agreed that Tóse switched between these two types. Wagsal’s own friends, who for the most part were middle-aged men, were very controlled when drinking, and I was often invited to join them. Outside Wagsal’s house a small group of men would spend the evenings passing around bottles of sweet gin while eating small slices of various types of roasted meat, polutan. The younger men were often having jammins elsewhere concurrently. The evening mist muffled their distant laughter. During those evenings, as we made our way through the bottles, stories were told in increasingly passionate tones. The men often talked about certain episodes during which young men had caused trouble and distress; they agreed that the young drank to become men but that they were unable to hold their alcohol, which made their attempts pathetic. Thereby, the adult men made a link between not only manhood and being able to control intoxication but also adolescence and the need for alcohol as a way of imitating manhood. Thus, if you had already reached manhood, drinking had no purpose. This became especially clear when I asked the men why they themselves drank: what did they get out of drinking? Without exception they avoided answering the question but simply switched to a different subject. When I proposed that alcohol might also have an effect on them, this suggestion was categorically rejected. Wagsal explained to me, perhaps in an attempt to satisfy me while also cutting off further questions on this matter, that they drank wine to help them sleep—that was the only reason.

Softness of the Youth I wish to consider now the idea that the story of Tóse stages a situation in which the young Bugkalot men often found themselves. Being consid-

25

26

Cutting Cosmos

ered an adult man had to do with harnessing one’s ligét, the “anger” or potentiality that the Bugkalot associate with chaotic forces. Ligét, however, was not an inherent aspect of the person. Rather, it was a response to external forces. In many cases such external forces were the manifestation of the beya of others—as seen, for example, when the elders implied that they were morally superior by talking about the youth as inferior. What if the account that opens up this chapter shows us an individual who in his attempts to contract himself in social space, that is, establish himself as a person, was continuously destabilized or dissolved? By looking into the Bugkalot experience of “shame,” I move on to explore this notion. The young men distinguished themselves from women in ways that often made my fieldwork challenging. As I mentioned earlier, for months it was virtually impossible for me to establish contact with the young men. While the women were more curious and extroverted, the men appeared extremely insecure and avoided me whenever they could. When I addressed them they covered their mouths with their hands, suppressing embarrassed laughter, or stared straight ahead with blank eyes. Steadily the gap between us widened until I had lost all hope of reaching any form of rapport. It was not until I met Tóse that the young men gradually started to appear to be more at ease in my company. The reason for their initial embarrassment, I came to understand later, was closely connected to the self-awareness generated by the “gaze of others.” Evelyn, who was an invaluable resource throughout my fieldwork, explained this to me. I often shared my wonder, confusion, or frustrations with her in the kitchen, where a large part of my fieldwork unfolded. Both children and adults enjoyed stopping by her kitchen, and she treated friends, neighbors, and travelers to coffee. As I shared with her my problems regarding my fieldwork, she nodded with a slight smile, showing that she had understood and, perhaps, anticipated this particular conundrum. She had been removing the scales of a fish, but now put down her knife to turn down the radio. Each day at noon she listened to the Christian counseling program “Family Matters” by the Far Eastern Broadcasting Company. The radio was barely able to pick up the signal and most of the time one could only make out a whistling, static noise that, when filtered through the dusty heat, created a soothing aural backdrop to all the activities around the property. Evelyn picked up the knife again, clutched the fish in a firm grip, and started moving the blade over the its slimy body again. She said, “Those young men think they know how to do everything; they have to know everything. But they don’t and that’s the problem, you see? That’s why

Of Mist and Men

they want to stay out in the forest. They go there to hunt. Or maybe they don’t hunt. Who knows? They rarely bring home meat … But they go because in the forest there’s no pressure. But back here [in the village] when someone talks to them, or even looks at them, it’s as if they cannot move!” Articulating a common and widely shared frustration, her brows lowered and tightened as she said the last sentence. The language of inadequacy and incompetence, which permeates much of the everyday talk about the youth, is well captured in this quote. Young men were frequently talked about in terms of instability, inconsistency, translucence, and concealment. Terms reminiscent of ethereal, intangible states—for instance mist, fog, and smoke—permeated the various accounts provided by my informants when they discussed the dispositions of young men. While the hardening of the body was a positively valued process that happened throughout a man’s life (R. Rosaldo 1986: 314), the young men were still “soft.” The young men sought refuge in the forest to get away from the pressure they experienced in the village, while as a man gets older his engagement in community life increases. The young men’s association with the forest was also related to the fact that their softness and elusiveness was, in fact, the key property of the forest spirit, the be’tang. And like the young man, the be’tang were beings of capricious anger, ligét. Evelyn linked ligét to a particular pressure placed on them. She noted that the young men would feel shame and suddenly withdraw to the forest or remain quiet when encountering men with beya—or at best make pitiful laconic replies with ashamed, downcast eyes. I agree with her. After having made numerous attempts to interview the young men throughout my stay in Ki-tegen, I realized that this form of interview would never work. They clearly found it uncomfortable to answer my questions.

Shame One evening, I told Linda, a middle-aged woman, about a recent episode. I had been walking in the forest on my own one early afternoon. It had been particularly muddy; sometimes I sank to my knees, and that, combined with the midday humidity, was making me tired and inattentive. I followed the trail around a large tree trunk that required me to stride over a massive moss-covered root, where I almost stumbled over a young man from the village who was resting against the tree in the shade. He seemed to have been dozing and sat up for a brief moment with a startled look. Before I had the chance to say anything, he jumped

27

28

Cutting Cosmos

to his feet and ran off at full speed, leaving a bag of tools behind. Linda laughed when I told her about the incident. Her husband, Ronny, had just arrived in the kitchen where we were sitting and Linda quickly explained to him what had happened. He too seemed amused. “Yes, they are like that, but they are not bad. They are scared—like an eel when you shoot it!” Ronny laughed, pretending to hold the shaft of an imaginary spear that had hit him through his forehead. He then paused for a few seconds. “Maybe the young man wanted to be civilized but he was too scared,” he reflected while Linda nodded. He was too scared even to talk! He did not know how to behave. He just sees you: you are a white man. Maybe he has never seen you chew betel nut … maybe you are a missionary. That was in his mind. When you look at him he thinks he doesn’t know how to behave. He has no beya. He is afraid. He is full of shame! You look at him and he cannot carry it. And so he runs. And so he is gone.

Ronny’s words resonated with what Evelyn had told me at one point. She had explained to me that besides being able to travel to faraway places without fear and act bravely when facing the unforeseen, men should be unaffected by the gaze of other people. Such properties were intrinsically masculine. Women, on the other hand, she said, were not expected to engage themselves with decision making outside of the household. Since they did not have beya they were more vulnerable to manipulation by others than are men. I never heard of any women having beya but that did not mean, necessarily, that it would be impossible for women to gain beya. Rather, beya, being a form of knowledge generated through one’s own individual experiences, required exactly that: experiences. Though having beya was often translated as having “knowledge,” beya was sometimes described by my informants as “events” or “spectacle.” For instance, when talking about an elder recognized for his ability to make good judgment, people would assert that he had “many events in his life.” Accumulating such “spectacular events” during one’s life thus made the man autonomous. Women were by definition tied to the home and were therefore said to have experienced few “events.” This also went for the children, who simply had not yet had the chance to experience beya. Besides referring to such spectacular events, beya more commonly referred to something that the person could have. Having beya made a person capable of “being seen”—most usually when telling stories or giving speeches—without showing any sign of shame or fear. Beya, in this sense, made a person autonomous. Due to this autonomy, it was said, men were able to avoid being manipulated. Beya enabled men to think

Of Mist and Men

independently, while people without beya were susceptible to words; for instance, young men could easily be convinced to vote for specific individuals during elections. Beya was thereby linked to upholding order through a form of sociality in which men remained autonomous in relation to each other. On the other hand, the beya of adult men caused ligét among younger men, who were talked about in terms of their various inabilities—especially their inability to remain unaffected by others. Youth were thereby always rendered morally inferior. The requisites of being unaffected by other people seemed to place the young men under much pressure and cause a specific negative emotion referred to as ang-béteng. This term was derived from the word betáng, which was translated as a “clearing far away in the wilderness,” and ébtang, which meant “to be separated.” Ang-béteng was the feeling of standing outside of the community, of being vulnerable and exposed and was normally translated by my interlocutors with the English word “shame.” The young man experienced this type of shame in the confrontation with his ignorance and when his fearfulness and incapacity to act independently was publicly exposed. The adult man, the person with beya, on the other hand, was said to have overcome such feelings of shame; he could “bear the eyes” or the gaze of others without fear since, ideally, he was unaffected by the surrounding world. The connection between shame and finding oneself unwillingly in the gaze of the Other finds its Western analogy in the writings of Jean Paul Sartre (1969). He provides a phenomenological analysis of shame and the gaze (le regard) in terms of a particular relationship between self and other: to experience the Other’s look is to experience oneself as no longer belonging to oneself but as becoming an object in the projection of the Other. The anxiety this may bring about Sartre thereby relates to a form of alienation, a shift in one’s experience of oneself from being a subject to becoming an object. For instance, when someone peeps through a keyhole, Sartre argues, one is fully absorbed in what he is doing, that is, he is not self-aware. However, when he hears a floorboard creaking behind him, he is immediately made intensively aware that he is being evaluated by a third party, another spectator, and that he himself has become an object through the other’s gaze (317). In this view, shame, the experience of involuntarily becoming an object for a specific or generalized Other, is not a feeling one can elicit on one’s own—it requires intersubjectivity: “[It] presupposes the intervention of the other” (Zahavi 2001: 158). It is through the Other that in this situation we “appear” in a phenomenological sense, though in an undesirable way, and become estranged to ourselves. Following this notion, the young Bugkalot man evaluates himself through the gaze of

29

30

Cutting Cosmos

the Other and experiences shame, as he, in Sartre’s terms, becomes a project in the gaze of the Other. He is thereby confronted with his own incapacity to act in an independent fashion. Shame in this sense was the effect of the man not only finding himself subordinate to others in a social hierarchy but also recognizing such hierarchies as being of social importance. Though some individuals were more knowledgeable, more skilled, and more compelling than others, my informants went to great lengths to avoid confirming such views through utterance and action, thereby keeping hierarchies to a minimum. Following this notion, beya, was the unanimous attempt of Bugkalot men to transcend all hierarchical social structures. The men strove toward social independence, the form of stoic composure that Lila AbuLughod (1999) identified as being of key importance among the Awlad ‘Ali Beduin. Among the Bedouin, showing signs of fear “implies that it has control over one” (88). Thus, this form of masculinity unfolds as an incessant struggle to avoid submitting to the control of others while exacting respect and commanding obedience. Among my interlocutors, however, such attempts at exercising power were most frequently ignored, except under special circumstances.

Dépyang, the Scapegoat Though Michelle Rosaldo emphasized that the Bugkalot were broadly organized around egalitarian principles, she recognized that they did possess a form of ranking but of the simplest sort: that between women and men and between younger and older. This age hierarchy was emphasized in everyday conversation and interaction. She writes: Inside the house men tuydek (command) women, who in turn pass their commands on to children, and children are quick to tuydek those who are younger than themselves. The dynamics of the tuydek tend ultimately to permit all adults the orderly poise of the platform—while requests for betel, food, tools, and water set children in almost continuous motion across the relatively unordered floor. (1980: 72)

She directly tied this pecking order to the young man’s impetus toward violence; this drive, she argued, originated in his desire to prove his “bravery”—independence and aggressiveness—and thereby gain the respect of the adults and his peers. She thereby explained the Bugkalot desire toward violence (both in its spontaneous and in its ritualistic form) in terms of a certain structural oppression of the youth (M. Rosaldo 1983: 137).

Of Mist and Men

In 2009 ligét continued to be caused by age hierarchies and to simultaneously engender and legitimate the age hierarchy in a circular fashion. When the elders referred to the ligét of the youth they did so in a negative way, and it was especially through this negative exposure that ligét was fashioned. This unfavorable position of the adolescent was encapsulated by the term dépyang, which connoted a certain lack of maleness. An elderly man, Tó’paw, explained this to me. Previously, he had referred to several of the elders in the village as having much beya. When I asked him what beya was he explained it to me meticulously: It is evening. Some men make a camp. This man over there says to you: “Sit here on the ground.” But you don’t sit. You look around first. You have beya. Is this a good place to sit? Can a rock fall down on your head and kill you? You think first. Even if your brother or cousins are talking. Maybe you come to a river. You must find your own way across. Never follow the man in front of you. The rock he was stepping on, you see, it is now loose. If you step on it you will fall. Some other time I go hunting and we are many men hunting the wild boar. My cousin thinks that I am the wild boar—it is very hard to see at night. He shoots me. But those men who have beya, they know what to do, they can think.

Interestingly, in these reflections Tó’paw problematized an issue of togetherness and sameness, which Michelle Rosaldo asserted to be a highly treasured cultural motif among the Bugkalot. Her informants, she argued, employed the image of equal men working together and traveling together to describe an ideal state of maleness. She specifically used the image of men traveling along a path through the forest to tease out a particular Bugkalot ethos. Michelle Rosaldo saw ideals of sameness as an engine that created social action. This striving for sameness, she argued, animated men to engage in various endeavors in their attempt to reach what others among their peers had reached before them. When the ideals of sameness were breached, that is, when someone in a group of peers had reached a higher level of social esteem through, for instance, having participated in a headhunting raid, the other men became unable to “work dependably, think clearly, or enjoy the company of kin because their ‘shame’ brings sullenness, distraction, and ill-ease” (M. Rosaldo 1983: 146). This form of shame, Rosaldo argued, was related to “selves defined within a moral system where relationships are shaped much less by hierarchies or histories, past desires or social claims, than by a present sense of balance and imbalance among would-be ‘equivalent’ adults” (M. Rosaldo 1983: 150). Thus, for instance, the motivation for engaging in ritual beheadings was for the young men to achieve equality with adult

31

32

Cutting Cosmos

men: “with marriage as with beheading, the youth transforms his social self by demonstrating that he is an ‘equal’—dependent on no other man” (165). This suggests that headhunting was not the only way to reduce one’s shamefulness. There were various ways of achieving sameness. Under all circumstances, the experience of being inferior to others generated an emotional imbalance, which clogged the youthful mind. Tó’paw continued: When we have a pogon [public meetings in which conflicts are settled] all the elders are speaking and discussing important issues and the young ones, because of their age and little experience, do not understand what the elders are discussing. Then people will say to the young ones: oh, you dépyang! The elders have all the experience and they know all that a man needs to know. Not only fishing, hunting. … If two people have a quarrel they go to an elder, because he has seen such quarrels many times before and does not listen more to one or the other. No one can disturb his thoughts. The young men do not know about such things. They are just dépyang.

I asked him if it made any difference that today the young men had learned to read and that they spoke different languages. “Yes,” Tó’paw admitted: They travel and they see civilization and they are better than the elders in languages. So in their mind we are the dépyang, ha ha! That is true. But it is not the true meaning of dépyang. We don’t run away like those youngsters. It is all about the things you have seen with your own eyes. If I told them about my beya [meaning “the events in my life”] they would maybe not believe my words.

Being a man in this account is talked about in terms of predictability and stability. Dépyang, in contrast, had a broad meaning, referring to someone who was not included in the world of men due to an inability to control his behavior. Dépyang was a characteristic that was evoked in everyday talk among the villagers. In such situations, the dépyang was not a category applied to all the young men, but rather to one person. In the first months of my fieldwork this “scapegoat” role was applied to Tóse, but during my stay several other men had the doubtful pleasure of being singled out in this way. Through these men, moral qualities were dramatically juxtaposed against those of the youth in general. As I have argued in this chapter, these moral qualities were closely tied to individual autonomy. The word dépyang was a pejorative term that was used to designate a form of personhood marked by shame. The shame of the young men revealed their lack of beya and their inferiority to men in general. One could thereby make the following model (Figure 1.1).

33

Of Mist and Men

Ligét

Beya

Depyang Figure 1.1.  Reverse Pyramid of Power

This model places the well-known pyramid of power on its head. Rather than the singularity, the “leader,” being at the top, we find the singularity, the dépyang, at the bottom. Ligét and beya are opposing motions on a continuum. At the one end of this continuum we find the ashamed youth who were continuously deprived of the chance to contract themselves in social space. At the other end we find men with beya who manifested themselves as morally superior—and as equal to each other in this superiority—by exposing the youth as inferior. Though this is a broadly accurate depiction of how my informants understood the relation between ligét and beya, it also leaves out a number of other ways in which ligét and beya worked. In fact, it was not only the young men who strove to obtain autonomy and saw it slipping through their fingers. In the following, I will look into what exactly I mean by autonomy and how it comes to pose a fundamental paradox in a man’s life.

Performing Autonomy It should be clear by now that the word beya refers to a certain generic way of talking about the Bugkalot man as unaffected by the surrounding world—though the term also implied that the person was humble and

34

Cutting Cosmos

had sufficient social skills to avoid conflict. Thus, I was continuously surprised to see—and hear about—situations in which men put the values of humble equality aside. More of such cases will be presented and discussed throughout this book. Though, as I have described, assertive behavior and dominance sometimes became part of the drinking sessions among young men, I will argue that other—and more socially accepted—forms of exhibitions of self-assertiveness and dominance played a pivotal role in relation to both Bugkalot masculinity and the egalitarian form of organization in general. The situations I refer to were ritual, performative situations in which a wide range of practices were carried out: from storytelling and dancing to ritual murder. What these practices had in common was that they presented the men in ways that ruptured dramatically with the way men would normally appear. In these contexts the man made what I shall later refer to as a pámotok, a “cut,” as he exposed himself forcefully in front of others. Through the pámotok the man “performed beya”: he manifested himself assertively in a way that explicitly transgressed the boundaries of egalitarianism. One can therefore add another element to the former model (Figure 1.2). Though beya signaled imperviousness and autonomy, all men went to great lengths to have their beya recognized by other people by engaging in pámotok. This made beya a highly social phenomenon. During these performances of beya the performer explicitly made himself the center of attention, that is, he exposed himself through an unambiguous attempt to temporarily define the social context. This was often done through the ta’gem, a certain highly masculine dance that men engaged in during celebrations. Here the dancer, who was in some cases dressed in aymét, the traditional male attire, exposed his chest while extending his arms out to the sides, one arm slightly toward the front and the other pointing in the opposite direction (as if the former was holding a shield whereas the latter was preparing to strike a terrifying blow with a weapon). The legs were bent, the back lengthened, and the head was raised, alert. The dancer was accompanied by the kolesing, an instrument made from bamboo with rattan strings, played by two persons—the strings strummed by a man and the sticks, in counterpoint, played by a woman. Every ta’gem that I witnessed was a spectacle. Some onlookers reacted with veneration, but just as many reacted with embarrassed laughter. I witnessed more than fifty dances during my fieldwork and was continuously surprised to find that many of the spectators appeared to find the performances greatly transgressive. They often pointed at the man and talked about his dress, which, besides his red headband, which was

35

Of Mist and Men

Ligét

Pamotok

Beya

Depyang Figure 1.2.  Reverse Pyramid of Power and the Performance of Beya

often decorated with the beak of a hornbill, consisted of a blue narrow strip of cloth that covered the genitals and was attached to a waistband. This form of clothing was only seen in the context of the ta’gem. Performing the ta’gem was an attempt to attract people’s attention. And the fact that admiration was only one out of many—and sometimes less flattering—reactions should tell us that it mattered little what kind of attention the performer received. What mattered was the fact that he made a transgressive “cut,” that he emerged intentionally in front of the spectators and thereby defined the situation through his performance.

36

Cutting Cosmos

The transgression was not only brought about by the man’s seminakedness, though judging by the many comments it attracted, this was clearly also a factor. The transgression was also engendered by the totality of the performance rather than any of its parts. The dancer would take center stage during the performance, which rarely lasted for more than a few minutes. Without the slightest indication of emasculated pride when confronted with the sporadic laughter from the audience, the dancer carried on with a serious, resolute look, rhythmically and deftly stamping his feet on the dusty ground. Every muscle was tense, the facial expression focused, stern—impervious to the circumstances of the dance, whether it had to do with performing at a wedding in front of spectators or at less formal occasions. The dancer moved in a vigorous and trancelike manner, and the sharp staccato sounds provided by the kolesíng increased and dropped in intensity in accordance with his steps. The dancer proved untouched by the outside world, decisively confined to himself and his movements. It should be clear that beya when viewed through the performance of ta’gem was not so much an act that created a reflection of autonomy as an inner quality, exposing as “exterior” what is “interior.” Rather, autonomy was a phenomenon that belonged as much to the outer as to the inner world of the dancer. In the duration of the dance he was both abstracted from and part of the social context in which he performed. Autonomy in this regard became an aspect of the relationship between man and audience rather than a negation of this relationship. Beya in the context of ta’gem was often associated with the color red. The red headband (tabénged), particularly, was by many of my informants considered the varnish of beya, the outward appearance of a man’s ability to bear the gaze of others and to remain unaffected. Red attracted the eye and was thereby a color that communicated to the surrounding world that whoever wore this color could also bear people’s gaze. Among young men, however, the red color had a different effect: the young men had a fondness for red clothes such as shorts and t-shirts. But rather than making the young men stand out, the red color did the opposite. Since many young men dressed themselves in red clothes while hanging out in groups, it had the ironic consequence that rather than catching the eye, and thus exposing the individual, it rendered them completely anonymous in the group. Thus, women tended to point mockingly to the fact that the color red was a way for the young men to “hide.” When worn by a young man, red was tied to his strong desire to efface himself, that is, seek refuge in groups. The term for this desire was ta-pom. The Bugkalot word for shame, ang-bétang, comes from the word for “feeling exposed.” Ta-pom should then be considered

Of Mist and Men

a response to this exposedness as a desire for obscurity. But it was because of this inability to let themselves “be seen” in the correct way that individuals felt shame to begin with. These dynamics seemed to cause a fundamental tension in the lives of the young men.

Hunting and the Unidentified Leader Individual autonomy has traditionally been of key value among the Bugkalot and has played an important part in preserving a form of society with no sharp distinctions in rank, status, or wealth between families. Though community representatives and other officials were elected every few years, their occasional attempts to claim leadership were ineffectual and their decisions usually ignored. It is thus important that one does not imagine Bugkalot social organization as a formal political system, that is, as something the people had agreed to uphold. It was not a smooth mechanism, and there were many examples of people who made clear attempts to claim leadership or to make decisions that aimed to control the lives of others. For instance, an elder who had recently been elected as the punong barangay, the officially elected head of the district, tried to introduce a ban on alcohol during weddings. Admittedly, to me this seemed a reasonable idea, since more often than not fighting broke out among drunken men during weddings. It was clear, however, that the decision of the punong barangay went unheeded. Though the ban was widely disregarded, the villagers did not drink in defiance as if they sought to openly make a statement against the punong barangay. Rather, they appeared to be genuinely indifferent. It was almost impossible to make people talk about this incident—which made sense, as this would have exposed a conflict in the village. Only Tóse was willing to comment on it, emphasizing that the punong barangay simply had no means of punishing those who disregarded his authority. Tóse said, “What can he do? He can tell us what to do, but if some man doesn’t want to listen and if I don’t want to listen … you know, I don’t do harm to other people or to anyone else … And later today he will be drinking also. You will see!” True enough. As we ate in Evelyn’s kitchen that evening, tired after a long day of sitting in the sun during the wedding celebration, Evelyn disclosed while shaking her head that she had seen the punong barangay drunk as she went home from the wedding. “If he wants others to do what he says,” she argued, “he should make a good example himself.”

37

38

Cutting Cosmos

I tried to challenge her on that point: “But if he could see that people here do not listen, why should he act any differently than other people in Ki-tegen?” Evelyn held her ground: You know, Henrik, that is why nothing is ever done in this village! Because if you want to make something, you need to be the boss: be strong and tell those other people what to do. Or else nothing happens. But here, as soon as someone says, ‘No, today I will not help in the village, I will rather go and tend to my own rice,’ then the other men say the same thing. Suddenly all the young are gone also—gone as if they had never been here. They have gone hunting. And then also the captain3 leaves and no one is left in the village.

This account has at least two interesting points. First of all, Evelyn referred to the many shipwrecked attempts that had been made to start up various community projects. Perhaps the most illustrative example had to do with the path that ran through the village. Every year this path needed maintenance, since the crossing of carabaos created deep, treacherous potholes during the rainy seasons. After having witnessed the failed efforts of other men to gather the villagers in a joint task of leveling the path, a local schoolteacher had concluded that there was in fact only one way of accomplishing the task: he arranged a “community day” at the school and had the children collect stones and sand. The path was thereby mended within an afternoon. Second, Evelyn’s account provides a typical example of the way women are portrayed as playing an insignificant role in the village; the people leading the village were men and thus Evelyn indirectly refers to women as “no one.” Though the women did not have much influence in the village (which, it should be clear by now, was a circumstance that they shared with the men), they had authority in the individual household, where they controlled the production of rice and ran the small sari-sari stores that were emerging in large numbers in every village across Kabugkalotan. Yet, though the women played a critical factor in relation to the economy of the individual household, their inability to scale the same heights of achievement as men was often stressed. A sexual division of labor was maintained, but at times the boundaries became fluid and subject to some adjustment according to needs. Especially during the rice harvest, little attempt was made to maintain such boundaries, though one would find that when men and women worked together they often had different functions in the same activity (for example, women cutting the rice and men carrying the bundles of straw). Tasks specifically associated with men were those that involved the use of guns or great strength. Only men carried out the physically

Of Mist and Men

demanding work of forest clearing in residual forests, where trees had to be cut with chainsaw and axe. In some cases the women helped in clearing the areas with lighter vegetation, especially at times when the dry spell had started late and rapid clearing was therefore needed. Though the clearing of undergrowth was done with bolos—a tool and a weapon associated with the men—no interdiction existed against the handling of bolos by women. Likewise, it was not uncommon to see men fetching water and preparing food, though most of my informants claimed that such tasks were only done by women. However, two forms of food production, hunting and fishing, were exclusively male pursuits. Hunting and fishing were starting to be of minor importance in their contribution to household economies. As the forest was being cut down to make space for vegetable fields, hunting was no longer a critical source of food. Yet most men went hunting every week—often as a form of entertainment, as they often did not shoot any animals. Evelyn tended to comment that the time spent on hunting, which was often days at a time, could be better spent in the vegetable gardens. Rice and vegetables were considered a private produce and were (like women) associated with the household. Meat obtained through collective boar hunting, laob, on the other hand, was bound up with the public domain (like men) and was ideally distributed equally in the village. Though this form of hunting economy, which was organized around the principle of “immediate sharing” (Woodburn 1982), had been in decline in recent years, it was still practiced whenever an animal was taken down. Boar hunting was organized through situational authority in the sense that a leader, known as the gemapó, emerged only in the particular context of the hunt. Usually the gemapó was the most experienced hunter in the group. In other cases, he led the hunt due to his intimate knowledge of a particular area of the forest. Yet, the gemapó did not appear to be elected in any obvious way by the other participants. Nor did he have to claim the position as the gemapó. One hunter explained this to me matter-offactly: “The gemapó is important. He will tell the other men where to go and when to go around the wild boar … We never have to discuss who will be the gemapó. He knows it and we know it. So what is there to discuss?” Clearly, some men tended to act as gemapó more often than others. However, they did not bring this role with them back to the village. After

39

40

Cutting Cosmos

the animal had been taken down, the hunting party would disperse and at that moment the only influence of the gemapó was to be found in the instructions he had given out beforehand—for instance, who would carry the game back to the village. The gemapó was not praised by the villagers if the hunt was successful, nor would he be assigned responsibility if it failed. Neither did the gemapó have anything to say regarding the distribution of the meat, since this was not a subject of negotiation. The distribution of meat was one of the paramount events in which Bugkalot egalitarianism was put on display: after the hunt the game would be carefully and equally divided between the households in the village and the hunters went from house to house distributing the meat. In this process the hunters were careful not to tell who had led the hunt and who had shot the animals. In this way, though hierarchical relations existed in the forest, these relations dissolved back in the village, allowing the men to maintain a certain amount of distance from each other. That is, they did not challenge each other’s beya.

One Man’s Beya, Another Man’s Ligét My aim in this chapter has been to identify how beya pointed to certain key dynamics of Bugkalot masculinity. Beya denoted a form a presence—what I have referred to as the man contracting himself in social space. Such contractions took on different intensities and in its most intense form, for instance during ta’gem, the male dance, they were confined to established contexts that were separated from the everyday, vernacular order. In fact, an important transgressive aspect of ta’gem was that the man presented himself so radically differently from the way he appeared in everyday life. Unlike these contexts in which the man emerged in a specifically assertive way, beya normally denoted the humble dispositions of the mature man who as an autonomous individual remained unaffected by the world. It was through this autonomy that conflicts were avoided between men. Normally, adult men went to great lengths to avoid challenging each other directly or indirectly. For instance, bragging was considered an extreme breach of decorum that caused “bad atmosphere” (angégetáget) and “bad thoughts” (en-oget ma nem-nem). Such adverse effects appeared in a variety of contexts, all having this in common: that someone was being forced into behaving or feeling in a certain way. Bragging was what frequently caused such “bad atmosphere,” since it created jealousy (apet) among the bystanders. Bragging thereby became an external force that acted on

Of Mist and Men

the individual, generating ligét, as it rendered other men inferior. The response to such bragging, however, was distance, that is, a subtle form of exclusion. The men with little sense of modesty were simply not invited to the jammins. Thus, Bugkalot egalitarianism was not the “fierce egalitarianism” that has been studied among hunters and gatherers. Richard Lee argued that among the !Kung of Botswana, egalitarianism was “fiercely” maintained. The social instrument most often applied in this regard was public ridicule. If a person failed to show proper humility, the rest of the group would poke fun at that person mercilessly until proper humility was shown. Also, whenever a hunter returned from a successful hunt and shared the meat with the others, he made every effort to explain that the animal was in fact skinny and worthless. If he failed to do that, others would do it for him and make fun of him in the process. One of the !Kung elders explained that the purpose of “insulting the meat” was to avoid an outcome in which the hunter “comes to think of himself as a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle” (Lee 2003: 54). Though I witnessed similar practices among the Bugkalot, such direct ridicule was only directed toward the youth. And rather than being ignited by a widespread desire for egalitarian stability per se, as among the !Kung, the opposite in fact seemed to be the case. Talking down to the youth was a way through which adult men made themselves socially visible. Though egalitarian relations were maintained between adult men, one way to make oneself equal in autonomy to other men was by acting on the youth. Thereby, Tóse’s story accentuates a number of features that characterizes the situation of young men in Bugkalot society. Though from the outset it appeared to me as if I was experiencing the Bugkalot people at a time where the adolescent men were rapidly increasing their social isolation through drinking, picking quarrels, and making themselves obnoxious, in fact there were few indications that the youth were behaving differently from when Michelle Rosaldo (1980) carried out her studies in the 1970s. Michelle Rosaldo depicted how alcohol, which also played a pivotal role in the youth culture during her fieldwork, often caused young men to end up in drunken brawls. It became evident to me that talking about the youth in a derogatory way was a technique to consolidate oneself as a man and as superior to them. Thus, my informants did not assume ligét as an innate trait among young males. Rather, the shame that gave rise to the precariousness of

41

42

Cutting Cosmos

ligét emerged due to external social circumstances—most notably the age hierarchies—in which the adolescent found himself. By talking about their shame, their emotional unpredictability, the propensity toward letting themselves be affected by others, the youth were made into people without beya—that is, an Other that embodied the way in which a Bugkalot person should not be constituted. While this does not explain to us exactly what beya is, one can identify how it works as a social phenomenon. Men find a proper way to contract themselves by tying youth to a lack of beya; this is an important component of beya, that it manifests itself via its opposition. Thus, while the term “Bugkalot masculinity” refers to a field of subjectivity consisting of the qualities traditionally associated with men and the practices and ways of being that serve to validate and sustain such cultural notions of masculinity, masculinity in this regard should not only be thought of as that which is not feminine. Though masculinity emerges among the Bugkalot in relation to other categories, these categories are not first and foremost dominated by the image of the feminine. Rather, the opposite of the ideals of the masculine is the anonymous area of society, in which women are indeed part and men also live most of their lives. Masculinity among the Bugkalot thus involves the ability to set oneself assertively against this anonymous egalitarian backdrop. What I have referred to as “autonomy” creates an image of a subject attempting to maintain a certain amount of distance from the social world. My informants, however, did not talk about the ideal of masculinity only in terms of a certain amount of distance. Rather, they persistently explained to me that the mature man “could tell other people what to do” and that he was “unaffected by the world.” That is, they talked about both a form of leadership and a detachedness from the social realm. This state of disentanglement is clearly not achieved by Bugkalot men. On the contrary, they seemed to enact an autonomy that relied heavily on social recognition. To me the most powerful image of this paradox of autonomy is the man “dancing his autonomy” through the public performance of the ta’gem. Though the dancer appeared completely oblivious to the context of his performance, it was nevertheless extremely clear that the gaze of his audience meant everything: the underlying motivation for performing ta’gem was for the man to have his beya socially recognized. Thus, clearly, the adult man had not separated himself irrevocably from the world. One might argue that the men were attempting to gain control over a body, which, as shown by Judith Butler, is never really one’s own: the body will invariably be “constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere” (Butler 2004: 21). The body has a public dimension and will never be totally subjugated to our own ends.

Of Mist and Men

Bugkalot men existed in a state of oscillation between different intensities and forms of social visibility. In most cases, the loss of visibility happened voluntarily—for instance, as the dancer deliberately stepped down from the stage and reintegrated into the crowd. This always happened without fanfare and without attracting further attention from the spectators, who turned their gaze toward the next performer. Thus, in this chapter, I have placed the adolescent and the adult at the two extremes of a conceptual continuum, with ligét and beya located at either end, respectively. In the following chapter, I wish to expand this continuum, since it appears that Bugkalot maleness involves a never fully actualized attempt to become contracted in an ultimate, autonomous way. This contraction is continuously prevented through its performativity (it is always carried out in the gaze of others), after which the man dissolves into the social backdrop as he leaves the stage. What would happen if the continuum from the adolescent to the adult only brought us halfway along the continuum of masculinity? What if the man did not dissolve but continued to contract himself? I will pursue this notion by exploring what would then be the radical endpoint of the male fulfillment. This radical autonomy—or complete detachment—is the faculty of a demonic and enigmatic being: the mansasadile.

Notes   1. Women, on the other hand, rarely encountered this kind of pressure. They were expected—though not forced—to stay with their families and did not generate income. The fact is, however, that more and more women were moving away, marrying outside the tribe, and supporting their families financially by working in the lowland towns.   2. Since a carabao could only transport a very limited quantity, the trunk is cut into boards using a chainsaw after the tree has been felled. Typically only onethird of the tree is used and the rest is left in the forest. Far from being as destructive as large-scale industrial logging, which is also banned in the area, carabao logging nevertheless also has a devastating effect on the forest.   3. The term “captain” is sometimes used instead of punong barangay.

43

2 Impartial Man

Wagsal’s teenage son, Ray, found himself evicted from his bed after I moved into their house. I protested at first but Wagsal explained to me that, in fact, Ray did not mind. Nevertheless, I often felt guilty when I found Ray sleeping on the hard floor. This sense of guilt and indebtedness became stronger over my stay in Ki-tegen. Ray was made personally responsible for my well-being and had been instructed by Wagsal to always call me by the respectful term kuya, the Tagalog word for older brother. He brought me coffee, washed my dishes, and helped me translate Bugkalot words, and during the nights he frequently embarked on a quest of Sisyphean proportions as he tried to make the village dogs stop howling. One could hear him shout so loud that all the neighboring families must have been able to pick it up: “Be quiet, you noisy dogs! Kuya Henrik is trying to sleep!” Sleep was, in fact, unattainable during many nights, since one particular pack of dogs tended to socialize directly beneath the hut. Both touched and utterly humiliated by Ray’s fruitless efforts, I tried to block out the sounds and focused instead on my breathing. Please let me sleep! I was looking out from under the mosquito net at the open space in front of the house. Occasionally, silhouettes would form when lightning flickered over the mountains and I predicted that I would still be awake as the traces of dawn began to form in the eastern sky. By that time the pounding of rice had already started throughout the valley and it produced a stomping sound that steadily coalesced into a droning background sound. The following day would be unproductive—a blurry,

Impartial Man

dreamlike haze, as if I were a figment of someone else’s imagination (I was not yet so relaxed in the home of Wagsal and Evelyn that I would luxuriate in a few extra hours of sleep in the morning). This forecast often made an anxious knot grow in my stomach, which kept me awake even after the dogs occasionally fell quiet. These plentiful hours of not sleeping, trying to enjoy the soothing, cool air from the valley, which at times had a sweet tang of smoke, often gave me an odd claustrophobic sense of the surrounding environment inescapably and incessantly forcing itself upon me. I could hear the soft snoring of Wagsal and Evelyn—and Ray on the floor, fast asleep, his head resting on nothing but hard wood. I thought about how they often talked of the importance of composure and of remaining unaffected. Indeed, my companions never showed signs of fatigue when hiking, and they would often sleep on the bare ground, seemingly indifferent to the cold nights—and even to the rain. Allowing oneself to be affected by outside forces was the primary cause of ligét. Michelle Rosaldo (1980) referred to this term as “anger” in her treatise on the emotional life of the Bugkalot man. She also mentioned that the word had a multitude of meanings. I came to understand it in this broad sense as an unpredictable and unfocused “force” or “potentiality.” “Anger” seems an imprecise translation, since it refers to an emotional state; ligét was slightly different. For instance, a spicy chili pepper also had ligét. Yet ligét was not the spiciness itself. Rather, the ligét of the pepper was its ability to inflict its spiciness on the world, its ability to “affect.” Ligét, then, would be the potentiality of anger—its unpredictable consequences—rather than the anger itself. Ligét was brought about by beya, that is, the manifestation or “contraction” of other men as autonomous beings in social space. And it was simultaneously through exposing those individuals as lacking beya that beya in fact manifested itself. Paradoxically, this meant that although beya had to do with the man exhibiting his autonomy, this autonomy relied on its contrast and was thereby rendered socially dependent. Thus, for ordinary men, autonomy should not be considered a process through which the man detached himself from relationships—on the contrary. Then how does pure autonomy—or detachedness—play out in relation to Bugkalot masculinity? That is the question I will explore in the present chapter. The purpose of this effort will be to understand what I will call a triadic relationship of Bugkalot male selfhood. The previous chapter dealt with the apparent opposition between the dissolved and the contracted, the youth and the adult, ligét and beya. Here, I introduce a third constituent part, which I refer to as mansasadile, the demonic.

45

46

Cutting Cosmos

The Bugkalot imagine the life trajectory as a “gradual contraction.” This means that from the outset, in childhood, one is embedded in the flux and chaotic forces of the world. However, with age the man gradually separates himself from chaos as he establishes himself as a person through the accumulation of beya. This is a process that entails the development of the man’s capacity to act independently and to settle conflict. While beya should, ideally, find its highest form in the elder, it has a limit. When reaching a certain, unspecified intensity, beya crosses a threshold, at which point it is no longer beya. At that moment the man moves from “dependent autonomy,” the autonomy that relies on social recognition, to “detachedness.” By seeing detachedness as the asocial and demonic zenith of beya, I will explore what the concept of the detached can tell us about autonomy as an organizing trope for an ontology of the Bugkalot man. I will raise some particular questions: If it were possible to cut the connections to the social world, what would this tell us about what a relation might be? And what would the man look like if he in fact achieved this radical state of individuality? To help us pursue these questions, I introduce a particular semimythic character known among the Bugkalot as the mansasadile. This is a demonic agency that is treated with equal amounts of fear, fascination, and distance. The mansasadile is the ideal of autonomy taken to its radical conclusion, thereby providing a particular perspective on the potentiality of the Bugkalot man. It offers an opportunity to examine the role of beya in Bugkalot cosmology more closely. My argument is as follows: Ligét—the unpredictable potentiality of the youth—is what men strive to overcome in order to establish themselves as adults, as we saw in the last chapter. Yet, the actualization of the male potentiality of beya in fact poses a threat, since it may become so “contracted,” so devoid of potentiality that it reaches detachedness in the form of the demonic mansasadile. Therefore, efforts are incessantly made to restrain the potentiality, to constrain the motion toward mansasadile. In this way, the mansasadile becomes the final component of the triadic relationship on which Bugkalot masculinity is based: at one end of the continuum we have ligét, the self-effaced part of the man, which contains unpredictable potentialities, and at the other end we reach the mansasadile, the masculine, assertive ideal. And beya, rather than being the endpoint of the ideal, is the motion toward this ideal, the perpetual becoming. Ligét, then, becomes the motion away from mansasadile. On the continuum between absolute social dependency and ultimate social detachedness is where the man lives out his life, wavering between dissolution and detachedness. Not only does the detachedness from social relations poses a challenge to the way mansasadile is comprehended, approached, and dealt

Impartial Man

with in Bugkalot social life; it is also hard to encompass within the scope of anthropology. How should we understand a term such as “detachment” that is not so much the creating of social distance as the establishing of a gap between a part and a whole in a science that takes relation and relationship as key analytical objects? I will approach this question by stepping into other scholarly fields, which do not hold the relation as their pivotal analytical unit and might therefore be better equipped for dealing with the contradictions of detachment. My point in this survey is not to be exhaustive, but rather to propose that the radical contraction of the mansasadile is ultimately a paradoxical state of being that establishes a critical role in relation to Bugkalot masculinity. The mansasadile is a special mode of being that is part of every man as potentiality.

Mansasadile As I attempted to show in the last chapter, masculinity among men in the Sierra Madre Mountains revolved around autonomy and visibility. This structure was made most explicit during the public performances of the dance known as ta’gem, which was a common and expected part of all celebrations in Ki-tegen. Mainly the elders performed the dance, though younger men occasionally also entered the floor in front of the crowd. During the performances I observed that only one man entered the floor at a time and each individual dance lasted for only a few minutes.1 Then the man would withdraw back into the crowd, allowing someone else to take his place. During the ta’gem the dancer was in focus. The performance asserted presence and the man stood out in a forceful way, thereby manifesting himself as a complete man. Judging by the response from the spectators during ta’gem, it was clear that by demanding attention the performer actively reversed the way he was usually perceived. The people present often shouted, made jokes, or tried to hold back their laughter by covering their mouths with their hands. The only person not showing any signs of emotion was the dancer. It became clear through ta’gem that autonomy—outward unaffectedness—should be considered a form of distance that relied on proximity: the performer relied on others to recognize his autonomy. This created a fundamental tension, or a paradox, in the lives of Bugkalot men: the more they proved themselves to be autonomous, the more they manifested their social dependency. Especially in my research on ngayó, violent rituals traditionally carried out among the Bugkalot, I was told stories of extraordinary indi-

47

48

Cutting Cosmos

viduals who, for mysterious reasons, acted completely on their own. They were not escorted by others on raids and did not ask the elders for permission before “going out.” Though in some cases these men were famous for having made assertive claims to power in the communities, most often they did the exact opposite and withdrew deep into the mountains, where they lived the life of a recluse. These individuals, who were understood to be completely detached from the social world of other humans, were called mansasadile. The mansasadile was a powerful image in present-day storytelling that caused both fascination and trepidation. According to the stories I heard, the mansasadile were in most cases unmarried men who lived in isolated and remote areas of the mountains. However, others were talked about in ways that conjured up images of boisterous, destructive forces. Whereas the word mansasadile was sometimes used as an adjective, simply meaning “independent” and thereby referring to individuals and acts marked by an impressive amount of independence, a person could also be a mansasadile. The latter use of the word could be derived from other Austronesian languages, where adil means “impartial.” It is likely that the term mansasadile—“impartial man”—could thereby have been, traditionally, a noun that designated a specific type of leadership or political mediator. Though this might indeed still be the case in some Bugkalot communities, when my informants applied the term mansasadile, they were not referring to a man’s diplomatic disposition. A mansasadile was indeed impartial, but this did not entail that one could be at ease around these beings. Rather, the word was used colloquially as a descriptor for a man who was unfamiliar to shame. The emotion of shame, my informants often explained, required that a person relate to the world and the people in it. According to them, the mansasadile was utterly indifferent to other people. Though in some cases the mansasadile caused fear and intolerable conditions due to its murderous behavior, simultaneously, as we will learn, it was the embodiment of masculine ideals. As a hyperbolic figure, the mansasadile was the antithesis of social life, as it exposed the potential dangers of individuality. Thereby, the mansasadile took up an intriguing, mythical space in the imagination of my informants.

A Man in the Mountains Though I never talked with Táno, he inadvertently became one of the most influential figures of my fieldwork. As I hope to be able to show in the following, my relationship to Táno—though it was, in fact, a non­

Impartial Man

relationship—can be used as a stepping-stone in our inquiry into his role, and that of others like him, in Bugkalot sociocosmology. During a wedding celebration in 2009 an elderly man appeared. Just before noon, after the wedding ceremony had ended, people spread out on the open area by the church in the northern end of the village. Most of them gathered in small groups in the grass, chatting and enjoying the food that was being passed around. The few scattered benches were packed with people of all ages sitting shoulder to shoulder. Out of these hundreds of people, one man caught my eye. A nervous space had built up on the far eastern end of the area and soon those who had been sitting there left the area—except for one man, who appeared to have caused the subtle unrest. He had shown up just after the ceremony. He was unaccompanied, which was unusual given his apparent advanced age. But that was not the only unusual thing about him. He was dirty, his ragged jeans and t-shirt covered in mud, and his long hair and beard were tangled and knotted. Whereas all the other visitors had washed themselves immediately upon arrival—or, preferably, as they crossed the river before entering the village—Táno did not seem to pay any attention to the mud that began to crust in the sun and fell from his clothes in flakes. Táno’s presence was remarkable. He was treated with a kind of awe that I did not witness in relation to any other person during my stay in Ki-tegen. On one occasion during the afternoon, I noticed that a village elder brought him rice and water without uttering a word to him and without receiving even a nod in reply. Táno took the food without any reaction. Though he made no attempt to communicate with the other visitors he attracted an immense, yet unspoken, amount of attention. I became more and more eager to talk to him, but none of my friends wished to escort me. I did not know how to approach him on my own. In the late afternoon I found Tóse and asked him if he could act as a translator between Táno and me. Tóse seemed relieved as he told me that only minutes ago he had seen Táno leave the village down the southern trail. In a sense, I also felt relieved. Táno had unsettled everyone in his vicinity, myself included. I saw Táno every few months in Ki-tegen and, like at the wedding, he never approached anyone. In fact, it seemed as if he had no particular purpose in coming to the village. The children were openly afraid of him while other people did their best to ignore him. Only once did I overhear someone talk about Táno: Tóse claimed in front of some of his friends that Táno was “half monkey, half man.” It was meant as a joke, but his companions did not laugh and the joke fell flat. To me Táno did not look like a monkey, but he was much smaller than most Bugkalot

49

50

Cutting Cosmos

men, with very thin arms and neck. His skin was almost entirely black, his hair a thick dreadlock. I noticed at the wedding that from time to time his body would appear to freeze in the middle of a movement; eating from a bowl, his hand would hover over the rice for a few moments before digging into the rice again. On each of his visits, I asked my friends to come along and help me talk to him, and every time they stalled and came up with excuses to avoid this task. After much pressure, Wagsal explained to me why he felt uncomfortable around Táno. He said to me: “When Táno is here, everyone is alert. You see the old men, one moment they chew betel nut, they sit close to the fire, and they talk. Then it is as if they have noticed something. They sit up and they look very vigilant. They cannot relax. It is like that when he comes here. They do not know what to do. He stands still like a tree; that is because he is mansasadile, but then, suddenly, he might attack, like this!”—Wagsal made a dramatic cutting motion with his finger across his throat and continued—“He once had a family, cousins. But no more. There is no one left in his life. That’s what the old men told me. He is completely alone. It is as if everything—you, me, everything—is no longer here.” Admittedly, I found this hard to accept. “Wagsal, how can this man be like that?” I asked. “How can nothing touch him? Why is he here then? If he truly had no ties to anyone, there would be no reason for him to come here. He would see no reason to spend the afternoon at a wedding around all these people. They would all be complete strangers.” Wagsal shrugged his shoulders. Clearly not perceiving my questions as an attempt to contest his words, he said: “Well, who knows what kind of thoughts are in his head? I cannot see his mind. No one can. No one can understand that kind of mind.” I tried again: “Well, if he has no ties to anyone, then why did people bring him food?” Wagsal shrugged. He was in fact the one who had pointed out to me at the wedding that while the women and children brought food to the elders who were sitting in the shade of a tree engrossed in conversation among themselves, individual elders in turn departed from the group to bring food and water to Táno. Wagsal explained to me that it was out of respect but had nothing further to add. The term used to describe the state of unease caused by Táno’s presence was éntagekot, which was often used to refer to the pandemonium—the collective terror—that occasionally swept through the mountains as the rumor spread that a raiding party was in the area. While the raiding practices, known as ngayó, were widely understood as attempts to control the violent tendencies of man, there were cases

Impartial Man

when these ngayó gave rise to rampages of retribution. A surge of killings and fear, éntagekot, spread throughout the communities. However, interestingly, none of my informants could recall even a single violent act carried out by Táno in the past forty years. Not even Wagsal, who was normally very willing to provide answers to my questions, wished to talk at length about Táno. And though I cannot be sure about this, I suspect that my informants did not even talk about Táno among themselves. This could explain why I only managed to glean a very rudimentary picture of who he was. Apparently he had never been married and had no children. He had grown up in a village in the eastern part of Kabugkalotan, but in his late teens moved away from the community to live a solitary life in a small hut on a steep hillside at the edge of the wood in the most remote corner of valley. The hut could be glimpsed in very clear weather. I asked Wagsal, who had followed me on numerous trips, if he could escort me to Táno’s house. He replied, apologetically, that he expected that no one in the village would help me with that task: “I would not sleep during the night if we went to his house,” he said. “I would hold on to my knife and I would not close an eye all night.” Wagsal advised me to give up the idea since, even though no one explicitly said so, they were afraid of him: like other mansasadile, he was extremely unpredictable and might kill his visitors in their sleep. The term Wagsal applied to Táno, mansasadile, was a word that reappeared in several conversations I had with my interlocutors. However, this was the first and only time it was applied to a person who was not first and foremost a semimythical character living in the past. By being an actual individual living in the present, Táno was clearly an exception. Yet, people talked about him in exactly the same way they talked about the ones living in the past. These stories accentuated various forms of unpredictability and unspecified violent acts that opposed the ungovernable mansasadile to the ordinary conditions of life in the village. Also, since I never managed to convince my friends to escort me to where Táno lived, I had to grasp him, like the mansasadile of the past, in his absence or, at best, through a distant gaze. This indeed seemed to be the main role of the mansasadile: it was a device that juxtaposed certain sets of values and fundamental conditions of human existence. Through his detachment from the world, as we shall see, the mansasadile exhibited how attachment was a primary element in the lives of everyone else, the exception that proved the rule. So far I have attempted to comprehend this form of attachment through the trope of the gaze. This concept was applied in relation to the young man’s inability to “carry the gaze of others,” an inability that caused shame in

51

52

Cutting Cosmos

the young man. But while the gaze could cause shame, it could also be used—for instance during ta’gem, when the dancer demanded attention. During this performance the man publicly exposed his beya, whereby the gaze became a tool for social recognition. What, then, does this tell us about the mansasadile? I suggest that the mansasadile is the outcome of the gaze no longer being capable of encompassing the Other. However, in following this notion we will have to venture beyond a conventional relational approach. I will argue that the social detachedness of the mansasadile in fact renders it impossible to encompass by the gaze—that is, the mansasadile ventures beyond the way persons are conceivable among the Bugkalot. Ignoring the mansasadile and talking about it as “dangerous” is a way of keeping one’s distance from it; distance becomes a response to its paradox. To explore this paradox further, I will turn to an area of anthropological theory that has often taken the relation as its key subject matter. Thereby, I will show that the notion of social detachedness among the Bugkalot poses a challenge not only to Bugkalot sociality but also to anthropological analysis.

The Relationist Paradigm It was often explained to me that the word mansasadile traditionally referred to a rare category of men who engaged in ngayó, ritual murder, in the form of headhunting. Ngayó, however, was a widespread practice. What set the mansasadile apart from other men was the fact that the mansasadile ventured on raids unaccompanied. This was very unusual, even absurd, since ngayó, almost by definition, had to do with carrying out an act under the supervision of others. As I will argue in the following chapters, the group was of key importance in the ritual act of killing in relation to the broader workings of the ritual. Therefore, that anyone would want to carry out this act on his own was a notion my informants found both intriguing and bizarre. Ngayó was normally controlled by the elders, who had the last say about when ngayó was to take place and who was to carry out the act. By going out alone, the mansasadile undermined the supervision and regulatory control of the elders. Further, taking into account that the ritual practices among the Bugkalot—for instance, the ta’gem—were highly performative and closely tied up with publicly becoming recognized in one’s autonomy, the mansasadile exposed the entire paradox, the circular attachment, in this action. What we get here, then, is an uncanny subject beyond all subjects who embody masculine ideals and stand above the interaction of ordinary humans.

Impartial Man

The concept of the mansasadile, then, makes us ask the question: how can we understand detachedness anthropologically? I maintain that any notion of “social detachedness” is counterintuitive to the anthropologically trained scholar. This is interesting in the context of the present chapter because the paradoxes that emerge analytically when detachedness is observed through the anthropological lens could perhaps be used to explain the ambivalence that surrounds the mansasadile among the Bugkalot. To explore this notion, I will first look into the role of the relation as it has often been envisioned in anthropology. In Art and Agency, Alfred Gell explicitly defines the subject matter of anthropology as the study of social relations: “My view is that in so far as anthropology has a specific subject-matter at all, that subject-matter is ‘social relationships’—relationships between participants in social systems of various kinds” (Gell 1998: 4). Though it is not always formulated as explicitly or narrowly as in Gell’s case, arguably anthropology is guided by a preconceived conclusion: that there is an intimate dependency between self and Other. The social relation is so often regarded as the key element of the anthropological exegesis that it has become the de facto ontological language of anthropology. It is not surprising that in our search for various forms of dependencies—or relations—anthropologists always seem to find them in even the most unlikely of places. Yet as Alberto Corsín Jimenez (2004: 2) argues, even though the notion of the social is the fundamental structure of the anthropological, theoretical edifice, it still remains undertheorized. This, he asserts, constrains our “anthropological imaginaries.” In other words, the ingrained tendency in our discipline to think in terms of relations makes it an almost insurmountable task to draw conclusions that go beyond such an approach. This does not mean, in my view, that relations are explicitly the focus of all anthropological endeavors. However, there is a salient tendency to take the relation as a truism in some areas of anthropological analysis. This way of thinking is an, often justified, attempt to move away from essentialism, determinism, and dualism to understand that whatever exists is necessarily an effect of relations. This is notably the case in the study of personhood. Contemporary Melanesian anthropology has been particularly sensitive to the way the elements composing persons are dismantled, so that the relations carried by persons can be invested anew. In the Melanesian ontology of social relations, the person embodies a composition of relations, which can be picked apart and reconstituted. Marilyn Strathern, especially, has persistently propounded the idea that people in Melanesia “have relationships enfolded within their bodies, simultaneously external and internal to themselves” (1998: 141–

53

54

Cutting Cosmos

42). Since relations are what animate the person, “[it] is impossible … to imagine a person cut off from relations and remaining alive” (Strathern 1992: 86). People in Melanesia, Strathern asserts, should not be seen as wholes but as a temporary sum of independent parts, embodying a conglomerate of relations, which can be picked apart and reconstituted: “the elements that compose persons are dismantled so that the relationships persons carry can be invested anew” (76). This is, for instance, the case during the Massim mortuary ceremony, which aims to “strip the deceased of social ties: the enduring entity is depersonalized” (84). This “partiability” of the person allows new relationships to take form. Though this occurs most notably in death, it may also take place during marriage exchange and other ceremonial exchanges, but it is only in death that the relations that the person embodies are extinguished.2 Though this idea of the person being ultimately partial and relationally constituted is put forth most persistently by Melanesianists, it is a key assumption in the anthropological imaginary at large. “If one has no relations, one is dead” seems to be the implicit idea. Consequently, imagining a living person being detached from all relationships produces a number of paradoxes. The most notable of these paradoxes is perhaps the fact that any actions that influence the lives of others will inevitably establish relations in some form. Thus, as Táno entered Kitegen and affected the entire atmosphere in the village with his mere presence, he in fact established a multitude of relations. At the same time, it seems difficult to explain what Táno was doing in the village in the first place, if he was truly indifferent to other people. Yet, my informants insisted that what characterized Táno and other mansasadile was the fact that not only were they stripped of social ties, but they were also fundamentally detached from society. Given the obvious contradictions at hand, how can we take such statements seriously? Might there be understandings in anthropology and beyond that could be helpful in this regard? I will explore this in the rest of the chapter. First I turn to another example of a mansasadile. In this case, the paradox becomes even more explicit, as we are dealing with a man who lived his entire life in the Bugkalot communities.

A Man in the Past The response to the presence of the mansasadile was to maintain distance. Some of my informants considered the mansasadile to be dangerous, and so staying at a safe physical distance from it was considered prudent. Yet, a different form of distance was also applied; for instance, the villagers in Ki-tegen went to great lengths not to pay Táno any attention. He was ac-

Impartial Man

tively ignored. This was possible since Táno only made brief appearances in the village. However, there were cases in which a mansasadile did not dwell most of the time deep inside the mountains. In such cases the mansasadile had a dire impact on the society in which it resided. One mansasadile in particular, Talikaw, made an imprint on the collective history of the Bugkalot. Even the young people, who had not yet been born when Talikaw terrorized the villages in the eastern parts of the mountains, knew his name. It was in fact remarkable how often Talikaw made his way into various unrelated conversations with informants. From the conversations, I was able to make out that Talikaw had been a fully grown man at the end of World War II. In those days he was among the most uncompromising participants in the massacres of the Japanese soldiers who had sought refuge from the U.S. forces in Bugkalot territory (see chapter four). During the late 1970s and 1980s Talikaw took several wives and thus conflicted with the rules of monogamy as it was encountered in both missionary dictums and customary conjugal practices. He did not ask the women’s families for permission and they did not dare to oppose him. Though he drank heavily, he seemed not to be affected by alcohol. He had no fear of losing face, since he did not care about recognition. Most infamously, claiming to represent the Bugkalot as their “chief,” he made illegal contracts with various logging companies during the 1980s and thereby became wealthy. He was known to be ruthless, even homicidal, until he died as an old man in the late 1990s. When I visited my friend Simon, a Pentecostal pastor, in his small church that he had built a few years earlier in a lowland town, he told me about Talikaw. Simon recalled him from his childhood, since Talikaw had often passed through Simon’s village. He explained to me: “Even the police feared him! They came to his house. He was sometimes violent and carried a gun in his belt. He brought this gun everywhere—even when he went down to Baler [a town on the east coast of Luzon]. He did something in Baler. But I cannot tell you what it was.” “Why is that?” I asked. Simon replied: Oh, it’s just because I don’t know. No one knows, I think. But he did so many things. And so, one day the police came to his house to get him. I think they wanted to put him in jail. But he refused to come with them. He stood there in the door with his gun and so, you know, the police were afraid of him. Maybe they were just young men. Did they want to get killed because of this? No, of course not. So they left again. I think they came back again, but the same thing happened. Talikaw didn’t even try to run away. He just stood in the door and looked at them. He was completely without fear. That was how

55

56

Cutting Cosmos

he was. Then what can you do? You can try to shoot him. But the police are not like that towards the tribes. They sometimes let us go because they know that we do things differently.

I asked Simon what had made Talikaw different from other men, and Simon answered: “That is the question I ask myself. Sometimes I ask myself if someone like him could be used for good. But I think the answer is no, he cannot. Because those like Talikaw have so much violence in them.” Though Simon did not refer to Talikaw directly with the term mansasadile in this interview, others did this on several occasions. Simon, however, reflected on some issues that few others were willing to. The rhetorical question after stating that Talikaw was without fear (“Then what can you do?”) indicates that “fear,” to Simon, was tied up with predictability and with being a social agent. Having no fear, on the other hand, meant that a person could not be expected to act in any predictable ways. The fearless was thereby placed outside of the social. One could also hypothesize that by the word “you,” Simon was not talking only about the policemen who were assigned with the ill-fated assignment of bringing Talikaw in; perhaps “you” referred to society in general. If so, Simon’s account points to how the Bugkalot communities had no institutions that could deal with or penalize a truly fearless individual, a mansasadile, who thus carried the seed of society’s demise.

The Demon as the Subversive Talikaw posed a threat to the egalitarian form of social organization in which there were no institutions that could deal with such phenomena as the mansasadile. Egalitarian societies tend to systematically eliminate social distinctions of wealth, power, and status through the mechanism of social exclusion (Woodburn 1982). The Bugkalot turned to a similar practice, though their form of social exclusion was a comparatively peaceful one: they simply ignored a person in his attempt to exercise power. Therefore, there were no means of dealing with the individuals who, from the outset, were indifferent to others. This difference between ordinary men and the mansasadile was made explicit in stories about both Táno and Talikaw. Though none of my informants would talk about these two men as role models as such, they clearly embodied certain ideals of autonomy that other men also strove for. The ability of the mansasadile to remain fundamentally unaffected by their surroundings and their imperviousness to any form of social pressure were the features of the mansasadile that especially fascinated

Impartial Man

my informants. The mansasadile pointed to an inherent contradiction or potential conflict in the Bugkalot power structure, namely, that the autonomy of a man, when taken to its extreme, could render the man a subversive, demonic force. This is what the story of Táno suggests. Though I wanted to learn how a mansasadile came into being, few of my informants were willing to approach this question and usually admitted that they did not have an answer to it. What seemed interesting to me in the first place was what made Táno and Talikaw merge under a shared category: Táno was a solitary hermit, while Talikaw lived in the communities, took several wives, and became wealthy. What the mansasadile represented, in this regard, was a form of existence that deviated radically from the usual way men lived out their lives. While men reached for autonomy in a symbolic form in certain ritual contexts, the mansasadile was a man who had actualized his potential for autonomy. He appeared to have contracted himself to such an extent that he (in Táno’s case) had lost interest in kinship relations and other social bonds. Becoming a hermit, in this sense, was not an attempt to get away from relations. Rather, living as a hermit was the way his detachedness manifested itself. Talikaw, on the other hand, challenged the egalitarian form of organization in his community, took more than one wife, and was entirely blasé in his attitude toward the police, the representatives of the Philippine state. By placing Talikaw in the same category as Táno, my informants showed that they were talking about the same dynamics— though the way these dynamics revealed themselves were different from case to case. In every case, the mansasadile offered a way of talking about certain fundamental, existential concerns among men. The social mechanism of shame and envy, which was said to be a key force of human motivation, was unknown to the mansasadile. Thus, though the mansasadile appeared to take the form of a radical Other, who opposed the egalitarian order of society, it simultaneously embodied the ideals of masculinity. Mansasadile was both the image of the deterioration of the social order and the extreme expression of the autonomy—the distance—that men in other contexts would identify as what prevents conflicts from breaking out. Thereby, the subversive, the demonic was inscribed in the Bugkalot social order. The demon is often associated with the fifteenth-century Christian theology known as demonology. This “science” sought to identify the nature of evil and thereby establish ways for dealing with witches. But by being somehow deterritorialized or detached from—or only partially part of—the world the demon may also be thought of in a philosophical register, which enables humans to think of the paradoxes associated with ontological problem of negation and nothingness (Thacker 2011). The anthropological version of this emerges as the demon brings to-

57

58

Cutting Cosmos

gether clusters of ideas about the nonhuman and thereby, importantly, what it implies to be human—and, especially, what may pose a threat to such humanity. The Australian anthropologist Bruce Kapferer (2012) has also observed how the demonic may become a way of thinking about relationships between humans and cultural categories of inclusion and exclusion. He writes that a fear is often expressed in egalitarian societies that the individual will eventually be “consumed, obscured, and will lose its identity in more inclusive orders and that those who command such orders will negate the autonomy of subordinates” (15). Certain persons, phenomena, and discourses that stand for “inclusive orders” thereby challenge the integrity of the individual and may create a clear tension in egalitarian societies. In hierarchical societies, on the other hand, the fear does not concern an emergent, totalizing order; rather, the fear revolves around the demonic individual, “the outsider within,” that counteracts the encompassing forces of society by asserting its individuality. The political aspect of the demon thus has to do with the demonic both dwelling within (and perhaps even as a logical product of the “order”), while also being a threatening Other. What is interesting in this respect is that Bugkalot fears seemed to conflate the models: there was a fear of the demonic, assertive agency, which was clearly the “stranger within” that Kapferer identified in hierarchical societies. Yet, this fear did not first and foremost relate to the threat that it posed to society as an engine of encompassment. Rather, by being without fear, the mansasadile was unaffected by the social mechanisms that restrained other men. It thereby threatened to develop hierarchies that would render other men inferior. The mansasadile was just as much an emerging, hierarchical force as the one threatening the egalitarian society, as a being who attempted to subvert the hierarchical society by contaminating it with its individualism. I see this form of being—which is somehow both a power and an individual—as “demonic.” This view was in fact reflected explicitly in several conversations. An example of one way of tying the mansasadile to something beyond the human came up in a conversation with Tó’paw and Wagsal’s cousin Luke about the practice of headhunting. Luke, who lived in the village Be-ge in the eastern part of the mountains, had just explained that a man had recently been beheaded close to his village. But it was not traditional killing, ngayó. The reason for this, he reflected, was that whoever had carried out the killings had not been escorted by elders, since, he claimed, none of the elders among the Bugkalot approved of any form of killings. And thus, the beheading could not be regarded as ngayó.

Impartial Man

“This man, the man who did the killing, is doing wrong,” Luke said scornfully. “He is selfish. He did not seek help. He was not escorted by the elders. It is as if he wants to brag. It is as if this man wants to show us that he can do these things himself and that he does not have fear.” Tó’paw silenced Luke with a gesture and shook his head. He disagreed with Luke: “It might look like he is selfish,” Tó’paw said, “but he cannot choose to do these things. He has a desire to kill. We do not know where this comes from.” Luke and I must have looked as if we did not quite understand, so Tó’paw continued: “It is like this, boy,” he said, referring to Luke. “Men can do one thing or they can do another. But this thing has no ligét. Mansasadile is like this: you do not know what is in his mind. He has no fear! That is why some people fear him. You do not know what happens when he holds a knife. More than anything, he is like the river. In my life the river has taken many children who tried to swim across it. Yet, no one would call the river selfish.” Tó’paw thereby proposed the idea that perhaps, when seen through human eyes, it looked as if the mansasadile wanted to brag and boast in front of others, but that in fact one should not evaluate it as someone driven by the ordinary desires inherent to a person. Tó’paw went so far as to claim that the mansasadile had no ligét, which meant that, in his view, the mansasadile had so much beya and was thereby so “contracted” that it could not be affected by others. Thus, the transgressive act of selfishness or self-assertion did not enter the motivations of the mansasadile, since to be selfish there had to be a self-Other relation to transgress. In the case of the mansasadile, however, there was only the impossible state of detachedness. The way Tó’paw attempted to comprehend this detachedness was to categorize the mansasadile as closer to a river than to a human in its state of being. This, however, only partially resolves the paradoxes that surround the mansasadile. By seeing it as demonic, I suggest that the mansasadile inhabits the edges of the human understanding of the world. For instance, it poses a logical problem that the mansasadile, in spite of its social detachedness, tended to show up around other people. In the following, I will look into detachedness more closely. My goal is to explore how (and if ) we can come to terms with the logical inconsistencies that detachedness—the absence of relations—brings about when this concept is applied to social reality.

Autopoiesis: Embedded Detachedness At this point it seems clear that the mansasadile provides challenges to our attempt to both grasp it anthropologically and take the words of my informants seriously. The mansasadile is not just an Other in Bugkalot

59

60

Cutting Cosmos

society. Otherness, as Rupert Stasch (2009) has recently shown, can be an important form of relationship. Stasch argues that the Korowai of West Papua organize their relations to one another around Otherness. In this society, distance plays a crucial role, which can be exemplified with the Korowai’s tradition of building houses in the trees and far apart. They actively make relations not of what they have in common but of what divides them. Though this appears, perhaps, as a strange “relationship to relationships,” it makes good sense, considering the Korowai’s attempt to both negotiate the autonomy of individual households and maintain contact with neighbors to prevent conflicts. Anthropology, in this sense, finds it difficult to grasp the nonrelational and tends to render distance into a different—and very powerful—form of relation. Yet, more than being an Other, the mansasadile was said to be entirely socially detached. Taking this conception seriously and following it to its conclusion involves an attempt to imagine a true nonrelation, nihil negativum: an inconceivable nothingness with no positive value. In the following I will briefly attempt to view the mansasadile from two different approaches that were developed outside anthropology. “Autopoiesis” was introduced as a concept in biology and later spread to sociology. The concept literally means “self-production” and was originally developed by Maturana and Varela (1980) as an analytical construct in the study of biological organisms. Gareth Morgan (1997) developed the idea of autopoiesis into a metaphor for certain types of organizations as “closed autonomous systems of interaction that make reference only to themselves” (253). Since the mansasadile, apparently, shared this self-referential, self-organizing nature, it seems that it could strike a chord with the concept of autopoiesis. Christina Toren, who understands autopoiesis through the combined scope of biology and sociality, has tried to engage the concept in anthropology. Torren writes: Autopoiesis … is characteristic of all organisms. The development of the human fetus of the zygote (the single-cell product of the union of egg and sperm) is an excellent example of autopoiesis for it allows us to realize easily how the growth and development of the fetus are a function of continuing cell division and differentiation in the human organism itself. In other words, fetal development is an autonomous process—one that itself specifies what is proper to it. (Toren 2001: 157)

In other words, autopoiesis should be thought of as the biological cell: made of various biochemical components that are organized into bounded structures, the cell produces the components, which, in turn continue to maintain the organized bounded structure that gives rise to

Impartial Man

these components. Rather than generating something external, it organizes its own structure. Though this initially creates an image of the cell as being truly capable of generating itself as a detached entity, Torren reminds us that this is in fact not the reality of any living, growing organism: the bounded structure, the cell, is not detached from the surroundings: [Fetal] development is not independent of conditions in the womb in which the fetus is carried, so it cannot be independent of the specific existential conditions lived by the woman whose womb nurtures it. [We] can only become ourselves in relations with others: from my very beginning the process of my self-making necessarily co-opts, as it were, all those others alongside whom I live and so my eventual idea of myself as the subject of my own actions is founded in intersubjective relations. (Toren 2001: 157)

Correspondingly, no organizations or living systems are isolated. In fact, they can only be understood as systems in the broader networks of interaction in which they function as a system. Transferred to the Bugkalot (or human) context, the autopoiesis merely reproduces the anthropological assumption that a person will inevitably unfold in—and as an inextricable part of—a larger cosmos of interaction. Thereby, the concept of autopoiesis is not sufficiently radical, since it merely refers to a given system’s supposed ability to self-organize in a wider environment, which in turn affects and is affected by the system itself. While at first glance the concept of the autopoietic attempts to draw our attention away from the hegemonic reign of relationality and toward the possibility of the purely self-referential, it ultimately merely reveals a wide range of other types of relations and points to the fact that man, even in his most intense moments of autonomy, will inevitably be enfolded in a larger cosmos of interaction. In fact humans, as well as all other organic organisms, are entities for which the world is an inextricable extension. Even by thinking of something as separate, this “something” has to be separate from “something else,” which creates at least a conceptual relation, an affiliation, between the two.

The Sacred as “Set Apart” To take the mansasadile seriously we need to go further than what the concept autopoietic has to offer. We need to remove the subject from the environment to create a radical form of distance. David Graeber asserts that the role of “distance” is fundamental in the relationship between individuals of power and the social:

61

62

Cutting Cosmos

[Any] system in which one member of a group can claim to represent the group as a whole necessarily entails setting the member off in a way resembling the Durkheimian notion of the sacred, as set apart of the stuffs and substances of the material world, even, to a certain degree, abstracted from it. (Graeber 2005: 421)

What is interesting in this quotation in relation to the present discussion of mansasadile is that Graeber, to apply the concept of “distance,” places it in the frame of the sacred and the profane. That is, he applies a form of distance that transcends both physical distance and distance in social relations. Theology, one might argue, is perhaps better equipped to deal with the paradoxical states that follow any notion of “distance” or “detachment.” The structures of distance, which are found in the sacred, could perhaps be used to illuminate the mansasadile. Though the mansasadile is not an object of worship, its ability to embody ideals while simultaneously being an enigmatic entity of danger has parallels to the sacred. Both mansasadile and the sacred bring about a need for ontological distance. Csordas writes, “The sacred is an existential encounter with Otherness that is a touchstone of our humanity.” He continues, “It is a touchstone because it defines us by what we are not— by what is beyond our limits, or what touches us precisely at our limits” (1994: 5). Indeed, the mansasadile appears to have certain features in common with the Homo sacer, the enigmatic figure of roman law, as described by Georgio Agamben (1998). Homo sacer, or the sacred man, was a person judged on account of a crime, who could be killed by anyone with impunity. Yet, he was regarded as sacred. The question, then, is in what the sacredness of the sacred men consists? Agamben encourages us to deploy the term “sacred” not so much to indicate the religious status of the person as to highlight another meaning of the word: as the which is “set apart.” As Csordas would agree, it is through the radical Otherness, the sequestered status of the sacred that we reach an understanding of ourselves as confined to humanness. My informants did not talk about mansasadile as a deity, and it may therefore result in misleading connotations to conceptualize it in such theological terms. Nevertheless, it seems evident that the properties of the sacred, referred to by Csordas and Agamben, are what is at stake in relation to mansasadile: it demarcates the boundaries of the world of humans. Jean-Luc Marion’s (2001, 2002) thoughts on the functioning of the “idol” focuses explicitly on Catholic traditions, but his ideas can be applied to various forms of “distances”, and they chime especially well with the forms of detached distance established between ordinary man

Impartial Man

and mansasadile. In his writings on the relation between divinity, idol, and human subject, Marion speaks of the phenomenon of the deity as something that “exceeds what the concept can receive, expose, and comprehend” (Marion 2002: 159). From the outset the divine is ontologically remote and conceptually elusive. However, this distance, for Marion, is a key component in worship, since it is through maintaining a distance that one actually allows God to become “the center of a discourse that orders itself in relation to him” (2001: 4). Thus, rather than understanding “distance” just as a distance in space, Marion, drawing on the phenomenological tradition, understands the concept in terms of alterity. Marion asserts that in man’s attempt to render God visible, to think the unthinkable, we construct the idol. This becomes the device that we place between the divine and ourselves. But although the human gaze when looking at the idol aims at the divine, the idol will always be the endpoint of the human gaze.3 As both the worshipper and the craftsman who manufactured the idol knows, the idol does not coincide with or personify the divine. What then, Marion asks, does the worshipper worship in the idol? The answer is a follows: since the idol is opaque, circularity is what characterizes the gaze upon the idol. “Man becomes religious by preparing a face for the divine” (2001: 5), a face shaped through the idolatrous gaze of the spectators. Marion emphasizes that other attempts to apprehend the divine, such as conceptualizing “God,” should be interpreted as idols, as ways of making the divine available (2001: 9). But whatever the idol may be— sculpture, man, woman, idea—it returns the gaze, though in such a way that the idol’s ability to act as a mirror remains invisible. As the idol functions as a mirror, a function that is concealed, one sees neither the mirror nor the thing in itself. Consequently, as we attempt to gaze at the divine through the idol, we end up gazing straight at ourselves. The one who gazes finally sees nothing other than itself in the idol. This theological approach has similarities to the postmodern critique of objective knowledge in the sense that God, according to Marion, becomes a cipher for the human subject: “Because the idol allows the divine to occur only in man’s measure, man can consign the idolatrous to art and thus keep it accessible” (2001: 34). The idol is thereby characterized by the subjection of the divine to the human conditions for experience of the divine. Even though the subject will inevitably be the limiting aperture by which God may be imagined (Marion 2001: 6), Marion is not, as one might expect, accusing the idol of a form of inauthenticity or of representing a false god as such. Yet, rather than reflecting the true nature of

63

64

Cutting Cosmos

God, who is by definition beyond representation, the idol reflects only the inadequate capacity of humans to see or conceptualize the divine in its totality. God’s revelation as the idol, Marion asserts, simultaneously manifests a close intimacy and an infinite distance—both proximity and absolute alterity. These concurrent yet opposing forces of intimacy and alterity are extremely critical to this relationship. If one broadens the applicability of Marion’s theological framework in an attempt to understand how people imagine the inconceivable or reify the abstract, it can shed light on the Bugkalot and the mansasadile. I would like to broaden Marion’s take on idols even further and include various human performances in the category of the “idol.” Among the Bugkalot there were no idols, that is, an entity that can substitute for the absent divine, beyond the man himself (unless, of course, he was a mansasadile). By “performing” autonomy, for instance as the man performed the ta’gem, he approached the mansasadile through an idolatrous act. This could be viewed as an effort to fix—hold still or secure—the distant and diffuse divinity and to disentangle its paradoxes; in this way the subject created a paradox of his own—autonomy was thought of not in terms of the mansasadile itself, the detached, but in terms of human sociality. Thus, in spite of all his efforts, the man could not capture “social detachment”: he would always enact detachment in human—and ultimately in social—terms. As he reabsorbed the distance and the withdrawal of the divine and made it partially available, he relied on the “idolatrous gaze” of the spectators: he relied on becoming socially recognized as distant. One might argue that the act carried its own negation. For Marion, the gaze thus has a pivotal function in producing the idol. For an idol to be created it must be perceived and thereby granted a social life. In other words, the idol is part of the human, social world, which by definition sets the idol apart from the world of the divine—or in this case, the mansasadile. The gaze also seemed to play an important role in relation to Táno. My informants often emphasized that they did not like to look at him when his path, for mysterious reasons, led him through Ki-tegen. The mansasadile had ventured so much beyond the social that the gaze could not contain him. The consequence of performing the ta’gem publicly was, then, that the man was in fact rendered social. One might perhaps even argue that by imitating the mansasadile in public the man in fact counteracted his motion toward the mansasadile. The ta’gem and other “idolatrous” acts that I will refer to in the following chapters as “cuts,” point to how the mansasadile was contained.

Impartial Man

The Triadic Relationship of Masculinity In this first part of this book, I have explored the way Bugkalot masculinity seemed to be suspended between different extremes. My informants would explain to me that masculinity had to do with gaining beya, that is, reaching a higher degree of “braveness” and autonomy and being unaffected by others. By doing this, the men gradually differentiated themselves from the youth, who were unable to achieve proper forms of contraction due to ligét, their unfocused force or potentiality. However, as I have aimed to show, taking these words at face value would only be scratching the surface of Bugkalot masculinity. In fact, the masculine ideals harbor an adverse potentiality. At the heart of the masculine ideals one can identify a subversive force, a threshold where beya switches from being a socially recognized autonomy to a state of demonic detachedness. Through an ethnographic presentation of the mansasadile and the adolescents in Bugkalot society, the goal of this first part of the book has been to show that in (male) social life, a “demonic” domain exists, which, in spite of being confined to the shadows, must be taken seriously if one is to understand what I refer to as the “paradox of masculinity”: that individual assertiveness was an ideal, while the men in fact were careful not to boost themselves, except in specific contexts. That is, that egalitarianism was not an ideal, yet it was an empirical reality. The demonic in Bugkalot life was the unsocial and the inherently unpredictable. Thus, interestingly, a homology is established between mansasadile and the young men that I described in the last chapter: in both cases my informants would refer to a lack of predictability. The young men were unpredictable because they had too much ligét; they were overflowing with energy that was socially produced through, for instance, shame, and this energy could manifest itself in unpredictable ways. The mansasadile, on the other hand, was unpredictable due to his complete lack of ligét. He had become separated from the social world and was thereby unaffected by other people. The motives of the mansasadile were just as incomprehensible as the motives of a river that swallowed up a child. While the young men were met with disparagement and ridicule due to their drinking, this never happened when they were drinking. When they were drunk, they were left alone; a distance was maintained. Thus when they were in a shameless state of being, they had ventured beyond the social. One could argue, that they could no longer be “contained by the gaze.”

65

66

Cutting Cosmos

The mansasadile and the drunk young men had thereby separated themselves from the conditions of the ordinary man, for whom autonomy was a performative act and was thereby not antithetical to the relation. Rather, it was the expression of certain masculine sets of relations. Male autonomy was thereby social to the core, since it manifested itself in the moment it was communicated to others. The crux of the matter is that for the ordinary man, autonomy had nothing to do with severing oneself from relationships. On the contrary, it was about generating social visibility: Autonomy relied on being socially recognized; autonomy was social dependency. The mansasadile provided a social narrative on this inherent conflict in the life of man: being detached from the social the mansasadile was also dangerously unpredictable. So Táno and Talikaw provided a commentary through their radical detachedness from what it meant to be socially alive for ordinary people: it meant to live a paradox, to be rendered socially dependent while enacting social autonomy, to strive for ideals that one was not supposed to reach. The mansasadile was the personification of the autonomy that my informants saw as ideal. Yet, such autonomy in its extreme form, as detachment, was not desirable. Mansasadile had the dual character of being a moral character as it embodied the ideal of independence, at the same time that it was threatening and impossible to understand. I believe, therefore, that the mansasadile provided a way for men to body forth and make distinctive existential conflicts and a particular set of assumptions. Mansasadile should be understood as a prism through which life was observed. It was the unremitting threat that one might reach a tipping point at which one was no longer a social person. The mansasadile—the shadow being that existed beyond society—was thereby what created balance among men: as an ideal it animated men to become agents in their own life while always reminding them to remain socially sensitive. In this sense, one might argue that it was the shadow of society—the thing that society could not contain that, in fact, made society possible. In spite of its absence, its shadow existence, the mansasadile was a constituent part in the topological space of Bugkalot masculinity. It was part of what I referred to as a triadic relationship of masculinity in the introduction to this chapter. The Bugkalot man is suspended between the backdrop of an anonymous society (ta-pom) and the masculine assertive ideal (mansasadile). And autonomy through knowledge (beya) is the motion along this continuum toward mansasadile. The motion in the opposite direction, from mansasadile toward the social anonymity of ta-pom, is what I refer to as ligét. The continuum between the extreme

Impartial Man

poles of ta-pom and mansasadile is where the man lives out his life, never reaching either the ultimate dissolvement or the ultimate detachment. Through this exposition of Bugkalot masculinity, we are now equipped to engage with the discussions in the following chapters: most notably, how the person is embedded in the cosmos and how the fluctuations of the man, between anonymity and social visibility—which I refer to as dissolvement and contraction—can be encountered analogously on different cosmological scales. This gives us a hint about the workings of a sociocosmological dynamic that relates Bugkalot males to the world at large.

Notes   1. I have been told that in other Bugkalot communities, ta’gem have taken on a more collective form. This development may have been inspired by the Ifugao farmers who have settled down in the area and are known for their elaborate collective dance performances.  2. This approach to personhood is often juxtaposed with Western individualism: the common distinctions depict Western subjects as bounded indivisible beings, as individuals, possessing fixed innate character traits. Such depictions of a Western individual construct a divide between society and the individual, in which the individual engages in relations of capitalist possession to things, animals, and land. On the other side, we have non-Western dividuals, who are authored through their intersections with others and as fractals, that is microversions, of a supposed totality such as society or cosmos (Strathern 1988).   3. In Danish, my native tongue, “idol” is sometimes translated as forbillede, literally “front image,” suggesting that an image is applied to an intangible form and thus renders something abstract visible or even tangible.

67

3 Chaosmology

Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. —Michel Foucault “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”

An elderly woman named May and I ended up in a conversation on the subject of childrearing (peseséken). Gesturing to her two infant grandchildren who were sitting on the dirt floor of her small kitchen space, she said, “Look. These children are dirty and noisy. I wash them and then they are dirty again. And I wash them again. Look, they sit on the ground—it is the same place as where the dogs sleep. Children can sleep in their own filth! This is hard to understand.” As if to underline what May had just told me, the youngest of the children laughed blissfully as he grabbed some dirt and flung it into the fireplace. May nodded toward him and said: This child will build a house or he will go to work in the city. But it takes a long, long time before this happens. It is like everything else. I say, it is like this: we burn away the trees to make gardens. All those trees must be burned first. It is like that. I say, when the men go hunting they can bring back meat; but they will have to find the meat; they have to shoot the wild animal; they have to carry it home all that long way through the forest, over the mountains. And even then you cannot eat that animal. You have to cut it into

Chaosmology

Figure 3.1  “Children can sleep in their own filth!” pieces and then give us [the women] the meat and we cook it. Everything takes a long time. Nothing happens on its own.”

The account reproduced here strikes at the core of this chapter. May links childhood to the chaotic forces of the forest and suggests that nature becomes of use through a violent and structuring transformation: being burned and being butchered. Children, she believes, are like wild animals: embedded in the nonhuman world of whirling, unpredictable forces. This reflected the general notion held by many Bugkalot that children were like “mist”—unpredictable and unstable—and gradually became more stable as they developed “mind,” nem-nem, and gained autonomy, beya. It was sometimes difficult to detect the role and influence of other people—for instance, the parents—in this process. This was why I had asked May, one of my most eloquent informants, to tell me about childrearing. Like my other acquaintances in Ki-tegen, she did not talk about the maturing of the child as something that took place between adults and children. Though maturation required one to move away from those qualities associated with the wilderness, how this happened was unclear. In some cases it seemed to be understood as an autopoietic process, through which the person simply generated himself through his own embodied potential. May, however, saw the maturation of the child as something that was done to the child: nothing happens on its own.

69

70

Cutting Cosmos

The link between childhood and chaos is epitomized by the child’s incessant oscillation between fear and joy, crying and laughter. Such whimsical and capricious moods are expected in a child though deeply looked down upon in men; and among the elders such affects are considered nonexistent. The motion from childhood to adulthood and to becoming an elder is thereby a motion from the chaos of uncontrollable affect to order, a higher level of contraction and stability. This motion finds its analogies on other cosmological levels—most notably in the relationship between the world of humans and the forest. Similarly, as we shall see, the chaos of unpredictable forces, what I refer to as gongot, is not only the condition out of which humans develop: gongot continuously attempts to manifest itself in the human world of order. By examining the role of shamanism—the interaction between man and spirit—this chapter sets out to show how the Bugkalot maneuver in this world of impending chaos. In this chapter I will explore the role of gongot—chaos or wilderness—in Bugkalot cosmology. The Bugkalot consider the wilderness to be a space of transformation, opposed to the ordered human space. That is, outside the human sphere of the village, one encounters a domain characterized by erratic movement and transmutation, the quintessence of which is the shape-shifting spirit, the be’tang. The Bugkalot have no widely shared knowledge of a pantheon of gods, spirits, and other features associated with a complex mythological universe. This does not mean that there are no gods or spirits. Rather, it means that there is a striking diversity of often conflicting cosmological ideas among the Bugkalot. They do not even agree to view their ancestors as objects of worship, which, in fact, makes the Bugkalot conspicuously different from other indigenous groups in the northern Philippines. Still, various forms of nonhuman agency play important roles in Bugkalot cosmology. The spirit creature known as the be’tang lives in the forests outside the human domain associated with the village. Identifying the different principles through which the Bugkalot organize their society of human as well as nonhuman agencies will simultaneously be a way to show how the disjointedness of the Bugkalot cosmology is related to personhood. In fact, the cosmological spectrum is not primarily topographically constituted. Transformation and chaos are just as much part of the person: the cosmos is inscribed in the human person by forces that are fundamentally unpredictable to humans. Thus, alteration, paradox, and inconsistency have an important role in the Bugkalot cosmos. Through a discussion of Bugkalot cosmology, in which an oscillation between chaos and stability is the core cosmological dynamic, I attempt to depict a form of cosmology in which the disjointedness of the cosmos

Chaosmology

becomes stabilized through human, shamanic forms of engagement. Thereby, I set out to place masculinity in relation to Bugkalot cosmology at large. The shape-shifting of the spirit was an attribute that should not be confined to the spirit but was also tied to a relation internal to masculinity, a tension that was present among men: the spiritness was akin to ligét—the unruly anger of men.

Shape-Shifting During a rainstorm in 2010, a crashing noise could be heard from where the main path curves down a steep hill toward the village Ki-tegen. It sounded slightly different from the thunder that rolled through the valley. A few hours later the rain stopped and the word began to spread among the villagers that the last tree on the slope had fallen and was now blocking the path. The burning of all the undergrowth in previous years had rendered the entire hillside susceptible to mudslides during the heavy rains. It had only been a question of time before this last giant would yield. The fallen tree did not pose an acute problem. Due to the rain the path was unsafe for the trucks anyway and motorcycles could still get around the tree trunk. But, needless to say, the tree would eventually have to be moved. The next day I encountered my friend Tebdey. With wide eyes he was telling a group of villagers of a strange event that had befallen him this morning while returning from hunting. As he had walked down the path toward the village just before sunrise, he witnessed a peculiar display through the rain. Approaching the fallen tree he had realized that a pale, naked “beast” was standing on the trunk. In spite of having arms and legs the creature looked nothing like a human being. It stared at Tebdey for a while and then, all of a sudden, it “made itself very small” and disappeared into a hole in the trunk. What he had witnessed, Tebdey said, was a be’tang. He thought it to be a particularly powerful be’tang, since from the time he saw the spirit until he reached the village many hours had passed: the be’tang had altered his sense of time. Tebdey believed that the fallen tree was the house (abong) of the spirit, for which reason he advised the villagers to leave the tree alone—that is, unless they wanted the spirit to cast illness on their families. This was, he added, the way spirits typically responded when being disturbed. After a few weeks the noise of chainsaws could be heard from the area on the hillside where the tree had fallen. From a distance, as I made my way up the muddy path, I was able to recognize the men who were cutting up the fallen tree. Tebdey and his cousin Rafael were turning the

71

72

Cutting Cosmos

tree into long boards. And in the next few days the timber was brought down to the southern slopes of Ki-tegen where Rafael had recently begun to build a house. Rather than discarding Tebdey’s story about the spirit and the fallen tree as little more than a lucrative scheme for personal profit, I venture to suggest that the spirit in his story is a quintessential example of the transformative character of spirits in Kabugkalotan. While it appears that the story was used strategically by Tebdey to keep the other villagers away from the fallen tree until he was able to turn it into building materials, one could argue that limiting the analysis in such a way leaves one question unanswered: why did the other villagers accept that Tebdey and Rafael made use of the tree afterward? And in what way might this tell us something about the phenomenon around which the story revolves, that is, the spirit? What is conveyed here, I argue, is that the spirit is part of a cosmic continuum marked by contingency. In other words, among the Bugkalot there appears to be no contradiction between a spirit posing a threat one moment and this threat being all but nonexistent the other. Numerous other forms of contingency were expressed in other stories about spirits: spirits appeared in various shapes and would, in some cases, show themselves as a white dog, a large deer, or a naked woman; people in Ki-tegen would tell me about having encountered spirits with grotesque shapes: long arms and legs, small heads, and oversized feet; sometimes they were covered in fur and at other times they had completely hairless bodies. Where did the spirits come from? How did they relate to humans? What powers did they possess? Such questions were answered in radically different ways. For instance, some claimed that there was an unlimited number of spirits and others claimed there were only two: one who lived in the forest and one who lived in the river. The be’tang often changed physical shape at one or at several instances in the accounts. And the transformation not only involved its outward form, it also involved the way the spirit was assessed: harmless and undisruptive at first, the spirit soon proved to be guided by malicious, yet unfathomable, motives. In other stories this development was reversed. There were also many cases, as in Tebdey’s story, in which a spirit one moment was considered of extreme importance but, shortly after, appeared to have been completely forgotten. As transformative beings through and through, the spirits always, ultimately, revealed their nature as shapeshifters. In fact, this was so predictable and anticipated that shape-shifting in relation to spirits assumed a form of disordered order, a bridge between order and chaos. This character of the spirit was frequently stressed. For instance, during a conversation with my host, Wagsal, about whether I should escort a

Chaosmology

shaman to look up a particular spirit in the forest, he warned me, “The only thing you can be sure of is that the be’tang is never what it seems to be. You think it will do you good but you do not see its true nature.” Through such statements it was made clear that the shape-shifting unpredictability of spirits made them Others (Descola 1992: 111), that is, agencies fundamentally different from men. One of the things that all of my interlocutors agreed on was that spirits could give humans access to ayog, magic powers. How exactly such powers were transferred from be’tang to human was an issue that many people disagreed on. Furthermore, not all individuals with magic powers had gained their powers through a spirit intermediary. While ayog was, for the most part, something people refused to have anything to do with, a handful of men openly admitted to making use of magic. The men were known as ayog’en, though some referred to them as “shamans” or simply as “the men with special powers.” While spirits were mostly talked about in certain storytelling sessions, which we shall return to shortly, the shaman talked about such issues all the time. And while the storytelling sessions were taken extremely seriously, the stories and reflections delivered by a shaman were frequently met with mocking laughter behind his back. Most of my friends and acquaintances had at some point made use of the ayog’en’s spirit magic—most often to cure a child who had fallen ill or to locate a person who had gone missing in the forest. Yet, seeking the help of an ayog’en was considered a last resort, and people clearly felt uneasy in their company. For this reason, all of the three ayog’en that I came to know had on different occasions made attempts to distance themselves from their public image as ayog’en. For instance, during my stay in the village, Tó’paw, a mild middle-aged man, who was known as a powerful ayog’en, made clear attempts to abandon this role by joining a Pentecostal Church. Yet, he explained to me, it had made no difference. He had realized that stories continued to be told about him in hushed voices and that the other villagers kept their distance from him by not inviting him to the informal—but socially important—drinking sessions that took place on many evenings. Though he made sincere attempts to distance himself from the spirits, he continued to represent an uneasy domain where the world of humans and the world of gongot intersected.

Unimportant Stories Though I often heard from people in Ki-tegen that one should not rely on the words of other people—that the only real knowledge one could

73

74

Cutting Cosmos

acquire was through direct experience—they admitted that not even such experiences were always to be trusted. The elderly people in particular were at times hard to interview on issues of traditional beliefs, since they were rarely willing to launch into general reflections on this topic. In most cases during interviews they unwaveringly stuck to what they had witnessed with their own eyes—stories from a first person perspective. This type of personally attained knowledge is sometimes called peneewa. Myths, hearsay, and wider assessments rarely entered into such conversations. Also, my inquiries on the origin of things, the Bugkalot cosmogony, and other broader cosmological speculations were generally fruitless. “How should I know such things?” tended to be the slightly irritated reply. Yet, there were exceptions. One afternoon as I was drinking coffee in Evelyn’s kitchen with a village elder, I tried, as casually as possible, to make him talk about where “the world came from.” Tó’paw, who always had a powerful, almost intimidating, presence, looked at me with a mystified look and as I tried to rephrase the question I sensed how the situation became more and more awkward. Apparently he did not see this as a casual subject. In a previous interview he had evaded a similar question by launching into a lengthy story about where he came from. The conversations I had with Dinwag was carried out with Wagsal’s assistance, and in spite of his swift and precise translations, I soon realized that it was quite easy for my informants to evade my questions. I could sense that Wagsal found it uncomfortable to ask the same question several times. However, in this case I was persistent: I emphasized that I wished Dinwag to tell us where humans in general came from. Dinwag looked discontented, as if I had somehow trapped him. Then the following burst out of him: “We came from a bamboo!” “Yes?” I probed trying to make Dinwag add something to his statement. Dinwag thought for a moment before continuing. “That is what I was told. It is what people know. In the early days people were very small. And so all people were trapped together inside the bamboo. But after many years there were too many. People had too many children and now they also had children. And so the bamboo one day split and out came people like ants from an anthill.” Wholly satisfied, I wrote the account down in my notebook. Though I tried to make Dinwag tell me more about this story, he merely shook his head. This, he said, was all he knew. In the following weeks I made it a part of my interview routine to ask people in the village if they could tell me about the anthill myth.

Chaosmology

In several occasions the informants thought that I was joking. I realized that no one else in the village had ever heard of this myth of origin. Could it be that Dinwag had made the story up? I returned to Dinwag and expressed my suspicion. Confused at first, he started to laugh and explained that he had just told me a getagetai storya—an “unimportant story.” When I asked him what made the story “unimportant” Dinwag replied that in his opinion stories were unimportant if the one telling the story had not witnessed the event: you had to see it with your own eyes. And even then one could not be sure that what one saw was really true. He thereby made it clear to me that I had asked the wrong question; naturally, he could tell me where people came from, but it would only be a story. During Renato Rosaldos fieldwork in the village Kakidugen, he had an experience that relates to this situation. One day, as he was clearing some vegetation with a young Bugkalot companion, Tukbaw, he stumbled upon an old bottle hidden in the grass. Excited by the opportunity to add some archeological layers to his research he asked his companion if this bottle had once been used by the Bugkalot. Noticeably irritated the companion answered sarcastically: “It belonged to granddaddy—yeah, granddaddy turd!” Renato Rosaldo pressed further and Tukbaw grumbled, “How should I know anything about that bottle? Do you think I lived here in this place long ago? Did I stand here and watch the man drink that liquor?” (1980: 38). In his book, Renato Rosaldo used this terse reply to develop the argument that knowledge and vision among the Bugkalot are tightly interlinked; since Tukbaw had not seen who left the bottle on the forest floor, he was unable to come up with a suitable answer and replied in an aggressive way. By not making claims to lasting truths, words were given a particular role in relation to knowledge and truth. This did not mean that lies; lebut, did not exist. But lying was very different in a normative sense from telling stories. Lebut referred more to the effect than to the content of the story. Tebdey, my neighbor and friend, explained that it would be lebut if one man recommended someone to follow a path through the forest knowing that the path was untraversable due to landslides. But it would only be lebut if the other actually followed his advice. That would, Tebdey explained, make the person providing the information a lebutan, a “liar.” The man following the advice would, on the other hand, be considered a dépyang—someone without the capacity for independent thinking. Thus, by not being able to understand Dinwag’s story as “unimportant,” it was I who lost face.

75

76

Cutting Cosmos

Storytelling The men rarely questioned each other’s words explicitly, except at the designated space provided by the village meeting—the pogon. During these public meetings, which were arranged whenever a conflict broke out among the villagers, all animosities and points of view were laid out in the open for discussion until agreements were reached. Since it was crucial that all parties agree on the settlement, the discussions often continued for days. The storytelling sessions that I participated in were equally remarkable—though in an inverted form. Rather than coming to an agreement, it appeared as if the presentation of viewpoints was the purpose itself. Telling stories was a way of conjuring up spirits while simultaneously maintaining distance. The sessions were spontaneous events that took place during drinking sessions when men were gathered in the evenings in Ki-tegen. The stories were brief and precise, were delivered forcefully, and revolved around the people’s personal encounters with spirits. After a storyteller had finished his story he would lean back, allowing someone else to talk. Another man would then take over and tell a story about a similar experience. The speakers were never asked to elaborate on their stories, and only on rare occasions did someone subsequently refer to a story that had been told. What was important in these storytelling sessions was that, for the duration of its telling, the story was given the undivided attention of the group. The following three stories were told among a group of older men gathered in the middle of the village one late afternoon. The men were discussing the well-liked subject of young hunters not having the skills to track down wounded animals. Then a middle-aged man said: “Not long ago, I shot a deer near Kakidugen. That was just before Tony’s wedding [the narrator was going to his nephew’s wedding in a village, Ka­kidugen, and wanted to offer meat to the host]. But it did not die and I never managed to find it. I looked and looked. I could see some blood. The tracks became more and more difficult to see since it was getting dark. So at night I fell asleep in the forest and I had a dream. I saw a large human figure in my dream. But when it came closer I realized that it was now a black beast with hair all over its body. I was still lying on the ground and it walked around me in a circle. I decided to take out my knife, ready to strike if it came near me. When it was within reach, I swiftly cut it in the chest. But it was only a dream. So at that moment I awoke. I could see that I had actually taken my knife and stabbed it deep into the ground next to me. I felt relieved that I had not brought a companion with me, since surely he would have been killed if he had been

Chaosmology

asleep next to me. I did not sleep for the rest of the night. And in the morning I went to look for the deer again. I tell you this: maybe the deer I had shot was really a be’tang [a spirit] and it had appeared in my dream? Maybe it wanted to speak to me and it was a mistake to attack it? Who knows such things? In any case, I did not find the deer. Then I went to Kakidugen [to the wedding]. I had to go there emptyhanded, as you might recall.” The man leaned back and a brief silence fell upon the group. Then a younger man next to the first speaker started talking: Only last year, I fell asleep one night and I had a vivid dream. I was in the forest and it was dark except for a small fire. Then a big deer appeared in front of me and I picked up my gun, ready to shoot. But when I looked up again I saw that instead of a deer a young woman was standing in front of me. She signaled to me to follow her into the forest. So I went with her. After a while she stopped and showed me a plant on the ground. This was the ga’ek [a magic plant, used in relation to hunting and fishing]. I did the naw-naw. That is an old prayer to the spirit that lives inside the ga’ek. And I awoke. But later, as I was hunting with a group of men from the village of Matmat, I realized that I was in the same place that the be’tang had shown me. And I found the ga’ek right there in front of me. Tó’paw was with us on the hunt. He told me to leave it alone. He said it was only the be’tang that wanted to control me. So I left it. I have never gone back to that part of the forest.

This time there was no transitional silence before another man took over: Last year during the rainy season, I walked to the village of Bayanihan with A’met and along the way we stopped to rest in the forests of the Nangitoy clan. It was evening. And as we lay down to rest we suddenly saw a large human figure in the forest. It had a white color and was walking toward us. I was thinking that maybe it would come and eat us. We could not move. That is the magic of the be’tang. We could only stare at the be’tang, since I had never seen anything like it before. But when it approached us it started to change in the moonlight and then we saw that it was now a horse with its tongue hanging out. I thought to myself: “If it comes after us it will surely be the end of us.” But then the horse ran away. A’met and I made a big fire. And I tell you this: we sat with our knives in our hands for the rest of the night. Only those old men with special powers can fight a be’tang, but we did not care. We would strike it with our knives if it came near us!

The men in the circle listened intentively, nodding empathically whenever the brief accounts took a turn, while keeping their attention on the speaker. Besides occasional laughter, the other men did not interrupt or make comments. Such stories are based on peneewa, knowledge anchored in personal experience.

77

78

Cutting Cosmos

The stories, when listened to successively, conjure up images of a forest inhabited by potentially harmful spirit creatures that constantly change their outward form. And rather than respecting the confinements of the person, the spirits trespass all boundaries by penetrating into the very minds of people, for instance in dreams. This radical unpredictability and enigmatic behavior is what, ultimately, sets the be’tang apart from humans. For instance, the men often indicated during the stories that they could not see what took place in the spirit’s mind (nem-nem). Never revealing their true motives, the spirits are seen as creatures of “false behavior.” I see the stories told by the Bugkalot men as events of key importance in relation to Bugkalot cosmology: just as much as the stories depict various strange encounters with spirits, the storytelling should also be seen as a cosmic “cut,” a way of stabilizing a world in motion. This obscurity and transmutation was inscribed into other areas of their world—from the topographic perspective in the movement from village to forest to the difference between adult and child.

Gongot—the Wilderness Few of the families of Ki-tegen kept animals besides dogs and carabao. Other animals such as chickens, ducks, and pigs were kept mostly by migrant farmers, who sold the meat to the Bugkalot. A young woman from the village, Sara, had several times tried to convince her husband that they should start raising ducks like the immigrants. But it was hopeless. She said: I tried it before, many times. But as soon as the ducks are big someone will take them. Someday my neighbor is hungry and then he will eat it … elders say that animals in the village are dirty. But they don’t mind eating the meat! It is like that. And now my husband tells me, “No more!” He tells me, “Animals cannot run around the village; people will eat them. Do not be angry when your ducks are gone. It is much better that you just stop.” That’s what he told me. So then they can all buy meat from the other tribes.

Sara’s husband had discouraged her from raising ducks, whose eggs were much appreciated. Such a project, he claimed, would inevitably cause conflict. However, such animals were also considered dirty (o-sepét). The only animals fully accepted inside the villages were dogs used for hunting, while the carabaos were tied up outside the village. The dogs were understood to be close to humans, since they were able to “think” and were therefore not considered as dirty as other animals. From the

Chaosmology

outer edge of the village where the carabaos were tethered and on the slopes that surrounded the village, one encountered the gardens. After passing the gardens, on the other side of the valley, one entered the remaining wilderness, gongot. Following the numerous trails that connected Ki-tegen with other villages across the mountains, space became progressively less organized. A few hours hike east of the village were some of the remaining stretches of trackless forest in the area. My informants warned me that the spirits that dwelled in this forest would sometimes swallow up the hunters who came there. In fact, the first couple of times that I encountered the word be’tang were when someone warned me against entering into the gongot on my own. “The spirits will surely trick you,” I was told. When I asked what the spirits were to gain from their trickery, I was met by an abundance of different answers: the spirits would eat me, would abduct me, would take various parts of my body, or—as one of the village pastors argued—would steal my soul. Many Bugkalot believe, however, that though spirits are endowed with intentionality like humans, it is impossible for humans to tell what the spirits desire. And this inaccessibility of the spirits’ intentions differentiates them normatively from adult men: while men are composed and autonomous, the spirits are, like the gongot in which they dwell, unpredictable and enigmatic. It seems ironic that the Bugkalot have been known as the Ilongot in the ethnographic literature. This exonym comes from the word e’gongot, which means “from the wilderness.” The name is considered inappropriate and incorrect by many of the people to whom the term is ascribed. Rather than seeing themselves as people of the forest, which is regarded as a chaotic space and therefore not a realm for humans, they see themselves as belonging in the ordered space of the village.1 This opposition between village and forest is not without parallels among forest dwellers in other parts of Southeast Asia (see Valeri 2000, 1994). And like elsewhere in Southeast Asia, it is known that though humans could organize this space and render it habitable through their labor, from the outset, before this transformation takes place, the forest is fundamentally different from the domain of humans. During my time in Ki-tegen, I was frequently puzzled by my informants’ unsentimental attitude to the extensive deforestation in the mountains. Only ten years previously the village had been enveloped by dense vegetation on all sides. But when I arrived in the mountains in 2009, one could gaze over a valley where limestone and red clay had been exposed. The mountains had changed due to the influx of migrant farmers from the overpopulated, neighboring provinces and the introduction of new logging technologies.

79

80

Cutting Cosmos

In the years following the planting of the first vegetables for commercial use in Ki-tegen in 1999 the farmers transported their harvest of sweet peas to the nearest town by carabao through the forest along a narrow muddy trail. This often took two days. From this town the vegetables were transported by truck to the Nueva Vizcaya Agricultural Trade Center (NVAT) in the lowlands. The sheer hardship related to transportation severely limited the production. As the trails were improved and the trucks were now able to reach Ki-tegen in the dry season, the area began to change rapidly. The sudden access to land and the prospect of soon being able to transport vegetables down from the mountains on a concrete road throughout the year had brought about immense migration to the area of farmers from the adjoining provinces. During my fieldwork the deforestation was taking place with breathtaking speed; vast areas of seemingly impenetrable primary forest were removed in just months. This sometimes gave rise to surreal experiences: What was first thought of as a vast expanse of wilderness proved to be merely a shallow, green curtain; as these ill-fated patches of forest were cleared, views were suddenly opened up to denuded mountaintops and distant horizons of newly prepared farmland—or, more often, to exhausted stretches of barren land for as far as the eye can see. This, however, had other consequences. During the evenings the villagers in Ki-tegen could now see the fires from three other villages in the distant expanses of the valley floor. Though some of the communities had existed for centuries, their recent visual emergence was shaping a new sense of relatedness among the inhabitants of the valley. While the deforestation made hunting more difficult and had started to cause mudslides in recent years, it was widely considered a positive development, since it opened up and structured the land in new ways: what had previously been almost impenetrable vegetation was turned into patios, gardens, and traversable landscape that represented the prospect for further development of the area. Yet even though the chance of shooting a deer or a boar was becoming less likely, the men continued to enter the forest on hunting trips that could last for days. Though many Bugkalot identified something unsettling about the forest, it was also a place where men behaved more freely than in the village and where rules for social conduct were, in some cases, altered and suspended. The forest was a place that allowed for transformations of the social order, most notably during hunting, laob. Hunting was a collective enterprise, which was arranged through “situational authority”; a leader, the gemapó, emerged just for the particular context of the hunt. At the end of the hunt the function of the

Chaosmology

Figure 3.2.  Denuded hillsides in Kabugkalotan.

gemapó came to an end. The gemapó would not be praised if the hunt was successful, nor would he be assigned responsibility if it failed. I never managed to make the men admit who the gemapó was during a particular hunt. The hierarchical leadership developed within—and was accepted within—the context of the forest and would be dissolved on returning to the village. At one point Tóse explained to me: The forest is not like the village. Children go to the forest to shoot birds. You know why? So they can get away from their father who slaps them or shouts at them: “Do this thing! Get water!” I ask myself this: why do so many people go to the forest? Even strangers? It is because you can find things in the forest that you cannot find in the village or even in the big cities … People go to the forest for a long time and stay there. Some do not come back. Maybe they go and they find that magic [ayog], like you know, and something happens to their mind. Some men have found treasures out there and they move away. And many years after, one day, a visitor comes here and tells us: “Hey, that man who was lost in the forest, he now lives in some other province.” Then we learn that he is now a rich man. He is now mayor in some town.

Tóse knew large parts of the forests extremely well and he frequently went there with other young men simply to get away from the village and its demands. Yet, as he indicated in different ways in this account, the forest also contained a transformative potential as a place where the village rules were somehow altered. As observed in other ethno-

81

82

Cutting Cosmos

graphic contexts, the wilderness was a place where “unmaking” took place; things were taken apart before being reconstituted (Turner 1970). Likewise, in Bugkalot cosmology the forest was a chaotic space of transformation, opposed to the ordered human space. Thus, it should be clear that opposite the human sphere of the village (that is, in the opposite end of the cosmological spectrum), one found a domain characterized by movement and transmutation—the quintessence of this movement being the shape-shifting be’tang. However, the cosmological spectrum is not primarily manifested in the shift between topographical areas. Rather, transformation and chaos are just as much, or perhaps more, part of the person. It may even be considered that from which man is born.

Embraced by Magic Spirits and magic were phenomena that almost all Bugkalot men unambiguously distanced themselves from. Even talking about spirits was— in most cases—confined to storytelling sessions, as we saw earlier in this chapter. What made a shaman a shaman, then, was his willingness to openly “embrace magic” both in words and in practice. Though this provided him with mysterious powers, it also pushed him to the fringes of social life. The most widespread response to the shaman was fear, hidden mockery, and, if possible, avoidance. Avoidance and disregard were common responses to those who could not be encompassed by the nonhierarchical relations among men. In the initial phase of my fieldwork, I got the impression that the ayog’en belonged to a past era. This notion had been prompted especially by my younger informants, many of whom held the belief that only decades ago the shamans had played much more significant roles in village life. I could even sometimes detect a slight disappointment regarding the ayog’en whose powers were less spectacular today than before. Siclab, a friend of Tóse, exclaimed with a loud and discouraged moan, “Nothing has any power anymore. It’s all gone!” Siclab recalled that during his childhood he had witnessed events that no longer occurred: the ayog’en back then could disappear into thin air by striking his cane into the ground. Even though Siclab believed that no ayog’en had such powers today, I soon realized that seeking the help or advice of an ayog’en was common. For instance, in December 2009, shortly after I left the Philippines to spend Christmas with my family in Denmark, Wagsal consulted an ayog’en. His older brother, Charlie, had suddenly started to suffer from sever pains in his throat. Wagsal told me about this episode upon my return in early January. It was in the after-

Chaosmology

noon. The rain, which had made my journey through the mountains difficult, had just stopped, and the sun was just about to come out. I placed the tape recorder next to our coffee cups on the bench in the yard and asked him when he had first heard about his brother’s condition. “If I am not mistaken … one year ago,” Wagsal began. Before that time my brother was really industrious. You cannot stop him from working. He would relax himself during nighttime only. But then Charlie said to his wife: “Why am I like this? The work feels so hard. And I don’t know why! As if my head is always sick.” We kept on giving him medicine but nothing happened. It didn’t help. Until such time here comes a … I do not know what it is called … a swelling on the throat. Until such time he could not take his food. I said to him: “I will bring you to the doctor.” So he had an operation. The swelling disappeared and he felt much better. But then, here comes again … His eyes … as if he could not see clearly, he told me. We went to the doctor again and he could not see what was wrong, but my brother’s eyes were now big. They were coming out of his head. So what should we do? We had already spent all our money on hospital bills. My brothers and my parents did not have money. What could we do now? I said: “Brother, shall we bring you to the ayog’en, to the old man who has those special powers?” And then we brought him there.

“Who was the ayog’en?” I asked? “Is it someone I know?” Wagsal replied: I traveled far with my brother [his younger brother, Gon­zalo]. Far away. We visited a very strong ayog’en. The ayog’en said to us that someone was doing witchcraft against my brother. I asked the ayog’en: “What do you think is the reason for that?” I thought that maybe Charlie acted badly against some person. The old man said to us that there was a conflict between Charlie and an old woman.”

“What was this conflict about?” I interrupted Wagsal. “The conflict was like this,” he answered. You know, first the ayog’en asked us to bring him one bottle of wine, one dog, and then one pig. And then he did a ceremony—he was talking to someone but we do not know [who he was talking to] because we could not see anyone. We do not understand such things … Then he said to us: “Your brother and the old lady has a conflict and it is about the boundary of land. According to this old lady your land enters her land.” But actually the land was in its correct measurement! I know that. But the lady, who owns the land next to my brother’s land, disagrees. So without our knowledge—and that is what I am thinking about—I am thinking: Why did [Charlie] not tell us that there was this conflict? That is my question! Why did he not tell us about the land? Then we would not have to sacrifice all of our money on hospital bills! You could just give [the old woman] the

83

84

Cutting Cosmos

piece of land! “Yes,” my brother told me, “we should tell her that she can have the land.” So I went to the old lady. And at first she did not admit that she was doing such witchcraft. Only, she admitted only … the old lady said: “Yes, it is true! I was insulted! And I have anger against your brother because of his behavior, because of the land,” she said. “But the thing you are thinking, about the witchcraft … about this you are not correct!” She said these things right in front of us. So I said to her: “Thank you, if that is true. Thank you very much, if that is true.” But then the old lady said, and that is strange: “As of today, Charlie will be free, he will be cured. He will be healed!” She said that! So she must have been a witch! Now after that my brother is very happy because he believes that what the old woman uttered was true. But after a day my brother cannot stay calm. He keeps on moving. He is in pain. And he says: “Please help me, please help me!” We could not do anything so we had to bring him to the ayog’en again. He tried to look into a bottle of wine and … He did not do these things in front of me … But he told us that we better bring out another pig for him. That was when I started to think: Why is my brother not cured when the old lady said that he would be cured. It was as if she wanted something else. I don’t know what. We did not understand. Maybe … As if she was asking for evidence [that Charlie would no longer trespass onto her land]. She would not let him go until she had some evidence. My prediction was that maybe she wanted my brother to prepare her some food to show that he did not want more conflict. So I said: “If that’s what she wants, let’s go! We will make food for her! Let’s go now!” My brothers said no. And now it is like this: Charlie is still sick.

Charlie was not willing to engage in the self-abasing act of preparing food for the woman. Wagsal shook his head, indicating that he regarded his brother’s behavior as senseless. Three weeks passed and as I came back to Ki-tegen, after a brief trip to the municipality of Bambang, I entered Wagsal’s house and found him lying half-curled on the floor in a dim corner of the room. He was crying silently and did not greet me as he normally would have. As I approached him he waved me away with a gesture while holding the other hand over his eyes. He stood up, his hands opening and closing with aimless emotion. Without talking we went into the garden in the light of the late afternoon sun. The breeze off the mountains was a welcome bit of cool after a muggy day, and we headed toward the black-painted bench from which one had a view over the entire valley. Wagsal often sat on the bench at this time, as the wood gave up the last heat of the day. The sun lingered low in the horizon and he took off his baseball cap with a sigh. Charlie had died that morning in agony. Gonzalo, Wagsal’s younger brother who had stayed awake during the night, had left the village in fury, shouting that he was going to behead the bruha, the witch. No one

Chaosmology

had dared to stop him because Gonzalo was known to be the strongest and, in his younger days, among the most fierce and aggressive men in the area; the group of villagers who had seen him race down the path toward the forest had noted, “He could not hear any words,” he had “lost his mind.” Wagsal knew that the killing of the woman would inevitably engender acts of retribution from her family and he was clearly relieved when Gonzalo returned to Ki-tegen in the afternoon after his temper had cooled down. What is perhaps most significant in relation to this chapter is the role that magic and distance play in this account. Rather than consulting a local shaman, Wagsal traveled for more than a day to visit a shaman living in a faraway village: thus, from the outset there was a physical distance between Wagsal and the shaman. However, this distance also existed on other levels. Though Wagsal talked about this visit to the shaman on many occasions, he never mentioned the shaman by name. Normally Wagsal would have mentioned both the name and, in many cases, how they were related genealogically and how he had come to hear about the person. Moreover, in his account Wagsal made sure to emphasize that he did not understand the techniques that were applied by the ayog’en. While Wagsal and Gonzalo were convinced that the old woman was responsible for the death of Charlie, they made no attempt to understand how she could have struck him with this mortal illness. Finally, and importantly, they were unable to properly grasp her motive. It seemed absurd to them that she would kill Charlie even after they had tried to satisfy all her demands and she therefore had no more to gain. So, though the distance between Wagsal and the ayog’en (and the old woman) was of a geographical type, the epistemological distance was just as significant. By explaining to me all the various aspects of the incident that he was unable to comprehend, Wagsal disclosed that he had ventured into a sphere where he did not belong, where things did not make sense to him, and where unpredictability reigned. Though this sphere made sense from the perspective of an ayog’en, to other people it appeared as chaos.

“Serious Talk”—Grass and Spirits That magic, spirits, and shamanism were elusive phenomena was an experience that I shared with my informants. This area of knowledge was not made easier to grasp by the fact that each of the four ayog’en I met

85

86

Cutting Cosmos

in Kabugkalotan talked about their practices in very different ways. In general, what they had in common was their willingness to engage with the spirits. They were willing to accept the loss of selfhood and social recognition that followed the use of magic. In this sense, engaging with magic, spirits, and other forms of chaos was not a special capacity or skill. It was something all men had access to if they desired it. Though the readiness to engage with spirits and magic set the ayog’en apart from other men, this was not the only difference. While ordinary men would mainly talk about spirits during storytelling sessions, the shamans did not confine such talk to these contexts. Rather, they constantly talked about spirits, which caused my other friends to roll their eyes and shake their heads giggling when the shamans could not see it. Yet, it was this willingness of the shamans to talk about such issues that made my informants continuously refer me to the shamans whenever I had a question. This happened on several occasions during my attempts to gain insights into the power of “magic grass,” ga’ek. It was a common notion in Ki-tegen that people could gain magic powers from eating such grass. But what these powers consisted of and how the grass worked were issues only few wanted to elaborate on. At this early stage of my fieldwork Wagsal recommended that I take my questions to old Tó’paw, who, Wagsal claimed, was the only ayog’en in Ki-tegen. No one had previously told me that Tó’paw was an ayog’en. I had seen him briefly on several occasions, but at this point he had not yet started to pay any attention to my research in the village and we had not yet become friends. Furthermore, he did not quite live up to my idea of the traditional shaman; in spite of his relatively great age and grizzled look, he was fond of wearing American-inspired hip-hop clothes and pilot sunglasses. I did not expect that he had shamanic powers. I went to visit him the following afternoon with Wagsal, who often volunteered to come along and assisted me with translations. Tó’paw was not home so we left a message with his wife in which we invited him to eat at our house the following day. We butchered a large rooster for the occasion. Having invited him to come at six in the evening we knew that he would take this as an implicit dinner invitation, which, as Wagsal remarked, would greatly improve the odds of him actually showing up. When he had not yet revealed himself two hours later, I started to feel discouraged. As we were about to eat the meal that had turned cold, the light of a flashlight could be spotted from the otherwise impenetrable darkness. Tó’paw entered the kitchen and sat down next to me on the bench, as if his arrival had only been slightly belated. I was able to get a proper

Chaosmology

look at his face for the first time and I realized that it was difficult to tell if he was forty-five or sixty-five. The only thing that gave away his real age was the steel gray, curly hair that revealed itself as he took off his baseball cap. After the meal Tó’paw looked at me and asked me what I wanted to know. He understood English but preferred to speak in Bugkalot. I asked him bluntly if he could tell me how I could become an ayog’en. Wagsal coughed, seemingly not prepared for this question. Tó’paw, however, did not seem surprised. He started talking and proved to be a masterful underplayer who yielded a wide range of subtle, magnificent gestures that made his audience listen intensely. Lowering his voice to a deep rumble he said: Yes, it is not just our own thoughts and our anger that make us do things. There is a grass—we call it ga’ek—that you eat. It can make you act with bravery. Ga’ek is in the forest, but few know where it is. Some people go out to find it and to use it. In the old days, when killing, we used ga’ek so even the wildest dogs could not harm us. Even if a man would try to shoot you he would not be able to see you, and his dogs became tame. That is because of ga’ek. And even if you kill somebody you can still be friends with those who have seen you. But that is not easy. It is serious talk!2 Also, it is not only for fighting. I tell you this: Adangsel [a recently deceased ayog’en] was lucky and passionate with the women. He passed his ayog on to his son. And many years ago it was my uncle who gave the ayog to Adangsel. I know that. If the ga’ek fits you, you will have many friends. It whispers in your ear and tells you what to do, so you must be very strong. Be independent in your mind. If you embrace the ga’ek and the ga’ek embraces you, all people will be friendly to you.

I asked Tó’paw if he also used ga’ek.

Figure 3.3.  “There is a grass, we call it ga’ek, that you eat. It can make you act with bravery.”

87

88

Cutting Cosmos

“Yes,” he said. “If I end up in a dangerous situation, then I will use ga’ek. When I was still a soldier, I offered the grass to my companions … When we had an encounter,3 I gave it to one soldier who was very afraid. And then he came again and asked for more. But I said to him: ‘That’s enough what I have already given you!’” Tó’paw picked up the backpack that lay next to him and brought out a small bottle. A few leaves were floating around in the murky liquid inside. I unscrewed the cap and took a sniff. The smell of strong spirits greeted my nostrils. “Is this ga’ek?” I asked. Tó’paw nodded: “It is strong,” he said. “We will see if the spirit likes you. Drink, but keep it in your mouth for a little while.” I tipped the bottle up and took a mouthful, resisting the urge to swallow. It was gin mixed with leaves that tasted like lime and thyme. An intensely warm sensation spread through my body. I had to hold on to the table with both hands in order to stabilize myself. Tó’paw laughed as he noticed that my face was flushing. Wagsal was looking nervously from Tó’paw to me and back again. Finally he said: “It is clear to me now. The spirits like you.” I felt the effect already fading. Tó’paw continued: “Listen boy, the truth is that I do not like the thought of you using ga’ek. You know, it is the grass of those be’tang …” He then said to Wagsal: “But if it is really his wish, I can bring you two with me to the forest. Then he can speak to the spirits himself.” He explained that ga’ek would only have an effect if the ayog, the spirit power that dwelled in the ga’ek, “desired” me when seeing me in person; then it would embrace me, defend me, and ensure my success when I went hunting and fishing. Tó’paw agreed to bring Wagsal and me to the place where the grass grew, and I was excited at the thought of achieving the status of shaman. But Wagsal had doubts. Later that evening he said to me: I’ll have to think! What if you begin to spend all of your time out in the forest like one of those ayog’en? We should be very careful. Yes, I have to think it over a hundred times or more. You will maybe have a new knowledge and you will no longer want to do your job. You will just go roaming around the forest. The ayog’en wants to stay in the forest or near the river. If you can control yourself it is very good, but what if you change and cannot control yourself? The spirit will want you to stay in the forest. What if you would rather spend your life in the forest than with your family? You would never know if it is you who wants this, or if the spirit whispers in your ear.

During the next few days Wagsal intensified his attempts to persuade me from using ga’ek—he repeatedly explained to me that it was too

Chaosmology

dangerous, that he was afraid that the spirit would take control of us. I needed him to come along to translate and said to him: “As I see it, if I get some new knowledge, and I don’t want to continue my work, it will be because I realize that I really wish to do something else. Why is that so bad?” “Yes,” Wagsal replied, “but you will not know if you really want this, or if it is just the magic. You know the be’tang can do that. They can affect your mind so you think you are yourself, but in truth you’re not. Also, Tó’paw was challenging us! Did you hear that?” Wagsal laughed. “Tó’paw said to us: ‘You’re sure that you really want this? And are you sure that this white man is strong enough?’ That’s what he said to us.” He had not translated this part during the interview as far as I could recall. “Do you think he was trying to trick us into coming with him?” I asked. He nodded his head solemnly, and the flames from Evelyn’s stove bounced off his heavy spectacles, rendering his eyes square, yellow screens of light. “I don’t know,” Wagsal said, “and that’s why you need to think it over. Not just one time, but many times. A hundred times if possible. Or even more times would be better.” Wagsal was afraid that the new knowledge would alter my personality and personal concerns. As I encountered Tó’paw a few weeks later, I did not even get the chance to bring up the subject before he swiftly offered me a betel nut. As I chewed it, he explained to me that he was afraid that I was not strong enough to “take” the ga’ek. He believed it would kill me and that I had better give up my hopes of becoming ayog’en. Much later, when Tó’paw had become one of my close informants, he admitted to me that it was Wagsal who had persuaded him to tell me those words of discouragement.

A “True” Shaman My second encounter with a shaman happened two months later. His name was Long-elong, and he was known to be a powerful ayog’en. He came from a faraway village, Kadigatan, and was spending a few days at his brother’s house in Ki-tegen before traveling on to the lowlands. Like Tó’paw, Long-elong told me that ga’ek could be dangerous. He stated that only the bravest of men were able to control its power. Yet many men chose to use it since it enabled them to find game when hunting. He appeared offended when I asked him if these men, then, should be considered ayog’en.

89

90

Cutting Cosmos

“No,” he replied, “the ayog’en is very different from those young men who go out in search of ga’ek.” I asked again: “You mean to say that ga’ek is not related to being ayog’en?” “Yes, boy, it is not,” he said. “Those who have the ga’ek are different. They can use the ga’ek for hunting and to become brave. But a true ayog’en … I don’t need to use ga’ek because the ayog [spirit power] is already inside of me. And when people come to me and I say to them: ‘Today when you go hunting you will shoot an animal,’ then they will shoot an animal. But other people … like the elder brother of Po-go, he used ga’ek, and then he killed himself with a gun. Because the ayog in the grass is dangerous; it is the grass of the be’tang!” “Why did he shoot himself?” I asked. Long-elong considered this question for a while. “I don’t understand the work of the be’tang,” he finally said. “But it will kill you if it gets the chance. And ga’ek belongs to be’tang. That’s why people do not want to talk about using ga’ek.” “What is the ayog?” I asked. “Is it a spirit?” “No, those things are not related,” Long-elong said definitively. I tried to explain to Long-elong what Tó’paw had previously told me: that the grass, ga’ek, whispered to the person who made use of it. If the grass whispered, would this require the presence of a spirit? Instead of giving a reply to this proposition, Long-elong said with a stern face: “Tó’paw does not have this kind of knowledge. Tó’paw only knows where to find the ga’ek. But he is not an ayog’en. Does Tó’paw know that something bad is about to happen before it happens? No! Then he cannot be an ayog’en.” I noticed that Wagsal, who was sitting next to us on the bench outside his house, was nodding excitedly as Long-elong was talking. I had already realized that Wagsal shared Long-elong’s profound suspicion of ga’ek. At one point during the conversation Wagsal requested Longelong to tell a particular story that he, Long-elong, had told him on an earlier occasion. Long-elong complied. “Yes, not long ago,” he started, I made a ritual in Kadigatán. In Kadigatán I made a ritual for a man who had suddenly become ill down by the river. He could not breathe and was already dying. He had used ga’ek for many years. Every time he went fishing he would tie a piece of ga’ek to his fishing spear and bring home an abundance of fish. Of course everyone in the village talked about this man, since he provided his family with fish. The fish would throw themselves on his spear. But no one knew that it was really the pengit [the name Long-elong used to refer to the spirits in the river] who did these things. And as the

Chaosmology

pengit did not receive the praise of the village it cast illness on the man. But I was dancing ta’gem [a dance used for celebration and, in this case, shamanic ritual]. The spirit had stolen the man’s heart, because the man had used ga’ek given to him by the pengit. You see, the spirit eats your heart when you use ga’ek. Without your heart you die slowly until you cannot breathe.

“Tell him why it eats your heart,” Wagsal said to the elderly man. Long-elong explained, Because the deed you have done is not your own. It eats your heart as payment. It eats your heart because you claim that [what you have accomplished] is really your own work. So I went down to the river to take back the heart by force. But while we challenged each other the sick man died. My powers did not have any effect at all. I was not able to demand anything from such a powerful spirit.

I felt dispirited after this conversation. Until my encounter with Longelong, I had assumed that Tó’paw, whom I had interviewed on several occasions before encountering Long-elong, had been providing me with a reliable depiction of how the Bugkalot cosmology was constituted, how the worlds of spirits and human were interconnected. Having seen Tó’paw as an expert who could represent and flesh out the traditional Bugkalot beliefs, I had spent much time and many pages of field notes mapping out the spirit world as Tó’paw had disclosed it to me. But now, in the words of Long-elong, I encountered an alternative version. Longelong was adamant that the power of the ayog’en was an inherent part of himself: either you had it or you didn’t. Consequently, according to Long-elong, Tó’paw was just an ordinary man who had gained certain powers through the help of a magic remedy—powers that should not be ascribed to him as part of his own potentiality.

Tó’paw Changes His Opinion After having met Tó’paw and Long-elong, I had the chance to talk to two other men who were known for their shamanic powers. They also presented me with different versions of the shamanic practice. One man, who had received his powers from his deceased uncle, said, “I can give my ayog to no more than eight men. These men can carry the same ayog. Before you can carry the ayog you have to kill a wild boar and give the intestines to the be’tang. If the be’tang accepts you, then you will get the ayog.” The final shaman, a middle-aged Bugkalot man whom I met by coincidence in a lowland town, did not concur with the “rule” of the eight recipients of ayog, the ritual sacrifice, or the idea that only men could

91

92

Cutting Cosmos

become ayog’en. Though unwilling to go into any form of detail, he explained that he had received his knowledge from his mother. The ayog’en, he explained, did not have any powers. Rather, the ayog’en had to be brave enough to talk to the be’tang, who would then help the ayog’en. Though Tó’paw had previously insisted that only men could become ayog’en, he changed his mind when I told him about the lowland ayog’en. Tó’paw now exclaimed: “Yes, women can become ayog’en—I have known so many!” Though women could engage with ga’ek, he explained, in most cases it was too dangerous; they lacked the beya, the autonomy, since they were too tied to the home. Tó’paw had in fact asked his daughter to one day become an ayog’en, but she had declined because she had received a college scholarship and moved to a lowland city. There is a connection between this sudden change in the way in which Tó’paw understood shamanism and the story that opened this chapter. In that story Tebdey one moment warned people against approaching a fallen tree that supposedly sheltered a powerful spirit; the next moment he was cutting the tree into boards that would later be used to build a house in Ki-tegen. Rather than understanding such changes in attitude as “misunderstandings” or even “lies,” these changes should be considered expressions of an area of the cosmology, which was continuously changing its shape. Forms of storytelling can thereby be located on a spectrum at varying degrees of “shamanic engagement,” which in all its forms has to do with rendering the unknowable knowable, giving form to gongot; that is, temporarily stabilizing chaos.

A Cosmic Continuum I have used the notion of shamanism here to point to a way that humans respond to a threatening and chaotic domain of their world. This domain, which is embodied by the shape-shifting be’tang, is impossible to grasp in its unlimited potentiality. Thus, responding to and reflecting an erratic cosmology, Bugkalot shamanism was hard to pin down as an actual practice: it was not based on certain static and agreed upon esotericism but rather involved a constant modulation of knowledge and practices. The sociologist Peter Berger (1967) has introduced the concept of “cosmization,” whereby, through placing cosmology in time, he reminds us that cosmologies are being shaped and fashioned through human activity as part of an incessant construction of social reality. Thus, Berger asserts that “[every] society is engaged in the never completed enter-

Chaosmology

prise of building a humanly meaningful world. Cosmization implies the identification of this humanly meaningful world with the world as such, the former now being grounded in the latter, reflecting it or being derived from it in its fundamental structure” (27). This understanding of cosmos as tied to the intersection between historical contingencies and an assumed human need for “meaning” seeks to approach the cosmos as emergent rather than being. Similarly, in Bugkalot cosmology it was crucial to consider the production of the cosmology as a critical aspect of the cosmology. But this did not mean that the cosmology could be confined to the process of its own construction or that meaning was an end in itself, as Berger would seem to imply. Rather, I follow Frederik Barth (1987), as he argues that a better understanding of cosmology comes “not by construing more order into it, but by better accounting for its production” (84). Similarly, in the Bugkalot case it seems that by “accounting for its production” one in fact encounters an order. To understand the wider social logics that organize cosmos require us to look at how cosmology is shaped by people in social space. Therefore, there should not be a dichotomy between the production and the order of cosmology, since the production, at least among the Bugkalot, is the order: the different stories told by informants were reports on the same cosmos in motion. Thus, rather than discarding Tebdey’s story about the spirit and the fallen tree as revealing little more than a lucrative scheme for personal profit, I venture to suggest that the spirit in his story was a perfect example of the transformative character of spirits. The be’tang is a key cosmological being. Though the be’tang is understood by my interlocutors as an Other, this does not mean that it is always paired in contrast to the category “human”; children, especially, contain a degree of “spiritness,” epitomized by the child’s capricious moods and soft body that undergoes a rapid transformation in the child’s early years. The topographic motion from village to forest is homologous to an internal relation in human beings. This was exemplified by the temporal dimension of personhood in which childhood is seen as a state of chaos out of which the mature person evolves. Thus, rather than seeing chaos as that which exists outside of the ordered cosmos, chaos is that from which Bugkalot personhood evolves. The purpose of this analysis of chaos and stability, then, has been to take inconsistency seriously as a cosmological dynamic. Knowledge of the cosmos among the Bugkalot reflects a cosmos, which is in itself marked by inconsistency and transmutation. Thus, such knowledge is not about “truthfulness” according to some fixed cosmological order but about effective invocation of metaphysics derived from a common cosmos in flux. From the direct use of spirit magic by the ayog’en to the distancing

93

94

Cutting Cosmos

tactics that were applied by ordinary people, I have suggested that these forms of shamanism may be viewed as reports on a cosmos in motion. Where is this taking us in our attempt to understand Bugkalot masculinity as embedded in overall cosmological dynamics? In a sense, there was a homology between the way my informants addressed the forest and the way they addressed spirits as Others. Spirits were portrayed as the inverse of humans, as embodiments of subversive, contingent forces that existed beyond any discernable rules. Yet, this dualism of order and chaos was just as much a relationship that one could identify in masculinity itself: while the (male) person was born of chaos, his life trajectory led to a higher degree of contracted order. These analogies were made when referring to the seemingly nonsensical action of, for instance, spirits and children: just as the be’tang was seen as infantile, the human child was seen as spiritlike. As Mary Douglas (1973) has argued, the body should be seen as a microcosm of the categorical distinctions relevant to a particular cosmology; the wider cosmology is inscribed in the body, the social world, and the surrounding territorial world. Like the paths away from the village into the forest, the motion toward the spirits was a continuum toward entropy, a gradual decline into impenetrable disorder. Spirits were the embodiments of subversive, contingent forces that existed beyond any discernable rules. The course from childhood to adulthood and to becoming an elder was therefore a trajectory from the chaos of uncontrollable affect to order, a higher level of stability. Chaos as a cosmic component, I have argued, was tied to the most inhospitable areas of the forest and the spirits that dwelled there. While gongot posed itself against the village and the man, the Bugkalot simultaneously identified a connection between chaos and the human world. Gongot incessantly attempted to enter into human society (for instance when spirits tricked people), but this was not the only way gongot manifested among humans. In fact, the child was seen as a “wild animal,” a beast of the forest—as not yet a person. Thereby humans were in fact believed to originate in gongot: the man was born from a state of disorder and through his life, as he accumulated experience (beya), he became gradually more “contracted”: he grew more composed and autonomous. While this was considered an ideal development of the man, there was a reversibility tied to male autonomy. The man could become so contracted that individual autonomy turned to social detachedness. This form of ultimate manifestation of maleness, known among the Bugkalot as mansasadile, was in fact the fulfillment of the ideals of autonomy, brought to a stage in which the man had become the embodiment of disavowal and distance. But this also made mansasadile the

Chaosmology

personification of a paradox, which was critical to Bugkalot masculinity: the mansasadile had achieved a form of radical autonomy, which was, evidently, not achieved by ordinary men. To ordinary men, autonomy was something to be communicated to others, whereby men revealed themselves as socially dependent. The mansasadile had overcome this otherwise irresolvable, internal disjunction and thus represented a modality in which cosmos had gone from an modus of transformation to a permanent, contracted state. One could say that the mansasadile was analogous to what would happen if one particular story told during a storytelling session was not subsequently replaced by another story or if a dancer, during ta’gem, simply continued dancing instead of stepping down from the stage after a few minutes. As I will argue in the last part of the book, the mansasadile represents a certain modality of power in which power assumes a constant form. This is what I wish to show by exploring headhunting, ngayó.

Notes   1. It should also be noted that alternative narratives are sometimes encountered among the Bugkalot, most notably in the discourse promoted by nongovernmental organizations working for forest conservation. They promote the image of the forest as a fragile domain of pristine order that should be protected, while human society is a place of chaos due to, for instance, corruption and uncontrolled population growth.  2. Pepeyan opowan.   3. Like many other Bugkalot men in the area, Tó’paw had been enrolled in the Philippine Army to fight against the communist guerilla the New People’s Army in the 1980s.

95

4 Ngayó

On the one hand there is poetry, the destruction that has surged up and deluded itself, a blood-spattered head; on the other hand there is action, work, struggle. —George Bataille “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice”

Ngayó is an event that circles around the intentional beheading of a human—and the treatment of the victim’s body during ngayó seems surprisingly brutal: after the victim is ambushed and shot from a distance, his or her head is cut off at the neck, preferably in one determined strike with the headhunting knife, the tek-yaden (though, as some of my informants reluctantly admitted, this was hardly manageable). Afterward the head is tossed to the ground in a final act known as balabag. This ritual practice has made the Bugkalot rise to scholarly fame through the works of Michelle Rosaldo (1980, 1983, 1984) and Renato Rosaldo (1980, 2004). More than half of my elderly, male informants in Ki-tegen claimed to have participated actively in such killings, and almost all people born into a Bugkalot community before the 1970s had first person accounts of ngayó—as killer, as eyewitness, or as survivor. Though the Rosaldos admit that ngayó in fact ended as a common practice years before their most extensive fieldwork in the early 1970s, they construed the practice of headhunting as the fulcrum of Bugkalot society, a critical and all-pervasive component around which ritual life revolved. Though I agree that such a component existed, ngayó was not

Ngayó

it. Rather, ngayó was one manifestation of a set of much wider dynamics that continues to operate in Bugkalot society. By arguing that ngayó was a form of ritualized transgression, I continue the discussion from the previous chapter, in which I suggested that certain acts carried out in particular, social contexts were used to stabilize chaos and transmutation. Drawing a parallel between such acts I argue that these involved a transgressive “cut.” The term “cutting,” pá­ mo­tok, originated in the context of headhunting. While pámotok simply meant “cutting,” ngayó referred to the overall customary practice: the departure, the long journey through the forest, the kill, and the return to the village. The cut, which was carried out during ngayó, was directed against another person in a very literal sense and seems to take Bugkalot masculine ideals to their extreme: killing another person in such a direct way entailed setting oneself apart from the ordinary forms of social interaction, which were marked by humble restraint. At the core of ngayó, and other form of cutting, we find the transgression, which, however, does not imply that we are dealing with unrestrained acts. As Slavoj Žižek writes, even “when my desires are transgressive, even when they violate social norms, this very transgression relies on what it transgresses” (Žižek 2006: 42). Transgression thereby always points back to what it contravenes and is, by definition, contained. Therefore, a transgression can never be an unlimited act of absolute chaos; it follows certain confining rules. Acts that venture beyond such limits elude society or, as the philosopher George Bataille (1986) argues, become acts of limitless, animal violence. On the other hand, the transgressive violence that I explore in this chapter was placed in a ritually prescribed frame. Even when it implied killing another person, the cut, pámotok, was inherently social—even though the ritual beheadings as a transgression went beyond the moral limits of Bugkalot social life. Rather than breaking down the moral boundaries of society, such boundaries were in fact drawn forth and reasserted. It has been argued by anthropologists that the introduction of new sets of Christian morals have put an end to human sacrifice and ritual killing in indigenous societies around the world. Thereby Christianity becomes related to a civilized order and new moral awareness that renders violence problematic and transgressive (e.g. Willerslev 2009; Yang 2011; Harris 1994). I will propose, however, that the problematic aspects of ritual killing should not be understood exclusively as a postconversion phenomenon: to understand what provided ngayó with its impetus for the individual practitioner as well as its wider social significance requires us to acknowledge that even the pre-Christian violence had a major transgressive ef-

97

98

Cutting Cosmos

fect. I follow Bataille in his argument that ritual violence is intrinsically transgressive. Yet, in spite of challenging prohibitions and moral limits, Bataille argues, there will not necessarily exist a discrepancy between the morally ambiguous and the ritually prescribed practice. Rather, ritual violence carries the transgressive act as an inextricable constituent. After first presenting ngayó as an ethnographic phenomenon, I will attempt to understand this practice by reference to the broader “aesthetics of murder” developed by the writer Thomas De Quincey, with the aim of allowing that there might be features of the act of murder that transcend the cultural confines in which the violent act is carried out. This form of murder, among the Bugkalot, targets not the head, as one might think, but the “face” (ga-nop). Killing another person face-to-face by severing the person’s head from his or her body is obviously transgressive in itself. But ngayó went even further: by targeting the face in a particularly brutal way that I find to be a crucial factor in its effects. While this discussion of the face is essential in our attempt to place ngayó as a meaningful practice in relation to Bugkalot masculinity, it ventures beyond the ethnography of Bugkalot society by requiring us to ask the following question: Why has the head become the focus of ritual violence around the world? I suggest that part of the answer lies in the radical transgression that the face offers and consequently its capacity to set the man apart from society in a ritual sense. Among the Bugkalot, as elsewhere, the face is often related to the social feature of one’s personhood as the locus of empathy, ethical relations, and the signaling of emotional states. Ngayó thereby gained its radical transgressiveness by transgressing the ethical relation. Besides opening up a host of questions of an ethical and philosophical character, ngayó is ethnographically remarkable, since it acts as a prism through which we can look back on the previous chapters and make better sense of the paradox of masculinity that I have attempted to lay out so far. I will argue that ngayó was a radical manifestation of certain principles that revealed themselves in many contexts. In other words, ngayó involved a specific (and extreme) form of cutting, pámotok, which was multiple through and through, dispersed in diluted forms across a multitude of areas in Bugkalot society.

The Rosaldos on Headhunting In his well-known essay “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage” (2004), Renato Rosaldo described how the accidental death of his wife Michelle deepened his understanding of bereavement among the Bugkalot. Bereave-

Ngayó

ment, he claimed, lead Bugkalot men to kill as a way of dispelling a rage embedded in their grief by severing and casting away the head of an unsuspecting victim. Renato Rosaldo wrote that he came to understand how beheading another person could become a common response to crisis. While this is the best-known attempt to explain Bugkalot headhunting, it is merely one of several. In his comprehensive book “Ilongot Headhunting: 1883–1974” (1980), Renato Rosaldo adopts a historical perspective through which he places headhunting in relation to reciprocal acts of violence between clans. Elsewhere (1986), Renato Rosaldo develops an intriguing argument in which headhunting becomes a key component in Bugkalot cosmology; after a successful headhunt, Renato Rosaldo wrote, the soul of the victim would become a helping spirit to the killer in both this world and in the afterlife—and the spirit would henceforth place itself near the ears of the killer.1 In this approach, the role of revenge killings is fully absent. Additionally, he claimed, the kill made men “beautiful” in the eyes of young women. In this sense, headhunting was a courting practice and a requirement for getting married. Like Renato Rosaldo, Michelle Rosaldo understood headhunting as the “fulcrum of Bugkalot society” (1980: 140). All Bugkalot men who had not yet killed, she stated, were driven by a relentless desire to “take heads.” Yet, by persistently placing headhunting in relation to the emotional life of men, Michelle Rosaldo was more consistent in her attempt to explain what led Bugkalot men to venture out to behead people. The focus on the emotional life of the headhunter became a way for Michelle Rosaldo to understand the fact that, apparently, her informants seemed to gain very little from their killings; the man who returned from ngayó was awarded neither with prestige nor with social privileges following his accomplishment. She developed an analytical framework based on explorations into the distinctive emotional idioms that surround ngayó. While avoiding the question of why the violent acts involved a beheading, she observed that ngayó was an instrument through which men could relieve hearts burdened with the “weight” of insult, envy, pain, and grief; and in discarding “heavy” thoughts, they could achieve an “anger” that yields “energy,” makes shy and burdened youths “the same” or equal to their peers, and “lightens” both their footsteps and the feelings in their hearts (M. Rosaldo 1983: 137). Suggesting that headhunting offered a way to dispose of traumas and heavy emotions through a cathartic experience, she attempted to understand headhunting through its therapeutic effects. This notion was shared by many of my informants, who believed that ligét built up in a person when he was being acted upon by outside

99

100

Cutting Cosmos

forces. Ligét was thereby related to a perceived lack of control over factors affecting one’s integrity. This was most often exemplified through the way in which young men would erupt in anger and be otherwise unable to control themselves due to their unfavorable position in the age hierarchy. Rather than expressing their anger, I was told, the young men kept to themselves in shame, while the ligét kindled and, sometimes, erupted in unforeseeable and destructive ways. One might recall Tóse’s aggressive outburst (in chapter one). This incident was subsequently framed by the villagers in a particular way: it was not the teasing that had caused the outburst; the teasing was merely the catalyst that triggered the outburst, while the ligét already existed inside Tóse. Through his outburst he disclosed the fact that he was easily influenced by others (and by alcohol). He was thereby exposed as a dépyang, a person unable to live up to the ideals of autonomy. Ngayó created a controlled outlet for violence by directing such violence to an outer object. Michelle Rosaldo argued that the overall reason men pursued headhunting was that it provided “an angry answer to the distressing ‘shame of childhood’” (1983: 144). She discovered that in local vocabularies ligét (which Rosaldo translated as “anger” and which I understand in a much broader sense as an unruly, unfocused force or open “potentiality”) was closely linked to ngayó and the particular act of “cutting,” pámotok. Ligét, Michelle Rosaldo argued, derived from insult and other intimations of inequality and was typically born of envy (apet) when equality among men was breached. Ligét made the heart heavy, and a successful headhunt was said to “lighten” and “focus” cloudy and distracted thoughts (137). Ngayó thereby made equals of otherwise unequal men, as it provided the means for ligét to be transcended through a violent catharsis. After having beheaded another person and tossed the severed head to the ground, the cutter—the momotok—experienced a release in “angry force.” As Renato Rosaldo explained, the purpose of headhunting was not to capture a trophy, but to dispel one’s adolescent ligét and achieve manhood by throwing away “a body part, which by a principle of sympathetic magic represents the cathartic throwing away of certain burdens of life—the grudge an insult has created, or the grief over a death in the family” (1980: 140). Thus, in order to make sense of the practice of headhunting, Renato Rosaldo explained, he and Michelle Rosaldo abandoned structuralism and focused rather on the emotional realm of their male informants. However, one might interject, by doing so they applied an emotionalfunctionalist (Højer 2009: 579) frame, whereby headhunting was reduced to a tool—a therapeutic instrument—whose main purpose was to

Ngayó

alleviate grief. It is, however, clear, even from the writings of the Rosaldos, that headhunting could have many purposes, and thereby their various initial explanations in fact seem to represent ngayó more truthfully. Reduced to a form of indigenous therapeutic practice around which society revolves leaves many questions unanswered. First of all, if headhunting was truly a fully accepted and encouraged way for overcoming grief, why did many (more than half of the male population) never engage in headhunting? And if it were solely a male pursuit, how did women overcome grief? Second, given the fact that many men chose not to engage in headhunting, how do we explain that they, seemingly, reached the same levels of recognition as men who had taken heads? Third, ngayó was in fact an occasional phenomenon: sometimes it was practically nonexistent for decades. This is supported by Renato Rosaldo’s historical outline of ngayó in which he shows that ngayó was characterized by intermittency: “[historical] conditions determine the possibilities of raiding, which range from frequent to likely to unlikely to impossible” (R. Rosaldo 2004: 154). Would this not entail that generations of men were bereft of the ritual means to reach the level of manhood and, thus, that ligét would accumulate in the communities? Such a perspective is not present in the works of the Rosaldos, nor has it been expressed by my informants. These three points may suggest that there were—and continues to be—other ways of accessing whatever ngayó offered. Rather than being a discreet and incomparable aspect of Bugkalot male sociality, other types of “cuts” were available to Bugkalot men. In order to understand how an act of such spectacular and violent proportions can be tied to a widely egalitarian society, where men normally go to great lengths not to challenge other men, we will have to tie ngayó to other forms of transgressive acts. I suggest that headhunting was merely one form of ritualized transgression encountered among Bugkalot men. From this approach it becomes inaccurate—or unnecessary—to specifically draw out ngayó as the center of social life—the place around which all else revolves. Such ritualized transgressions include the storytelling sessions and the traditional dance, ta’gem, the accomplishment of which had little bearing on the future of the man. In a way that will become clear in this chapter, headhunting contained a transgressive performance, a cut that was found in different forms among the Bugkalot. And as in the context of headhunting, the accomplishment of other forms of cuts did carry with it a higher level of authority or prestige. The concept of transgression allows us to approach ngayó as other than a uniformly accepted, pristine, traditional practice, as it is depicted

101

102

Cutting Cosmos

in the writings of the Rosaldos. In fact, in the following, we will see what might be gained from seeing ngayó as an act of “murder” rather than an unambiguously endorsed act. By employing this term, I seek to decisively depict ngayó as a morally problematic act.

Blood Stains As I returned to Ki-tegen in early January 2010 after having spent Christmas in Denmark, an elderly man named Daniel came to visit me. Daniel had a gray beard and supported himself with a long walking stick, reminiscent of an Old Testament prophet, and talked to me in a mixture of English, Bugkalot, and Ilocano. Tóse, who had also dropped by Wagsal’s house that afternoon, translated the phrases that I did not understand. “I had a dream not long ago,” Daniel intoned. “It was just before you moved to this house. In my dream a young Americano came to our village to teach us the words of Jesus. I believe this is you. We need to learn more. We need to learn, so we can stop the killing.” I looked from Daniel to Tóse, slightly uneasy. Tóse, however, made no indication that Daniel was anything but deadly serious. At this point of my fieldwork most of my daily interlocutors talked openly about the violent past of the Bugkalot; the violence that clustered around the male practice ngayó, especially, often came up in conversations. But so far my informants had all talked about this as a thing of the past that had ended decades ago. I tried to understand what might be underlying Daniel’s words. He attended services in the village along with approximately half of the villagers, so both he and the other people in Ki-tegen were already well versed in Christian doctrine. I had been open about not being a Christian, and though this information had caused astonishment it had, apparently, not caused any form of distrust. Though most of my Bugkalot friends were unaffiliated with the Church, they found no reason to proclaim that they did not believe in God. That I had appeared in Daniel’s dream was also interesting. As the anthropologist Jadran Mimica has noted, dreaming both amplifies the extraordinariness of an event and affirms the dreamer’s relevance in relation to the event. Such relations might not have existed otherwise— for instance, when an event happens completely independently of the person (Mimica 1996: 214). In relation to Daniel’s statement, Daniel created a conceptual relation between himself, me, and the Bugkalot community as a whole. However, more importantly, he manifested himself in a dual modality both as a moral person and as an individual who

Ngayó

had not yet put the “traditional ways” behind him. In a sense, he was still waiting to become a full-fledged Christian. This made him a person with uncertain potentiality, as he affiliated himself with both a violent past and a Christian morality. In an area infamous for its indiscriminate violence directed against strangers, knowing that the people around you are Christians might relieve one’s initial apprehension. I would later learn, however, that such relief was in fact unwarranted: born-again Christians among the Bugkalot had been responsible for plenty of killings in the past four decades. Tóse clarified to Daniel that I was not a missionary. Daniel just nodded—he knew that already—and got up to leave. He had been there no more than a minute. I was not sure why Daniel had imagined that I would teach the words of the Bible in Ki-tegen. As we observed him walking slowly but dexterously along the muddy path leading away from Wagsal’s house, I asked Tóse if he knew anyone in Ki-tegen who was still practicing ngayó. He shook his head. “No, I do not know such things. It doesn’t happen like back then.” This term—“back then”—was frequently used by people in Ki-tegen. It referred to an unspecified, ahistorical past marked by different forms of traditional living. “Back then” could thereby refer to an era of headhunting as well as to the times before money, Christianity, commercial vegetable farming, immigration, health clinics, and schools. “No, people in the village do not go out like that,” he continued. “Today it is very secret. People are maybe more afraid now. Back then the old men took the young men and showed them what to do and who to kill. Today it is very different.” Tóse explained that a few weeks ago, while he briefly worked as a tricycle driver in the lowlands, rumors reached beyond the mountains that two men had been found in the mountain interior, their heads cut off. Tóse did not know exactly where it had happened. As I asked Tóse whether he believed this had actually taken place, he merely shrugged his shoulders. I was skeptical about this information. But I was equally intrigued. Even if it happened to be merely a rumor, it was indeed a very interesting rumor, which could perhaps be used as a stepping-stone to learn more about the way killings were perceived in present-day society. During the afternoon I talked to several of our neighbors about what Tóse had told me. Though most of them found no reason to doubt that a case of ngayó had recently taken place, they could not believe that it had been carried out as part of a customary raid. One of my neighbors, a young, fast-talking man named Johnny, told me:

103

104

Cutting Cosmos

Just imagine that! That the men went out today! We live in big villages. Everyone would know what you had done. And those people who come from other provinces, all those people working here, they would also know. They are not like us, so they do not understand. They tell the police and the police come here to Ki-tegen. No, if something like this happens a crazy man must have done it. Maybe soldiers did it.2 I don’t know.

Though Johnny had never killed anyone, he established a link between himself and the older generations of Bugkalot men as opposed to the outsiders who “did not understand.” This identification was widespread among younger men as they established continuity between their own selfhood and the selfhood of their predecessors: they were all fused into a single identity. Thereby the ability to kill became a capacity of Bugkalot men in general. Yet, Johnny found it probable that the recent killings were acts of random violence. In certain ways, these killings went against the way in which killings had traditionally been practiced. Talking to Wagsal and Tó’paw that evening, I explained to them what I had heard. Wagsal looked serious and said: “Yes, what Tóse told you is true. But we do not talk about these things in the village. It is too dangerous—you know, the police is not far away. So try not to talk about it.” “Because it will attract the police?” I asked. Wagsal nodded. “That is one reason, yes.” He started talking about the strained relationship with the police—stories he had told me before: “In the past, so many young men were put in jail—but not anymore. We learned that to us in the mountains, jail is the worst thing. So many died in jail.” I had often heard stories of police brutality in the mountains. In the 1960s, I was told, the police had made random arrests in the villages in an attempt to ban ngayó. In some cases the prisoners died from illness in jail. Wagsal confirmed that, yes, two men had in fact been found by the river close to the village shortly after—only two weeks ago. He looked uncomfortable as I asked him if he could take me to that place but agreed to do so. Around noon the following day, I went to find Wagsal in his garden, which was placed on the windy hillsides north of the village. The morning had—like most mornings—been heavy with a milky mist that softened the sounds from the kitchens around the community. Now the fog rolling down from the hillsides would soon be burned away by the sun. As I walked toward the garden the village quickly dissolved behind me in the colors of bluish gray. Wagsal had left before dawn to fetch vegetables along with our neighbor Ronny and his Ilocano wife, Belle. I found the three of them sitting

Ngayó

on the ground outside the small shelter. Apparently, Belle had just cut her finger badly on a knife. When the blood was wiped off, we could see that the bone was exposed. As Belle’s initial state of shock gave way to pain, she started to moan loudly. Wagsal and Ronny responded by giggling. The moans became screams, and the giggling turned to laughter as Ronny applied a mixture of tobacco and chili to the wound. Wagsal turned to me and said: “I knew something would happen this morning. I heard that from Tó’paw. When he says something bad will happen, it happens.” I was unsure whether Wagsal believed that Tó’paw could predict or produce misfortune but suspected Wagsal to have intentionally kept open this room for interpretation. In the meantime, Belle’s blood trickled from her finger onto her jeans and down on the dusty ground below her. Having never seen such amounts of human blood before, I realized that blood is darker than red. It appears to absorb light like a black hole. Wagsal and I left Ronny and Belle in the shelter and carried the vegetables back to his house. Then we left for the river. The walk down the steep hill from the village to the lower altitude made the sweat pour down my face. A few days ago the seemingly endless rain had stopped after a particularly wet rainy season that had put the villagers to the test. Just as the sun had almost dried out the ground, a brief but heavy downpour during the night had, again, turned the trails into mud-covered roller coasters. I staggered ahead in an effort to keep up with Wagsal, who walked hastily, unwavering, almost mechanically, like a man who had already taken the trip in his mind many times before the actual journey. I could hear from a distance how the river ran high, a thundering froth surging through the valley. The air seemed stale and close as a tomb and my neck prickled with aimless trepidation, as if every step toward the river gradually relocated the violence of which I had heard and read so much from the realm of mere storytelling to the realm of the actual. One of Wagsal’s dogs accompanied us and eased the atmosphere slightly with her energy. She ran ahead, excitedly darting into the tall grass that had grown thick and lush, remerging further down the hillside. For a few moments a view opened up through the grass to the valley, where the mist was now completely gone. In the most remote corner of the valley, I could just make out a small dark spot. This was the neglected house that belonged to Táno, the mansasadile. I was not the only person who felt something ominous about the place. I had been told that men tended to keep a hand on their knives when they passed the house. Though it sat frail and scrawny against the mountains—as if

105

106

Cutting Cosmos

a light breeze could lift it from the ground—it seemed more threatening than ever. The path we followed rose with the hillside, and then, as we turned a corner, we could see the river glistening through a lattice of grass. “Here it is,” Wagsal said. “There.” He pointed at a large rock. The river in front of us was the only thing that had not been dulled by the heat. Wagsal and I were standing on the riverbank. He ran his hand over the smooth surface of the boulder and seemed to be engaged in an internal conversation. Then Wagsal took a few steps down the embankment to a knotted tree that leaned crookedly out over the water. He placed one of his feet on a root that had been half-exposed by the bank erosion. After a few moments he started talking. The previous evening, Wagsal explained, Tó’paw had said something that had not been translated. Tó’paw had revealed that he was among the group from the Ki-tegen who went out to bury the corpses. No one knew who the dead men were, but they were not from the area. It seemed as if they had been killed during the night in their sleep, their skulls bashed in with a sharp rock. Subsequently they had been decapitated. Tó’paw had referred to it as an act of ngayó. The headless bodies had been lying on the large, flat boulder that was sometimes used as a campsite by travelers and hunters who followed the small trail along the river. I climbed the large rock. The blood, Wagsal had been told, had formed dark shades on the chalk white rock. But now there was nothing to see. Had the rain really managed to wash away the stains in such a short time? As I climbed to the plateau I wanted to ask Wagsal more about what they, the villagers, had done with the bodies—who had taken charge of the work? It was hard for me to imagine how this had taken place. Had there been any conflicts or subsequent discussions? These were questions that I wished to pursue, but Wagsal asked me not to mention this incident in front of the other villagers.

A History of Ritual Violence Though I had talked to many informants about ngayó, this was the first time I came to understand ngayó as more than just a part of stories. So far I had merely recorded the various accounts as if they had taken place in a distant past that was somehow severed from the present. But gradually a hazy tactility was starting to enter into these accounts—an ambiguity that, I will argue, was a critical component of ngayó. The ambiguity of ngayó was found in the story of Daniel above, who presented himself in a mys-

Ngayó

terious way as both a moral person (striving to become a Christian) and someone retaining certain violent capacities (not quite a Christian yet). Similarly, Johnny stated that only a “crazy man” would kill someone today, while also indicating that killing was part of Bugkalot tradition— and that it was, in fact, this tradition that separated the Bugkalot from outsiders. Though it never became clear whether the beheadings by the river were carried out as part of a Bugkalot headhunting raid, the incident was widely used by my interlocutors to emphasize a side of Bugkalot traditions that had to do with the man’s violent potential: though the practice of headhunting had been abandoned, the tradition was, in a sense, still there. The Bugkalot talked about the time prior to the emergence of Christianity as if it took place against a backdrop of continuous risk of attack and violent death. The elders, especially, vividly recalled the chaotic years that followed the end of World War II. These years, which were a time of pivotal significance in the collective history of the Bugkalot, were marked by rampant killings. American and Philippine troops were pressing the Japanese army north through Luzon, and thousands of desperate Japanese soldiers flooded the mountains. With the arrival of Japanese troops who raided the villages in search of food, the Bugkalot were turned into refugees, leaving behind homes, land, animals, and belongings and moving into the mountain interior. Within only months, more than one-third of the Bugkalot lost their lives due to random executions, hunger, and diseases that followed the displacement of the tribe (R. Rosaldo 1980: 48–54). At the time of my fieldwork this was still remembered as a time of horror and chaos in the minds of many of the Bugkalot elders. The women’s memories, particularly, revolved around the constant moving from place to place, being carried on the backs of parents and siblings. A few elders had been old enough to be the ones to carry their own children, siblings, and elders, while trying not to think about the hunger and the unpredictable dangers that dictated life for months at a time. Some elders, however, had a very different set of memories: rather than focusing on the collective trauma, they recalled a certain “joy” or lightheartedness due to the numerous headhunting raids they carried out. The Japanese soldiers, who were poorly organized and already dying from starvation, fatigue, and dysentery, were tracked down and massacred by the hundreds. Especially during the last months of the war when the discipline of the army had completely dissolved, the Bugkalot realized that the soldiers were incapable of carrying out acts of retaliation. It was not uncommon that a raiding party beheaded as many as ten soldiers during a single raid.

107

108

Cutting Cosmos

The elders whom I talked to about these massacres explained that the Bugkalot men suddenly found an overwhelming profusion of Japanese scattered throughout the forests—that is, people with no affiliation to the local clans. Since their death would not cause any local conflict, they were perfect victims. The anonymous victim was considered ideal in the context of ngayó, and thus the Japanese soldiers were perfect targets. The phase following the beheading was talked about as extremely uplifting. The skin of dima memomotok, “the ones who cut,” had acquired a reddish glow. This somatic effect established a visual indication of the newly acquired masculine autonomy, beya. The effect on the skin was similar to what takes place during another transgression of much less intensity—most notably during the dance, ta’gem. In both cases the red color was considered the varnish of beya. And like ta’gem, ngayó was a public performance: my informants stressed the importance of the beheading being carried out under the supervision of elders. The gaze played a pivotal function during ngayó, as it established a context for the act. Following Bataille one might argue that this context was what rendered the killing transgressive. Rather than being an act of chaotic violence, Bataille argues, the transgression is organized, limited, and carried out according to rules. In fact, he claims, though transgressive violence seeks to defy rules and morals, the violence is no less subject to rules than the taboo that it transgresses. For instance, even the most violent act of transgression is only carried out at a certain time and place and is only permissible up to a certain point (Bataille 1986: 65). The same was the case with ngayó. An elderly man, Tapdet, told me about the first time he participated in ngayó, which was just after the war, when the Japanese soldiers were still scattered across the mountains: My parents said that I should go out even though my older brothers had not yet gone out to cut. My parents could see that I carried much ligét. I said to myself: “I really want to do this! I want to talk in front of others—and when I talk others will listen. I will come back and I will be brave in the eyes of other men.” That was what happened. One day I was asked by the elders to go. They said to me that I would be the one to cut. My older cousin would also cut. Let me say this: the ones who were cut, two soldiers—they were soldiers, they carried military rifles—they were resting on the ground next to the river. We had followed them. We were looking at them maybe for days. We knew the forest and had light feet, so they did not know that they were being watched. Yes, maybe we watched them for days. They were resting in the evening. We jumped on them and used our knives. When they were all dead we cut their necks. You see, they had been walking and were very tired

Ngayó

and sick. They were fast asleep when we jumped from the shadows. And just as they opened their eyes they saw the knives flashing. I had not eaten or had any sleep for many days and still my feet were faster than ever before. What was in my mind was only joy since now I could speak my mind! The shame was gone! The ligét was gone. But this is what happened: [After this] I told my older brother that I wished to get married, but he said to me that I could not get married. First I should escort him on ngayó and help him to make a kill also. I could not say no to him. So I went with him. But then my other older brother demanded the same thing. At that time, I had already seen a young woman that I liked. But then the following happened: the father of the young woman demanded that I let him kill before I married his daughter. I could see that the girl liked me, so I went with the father. Afterward he asked me for steel and ten knives. I found the steel and the ten knives and then I got married in her village. But then, because of all of my knowledge of ngayó her brothers came to me. They asked me to help them, as they too wanted to cut. And I went with them. I did not only cut once. I cut more times.

I asked Tapdet how many times he had killed, to which he replied: “I cannot recall how many—not very many. I went out again when I was a grown man. Not only young men kill. One day I stopped. When my youngest son was born. That’s why I decided to give him the name Te’kag.”3 Tapdet predicted that I was about to ask him why he had stopped practicing ngayó, and he continued speaking: There were so many reasons. I often went away at that time to work. I worked in Aurora Province in 1985. Many outsiders came up here to work in the forest. Many logging people came here. So everyone was traveling much more than before. Also the Bugkalot were traveling. Because of the missionaries, we knew people from many villages, not only our own villages. Before, we were afraid of each other, but because of the missionaries we now talked. We knew people from many villagers and we traveled all over the mountains. That was why ngayó was too difficult. It was too dangerous.

Tapdet explained the end of ngayó in terms of a new type of “difficulty” or “danger” that had emerged. According to Tapdet, this danger had to do with the peaceful relationships that were developing between Bugkalot communities, where previously, he claimed, there had been only a minimum of interaction. In mentioning the Church as a key factor in relation to the end of ngayó, Tapdet expressed a widespread opinion among the Bugkalot. There is no doubt that the Baptist and Pentecostal missionaries who managed to gain a foothold in the Bugkalot communities from the early 1960s onward realized that banning ngayó would be a crucial step in creating a self-image among the Bugkalot as civilized Christians. By the

109

110

Cutting Cosmos

turn of the 1980s, most Bugkalot had accepted the missionaries’ rhetoric of equating headhunting with savageness and Christianity with civilization. After interviewing missionaries who operated in the area during the 1960s, the anthropologist Shuy Yang wrote: “Conversion was constructed as a rupture with the past, particularly the headhunting past. For the missionaries, the end of headhunting marked the success of their proselytizing efforts. It was the most obvious and significant sign that God’s amazing power had prevailed over the devil’s reign over [Bugkalot] hearts and lives” (Yang 2011: 163). What is interesting, however, is that raiding in fact did not end. There were numerous raids throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. Though the missionaries managed to establish churches in all Bugkalot communities, symptomatically to the local approach to authority, raiding continued. In fact, the conversion to Christianity seemed only to have played a minor role in the decrease in ngayó (for a further discussion on the Church, see chapter five). This point becomes clear in the following account. Tó’paw, whose accounts inform much of this book, committed two murders in 1993 and is thus one of the informants who provided me with the most recent first person description of a beheading. During a conversation between him, Wagsal, and me, I realized that Wagsal sometimes made brief comments to Tó’paw in the Ilocano dialect. Wagsal seemed nervous. Several times he mentioned the word “tape recorder” and I assumed that Wagsal was telling Tó’paw to be careful of what he told me. Indeed, Tó’paw did have a tendency to include certain graphic details in his stories. Suddenly Tó’paw said to Wagsal, with an irritated strain in his voice: Don’t hide it from him, boy! Just before you came here with your family [in the mid-1990s], I killed twice. That was the last time that I killed. Those two persons that I killed were from far away. People in the villagers said that they were liars. An elder, Ramon [an elder from Ki-tegen who used to be the head of the Barangay officials], told me I could go to Pinagá, where the men stayed. And so I did.

The men Tó’paw killed were most likely early migrant farmers who were targeted at a time when there was a growing suspicion against the newcomers. Pinagá was a valley two hours’ hike from Ki-tegen that housed a growing community of migrant workers. Tó’paw did not want to explain to me why they had suspected the victims to be “liars.” He used the Tagalog word manloloko. This word was often used in colloquial speech to refer to people who were suspected of having hidden agendas. Thereby, Tó’paw hinted that the men were killed due to a wrongful act on their part. Tó’paw continued: “I went to

Ngayó

their place, to their garden. Ramon and Pagada [two others elders from the village] came along. My cousin, David, also came along. We then shot the men and I cut off their heads.” I tried to make Tó’paw explain to me how exactly the raid had been carried out and what had happened afterward, but he was unwilling to go into further details. It was Tóse who explained to me what had been the embarrassing outcome of the murders; Tóse, who had been a boy at that time, was able to recall the event clearly. During a conversation in which we discussed why ngayó had ended, I asked him to tell me about the last raid that had been carried out by men in Ki-tegen. He said: Maybe this is not the real ngayó, like my father did it. But when my uncle [Tó’paw] killed those Igorot men [the settlers], he did it because the old men [Ramon and Pagada] wanted to scare the outsiders who were stealing our land. These mountains here belong to the Bugkalot. But no one respects that. These two men, they did not behave as visitors here. They did not come here [to the village]. They did not say their names to the old men. You know, that year only two men came to this mountain. But the year after that, two more. And then many more. So Ramon asked my uncle to …

Tóse made a downward cutting motion with his hand and carried on: Then this happened: The family of those men came here! All their cousins! They had guns and were not afraid of the Bugkalot. We were afraid of them! They were looking for the men who were dead. And so what happened? They came to this village and they said: “We want to talk to your chief.” And everyone just, you know, pointed there—to Ramon’s house. So they asked that old man: “Hey, where are our cousins! They were working down there in Pinagá, they were making a garden, and now they are not there.” The police was here also. And the old man had to say to them, right here in front of everybody—the entire village!—that he did not know what had happened, that he did not know those men. He had to lie, you see! Or else they would throw people in jail.

This incident, Tóse explained, had been extremely shameful for the elders, who were questioned by police and the relatives of the victims. Though no arrests were made and the search party did not stay for long, Tóse believed this episode to have destroyed ngayó. He concluded his story: “The mountains are not big enough for killing; there are just too many people.” Through this introduction to ngayó, seen through a prism of today’s recollections and imagination, it should be clear that headhunting, though it was carried out in different ways at different times, had a critical feature in common: it was deeply dependent on the anonymity of the victim. The Japanese soldiers, for instance, were

111

112

Cutting Cosmos

considered ideal victims, as there were no risks of subsequent acts of retaliation. The raid carried out by Tó’paw, however, had not been carried out against anonymous victims but against specific individuals who had, supposedly, behaved dishonestly. This example showed that ngayó had a limit—a point where the act went from being a ritualized transgression to a socially subversive act. At this point the act of ngayó could (like the mansasadile) no longer be contained by society. In order to unfold this argument further I will first look into the particular role of the victim. The three men—Tapdet, Tó’paw, and Tóse—all in different ways pointed to the fact that ngayó had become too dangerous. Or, rather, that the circumstances under which ngayó could be practiced had changed. In the following, I will argue that what in fact hindered the practice of ngayó was that proper victims were no longer available. The ideal victim should be without any ties to the cutter so that the act is not directed against any specific person but is, rather, a transgression upon human sociality as such.

Faceless Victims Of the twelve men that I interviewed in detail about their experiences with ngayó, there were only three cases in which informants willingly provided any information about the victims. While the men often explained in detail how they had captured and killed their victims, demonstrating with their hands the motion and angle of the knife as it severed skin, flesh, and bone, they left out almost all details concerning the victims to such an extent that at the end of the story, I did not know whether the victims had been men or women, children or adults. The victims were merely referred to as pinotogan, the “cut ones.” I could tell, however, that the victims were primarily chosen among people who were considered strangers. Such people could be Bugkalot or non-Bugkalot. The elders who escorted the raids attempted to find victims whose violent death would not cause a conflict in the community. The best way to make sure that the kill did not give rise to conflict and acts of retaliation was to pick out a complete stranger, far away, whom the man had no incentive for killing. An important part of ngayó therefore consisted in the journey of the raiding party to faraway areas of the mountains. The specificities regarding the victim—gender, age, ethnic and social affiliations—played no role in relation to the act. Ngayó was not aimed at any particular person or at a particular group of people. Thereby, ngayó distinguishes itself from “headhunting” in other ethnographic settings.

Ngayó

The cutting off of body parts, and heads in particular, has been widely understood by anthropologists as an attempt to classify enemies as “sub­humans.” For instance, the Marind-anim of Southern New Guinea classified all non-Marind peoples as “semi-human objects of headhunt” (McKinley 1976: 111). The act of beheading the enemy had to do with removing their “humanness.” Humanness, Robert McKinley suggested, posed a phenomenological threat in a cosmological system in which “outsiders” were considered nonhuman. Yet, the inescapable, empirical fact of the humanness of the outsider kept “putting humanness where it should not be.” Thus, by making sure that a critical human component of the enemy— his head—belonged to one’s own society, the Marind maintained ontological order and made sure that things were no longer “out of place” (cf. Douglas 1966). It had to do with bringing “the inconvenient humanness of the theoretically nonhuman ‘back’ into society where it belongs. By doing so they rescued an entire ideological system from being destroyed by its own inherent contradictions” (McKinley 1976: 116–17). This relationship between “dehumanization” and headhunting has not exclusively been an exotic curiosity of tribal practice. The anthropologist Simon Harrison recently described the “collecting practices” of American soldiers in the Pacific during World War II. “Fieldstripping” involved a wide variety of “souvenirs” obtained among the defeated Japanese soldiers and “[the] collection of skulls, teeth, and other body parts seems on the whole to have been carried out as an extension of this ‘normal’ and widely practiced looting of corpses” (Harrison 2006: 826). Servicemen particularly collected the skulls, though the collectors did not keep them. Instead, skulls were sent home as gifts—after the meat had been boiled from the bone—to friends and relatives. Harrison describes how the practice received international publicity in 1944 when Life Magazine issued a full-page “picture of the week” with the caption “Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank you note for the Jap skull he sent her.”4 The photograph reveals a young woman writing a letter while gazing at a skull placed in front of her on her writing desk. The skull was a love token from a Navy officer in the Pacific (Harrison 2006: 825). Harrison observed that none of the trophy skulls appearing in the forensic records were collected from German soldiers. They were all identified as Japanese. The corpses of Italian and German soldiers did not undergo the same treatment. Harrison argues that the fetishizing of the Japanese remains as “desirable acquisitions” was encouraged and justified by the racial categorization of the Japanese as having a lower degree of “humanness.” This allowed the moral boundaries of normal military

113

114

Cutting Cosmos

fieldstripping to be extended, in the case of the Japanese, to the looting of body parts. However, it was simultaneously through the symbolic act of mutilating the bodies of the enemies that the racialized wartime imagery and conceptions of the Japanese as subhuman were reproduced and sustained (831). While it has been a common assumption among anthropologists that headhunting was related to a problematic “humanness” of neighboring tribes, Harrison argues that one of the conditions required to make human trophy taking occur in any given society is that the human status of the enemy is denied to begin with; thus, the rendering of victims into “subhumans” is a necessary step before such violence can be executed. The Bugkalot case does not support this notion. Ngayó was not directed at a specific category of people; besides living up to the criteria of not being part of the assailant’s immediate family, the victims did not belong to a certain category of humans. The victims were neither dehumanized nor classified as Others to whom there was a relation of antagonism. Though my informants rarely described any details about the victims, they claimed that the victims were Bugkalot and non-Bugkalot alike—men, women, and children. But it was not only the victims who were “faceless.” Though my younger informants, Ray and Tóse, were fully aware of the fact that the Bugkalot had a history of headhunting, they appeared completely uninformed when I asked them who had done the killings—though several of Ray’s uncles had in fact taken lives during raids. Tóse later explained to me that he knew that his father and his uncle—who were both village elders—had killed. When I named three of his other uncles who had also participated in raids, he did not seem surprised, though he admitted that he had not heard this before. At first, I thought that Ray and Tóse simply felt uneasy talking about their uncles, but that was not it. On several occasions I asked the elders to tell me about their experiences with ngayó and during such stories the young men who were present would stare with varying degrees of amazement. Thus, the young men’s disinclination to talk about their uncles’ engagement with ngayó was not a result of, for instance, loyalty; they simply had a very limited knowledge on the subject. The fact that stories were not widely circulated suggested, to my surprise, that the purpose of ngayó was not first and foremost a matter of prestige or creating a difference in status between momotok (cutters) and non-momotok. In fact, it was not possible to detect who had been engaged in ngayó from the way they were treated in general or from the amount of respect they received. This observation is supported by the Philippinist and historian William Henry Scott (1979). He wrote that

Ngayó

headhunting among the Bugkalot did not have any significant influence on the social status of the killer, who was neither awarded with special privileges nor subsequently classified as belonging to a warrior elite. To understand the Bugkalot impetus to engage in headhunting we must look beyond matters of social prestige.

De Quincey on Murder Anthropologists rarely deal analytically with the moral implications of headhunting. Scanning through the anthropological literature on ritual killing and traditional headhunting leaves the impression that besides gaining honor, admiration, and social privileges (such as the right to get married), this experience has little moral impact on the killer. Headhunting among the Bugkalot, ngayó, seems to turn this around: the kill did have a profound effect on the Bugkalot man, but the successful headhunting raid did not lift him above other men in social status. The Bugkalot did not first and foremost understand ngayó in terms of creating continuity between generations, maintaining cosmological balance, ensuring fertility, gaining honor, and so on. Rather, the common feature that connected the various cases of ngayó was that ngayó, in all cases, became the man’s response to outside forces. How should we understand the relationship between the specific act and the effect it was said to engender? To answer this question let us first turn to the phenomenon of the “murder,” which is a term that describes a killing of an illegitimate and morally problematic type. Headhunting was, I argue, an act that should be grasped in all its moral ambiguity: it had its impact on the “cutter” due to the empathically conditioned relationship that he violated. Thereby, ngayó finds a perhaps odd analogy to the writings of the nineteenthcentury British writer Thomas De Quincey (2009), who identified a transcendental, cathartic capacity in murder. Extrapolating on fragmented literary sources, De Quincey developed a phenomenological analysis that presupposed some basic structures of human experience. He saw the act of murder as a way of breaking with the conventional world, which made murder similar to a work of art. However, for murder to be considered art, it had to be as “useless” as art. This point is made in relation to John Williams’s mass murders of two families in Ratcliffe Highway, London, in December 1811. Above all, Williams’s violent rampage, according to De Quincey, was purposeless and, apparently, inexplicable. For instance, the killer did not know his victims and did not steal anything from the households.

115

116

Cutting Cosmos

As the murder could not be tied to motives of any sort, it brought about a perfect transgressive experience on behalf of the killer. Murder, De Quincey asserted, created an aesthetic suspension from the world through a break with the ethical. These aesthetic qualities of murder lie in its ability to “cleanse the heart by the means of pity and terror” (2009: 32). The murder that was resolutely carried out elicited a cathartic experience in the killer, relieving him from repressed sentiments and establishing emotional equilibrium. In his day and age, De Quincey inspired a host of artists who set out to explore mortality and the human preoccupation with and evasion of the topic of death. Moreover, they even attempted to re-create the experience of death in art. In the more obscure currents of French art theory and literature that developed in the nineteenth century, Lisa Downing argues that the use of “aestheticized murder” created a space in which the modern man could play with images of mortality and experiences of dying: “It is not merely a matter of annihilating the Other in order to affirm the self, but of annihilating the Other because this allows for the contemplation of self-annihilating, in a society in which one is increasingly aware of being overlooked, alienated, unconnected” (Downing 2004: 200). This type of “decadent fiction” was concerned with murder committed for pure pleasure, for the thrill of the ultimate experience, or for no reason at all. What underscored murder in the fictions of that century, she argues, was the idea of murder as a catalyst through which the individual sought to become a “pure subject,” to hold on to the notion of agency while keeping the forces of society at bay. These forces, which became especially prevalent during early industrialization, were expressions of society’s intervention and control, on the one hand, and, on the other, incomprehension and indifference, which caused an oppressive awareness of isolation (Downing 2004: 198). What De Quincey claimed (and, arguably, the reason his writings appear so controversial) was that murder in his view offered a “sublime effect” when applied decisively. But this required that the human victim not be denied its status as exactly that: a human. This makes his approach to murder of relevance to ngayó. Like the murders described by De Quincey, ngayó was “useless” from the perspective of the killer. Though it was sometimes understood to lessen the “anger” of young men—and thereby reduce the risk of violence breaking out in the community—this was not the end that prompted men to take heads. Nor was ngayó explained or legitimized by being directed against an “enemy” or an “Other” who was classified as “less than human,” as among the Marind-anim.

Ngayó

One of the most important things that sets ngayó apart from the murders described by De Quincey is the fact that ngayó was traditionally carried out as a collective enterprise: the killer was escorted by the elders, whose task it was to single out the victims and observe the event. This, I will argue, attributed a particular transgressive ambiguity to the act. Like other types of “cuts” that we have explored in the previous chapter, ngayó was a transgression carried out in social space, in the gaze of Others. We will now look further into this ambiguity, which allowed the man to emerge paradoxically in different capacities—as both tied to and set against society.

Ngayó as Transgression Ngayó was structured around a single, violent act that radically transcended ordinary social rule and conduct. The beheading of the victim must have had a major impact on the person carrying out the deed, since, clearly, it stood in stark contrast to everyday life, which was characterized by humility and even shyness. Yet, extreme violence, in the form of ngayó, was understood to have been practiced by the Bugkalot since time immemorial; and through talking about ngayó as such a primordial feature of Bugkalot culture, it was continuously reinserted as a persisting component of male potentiality. Given the fact that Bugkalot men in general were extremely temperate and humble, it seemed remarkable that Bugkalot society harbored a type of violence that left even other tribes in the region (with violent rituals of their own) aghast.5 Often, when being interviewed on the subject of ngayó, the elders tended to include the exact same details in their stories, which gave me the sense that I was listening to echoes or reproductions of the same ideal type. The stories revealed little inconsistency, hesitation, doubts, or fears. Therefore it was interesting for me to interview Tó’paw, whose stories were more unpredictable. As we recall, Tó’paw was—or considered himself—a shaman, an ayog’en, and thereby did not always behave in the same ways as other men; he was not afraid of being socially excluded since, in a way, he already found himself on the fringes of society. He added details to his stories that other people would not; for instance, he described in detail, without having been requested to do so, how some men “froze,” became transfixed, when confronted with the “smell of blood.” Tó’paw’s stories were mere poignant than those I collected from other men, as he allowed me to get brief insights into how ngayó as a structured event in fact often ventured beyond the ordered framework in unpredictable ways. Tó’paw told the following to me

117

118

Cutting Cosmos

during a casual conversation. It was spurred by my remark that Christianity and ngayó must have collided in some way in the early days. Tó’paw, who was sitting on a wooden bench in our kitchen with Wagsal on one side and our neighbor Tebdey on the other, shook his head and then started telling us about the second time he attended a ngayó. On the recording of the interview, Evelyn could be heard in the background as she scuffled around the kitchen making coffee for us. Tó’paw said: I was around twenty years old at the time that I went with my father and two elders. It was my younger brother who would now cut. We walked for many days and we needed only little rice, our feet were light. When we were very far away we found a trail. Then we came to a place by the river where people came to cross. We then waited here until the next evening when a man and a woman stopped to rest. They had come to the mountains to fetch rattan and they were now on their way down [from the mountains]. And you know, Pastor Mendez [one of the first missionaries in the area] had already been here for many years at that time. Or maybe, I think Mendez had arrived five years before or the year before. I don’t remember what year that was. In 1962 or 1963 maybe …

The story halted for a few minutes, while Tó’paw and Wagsal debated what year Pastor Mendez had arrived. They settled on the year 1960. Tó’paw then continued, while biting into a betel nut: “We killed the man.” Tó’paw made a motion with his hands as if he held a spear, indicating that the man had been speared to death. He carried on: My younger brother was the one who cut him. [He] then tossed the head. That is our custom, as you know. And then the other, the woman, was for my uncle. We tied her with the rattan. But before killing the woman, my uncle cut off her one leg. I remember how I felt pity, yes, how I pitied her. She screamed and so we killed her. My uncle cut and tossed the head.

When reading this passage in the transcript, I realize that my way of absorbing the words have been altered since I heard the story in Ki-tegen. There is an uncanny, de-emphasized tone to the story, which breeds no less revulsion than skepticism; and the first thing that came to mind, maybe as a hope, was how time may have embroidered on Tó’paw’s recollection. When I heard the story, I was not skeptical. Judging from my next question, I must have assumed that he had given me an adequate account of what had in fact taken place. Hesitantly I asked Tó’paw: “You captured two people who had never done anything to you and killed them with your spear. So, did you think this was wrong?” Tó’paw leaned

Ngayó

his head at an awkward angle as if he had been about to nod and then thought better of it. He said: Even though we were just boys we were not scared since the elders were with us. It was just normal. It was an honor to be with them … As a young man if you stab and smell the blood of a human—we call that nang-et—after having that experience you will feel very brave and strong. You don’t feel heavy. No matter how long you have to travel you will feel vigorous [masigla. This word also means “lusty”]. After killing there will be a change in the color of your skin. You will become flushed.

Several times during the interview, Wagsal and Tebdey gasped in surprise, and Evelyn let out a loud shriek and shouted, “Stop it!” when Tó’paw mentioned how they had tortured the woman before spearing her. But that was not the only response. Stories of ngayó, like the one provided by Tó’paw, invariably elicited exclamations of dismay mixed with hesitant laughter. This combination reminded me of the audience in a movie theater watching a horror movie. On the recording I can hear that I too was laughing. Later that day I asked Wagsal: “I noticed that when Tó’paw told the story we were laughing. What do you think about that?” “Yes, we were laughing,” Wagsal said. “So what you are wondering is this: ‘Why are we laughing? The story is not funny!’ The story is really … it is not funny.” “Then why did we laugh?” I asked again. He explained: “It is almost not real. So when I hear the story, I think the story is not entirely true, maybe only 90 percent true. But my hair stands up as if the story is true. But maybe that is only one factor …” He thought for a while, and then he started to laugh. “I notice that when the other tribes like the Ilocano, the Igorots, and so many others, when they hear our stories they look like this!” Wagsal pretended to look scared, biting his fingernails cartoonishly. “But when the Bugkalot hear the stories we’re like this!” He now flung his head back and laughed. “It’s as if we’re proud!” he said, striking his hands together. “But other people are afraid. I think that is another factor why we laugh.” Wagsal was far from correct that the local audience only reacted with pride and delight. Rather, Evelyn, Tebdey, and even Wagsal himself changed dramatically between different expressions: from exclamations of pleasure to interjections of horror. This presence of both terror and laughter is related to the morally problematic and transgressive role of ngayó, the dialectics of sentiment contained in the image of ngayó: fascination and condemnation, respect and contempt, pride and scorn.

119

120

Cutting Cosmos

Simon Harrison (1993) asserts that among the Manambu of Papua New Guinea, who practiced ritualized murder and cannibalism, a sense of solidarity was formed among the men through “a shared experience of transgressing norms” (89). Though it would be imprecise to state that my informants were prompted to kill due to such a desire for communitas (they never expressed solidarity as such to be a driving motive in relation to ngayó), there appear to be parallels between the Manambu and the Bugkalot. In both cases, violence became the vehicle through which a sense of transgression was fashioned and certain masculine ideals of autonomy were reached. Yet, James Weiner points to a contradiction in Harrison’s analysis: Weiner argues that “in the moment when a shared way of transgressing norms emerges as a consensual image among men, it becomes as thoroughly normative and conventional as that which it purportedly transgresses” (Weiner 2001: 108). In other words, how can a common, customary practice be considered a moral violation? By raising this question, Weiner inadvertently points to a paradox intrinsic to the Bugkalot case: if “transgression” is an act of going beyond or infringing a moral principle or an established standard of behavior, then how can a culturally institutionalized and socially encouraged practice be considered subjectively as a moral transgression? But it surely can be: For a young man who was standing over his victim, perhaps for the first and only time in his life, clutching a knife in his fist, this was not experienced as an ordinary event. Tó’paw’s narrative above showed that the men did not limit themselves to perform the violent deed that they had set out to do: they improvised in an excessive way. One might reasonably hypothesize that the situation escalated as the men found themselves in a place where they were unaccustomed and in which they were granted an unprecedented amount of authority over another human, However, even without including the ghastly details, it is difficult to imagine that beheading another person could be anything but a transgressive and highly ambiguous act. Bataille argues that even though the transgression challenges, or suspends, a “taboo”—in the Bugkalot context this taboo could be the basic prohibition against violence—it does not destroy the taboo. This might seem counterintuitive, since in our ordinary way of understanding transgressive behavior we might think of acts that destroy whatever they transgress. Bataille, however, sees the transgression as an act that both ruptures and maintains boundaries. In fact, the transgression preserves—and even reinforces—what it appears to challenge (for instance, sexual norms, ethical values, and political ideologies). Therefore, though the transgression aims at a form of taboo, the transgression “does not deny the taboo, but transcends it and completes

Ngayó

it” (Bataille 1986: 63). This dual aim of the transgression makes it paradoxical: the transgressive experience is always and continuously organized around a taboo—a “limit”—whose existence depends on the transgression, and vice versa. The transgression is thereby conditioned by the recognition of the taboo and is, as a result, fundamentally twofaced: it reconciles “what seems impossible to reconcile, respect for the law and violation of the law” (36). In other words, transgression, for Bataille, heightens our awareness of the taboo, which is transgressed. To breach the limits of the acceptable is to simultaneously define it. If transgression did not have this limited character, Bataille argues, it would be nothing but animal violence (65). What makes Bataille’s understanding of transgression so particularly interesting in relation to ngayó is that it appears to shed light on apparent paradoxes encountered among the Bugkalot, for instance, that it could be possible to engage in radically violent acts on innocent strangers and, yet, remain extremely socially attentive to other people (or, as Bataille would claim, even more so). The transgression in fact reaffirms the ordinary ethics of society. The concept of “transgression” allows us to understand ngayó as a type of murder, with all the moral meanings that emerge from this word. Following Bataille, it is clear that the transgression simultaneously challenges moral boundaries and reaffirms such boundaries. Yet, in this ethnographic exploration of ngayó, we still need to look at the final, crucial element that makes ngayó a specific form of murder: the beheading. The beheading, as we shall see, is what establishes ngayó as a particular form of radical transgression. In the following I will explore the role of the head—or rather the “face”—in relation to ngayó and in this way will establish a connection between the beheading and the apparent transformation of the man. By transgressing against the ordinary ethics and empathic imperatives, the act of the beheading is endowed with the force that propels the young man out of his state of shame or grief, that enables the man to accumulate beya and thus “contract” himself.

The Liminal Face Though Simon Harrison and other anthropologists are intrigued by the local, cultural ways headhunting is carried out and the cultural implications this particular form of violence has in relation to, for instance, personhood and cosmology, few anthropologists ask the fundamental question: What feature of the head elevates it to such a prestigious level as to be the focal point of violent rites? Similarly, though Renato Rosaldo

121

122

Cutting Cosmos

through his personal experience of loss understood why the Bugkalot would take recourse to violence in the face of severe loss, he made no attempt to explain why this particular act—and not a different one—had become so prevalent among the Bugkalot. Few have attempted to explain the connection between the act and the effects it was said to bring about. It seems obvious—and perhaps so obvious that it borders on universal common sense—that the severed head is a powerful evocative entity that carries significant symbolic components. The beheading involves a violation of established boundaries regarding the normal treatment of the bodies of both the living and the dead. It is perhaps for this reason that it has been used as a symbolic act at historical junctures such as the French Revolution, when the guillotine came to signify not only the actual beheading of the aristocrats but the overthrowing of monarchy through the “beheading” of society. In recent times, the widely televised spectacle of the beheading of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Bagdad during the second Golf War was a staged ritual, part of a conscious media strategy by the American military. Like the beheading that took place during the Reign of Terror in France in the late eighteenth century, the beheading of the statue embodied a “creative destruction” (Mitchell 2005: 18), a form of iconoclasm that provided a “secondary image” of the defacement as a symbol that transcended the confines of the act itself. The beheading of the statue was clearly a performance of humiliation. However, as the head was subsequently wrapped in an American flag, it also appeared to be an attempt to domesticate Saddam Hussein—from an American point of view—or absorb him into an American totality. This way of rendering an “Other” into a “Same” through ritual treatment of the head has numerous ethnographic antecedents. For instance, the Iban of Borneo used elaborate headhunting rituals to incorporate into the village, and the world of kinship, fertility, and social reproduction, the severed head of enemies slain on a recent war raid. The heads were treated in a friendly way after they were brought to the village; this involved the offering of food, wine, betel, and tobacco—and keeping the heads warm on a cold night (McKinley 1976). Headhunting has also been understood as an instrument to “suspend mourning for important men, to impress a potential bride, to display one’s honor and prowess, to prevent sickness or famine, to promote better crops, and to even the score in feuding” (Hoskins 1996: 13). What all the ethnographic cases have in common is the way that the head is brought back home by the headhunter to be used in ceremonies, put on display, or stored for protection. This is where the Bugkalot become the exception, as they simply tossed the head to the ground and left it there.

Ngayó

The apparent insignificance of the head has led anthropologists to comment on the Rosaldos’ depictions of ngayó. Peter Metcalf writes that the fact that Bugkalot men did not bring the head back to the village to be used in rituals made him wonder “how contingent the business of decapitation was; … might not a knife thrust through the heart have done just as well?” (Metcalf 1996: 274). Furthermore, Metcalf finds it problematic that the Rosaldos never offer any explanation for why the outlet for rage is the particular act of chopping off heads. “Why not hack the victim to pieces? Why not turn the violence on to themselves, like the aborigines, or channel it into ascetic practices?” (Metcalf and Huntington 1991: 5). I agree with Metcalf that, judged from the writings of the Rosaldos, the beheading appears completely arbitrary—as merely a collectively agreed upon act picked from among an unlimited number of alternatives. But what is it about “taking heads” that provides it with this therapeutic ability to “lift the hearts of men”? The answer to this question will inevitably be based on my own interpretation, since none of the elders whom I interviewed about their experiences with ngayó were able—or willing—to explain why the head should be severed from the body to begin with. Furthermore, should the abandoning of the head among the Bugkalot be considered a deliberate act or simply a consequence of the head not having any significance? I adhere to the former explanation. It is difficult to find a facet or domain of human interaction in which the face does not play an important role. In the development of self-identity and in the very composition of the intersubjective, facial signaling figures centrally. We spontaneously associate the face with not only the physical face but also, by extension, the “character, social status, situation, and past, that means the ‘context’ from which the other person becomes visible and describable for us” (Burgraeve 1999: 29). Since, arguably, the face is cross-culturally perceived as the main bodily site of affect, it is highly linked to the social person through rendering visible what is otherwise a concealed part of the person. The face thus emerges as a key component in a multiplicity of sociopsychological phenomena, such as the human capacity for empathy and the experience of shame. Thereby, the metaphor “losing face”—which applies to the notion of “face” as a social component of one’s personhood that one can somehow be deprived of—might not be completely arbitrary. As Sartre (1969) argued, shame does not only mean being reduced from a fellow human to a mere thing. Rather, one becomes an object through the gaze of the Other, who in turn comes to stand out as the subject. Phenomenologically, through the experience of shame one becomes intensely secondary.

123

124

Cutting Cosmos

In an important sense the face is perceived cross-culturally as the essence or surrogate of the person, which may explain why the face has been given such a prominent role as an analytical category in a wide variety of scholarly work, from Lacanian psychoanalysis to Erving Goffman’s contributions to symbolic interactionism. Goffman saw the face largely as “the image of self,” that is, the condensed rendering of the person in his or her totality. Thereby face was understood as “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact. Face is an image of self—delineated in terms of approved social attributes” (1955: 213). Yet, the most forceful account of the face in relation to intersubjectivity has been put forward in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (1969). In his extensive writings on the face of the Other, the face is not solely associated with the countenance, the physical face. Rather, Levinas understands the face-to-face encounter with the Other as the primordial ethical relation: the encounter with the Other commands us to engage in an ethical relationship. Beyond this ethical imperative that emanates from the face, the other is beyond intelligibility. “Face,” to Levinas, is the aspect of the countenance of the Other that escapes our gaze: the Other is thereby always more. In fact, the imperative, which is the core of the face, Levinas asserts, is a prohibition against reducing the other solely to his countenance, that is, to the mere material of his physical appearance. By reducing the Other to his or her various parts, the Other becomes an instrument in one’s own project. The rendering of the Other into an object is what Levinas sees as ultimate violence and the most fundamental form of evil. Levinas’s understanding of the face proves informing when applied to Bugkalot headhunting. There is something ghastly or grotesquely evocative about the severed head, the motionless face, that could be related to its inherent ambiguity: the severed head is rendered an inanimate object—and is treated as a “thing” by being thrown away.6 And yet, by maintaining its human features, it is both “something” and a “somebody.” The severed head thereby belongs to a class of artifacts that are liminal in the sense that they radically confound the distinction between persons and things. Like its Western equivalent, the Bugkalot term for “face,” ga-nop, does not refer only to a person’s physical face. More than describing the various sensory components located on the front of the human head, it also pertains to a certain nonphysical feature of one’s selfhood that comes into play in social settings. Could it then be that what makes ngayó so particularly transgressive is that it literally targets the face in both its

Ngayó

concrete and symbolic sense? By reducing the person to an object, ngayó would thereby become a radical version of what Levinas sees as the essence of moral evil, namely exposing the Other in its thingness. In this sense, not only does the Bugkalot man kill the other, he goes so far in the process of rendering the other into a thing by actually removing the face and tossing it to the ground. Since the head, or rather the face, plays an important role in so many domains of human interaction, discarding a severed head seems to be a fitting symbol in the Bugkalot man’s venture into a state of autonomy. According to Levinas the face is the foundation of ethics since in the face we see humanity in general; thus the obligation to the Other is the obligation to society. “The presence of the face, the infinity of the Other,” Levinas writes, is “a presence of the third party (that is, of the whole of humanity which looks at us), and a command that commands commanding” (Levinas 1969: 213). Though this command concerns an ethical relationship and care for the Other, not only is the face of the Other related to our capacity for empathy, but the face is the image of sociality at large. If one accepts the hypothesis that the face is the locus of empathy and the ethical relation, what can this tell us about the role of the head or, rather, the face in ritual violence? I propose the following: through the face-to-face encounter with the Other, I see myself in the face of the Other; I realize that, fundamentally, he or she is like me in my capacity of being human. This has implications in relation to the beheading, since if the Bugkalot adolescent sees himself in the face of the other, whose head, one might ask, does he cut off? By answering “his own” one reaches an insight regarding the impact of the beheading on the beheader. The Bugkalot man thereby not only transgresses the ordinary, ethical state of nonviolence of which he is accustomed but even removes his “face,” the childlike, feminine, and shameful part of himself, the shared, dependent, and social facet of his selfhood. He manifests his selfhood as an autonomous man and will no longer be exposed in social space to the evaluative, objectifying gaze of Others. Ngayó is therefore considered of defining significance in its bearing on the life of the cutter. It not only separates the cutter from other children in social space but, perhaps more importantly, violently propels the man out of the chaotic, emotional domain of childhood and consolidates the man as a self. Transgressing against the ordinary ethics and empathic imperatives of everyday life, the very social relation, the act of the beheading is endowed with the force that propels the young man out of his shameful and ontologically unsolid state.

125

126

Cutting Cosmos

Ngayó and the Mansasadile While moral transgression is not often seen as a relevant analytical path to be pursued in the study of headhunting, I have aimed to show that moral implications should in fact be placed at the heart of this practice. Therefore, rather than referring to it as “ritual killing,” I have deliberately laid out ngayó as a specific form of murder. I have argued that this practice allowed Bugkalot men to engage in transgressive acts by which they simultaneously violated and reconfirmed a common and fundamental dictum of social life. Yet, ngayó carried important social components. It was often stressed by my informants that ngayó should be carried out as part of a group endeavor. The raiding party included elders whose sole task it was to choose the victim and observe the killing. Additionally, as I described earlier in this chapter, ngayó was understood to limit violence in the community and lessen internal conflicts. I encountered this apparent paradox in numerous conversations with my informants. But they all agreed that ngayó could no longer serve this purpose. Following the increase in interaction between the communities and the growth in population density, ngayó in its traditional form no longer existed since, as my informants agreed, headhunting today would give rise to conflicts between communities. Though a few cases have been documented since the turn of the millennium (Yang 2011), it appears the practice has died out in its traditional configuration. As ngayó began to entail too great a risk, the elders in Ki-tegen started to discourage the young men from pursuing headhunting in the late 1980s; but, as Tó’paw explained to me, this was not necessary any more: few among the young men expressed any wish to take heads at the time. Today, he said, only the most ruthless would consider engaging in ngayó—and such men, Tó’paw explained, could not be affected by words anyway. In the discourse on headhunting among my informants, thereby emerged the image of the mansasadile. Present-day beheadings were in many cases tied to this demonic being. The mansasadile, being entirely indifferent to any boundaries of human conduct, played a prominent role in headhunting imagery. My informants claimed that for as long as they could recall, they had heard of cases in which the mansasadile had taken heads. Thus, while it was often explained to me that ngayó had always been arranged as part of a group endeavor under the supervision of elders, in reality there were many examples of ngayó in which the momotok, the cutter, carried out the killing unescorted. By going out on his own initiative, the mo-

Ngayó

motok circumvented the elders and did not carry out the act as a social performance of beya. In my (largely futile) endeavors to gather more information about the recent beheadings by the river, I came upon several informants who pinned the murders on the mansasadile. My close informant, Tebdey, made that argument. As I realized that I was unable to make Tebdey tell me any specifics regarding the killings, I instead asked him what made the mansasadile different from other men. “If this young man here goes out,” he said, pointing a finger at a fictitious person next to him: he always comes back after he has killed. But the mansasadile, he does not come back. He does not care about this village. When he goes out, he keeps going and he never comes back. Other men come back. When the women see them, they say … I think, the men are attractive in their eyes. Such men are no longer afraid. They answer back or they just laugh when someone teases them. The mansasadile doesn’t want any of that. He doesn’t care. He goes out and he stays out there.

Through such conversations, I distinguished a different type of ngayó, which seemed to oppose itself directly to the way it was normally carried out. While ngayó was generally understood, and legitimized, by its capacity to minimize the risk of violence erupting in the immediate community, the other type seemed to embody an adverse potentiality. This unwanted concomitant may be considered the flip side of ngayó: the place where ngayó, while still being ngayó, was also something radically different. In a sense, by being carried out by a single, unescorted individual without the approval of the elders, this type of ngayó appeared to be the ideal form of ngayó: the transgressive experience should be even more powerful given that it had not been endorsed by any authority outside of the person himself. This, one might think, would make it an ultimate manifestation of the person’s autonomy, a radical transgression that would make the more widespread, collective form of ngayó seem somewhat uncontroversial. Surprisingly, this was not the case. In fact, the reverse was often the case. For instance, most of my informants admitted that they found headhunting to be fundamentally wrong. However, only in very rare cases were they willing to condemn the recent cases of headhunting, that is, those cases that had been carried out by mansasadile. Rather, when talking about recent killings, my informants shrugged their shoulders. This was the shared response among my informants following the killings of the two men by the river during Christmas 2009.

127

128

Cutting Cosmos

Though some of the villagers that I talked to about these killings suggested that local guerrillas might have been involved, most were convinced that it had been done by a mansasadile. This group of informants did not criticize the act or in any other way place the murders in a moral framework. Recall Tó’paw, who in the last chapter I quoted as arguing that a mansasadile could in fact not be evil, since a mansasadile was like “the river swallowing up a child.” Accordingly, the beheading carried out by the mansasadile could not be a transgressive act, since the mansasadile did not orient itself to whatever it transgressed: being detached from society, it was also detached from its morals. Thus, the acts of the mansasadile were decontextualized and limitless. And acts without limits, as we learned from Bataille, cannot be transgressive but are merely mindless, animal violence. The mansasadile thereby shows how a social phenomenon such as ngayó can contain its own negation, its opposite: Ngayó was considered of defining significance in its bearing on the future life of the cutter, as it violently propelled the man into the world as an autonomous person with the potential to violate the most critical of human moral imperatives. Yet, by being placed in a social frame and by being supervised by the elders, it was not an unlimited violent act. Conversely, in the hands of the mansasadile, ngayó became demonic: rather than transgressing any limits, it in fact eluded the boundaries of the social world of humans.

Notes   1. None of my informants was familiar with this particular belief. Tó’paw, however, suggested that this belief could be a local one shared by some of the clan members among whom the Rosaldos conducted their fieldwork. Following my argument from chapter three, one could argue that this story is also an expression of a particular domain of cosmos that is in constant motion.   2. The soldiers Johnny referred to were the NPA (New People’s Army), a group of communist guerrillas.  3. Te’kag means “fence” or “barrier.”  4. See the Life magazine cover here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_ mutilation_of_Japanese_war_dead.   5. I encountered several men from other tribes who commented on, and disdained, the fact that Bugkalot men ambushed their unsuspecting victims and killed without discriminating between men and women, children and grown-ups, healthy and ill. In contrast, the type of “headhunting” carried out by the neighbouring Ifugaos, Kalinkas, and Ibaloi, along with other tribes falling under the generic ethnic designation “Igorot,” ended at the turn of the twentieth century

Ngayó

and is today commemorated as an honourable handling of slain enemies during tribal warfare (see Finin 2005; W.H. Scott 1979).   6. The term “object” comes from the Latin word obiciere “to throw away.” By coincidence, no doubt, in ngayó this can be taken literally, since the head, the object, is tossed away.

129

5 Power without Chief

A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters —Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spake Zarathustra

As I have argued through the preceding chapters—and as both anthropologists and the inhabitants of Ki-tegen have realized before me—the Bugkalot communities were traditionally organized in an egalitarian fa­ shion, so that acts of dominance were confined to particular settings. For instance, during hunting, a leader—the gemapó—would emerge and organize the event; yet, upon the return to the village, he would claim no recognition. In fact, the gemapó was anonymous in the sense that no one openly talked about who had organized the hunt. Even though formal leaders—state representatives—were elected every three years, these persons held little actual authority in the village. How can we explain this continuous maintenance of nonhierarchical relationships between Bugkalot men? In a circular way, part of the answer seems to lie in the avoidance of conflicts peculiar to such relations: even minor conflicts, the Bugkalot assumed, could easily turn into uncontrollable violence. The society had no institutions that could swiftly contain and control such rapid escalations of a conflict and, consequently, as described by Renato Rosaldo (1980), violent acts of retributions could continue between families for generations. Though this

Power without Chief

preoccupation was evident in everyday life in which men went to great lengths not to act self-assertively, it became in fact even more explicit in different settings in which the acts of men went directly against the ordinary practice of egalitarianism and moderation: the men boosted themselves dramatically through a male dance, ta’gem, or they would tell stories through which they drew attention to their encounters with various spirits. In the most extreme case, as we saw in the previous chapter, the Bugkalot men carried out ritual murders. Seeing these practices as different modalities of what the Bugkalot call pámotok, “cutting,” I will argue that the “cut” aims to exhibit power as a certain potentiality. Though I borrow the term pámotok from the context of headhunting, I am not ascribing a specifically prominent role to the act of headhunting. The cessation of headhunting had little impact on the way Bugkalot masculinity was regarded or practiced, since it was not the particular headhunting act itself that was important in relation to Bugkalot masculinity. Rather than being the “fulcrum of Bugkalot society,” as Michelle Rosaldo asserted (1980: 140), headhunting contained a transgressive performance that was found in different forms among the Bugkalot. And as in the context of headhunting, the accomplishment of other forms of pámotok did not carry with it any difference in the way the person was subsequently treated or regarded. What pámotok did, then, was allow power to change hands in a social form of “serial sovereignty.” These performances thereby prevented power from tying itself to any single individual over time. To account for the apprehensive stance toward power among the Bugkalot, I will take recourse to the seminal writings of Pierre Clastres. The Amerindian Aché, he argued, were organized around a “chief without power,” that is, a form of leadership that was excluded from the spheres of exchange and paradoxically stripped of influence. In this sense there are both parallels between Bugkalot and Amerindians and important differences—the most notable being that the Bugkalot did not traditionally have the institution of chieftainship. I refer to Clastres’s ethnography since he identified a fear lying in and spurring the activities of egalitarian society. Clastres was writing against the evolutionist tendency to think of the state as an inevitable (and more sophisticated) form of organization than what came before it and argued that the Aché actively resisted any development that might lead to state formation. In these societies the idea of one person giving other people orders, backed by power, was considered morally problematic. Though there was a chief, his status was based solely on his ability to encourage others through gifts and oratory to recognize him as such. Since he had no coercive means to do

131

132

Cutting Cosmos

so, it was not uncommon for him to be killed (though he would usually just be ignored) if people got the impression that he was abusing his position. By separating the chieftainship from the capacity to exercise coercion, people “rendered power powerless” (Clastres 2010: 89–90). How does this become relevant to the Bugkalot case? Whereas Amerindian society is loosely organized around the chief without power, the Bugkalot society, I will argue, circled around power without a chief. The actualization of this power, mansasadile, was continuously counteracted as power was prevented from tying itself to any man—or institution— over time. As part of this process, power was exposed momentarily in certain settings and was thereby kept in constant motion: the prestige and visibility that is the privilege of the chief in Amerindian society is serially dispersed to all men among the Bugkalot. Rather than being antithetic to egalitarianism, I will argue that hierarchy is highly present as an imminent potentiality at the core of Bugkalot society. In this way of understanding potentiality, it refers to a becoming or a causing of effects in unforeseen and unforeseeable ways. But at the same time it entails a capacity to not do. Or, as Georgio Agamben quotes Aristotle as saying, “All potentiality is impotentiality” (Agamben 1999: 182). While the potentiality may result in “nothing,” there is a “more” in the potential, in the sense that the “actualization” of the potential is a diminution of the potential. It is this open-endedness that much of Bugkalot cosmology circles around and that ritual life attempts to sustain. As an Aristotelian concept, “potentiality” has often been understood in the philosophical tradition as that which is opposed to the “actual.” By defending the idea of the existence of the inactive, Aristotle launched a critique against the “actualist” philosophy of the contemporary Megarian School. Supporters of this school claimed that something existed only when it was active—for instance, a man could only be a housebuilder if he was actually engaged in building a house in the present moment. Aristotle interjected that one could imagine a master housebuilder who happened to not build a house right now. This person, Aristotle argued, held a certain potentiality. This potentiality could be understood as the “surplus” that is not being expressed in any given moment (Witt 2003). In his essay “On Potentiality,” Agamben attempts to venture beyond the opposition between the actual and the potential that permeates much of Western philosophy. By referring to the potential as a “presence of an absence” (Agamben 1999: 179), Agamben argues that the potentiality is a certain mode of existence, a shadow in the actual. It is this idea that the present chapter engages with. I suggest that in Bugkalot egalitarianism, power is imminent as a potentiality. It assumes a “virtual” mode of existence, which, however, does not make it “unreal.” Rather, to

Power without Chief

trace a connection between the paradoxical practices of power ingrained in Bugkalot egalitarianism requires us to locate a domain where various forces are contained as potentiality. Whereas Bugkalot culture has been characterized by scholars as strictly founded on particular types of egalitarian values that have to do with “sameness,” I have so far attempted to engage critically with this assertion: rather than being a “value,” egalitarianism was the manifestation of certain social dynamics that revolved around the perpetual rejection of equality. Thus, I have observed how Bugkalot men engaged in self-assertive, arduous, and transgressive practices—performances of dominance—to manifest themselves as men. Yet, the execution of such “cuts” did not build up prestige that could be converted into political capital. Such political capital appeared unable to root itself in Bugkalot society. We should picture this as the workings of a “centrifugal dynamics.” This term points to a “turning towards the exterior, an exiting from itself towards those regions above and beyond the social” (Vivieros de Castro 1992: 3). These dynamics, I would argue, is the state in an inverted form; the state, as Pierre Clastres maintains, is a “centripetal force” that draws power toward the center. Thus, inverting these dynamics would imply that flows are maintained and potentialities toward power are incessantly centrifuged away from the center of society—propelled apart from the stuff of ordinary life. These dynamics were constantly at work in Bugkalot social life. “Power,” that is, the emergence of systematic and enduring political economic dominance, looms in the midst of Bugkalot society as imminent potentiality. This emergent stratum is not “real” in any empirical sense, that is, as something we can directly perceive. Yet it is clear that to account for the real, when viewed through Bugkalot society and cosmology, one must include potentiality—the open-endedness brought about by the capacities of people and objects. Pámotok, the cut, maintained such open-endedness by both exhibiting and rendering power powerless, whereby power assumed a social, performative form that we have come to know as beya. This, I will argue, was the how power was encountered among the Bugkalot: as brief, spectacular performances.

Pámotok Revisited There are certain recurring questions and concerns that readily spring from the outline of ngayó that I gave in the previous chapter. While Michelle Rosaldo argued that the act of beheading another person was the necessary step into manhood in a society exclusively defined by the

133

134

Cutting Cosmos

institution of headhunting, this apparent ordinariness of the practice seems to be, at the very least, an overstatement; even during the periods when headhunting was most prevalent (for instance, in the years following the end of World War II), many men did not either wish or get the chance to go headhunting and were nevertheless regarded as adult men. Renato Rosaldo, in fact, supports this in his historical excursion on Bugkalot headhunting (R. Rosaldo 1980), in which he showed that for long periods, often for decades, headhunting was virtually nonexistent. But would this entail, logically, that generations were bereft of the chance to reach manhood? While this appears to be the view promoted by the Rosaldos, the role of the headhunting practice in fact becomes even more muddled, as Renato Rosaldo elsewhere (2004) depicts headhunting as an extremely common phenomenon, which was carried out, whenever a man experienced grief. Renato Rosaldo describes ngayó as a cathartic experience—almost a form of therapy—that reestablished emotional equilibrium and allowed men to cast off their discontent and emotional unrest in the face of hardship, despair, and sorrow. Being subjected to grief, for instance at the death of one’s child, was said to generate restless energy, ligét. Headhunting, then, was a way for the man to focus his energy. By applying the term “contraction” in relation to this focusing of energy, I have tried to point out that ngayó did not only have an effect on the internal, emotional state of the momotok. The ritual murder was directed at the very composition of the body that had turned “soft” and “foggy.” This is revealed in the following poem composed by one of Michelle Rosaldo’s informants: Oh dear, boy, you are as a fog, and all things wait dear child, for the moment when you will say the headhunting spell warm your thoughts for the thing you desire, that you may, like an airplane, fly to the spirit that you will dismember go right on with your plans to kill (M. Rosaldo 1980: 141).

While headhunting was undeniably the best-known male ritual in the Sierra Madre Mountains, this was not the only act that allowed men to shed their unrest and reach higher levels of masculine contraction. Yet ligét was not more prevalent in those years when the men could go headhunting. While around half of my elderly male informants claimed that they had never wanted to engage in headhunting, there were also periods when headhunting ceased almost entirely. This was, for instance, the case during the years of martial law in the 1970s, when there was a strong military presence in the mountains. Therefore, there must be other ways for attaining the form of contraction that headhunting offered.

Power without Chief

Ngayó revolved around an act, which was carried out under the supervision of the elders. Thereby, rather than being just an act of violence, the act was socially contained. Besides the actual cut, that is, the physical beheading of another person, the man also “cut” himself off from society by intentionally transgressing the ordinary ethics of everyday life. Yet, by being carried out intentionally under the gaze of others, the cutter manifested himself socially. These oppositions between the morally transgressive and the social were central to pámotok, and present to us a structure that should not be confined exclusively to the ritual beheading. By broadening pámotok to include other forms of cuts, we can see that though ngayó was the most extreme form; it was not the only way for men to contract themselves. Further, it will enable us to see how the egalitarian and the hierarchical are intertwined, rather than mutually exclusive: egalitarianism is conjured up by multitudes of potentialities toward hierarchy. Pámotok in its various manifestations was transgressive in different ways; but one form of transgression they all shared was the way the performance ruptured the egalitarianism that reigned among men in most other contexts of society: through the cut the man drew radical attention to himself and momentarily stabilized a world in motion. Perhaps the most straightforward way of understanding pámotok as a “cosmic cut” is in relation to the storytelling sessions that I described in chapter three. There I presented a form of storytelling in which men orally laid out their personal encounters with spirits. Storytelling asserted presence: that of the storyteller, who stood out forcefully. Through storytelling, the men attracted the full attention of the audience—they defined the social space in which the storytelling took place. Simultaneously, they “stabilized” an erratic cosmos by rendering the spirits into narrative form—the ultimate image of transformation and unpredictability. In other words, they both stabilized and momentarily made themselves the center of the cosmos. What lies at the heart of pámotok, and what creates a homology in its different manifestations, is the transgression, which was brought about as the headhunter, storyteller, or dancer juxtaposed himself against the ordinary, quotidian egalitarianism. Thus, the performance fixed the cosmos as well as the performer, who temporarily carried out an act of dominance and momentarily manifested himself assertively in relation to the spectators. It was important that these acts were brief and carried out in accordance to certain rules. So, for instance, as the villagers criticized Tóse and other young men for “running around” and trying to appear “brave” in the eyes of others, they were referring to the perceived incapacity of the adolescents to confine their aggression to the correct contexts.

135

136

Cutting Cosmos

By incessantly pointing to specific qualities that young men lacked (their inability to speak their minds in front of others, to control themselves when drinking, to be financially independent, and so on) the adults came to be indirectly associated with such qualities through an “artful display of not displaying” (Taussig 2012: 38). While this was in fact a harsh misrepresentation of the adolescents, who were, for the most part, excessively self-effacing and industrious it was true that “braveness,” that is, self-assertive behavior, only generated a positive response (or, more often, a conspicuous lack of response) when carried out as a pámotok. In the context of pámotok, self-assertive behavior was disjointed from the vernacular order. It seems of critical importance that the Bugkalot—with their paradoxical intertwining of egalitarianism and a widespread veneration of self-assertion—saw the fulfillment of masculine ideals as the detached, free-floating entity known as the mansasadile. If the progression toward the ideals of masculinity entails a contraction of the man to the point where he is rendered into a cosmic singularity, could one then argue that pámotok, in its broadest sense, had to do with the man revealing this detached singularity as part of his potentiality or as a latent faculty? The following sections will equip us to engage with this argument. We will explore pámotok in two different ways that at first appear to be unrelated to the way we have understood this concept so far. In order to dislodge pámotok from the idea of a transgressive act being carried out just by individual men in social space and, instead, see it as a wider set of dynamics, I will unfold the role of the Church as a certain form of cut in the Bugkalot communities. Yet, we will see that the Church, rather than having transformed society had been engrossed in the dynamics of Bugkalot cosmology. First, however, pámotok will be explored by looking at the elders, that is, men of great autonomy. As we will see, they were confined to particular spaces in Bugkalot social life and were largely isolated from participating in much of informal social interaction. Unlike younger men, elders did not have to carry out any ritualized acts of power, since they were, in a sense, the very embodiment of power: The elders demanded attention and defined the social space by their mere presence.

Elders and the Cosmic Singularity The bodily composure of the elders was admired among the Bugkalot. While younger men were called dima o’avet, “the strong ones” and were thereby talked about in terms of their capacity to bring about physical effects, the elders were revered for having a certain remoteness from

Power without Chief

any situation in which such exhibitions of strength would be required. What my informants admired, then, was the composure of the elders—a self-control that was made especially visible in the tranquility and motionlessness of the face. Also, it was frequently remarked that elders experienced little hunger, that they needed little sleep, and that they were impervious to rain and cold weather. These were just some of the characteristics that set the elders fundamentally apart from the adolescents and younger men and that caused younger men to venerate them. This in fact resonates with David Graeber’s description of the characteristics of the man of power: “Much of the etiquette surrounding figures of authority always tends to center on a denial of the ways in which the body is continuous with the world; the tacit image is always that of an autonomous being who needs nothing” (Graeber 2005: 421). As I have argued, the image of the contraction should not only be seen as a metaphor for social visibility but also be taken literally. The notion of “contraction” captures my informants’ understanding of maleness as tied to different degrees of bodily firmness: from the soft body of the child, to the fogginess of the youth, to the body that condenses and hardens as the shamefulness of the adolescent is replaced with beya. Bugkalot masculinity, as a cultural ideal, thereby shows the man as being born from chaos, a fuzzy cosmic backdrop, and becoming a man is a progression toward higher degrees of contraction, order, until he, in a sense, folds in on himself, whereby he is rendered into a singularity. While such complete detachedness was only realized on rare occasions, I was often told that with age, the bodies of men would gradually turn hard and rigid. Gaining beya was a physical transformation. I heard stories of how elders in the old days would achieve so much beya that they would slowly turn completely motionless. They were then wrapped in the skin of a boar and placed in a tree in a sitting position. Beya, in this sense, involved a form of gradual death that could not be encompassed by the common distinction of the body as either alive or dead. Rather, the body simply continued to contract and was finally consumed by wild animals—returned to the chaotic forces of the wilderness from which they had originally come. The elders generally tended to dominate public space during formal occasions and thus always found themselves at the center of attention in such settings. Though they often did not speak or do anything in particular, they had an immense effect on people’s behavior around them; people tended to gather around the elders to listen to them or, apparently, simply to observe them. On such occasions the elders became the center of centers, that is, the axis around which social life revolved. This differentiated the elders from the adolescents. While young men

137

138

Cutting Cosmos

constantly ran the risk of suffering the humiliations inflicted on them by their seniors, most of the time they did not attract much direct attention: as they were indeed “like a fog,” they also moved around more freely without attracting attention and took part in the informal interactions of which most of everyday life in Ki-tegen was made up. Several young men tended to hang around Evelyn’s kitchen almost every time I was doing interviews. I welcomed them—and so did the people I was interviewing—since their presence helped to create a relaxed atmosphere. Becoming an elder among the Bugkalot, on the other hand, entailed some degree of isolation simply due to the immense attention that they tended to attract; whenever an elder was in the vicinity, the informal banter came to a halt. While the elders were highly present during formal celebrations and events in Ki-tegen—such as weddings and community meetings—I often witnessed that younger men did not invite the elders to participate in drinking sessions. On the few occasions when elders did participate, the atmosphere was tense; the tone of the voices was formal; the passing around of the gin stiff; and the younger men remained on the outskirts of the circle. The age-based hierarchy was thereby rendered more visible than usual in these contexts. Before long the group would start to break up, each person leaving after offering a vague excuse. Since they attracted such immense attention, the elders undermined any attempts to create an informal atmosphere. Therefore, it seemed, the elders were in fact sequestered from a large part of everyday social interaction. The mechanisms through which power was exposed and contained were effectively directed against the elders. As we recall, beya did not mean only “autonomy”; it was often translated as “event” or “spectacle,” and an elder was said to have “many events in his life.” Their presence demanded attention due to this capacity alone. “Events” were happenings differentiated from the vernacular order. And elders embodied beya to the point that they themselves attracted the same attention that was normally awarded to the act of pámotok: they were the embodiment of the event. And like other forms of pámotok, elders were performative spectacles—simultaneously placed at the heart of society and somehow disjointed from it. Following the earlier argument that the mansasadile was a masculine ideal, the individual’s development through life should entail the manifestation of a detached singularity. Mansasadile was a demonic force of ultimate contraction and autonomy. While to ordinary men autonomy relied on a public endorsement, the mansasadile transcended this contradiction through its uncompromising self-containment. There was no continuity between the mansasadile and the world at large. While the

Power without Chief

mansasadile represents a form of power that exists beyond society, in most cases power was, in fact, integrated and compartmentalized in society. This is what I will focus on in the following. In order to do so, I will turn to the case of Pentecostalism. Rather than permeating all spheres of social life, as seen in relation to the introduction of Charismatic Christianity elsewhere (e.g., Robbins 2004; Meyer 2010; Gill 1990; Tomlinson 2009), Pentecostalism was absorbed and isolated in Bugkalot society. The Church represented a cut—a fixing of the cosmos—whereby the Church became a certain modality of transgression, a pámotok. As we shall see, even cosmological cuts as pervasive and all encompassing as the one provided by the Church were confined to their own performative space.

Pentecostal Cuts Writing from the tradition of feminist critique, Michelle Rosaldo argued that Bugkalot notions of human “sameness” overrode gender as a system of difference. What set men and women apart in Bugkalot society was the women’s socially ordained inexperience and immobility. Aside from this, cultural experience was not bifurcated into separate male and female realms (M. Rosaldo 1980: 232). At the time of my fieldwork, however, a wide range of differences could easily be identified in the ways men and women were regarded. Not only were women believed to be unable to scale the same heights of achievements as men, they were also regarded as socially dependent. For instance, I frequently heard informants claim—men and women alike—that the reason women would rarely speak in public was due to their incapacity for independent thinking: their “thinking,” nem-nem, would therefore easily be manipulated by others, which could cause conflict. Women were explicitly talked about as inferior to men, and men and women had their separate spheres of social interaction: most notably, women were completely excluded from drinking session in Ki-tegen and never participated in hunting and fishing. Whether this apparent change in how women were perceived in Bugkalot society was directly related to the influence of fundamentalist Christianity is an issue that needs to be studied further; it is likely that gender relations were affected by Pentecostalism through its strong commitment to Pauline notions of patriarchy in which women were expected to subordinate themselves to men. If this was indeed a recent transformation in Bugkalot society, this, it seemed, was the only effect of the Pentecostal Church to have spilled over into other areas of Bugkalot social life.

139

140

Cutting Cosmos

In the context of the Church, however, social interaction went through explicit and radical transformations. In spite of its emphasis on the subordination of women, more than 70 percent of the adults who attend services in Ki-tegen were in fact women. Young women enjoyed going to the small church at the outskirts of the village, as it offered a desexualized space where men and women could interact in nonthreatening ways during services and Church-related activities. The services were participatory events in which the pastors, who dressed in simple apparel, animated the congregation to express their praise to God loudly and spontaneously. During the most successful and dramatic homilies, even the elders, who were normally the images of composure, wept uncontrollably. However, the change in conduct was not exclusively confined to the services. I was often surprised to find the elders in Ki-tegen turn chatty and indulgent when food was served for the attendees in front of the church after services. On these occasions, which lasted for no more than a few hours, women and men of all ages were engrossed in conversations with each other. As the anthropologist Lesley Gill (1990: 717) has observed, men tend to be perceived as more “domesticated” when they are reborn into Pentecostalism due to the Pentecostal doctrine that dictates cleanliness and rigid behavioral norms, such as no smoking, drinking, gambling, extramarital liaisons, and so on. Thus, in the context of the Church, the gap between genders is diminished through a sense of community instilled by shared religious involvement. Such effects of Pentecostalism as an engine for social change have been depicted in Joel Robbins’s influential studies among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea. Robbins argues that traditional structural thinking among the Urapmin was oriented by way of relationalism, while Christian thought was structured through the value of individualism (Robbins 2009: 75). As Pentecostalism was introduced, the Urapmin came to live by the logic of Christian individualism, since, as dictated by the scripture, it was the individual who would be judged in the Second Coming. So, while traditional values were oriented around networks and gift exchange, Christianity was the most important factor in instilling individualism as a key value among the Urapmin. Though less than half of my male informants attended services on a regular basis in the local Church in Ki-tegen, they almost all identified themselves as Christians, and they all had vast knowledge of biblical characters and important events. Though this could imply that the social change that Robbins witnessed in Papua New Guinea had also played itself out with the introduction of Pentecostalism among the Bugkalot, I maintain that this is not the case. The Church, in fact, did not permeate

Power without Chief

all spheres of social life among the Bugkalot. This is best exemplified by the jammings that emerged throughout the village on Sunday afternoons. Even the pastors joined these drinking sessions just hours after having condemned the use of alcohol and tobacco. Though I found these glaring contradictions both amusing and somewhat liberating, most of my informants were completely indifferent to the general nonadherence to religious doctrine of their religious leaders. Ever since the evangelization of Bugkalot began in the early 1960s, missionaries have been frustrated by the apparent lack of consistency and commitment among the Bugkalot. In a conversation with Pastor Simon and his wife, Sara, in their small church in the lowland municipality Bambang, Sara explained that the problem with the Bugkalot was their tendency to attend Church just for the entertainment. In fact, she claimed, the Bugkalot did not really take the Bible seriously, and she often could not understand why people even bothered to show up in church. I launched the argument that no religions were practiced in the same way all over the world, but were always made to fit into local cultures and practices. She protested: What me and my family are part of—we do not call that a religion. That would be like saying that Jesus Christ is not really true. There are so many religions, and if we say that Christianity is also just a religion we would say that it is not really true. You would say that it is no more true than the beliefs of Muslims in Mindanao! So why call it a religion when you know that this is the truth?

There was an arrogance to this statement that provoked me. I asked her how she could be so sure that her version of the Christian doctrines was, in fact, the right one. Wouldn’t it make more sense, I said, to think of religion not so much as a truth but as something that would, as a matter of course, unavoidably be interpreted by the people adhering to this religion? It was Pastor Simon who answered. Unlike Sara, he had been born into a Bugkalot family and had preached in churches throughout Kabugkalotan for twenty years. He said: “What you must understand is that most of the people who come in the Church in Ki-tegen are there for show! To them it is as if faith is not even important. They are like the Pharisee.” Not being particularly well versed in the tales of the Bible at the time, I asked him what that meant. The Pharisee is the man in the Bible who only appeared to be holy and good. But really he was very selfish, and so Jesus confronted him. The Pharisee was only acting in good ways when other people were watching. That is how I see the church in the mountains. It is as if it is a show! We have some good

141

142

Cutting Cosmos

pastors in our organization—but also many who are not so good. And there are too many! Like in this church there is just me as a pastor—but in Ki’tegen it’s very different, as you know.

Simon explained that the early missionaries had realized that the only way the Church could establish itself in Ki-tegen was if large numbers of villagers came to occupy formal positions in the Church. This was not just a practical way for mobilizing people in the institution-building efforts but also an act of necessity. If all the villagers, especially the elders, were not included directly in its development, the Church could never gain a foothold in the area. This had been recognized as a fundamental condition for running a Church in Ki-tegen. The villagers were not only invited to worship God in the Church but also also continuously invited to run the Church. This was taken to such an extreme that not even the position of pastor was ascribed to any single individual: at times, as many as eight men referred to themselves as village pastor in Ki-tegen. They took turns managing Church affairs, which meant that every pastor would conduct about one service every two months. In a community consisting of only forty-two households, eight pastors is an impressive number, which would in most other cases reflect a strong commitment to the Church by the villagers. Interestingly, this was not the case in Ki-tegen. In fact, some missionaries in the area habitually expressed their distress to me that the Bugkalot would show up for “service and free food” and subsequently pay the Pentecostal dictums little interest for the rest of the week. They drew a direct line between this tendency—which one of the missionaries related to the “lawless nature of mountain people”—and the challenges that had faced them in the early 1960s, when the first churches had been established in the villages. While it had been relatively easy for the missionaries to gain access to the villages, it had been immensely difficult to convince the men to stop taking heads. As one missionary, a middle-aged Filipino named Pastor Mendez, said, the Bugkalot in the 1960s “went to church on Sundays and went headhunting the rest of the week.” Though this was a well-known humorous exaggeration that I encountered in different variations from different people,1 it was not completely wrong: most of my informants who had taken heads had done so in spite of having been reborn into Pentecostalism and acted directly against the morals that the missionaries attempted to promote. Pastor Mendez admitted that the Bugkalot had not yet truly embraced Christianity, which he related to a fundamental, deceitful disposition among the Bugkalot that made it hard to know “what the Bugkalot truly believed in.” My Bugkalot friends, on the other hand, seemed to take pride

Power without Chief

in the image of the Bugkalot man who was able to encompass the inconsistencies between, for example, carrying out headhunting raids and going to church. Rather than arguing, as some missionaries tended to do, that the Bugkalot were still too “uncivilized” to appreciate Christian doctrines, it seems much more likely that even a pámotok as extensive as the one provided by Christian doctrine was contained as a spectacular event in Bugkalot society. Like other types of pámotok, it was simultaneously exposed and isolated in Bugkalot society. During the weekly sermons the pastors made cuts, fixed the cosmos, through hour-long oratory. Thus, the Church attained the effect of the pámotok as a particular modality of transgression and was confined to a particular sphere, whereby it was prevented from spilling over into other spheres. I rarely encountered references to Christianity among men outside of the Church context and never during jammings. Likewise, in spite of the persistent attempts by the missionaries to frame spirits and magic in the image of Christian evil, only one of my informants in fact linked such phenomena to the devil. As we have seen, this did not entail that spirits and magic were not highly problematic; nor should one assume, however, that the threatening and satanic nature of spirits and magic was introduced with Pentecostal Christianity (see chapter four). I have drawn out the case of Pentecostalism in relation to the discussion of Bugkalot egalitarianism because the Church in Ki-tegen provides a striking example of the way power is sequestered in Bugkalot social life. Christianity, ritual violence, and even elders were contractions or forms of power that were isolated in different performative spaces and prevented from transforming into separate institutions of authority.

The Egalitarian Ethos In the early 1970s, Michelle Rosaldo (1991) observed the emergence of a new style of speech in a particular area of social life: while the discussions during traditional forms of community meetings, pogon, were evasive and revolved around subtle persuasion and the avoidance of being too direct, a modern form of oratory, “free speech,” was starting to develop in the context of the Christian Church. The Church, she realized, offered a space in which people could confront each other directly on matters related to Christianity. Pogon, on the other hand, was a way of solving disputes without recourse to any form of open conflict. This difference between the Church and pogon continues to this day. The pogon was a public meeting in which opposing parties came together to

143

144

Cutting Cosmos

resolve their differences and conflicts. It was, for instance, standard procedure for a pogon to be carried out before a wedding, so the skirmishes between the families could be exposed and settled. I also witnessed a pogon that was arranged after a violent encounter between two young men in the village. During the meetings—which often continued for more than twenty-four hours—all the participants could make themselves heard before the community as many times as they desired. The more critical voices in the village remarked that though the purpose of the pogon was to offer a space in which an issue could be approached from all perspectives and all voices could be heard, the speeches were in fact characterized by excessive repetition: the speakers went to great lengths not to make direct assertions and accusations, and they often gave nearly the same speech and made the same suggestions as the former speaker. When discussing initiatives regarding community projects, disagreements were expressed in a subtle way, which, nevertheless, had the effect that the project would not be initiated. The consequence of this was, I was often told, that only few—if any—projects were initiated by the villagers. Especially among the younger generations, pogon was considered both droningly boring and unconstructive. If any decisions were made they required a consensus between the parties and voting was thereby never used, as this would merely expose the disagreements between the villagers and cause conflicts rather than settle them. While many of my informants complained that the pogon was no more than talk, the meetings had important effects on the level of the community—effects that went beyond whatever was agreed upon during the meetings. Rather, the effect emerged from the meeting itself as a social event. Pogon was a consensus process that allowed people to live together despite disagreements and conflicts of interest. Though egalitarianism is maintained among Bugkalot men, it seems to be a form of egalitarianism that diverts from how this phenomenon is typically depicted in the anthropological literature. In Rupert Stasch’s Society of Others, for instance, one learns about a West Papuan people, the Korowa, who offer an archetypical example of egalitarianism: Korowai egalitarianism consists of aversion to anyone controlling others’ actions by authoritarian domination and discomfort with anyone being wealthier or better than others. Social relations are felt to be valuable and livable only to the extent that the participants are equals. Prominent patterns of egalitarianism in Korowai social practice include that there are no indigenous long-term leadership offices; that any accumulation of wealth is usually quickly dispersed, under pressure of requests and demands; that a relation

Power without Chief

in which people’s material gifts are reciprocal and commensurate is felt to be satisfying while asymmetry … is annoying and immoral. (Stasch 2009: 43)

Though egalitarianism is the underlying engine of Korowai society— somehow inscribed in the very moral fabric of the community—Stasch admits that “Korowai egalitarianism does not imply that peoples’ lives are free of inequality, but only that that inequality is a problem to them” (2009: 43). For instance, the fact that some people are landowners and some are not creates an asymmetry to which the Korowai are highly sensitive. By placing egalitarianism in the domain of the “moral,” Stasch guards himself from the criticisms that have been launched against other studies of supposed societies of equals. Pure forms of egalitarianism, such criticisms assert, cannot endure, since hierarchies will inevitably emerge in all forms of sociality (Flanagan 1989; Sahlins 1958). The challenge in relation to the type egalitarianism I observed in Ki-tegen is that framing it in relation to cultural ideals and moralized forms of sociality would mean disregarding the ways other forms of relations were praised. Though, as in other egalitarian societies, much praise and importance was given to the “autonomy of the individual, and the capacity to act as a free, self-determining, and moral unit or agent” (Kapferer 1988: 15), the equality was not a primary ideal or “value.” Rather, in various contexts the ability of the man to go against the grain, to willfully act in radical transgressive ways and to exercise power over others was idealized. To understand this requires us to consider the ideals of masculine autonomy—rather than the Bugkalot ideals concerning the society as a whole. In this view, egalitarianism becomes an epiphenomenon, a secondary effect due to other features considered masculine. This brings us to an understanding of egalitarianism that is, in fact, not limited to a Bugkalot context. Bruce Kapferer (1988) shows how Australian egalitarianism is brought about through an opposition that is continually established between the “people” and the “state.” This nationalist ideology, which draws its mythological underpinnings from the fallen Australian Anzac soldiers during World War II, does not promote equality per se. Rather, it promotes an idea of “natural differences” between people as opposed to differences inserted by the state. The state, in this ideology, is considered a formation of power that threatens to subsume the individual. Kapferer argues that at “the heart of Anzac is the recognition of the possibility that society, rather than an extension of man, is a negation of him” (1988: 177).

145

146

Cutting Cosmos

Thus, Anzac egalitarianism accentuates the individual identity as critical to political and social life. Evidently, there are parallels between the egalitarianism in Australia and among the Bugkalot: in both cases, egalitarianism is the result of a fear that an overarching, hierarchical order will swallow the subject. And though the ideals revolve around individual autonomy, the individuals in these social orders become extremely socially oriented. However, most interestingly, Australian egalitarianism is embedded in the idealization and nostalgia that surround, especially, drinking, fighting, and gambling. By engaging in such transgressive activities, Australians ritually challenge the state once a year, during Anzac Day. As we have learned from Bataille, however, transgressions in fact reinsert what they seem to counteract: like the assertive behavior that does not spread uncontrollably following pámotok, the Australian state is, we can safely assume, not significantly threatened by the Anzac Day binges. Could one, then, think of Anzac Day as pámotok? Being placed in a certain ritual space—April 25—Anzac Day allows people to engage in and celebrate activities—gambling and fighting—that could in fact be seen to oppose egalitarianism: as the epitome of Anzac egalitarianism, Kapferer singles out activities through which people might be said to dominate others. Like the pámotok among the Bugkalot, such exhibitions of power are not just permitted but expected on Anzac Day. Thus, I maintain, power or hierarchical relations among the Bugkalot are intrinsically linked to certain forms of egalitarianism. And to understand this egalitarianism one will have to look at how exhibiting such power—as a form of celebration of dominance and assertion—was not only tied to masculine ideals but, paradoxically, a way egalitarian sameness was maintained and such powers were prevented from being exercised. To lay out this way of isolating power, I will now turn to the Amerindian Aché in the well-known writings of Pierre Clastres. Clastres famously argued that though hierarchies existed among Amerindians, the men at the top of the hierarchy in fact had no power over their people. By being tied to a chief who was continuously prevented from causing any assertive effects in the society, power was effectively rendered powerless. This impossible rule of Amerindian chieftainship makes one ask the question: Just what is this power that is deprived of its own exercise?

Something Exists within the Absence Michelle Rosaldo claimed that the Bugkalot, unlike the individualized subjects of the West, “assume that persons want to be not different but

Power without Chief

equivalent or ‘the same’” (1983: 137). Tying this to an indigenous, egalitarian ideology of the autonomous person, she argued that the striving for sameness and the safeguarding of individual autonomy restrained “conflict-breeding inequalities” in the communities. Thus, the Bugkalot never required “punishment for wrongs” or sought “displays of suffering and remorse in atoning for untoward violence” (144). Though few of my informants were as tolerant or self-effacing, in general the adolescent males attempted not so much to become part of homogenous cohorts as to avoid confronting or challenging each other more generally. The risk of being made to look like a fool was clearly a deterrent in this regard. This risk was in fact made tangible on several occasions, perhaps most explicitly during a wedding, where the elected punong barangay— the local government official—attempted to impose a ban on drinking (see chapter one). During a pogon prior to this wedding, an elder in the village had exposed the punong barangay to a direct and devastating reproach. He criticized the younger man for not assuming his responsibility by taking the initiative for the development of the community in spite of receiving funds from the government. Making a subsequent announcement against drinking may have been the official’s way of showing the community that he was, in fact, a man of initiative. Accordingly, the initiative was seen as the punong barangay’s attempt to regain face and assert himself as an authority. Thus, the ban on drinking was ignored—though not in a confrontational way. Rather, the attendants at the wedding unobtrusively shared their bottles of gin with a genuine indifference. The remarkable thing about this example was that the punong barangay, through his attempts to live up to the position for which he had been elected, in fact also lived up to certain masculine ideals: he exposed himself forcefully in a public space. This form of masculinity was, in fact, normally celebrated in a way that I had found astonishing since the beginning of my fieldwork: during conversations with my interlocutors, I was continuously surprised to find how they in fact did not live up to their reputation as fierce defenders of egalitarianism as a cultural value. While they indeed behaved in a self-effacing way that sustained egalitarianism, they highly admired the capacity to act independently, to be unafraid of conflict, to achieve success, and in other ways to distinguish oneself from the rest. Rather than opposing themselves to the idea of power being claimed by any specific individual, my informants were in fact greatly intrigued by this idea. While others among my Filipino friends were greatly skeptical toward elected politicians—notably those in high positions—my Bugkalot informants often expressed a great admiration especially for those in high positions who managed to wield their power in excessive ways.

147

148

Cutting Cosmos

One remarkable example was the widespread admiration for the former President Marcos, who submitted the country to a brutal authoritarian regime throughout the 1970s. In spite of the military presence and the impediments to free movement in the mountains, the 1970s played an important role in the Bugkalot collective memory. The fact that this was a time when personal freedom was at its lowest is not talked about as problematic, as one would have thought. In conversations about the historical developments in the area, the Martial Law Period was associated with the successful introduction of state bureaucracy and health clinics, the building of bridges and schools, and the spread of Christianity. Yet, none of my informants expressed any desire to become a person of authority. During a conversation with Wagsal, I confused the two words purun (the facilitator during community meetings) and punong (the elected official). I mistakenly asked Wagsal, who often acted as purun, if he enjoyed being a punong. “No,” he laughed, “that is not for me. I don’t want to become part of that.” I quickly realized that I had used the wrong word. Though the two words were treacherously similar, there was in fact a vast difference between what they referred to. While the task of the purun was merely to coordinate meetings, the punong was an authoritative position. The prospect of becoming a punong did not appear very attractive to Wagsal. While I never managed to make him elaborate on what caused this lack of political aspiration, Evelyn offered me her theory. I asked her why some men still chose to run for the post of government official in Kabugkalotan, to which she replied: Most are not even Bugkalot—most are Igorot. The Bugkalot do it because of the money. You know, they get money every month from the government? It’s not much. Just a little. But they get money. But what else? Nothing! They cannot even do anything in this village. They have very, very little to say. If [the punong barangay] tells some other man what to do, what will happen? Like I say: nothing! This other man will just pretend as if he did not hear. I think that’s what happens most of the time—he will listen to the birds.

I was thinking about Wagsal, who in fact managed to convince people to do certain things. By applying a combination of modesty, discretion, and humor, he was able to gather the villagers for the community meetings. This was something that the punong barangay would not be able to do. I asked Evelyn whether the officials had more influence in the village than other men. She replied: No, I think the punong has even less to say than other men. He cannot even ask favors from his friends with sugar words: “Come help with this, please.”

Power without Chief

He will just be the punong. That’s the way they see it. People will say: “He is the boss; he thinks he is the big man here!” Look at Wagsal now. He is always kind, helping people all the time, doing this, doing that: “Oh, you cannot read? I will help you with those documents!” It is as if he does not have just one family to help—he has so many! So all those people come to our house and they eat our food and they help. They even ask us: “Please, can we help you also?”

What Evelyn described was the way power, when exercised, was continuously pushed to the fringes of society. For this reason it was futile to launch community projects. Though acknowledging the importance of such projects, Bugkalot would rarely launch these enterprises. In fact, the community scale projects—such as establishing irrigation systems— were mostly initiated by Igorot migrant farmers. The problematic character of power among the Bugkalot has parallels to the Amerindian Aché as described by the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres. As Clastres famously observed, the Amerindian chiefs had little authority. In fact, any attempt on behalf of the chief to assume authority was disregarded by the people. Though the chief did embody some form of power, it was a power outside of society: the chief was vested by society with a representational role as his people’s spokesperson when circumstances called for communication with other tribes (Clastres 2010: 165). Except in the case of war, the chief could command only through subtle persuasion, so great oratorical skills were normally the major qualification for the office. But even preparing for war was done in accordance with the community’s wishes: “When a chief seeks to impose his own desire for war on the community, the latter abandons him, for it wants to exercise its free collective will and not submit to the law of desire for power. At best, a chief who wants to act the chief is shunned; at worst he is killed” (280). In society the chief was stripped of all power; he was confronted with forced generosity (he was obliged to give away his possessions) and a duty to speak (to talk even though he was being openly ignored). Though the chief did not have any “coercive power,” he still had “persuasive power,” which was meant to inspire acts of compliance in others. The difference was that this power, Clastres argues, was not a power that automatically followed the chief’s position per se but fully relied on the abilities of the individual chief to convince the villagers to do what they, in a sense, already wanted to do. In his attempts to grasp the workings of power and the paradoxical role of the impotent chiefs, Clastres develops one of his key arguments: “It is in the nature of primitive society to know that violence is the es-

149

150

Cutting Cosmos

sence of power. Deeply rooted in that knowledge is the concern to constantly keep power apart from the institution of power, command apart from the chief” (Clastres 2007: 154). Thus, closely tied to the social imaginaries in “primitive society” is the belief that any accumulation of assertive power becomes a trajectory at the end of which is society’s violent demise. Since leadership is the source of conflict, individuals who attempt to make decisions on behalf of others will be ignored. Leadership is dangerous, as it generates new social factions and violent potentialities, “an uncontrollable and antagonistic beyond” (44). Clastres thereby identifies among the Aché a mechanism that targets a particular potentiality, which dwells as a shadow in the very fabric of society. Clastres refers to this potentiality as the “state”: a constellation of hierarchical power that keeps threatening to invade from the outside or erupt from the inside whereby the social flows will be discontinued. When evoking the state it might be helpful to draw on its Latin etymology (“order,” “condition”) or the old French estate (“position,” “condition,” “station”). Thus, in its etymology there is something fixed about the state, an opposition to flows and transmutation. What, then, is so ingenious about the institution of the powerless chief, which the Amerindians sustain, is that they have constantly available a model of power that they can both appreciate and control. As Joel Robbins writes, through the structure that Amerindians offer for chieftainship “they posit the state only to banish it” (Robbins 1994: 48). By preventing powering from exercising itself, the Aché ward off the emergence of the state. The similarity between the Aché and the Bugkalot is striking. Power in both societies is pushed to the fringes of society and is prevented from actualizing itself. Among the Aché, power is tied to an impotent chief and among the Bugkalot power is either turned into a public performance, beya, or placed beyond society by being seen as something demonic, mansasadile. Thus, as Clastres remarked, even in societies without any formal political institutions with the mandate to exercise power, questions of power are posed: “Not in the misleading sense of wanting to account for an impossible absence, but in the contrary sense whereby, perhaps mysteriously, something exists within the absence” (Clastres 2010: 23). Power appears thereby not only as negativity, stripped of any real might but as something that is not there yet, as a perpetual potentiality. But, as Clastres reflects, it nevertheless “exists.” While Clastres does not engage further with this “existing absence,” I will try to make sense of this apparent oxymoron. To do this I will, in fact, point to one of the key differences between the Aché and the Bugkalot, which is that Bugkalot society was not tra-

Power without Chief

ditionally organized around a chief. Thus, while Clastres asks the question, “What is it that defines the chief, since he lacks authority?” (2007: 29), one should in fact reverse the question in relation to the Bugkalot: what is it that defines power, since it lacks a chief? In other words, how should we imagine power, authority, or dominance without a person or an institution to which these tie themselves over time? In the language of Clastres, how can we identify the chief to whom power is sequestered? I suggest that rather than being tied to one person, the role of chief is assumed serially by all men through pámotok. We are thereby talking about an unceasing changeability of chieftainness. Though power and hierarchy are absent, they are, in fact, continuously present by being publicly performed.

Serial Sovereignty: Potential and Virtuality Though there are clear parallels between Bugkalot and Amerindians, one can identify a significant ideological difference between the two societies: while the Amerindians see individual autonomy as an end to egalitarianism, egalitarianism among the Bugkalot allows all men to engage in assertive actions in particular contexts. Through this unceasing changeability of chieftainness, power is kept in motion. Hierarchy is thereby inherently present at the core of Bugkalot egalitarianism. Thus, egalitarianism is paradoxically tied to a particular performative version of possessive individualism. This concept has recently been appropriated by Melanesianists following their encounters with a rapidly emerging ideology among certain elites in postcolonial Papua New Guinea. This ideology, which is highly individualistic, goes directly against the traditional appreciation of collectivity and kinship and, similarly, stresses the importance of both individual autonomy and establishing oneself as an authority. Possessive behavior, however, is related to exceptions. Men known as “big shots,” by going against the traditional ways of accumulating prestige and personhood, attempt to carve out contexts in which they can constitute themselves as “possessive individuals” (Martin 2007: 286). In contrast, individualism among the Bugkalot is neither a question of gaining authority over time nor a privilege ascribed exclusively to any single individual. What I advance here is thus not a form of possessive individualism as a de facto formation of the self among the Bugkalot, since, as I have argued, egalitarianism permeates everyday life. In fact, the Bugkalot should be placed in the juncture of the “big shotship” of Melanesia and the egalitarian chieftainship described by Pierre Clastres.

151

152

Cutting Cosmos

The combination of these two models entails that the society be built of men engaged in hierarchical relations who continuously prevent power, dominance, and precedence from taking root. At the same time, a form of “possessive individualism” is an important component of Bugkalot masculinity. However, establishing oneself “possessively” is not the privilege of any single individual. Society circulates around a form of sequestered sovereignty that is serially dispersed. Since they do not aim to maintain egalitarian relations per se, one should not talk about the Bugkalot as a “society against the state” (like the Aché). Rather, we are dealing with many acts of dominance that conjure an egalitarian social landscape. While power may assume the form of beya, that is, sequestered, spectacular acts of transgression, it may also take the form of the demonic, the mansasadile. In this sense, the mansasadile is the form of power that the Bugkalot cannot contain or place in any social sphere. It is detached from society. Power is thereby met with counterpower. As David Graeber has argued, counterpower in egalitarian societies is not directed against anything actually present in such societies. Rather it ensures that the actualization of power never comes about: “What counterpower counters, then, is a potential, a latent aspect … within the society itself” (Graeber 2004: 35). However, when power did in fact actualize itself—as was the case with the mansasadile named Talikaw, who once terrorized the communities, took multiple wives, and became a wealthy man—the only response to such persons was to, in fact, ignore them. Though Talikaw was undoubtedly a man of excessive autonomy, he became detached from the community by being pushed beyond society, submitting to a form of “social death” (Patterson 1982: 42). Simply by being disregarded in everyday life, a man became a mansasadile and was effectively expelled from normal participation in community life. This mansasadile successfully exemplifies the masculine ethos of autonomy, fearlessness, and self-assertion. He was a being of extreme autonomy, which made him a threat to the beya of other men. Recall that the Bugkalot saw one man’s beya as another man’s ligét: as one man contracted himself in social space, other men would, inevitably, lose beya and gain ligét: they would build unruly energy. Thus, as Paul Bohannan has observed (in Graeber 2004: 27), “Men attain power by consuming the substance of others.” Such fluctuations took place among men as a constant give-and-take of social visibility. The mansasadile was different, as it was characterized by a mysterious form of permanent contraction that for normal people was only attainable in death. While other men performed autonomy momentarily, the mansasadile was autonomy.

Power without Chief

The fact that the performance was of a limited duration provided it with an inherent ambiguity: the performance both revealed an ability to act—that is, a potentiality—and was an act in itself. The importance of the acts of public storytelling, ta’gem, and ngayó, lie in the fact that they were indexical; they both stood for the male capacity to act and were concurrently a manifestation of this capacity and were thereby part of what they expressed. The performativity of pámotok ascribed to it an inherent ambiguity. Through this performance, one might say, the man did without doing: he both acted and acted as if he acted. Being placed in a ritual setting, provided pámotok with an “as if” structure: by performing the ta’gem the man acts as if he were radically self-assertive; through ngayó the man acted as if he could, at will, place himself beyond the ordinary moral imperatives. Pámotok thereby revolves around the confinement of potentially subversive acts in a domain that is contained in society. As I attempted to establish above, pámotok is transgressive in spite of being socially encouraged: it contravenes the most basic conformities and predictabilities that surround ordinary encounters with another person. Yet (or perhaps for this very reason) pámotok stood out as a “spectacular event” in relation to ordinary social life. I see this as the difference between virtual and actual domains. Following this Deleuzean distinction, Bruce Kapferer suggests that we see “virtuality” as a quality of the ritual that sets the ritual apart from the “actual.” The idea of the virtual does not imply that it is “less than real”—as opposed to the actual, which would then be “fully real.” Rather, the virtual is substantially different from the actual. Kapferer sees the virtual as a space that allows all kinds of potentialities of human experience to take shape and form. It is, in effect, a self-contained imaginal space—at once a construction but a construction that enables participants to break free from the constraints or determinations of everyday life … In this sense, the virtual … may be described as a determinant form that is paradoxically anti-determinant, able to realize human constructive agency. (Kapferer 2005: 47)

This idea of the virtual as a different modality of being that allows potentialities to unfold (not as imaginary, but as real) is what is at stake during pámotok. The pámotok elicits certain potentialities of the man in a virtual space where hierarchies and dominance are asserted in transgressive ways, as the man shows his ability to set him against the social— from within society proper. Yet, this virtual space manages to assemble contradictions: it allows the man to engage in acts of dominance without challenging the autonomy of other men over time.

153

154

Cutting Cosmos

The virtuality of the pámotok, then, takes place on a backdrop of the “actual.” While the virtual is the domain where something may be exhibited, staged, or otherwise placed at the foreground of society in a performative way, the actual, Kapferer asserts, consists of ordinary human realities that are characterized by a chaos of flows: The ordinary everyday realities that human beings live, construct, and pass through are continuously forming, merging, and flowing into each other. They are chaotic in the sense that they are fractal-like, always changing and shifting, immanent within and structuring, differentiating in form, crosscutting and intersecting as persons move through space and alter standpoint … The chaotic dimension (or chaosmos) of ordinary lived processes constitutes the reality of actuality. (2005: 48)

The actual is the vernacular order, everyday life, a place of informal social interaction and, among the Bugkalot, egalitarian relations between men. The actual is the unspectacular. And though the Bugkalot did possess some form of ranking—especially between men and women, elders and adolescents—these inequalities did not carry any transgressive force but, rather, remained with the unremarkable flows of the actual. In contrast, the virtual reality involved a slowing down of quotidian flows. Here some of the qualities and potentialities of lived reality are condensed and held in suspension. This is what took place among the Bugkalot as the pámotok became an act that was placed against actual social life, the backdrop of society, as it momentarily fixed the flows of the actual; dominance, the ultimate cessation of social flows, was elicited as potentiality. To grasp Bugkalot masculinity and egalitarianism one must take into account that which is perpetually not there yet. This form of potentiality was elicited in areas of social life where certain ideals and dangers were dramatically presented—yet amputated from the “actual” everyday life. This virtual space is what Michael Herzfeld (1985: 11) refers to when he writes that the “self is not presented within everyday life so much as in front of it.” In this sense, the social profile of the man was created in performative acts rather than in the egalitarian social backdrop where he in fact lived out most of his life.

What If As Marilyn Strathern has argued, the cut always involves a violent act: it violently opens up, splits, and disconnects. Yet, she appropriates the idea of the “cut” from Jacques Derrida to picture the way “one phenom-

Power without Chief

enon stops the flow of others” by “cutting into an expanse” (1996: 522). This “stopping of flows” is what I have referred to as a certain form of “holding stable.” As the man carries out his performative cuts, he momentarily stops the flows of social life and defines the space by transgressing against various forms of ordinary conduct. He performs power. That is, he draws on his capacity to claim power, and he does this as part of a performance. Thus, he does and he does not. Such cuts dominated the previous chapters, which in themselves, I might interject in a concluding comment, provide cosmic cuts of their own. This book, like all anthropological products, holds stable what would otherwise be in motion as it cuts through time and space. Like the Bugkalot man who renders his encounters with spirits into narrative form, this book fixes the domains of transmutation, which is the field. Containing and suspending the Bugkalot society in written form, as I have attempted to do, does indeed seem like an act of violence. While anthropology is often envisioned as a discipline that seeks to grasp social phenomena in their complexity, one might argue that, in fact, anthropological analysis in particular moments comes to bear similarities to the “secondary revision” in Sigmund Freud’s method of interpreting dreams; in the stage of revision, the analyst reorganizes the dream, presents it in a somewhat consistent form, and provides it with a clear narrative. The dream is systematized, the gaps are filled in, and contradictions are smoothed over so as to render the dream—the distorted narratives—into a “coherent fable” (Eagleton 2008: 157). Indeed, thinking back on fieldwork may feel like trying to recall a dream. The field may loom up at the anthropologist with all the force of a trick of the unconscious. Though anthropologists have the advantage that we, unlike the analyst, have (more) direct access to what we analyze, we struggle with the fundamental condition of our writings: that any representation of reality will necessarily be reductive and partial (Clifford 1986). Various aesthetic criteria, analytical models, theoretical scopes, and ethical standards guide, inform, and qualify our research. By viewing my informants through the expression of masculinity and the fundamental existential conditions in the life of many Bugkalot males, I privilege a certain perspective and deemphasize, say, kinship and exchange; and when objections are raised about the rather small role that women play in this book, I can only agree: due to the scope of the book I have been forced to leave out elements that would indeed have created a more exhaustive depiction of Bugkalot society. However, one could easily undermine the very notion of a “Bugkalot society.” The Bugkalot is—and has most likely always been—a diverse and imprecise category. What characterizes a Bugkalot person? Not all the young

155

156

Cutting Cosmos

people in the mountains speak the Bugkalot language; not all have been born in the mountains; not all in the mountains who, at times, refer to themselves as Bugkalot are, in fact, children of two Bugkalot parents (and whether the father or the mother is Bugkalot seems to make little difference). Evoking the notion of Bugkalot culture, identity, and worldview will inevitably involve some amount of fictitious freedom. The image of the Bugkalot man telling stories about spirits in chapter three comes to mind, as it offers certain analogies to the anthropological way of making social phenomena emerge from a given context. Thus, the anthropological exercise, which in many cases attempts to condense (what may appear as) chaos into narrative form, bears significant similarities to the cut, the pámotok; like the Bugkalot man “cutting the cosmos,” we make cuts in an attempt to establish order, rejecting parts of reality for the sake of coherence. Thus, the act of fixing a fluctuating world in written form is an inherently violent and transgressive act through which I attempt to establish a totality. This concept of transgression has been a pivotal conceptual vehicle throughout this book. The concept of transgression proceeds from an assumption of boundaries against which the transgression is aimed. The transgressive act challenges such boundaries and thereby exposes, confirms, and fortifies these boundaries. Thus, taking the cut seriously as an analytical trope would entail that, rather than seeing the ethnographic endeavor as fundamentally a simplification of the social, we approach ethnography as a performative contraction: a mode of transgressive analysis that condenses and exposes. “Leaving things out” could then become an aim rather than an unfortunate inevitability. The analytical cuts of this book have been driven by the contradiction of an egalitarian people who entertain values and are engrossed by practices that fundamentally oppose the very tenets of egalitarianism. How can we imagine a society with empirical equality but with an ideological charter for hierarchy? The Bugkalot compel us to confront this question. What is celebrated among the Bugkalot is not egalitarian relations among men but, rather, different forms of self-assertive behavior and male capacities for dominance; these are, I have argued, the key values that structure their social, egalitarian reality. By laying out this paradox, I advanced the argument that we need to realize how hierarchy among the Bugkalot is encompassed in egalitarianism, and I proposed that this argument requires us to look into the way male personhood is constituted. David Graeber notices how the striving for consensus in egalitarian societies often sparks a “spectral nightworld inhabited by monsters,

Power without Chief

witches or other creatures of horror.” Thus, he argues, “It is the most peaceful societies, which are also the most haunted, in their imaginative constructions of the cosmos, by constant specters of perennial war” (Graeber 2004: 25). The Bugkalot appear to have gone even further in their attempts to establish such nightworlds: they identify the demonic as an inherent aspect of themselves. Although very few men ended up as mansasadile, it represented a normative role: it embodied key masculine ideals and thereby required all men to position themselves in relation to it. This was most notably done as my adult male informants revealed the ideals of the mansasadile as potentiality through performances. Thus, this book has attempted to indicate the predominance of open-endedness in social life. It has been noted that we tend to think of uncertainties as anomalies in the continuum of life; they are seen as irruptions of unpredictable forces into a largely predictable world (Kleinman 2006). Similarly, “potential” is a word that has entered our daily discourse: one should “live up to” or “fulfill” one’s potential. Not attempting to do so may even be considered morally problematic. Among Bugkalot men, one might argue, reaching one’s potential involves the cessation of social flows and attaining a demonic state of being, detached from society. The safeguarding of potentiality, on the other hand, allowed men to continuously resolve the tensions between masculine ideals and the social in general: continuously not fulfilling one’s potentials (but revealing the potential) allowed men to engage in egalitarian social relations. Masculinity consisted of not what it was but what it could potentially become. This generated an intersubjective field of virtual potentiality, which cannot be properly grasped if one discards it as imaginative and therefore unreal. This field was immensely real, though comprising in large part various forms of absence. Potentiality is thereby a powerful force that enables the Bugkalot to combine what in fact seems impossible to combine. But, clearly, potentiality is a powerful element in social life as such. I believe this is what Michael Taussig means when he—in relation to a completely different ethnographic setting—writes, “[There] is only one thing more enchanting than beauty, and that is the capacity to metamorphose into beauty” (2012: 14). This “capacity” is the not yet; that is, the beauty that is not yet actualized but that nevertheless exists as a potentiality. According to Taussig beauty in itself will always be tied to the grotesque, to its looming decay—to death. Beauty has thereby already, in its actualization, turned upon itself. Likewise, beya may become so contracted that it is in fact disengaged—detached—from society: it flips over, is inversed, and reemerges as its own abject concomitant. At that moment, as beya

157

158

Cutting Cosmos

becomes grotesque, it switches to mansasadile, wherein the beya of the man is no longer confined to momentary performative space but actually asserts itself against other men. Mansasadile is thereby the personification of wider forces working in Bugkalot cosmology, as it represents a dimension of society, which is simultaneously exterior to relations between people while also having a direct influence on the character of their relationships. Through the image of the mansasadile I have attempted to convey the Bugkalot response to a situation in which power and hierarchy become fixed. In the words of Pierre Clastres, one could envision this as the emergence of the state. Such forms of power were ignored, disregarded. In this sense, egalitarianism was, in fact, made up of fluctuating hierarchies. These paradoxical dynamics, I have aimed to show, are integral to Bugkalot masculinity.

Notes   1. Wagsal said that, in the old days, “the Bugkalot pastors collected souls on Sun­ days and heads on all days of the week.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abu-Lughod, L. 1999. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Agamben, G. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Powers and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 1999. “On Potentialities.” In Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Giorgio Agamben. Edited by D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 177–184. Barth, F. 1987. Cosmologies in the Making: A Generative Approach to Cultural Variation in Inner New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bataille, G. 1986. Eroticism: Death and Sensuality. London: Calder & Boyars Ltd. Berger, P. 1967. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Anchor Books. Burggraeve, R. 1999. “Violence and the Vulnerable Face of the Other: The Vision of Emmanuel Levinas on Moral Evil and our Responsibility.” Journal of Social Philosophy 30(1):29–45. Butler, J. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. Cashdan, E.A. 1980. “Egalitarianism among Hunters and Gatherers.” American Anthropologist 82(1):116–20. Clastres, P. 2007. Society against the State. Brooklyn: Zone Books. ———. 2010. Archeology of Violence. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Clifford, J. 1986. “Introduction: Partial Truths.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Edited by J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1–26. Cohen, A. 1985. The Symbolic Construction of Community. London: Routledge. Comfort, A. 1990. People without Government: An Anthropology of Anarchy. London: Kahn & Averill. Csordas, T.J. 1994. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press.

160

Cutting Cosmos

Demant, J. and J. Østergaard. 2007. “Partying as Everyday Life: Investigations of Teenagers’ Leisure Life.” Journal of Youth Studies 10(5):517–37. De Quincey, T. 2009. On Murder. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Descola, P. 1992. “Societies of Nature and the Nature of Society.” In Conceptualizing Society. Edited by A. Kuper. New York: Routledge. 107–26. Douglas, M. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. ———. 1973. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. London: Routledge. Downing, L. 2004. “Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Aesthetic Violence and Motiveless Murder in French Decadent Fiction.” French Studies 58(2):189–203. Dumont, L. 1970. Homo hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eagleton, T. 2008. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Finin, A.G. 2005. The Making of the Igorot: Contours of Cordillera Consciousness. Quezon City: Ateneo De Manila University Press. Flanagan, J.G. 1989. “Hierarchy in Simple ‘Egalitarian’ Societies.” Annual Review of Anthropology 18(1):245–66. Fowler, C. 2004. The Archaeology of Personhood. London and New York. Routledge. Fried, M. 1967. The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay on Political Anthropology. New York: McGraw-Hill. Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gill, L. 1990. “Like a Veil to Cover Them: Women and the Pentecostal Church in La Paz.” American Ethnologist 17(4):708–21. Goffman, E. 1955. On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements of Social Interaction. Psychiatry 18(3):213–31. ———. 1992. Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin Books. Graeber, D. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. ———. 2005. “Fetishism as Social Creativity: Or, Fetishes Are Gods in the Process of Construction.” Anthropological Theory 5:407–38. ———. 2012. “Dead Zones of the Imagination: On Violence, Bureaucracy, and Interpretive Labor.” HAU 2(2):105–28. Harris, O. 1994. “Condor and Bull: The Ambiguities of Masculinity in Northern Potosí.” In Sex and Violence: Issues in Representation and Experience. Edited by P. Harvey and P. Gow. London: Routledge. 41-65. Harrison, S. 1985. “Ritual Hierarchy and Secular Equality in a Sepik River Village.” American Ethnologist 12(3):413–26. ———. 1993. The Mask of War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 2006. “Skull Trophies of the Pacific War: Transgressive Objects of Remembrance.” JRAI 12:817–36. ———. 2012. Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Herzfeld, M. 1985. The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Bibliography

Højer, L. 2002. “The Anti-social Contract: Enmity and Suspicion in Northern Mongolia.” Cambridge Anthropology 24(3):41–63. ———. 2009. “Absent Powers: Magic and Loss in Post-Socialist Mongolia.” Journal of the JRAI 15(3):575–91. Hoskins, J. 1996. Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jackson, M. 2008. Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects. New York: Berghahn Books. Jenkins, R. 2012. Being Danish: Paradoxes of Identity in Everyday Life. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Jimenez, A.C. 2004. “The Form of the Relation: Anthropology’s Enchantment with the Algebraic Imagination.” Manchester: unpublished manuscript. Kapferer, B. 2005. “Ritual Dynamics and Virtual Practice: Beyond Representation and Meaning.” Social Analysis 18(2):33–54. ———. 1988. Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Kleinman, A. 2006. What Really Matters: Living a Moral Life amidst Uncertainty and Danger. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lasco, R.D., Visco, R.G. and Pulhin, J.M. 2001. “Secondary Forests in the Philippines: Formation and Transformation in the 20th Century.” Journal of the Tropical Forest Science 13(4):652–70. Lee, R.B. 1969. “Eating Christmas in the Kalahari.” Natural History:1–4. ———. 1988. “Reflections on Primitive Communism.” In Hunters and Gatherers 1. Edited by T. Ingold, D. Riches, and J. Woodburn. Oxford: Berg. 242–68. ———. 2003. The Dobe Ju/’hoansi. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Levinas, E. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Lipuma, E. 1988. “Modernity and Forms of Personhood in Melanesia.” In Bodies and Persons: Comparative Views from Africa and Melanesia. Edited by M. Lambek and A. Strathern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 53–79. Marion, J. 2001. The Idol and Distance: Five Studies. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2002. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. New York: Fordham University Press. Martin, K. 2007. “You Own Buai You Must Buy: The Ideology of Possessive Individualism in Papua New Guinea.” Anthropological Forum 17(3):285–98. Maturana, H. and Varela, F. 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. London: Reidl. McKinley, R. 1976. “Human and Proud of It!: A Structural Treatment of Headhunting Rites and the Social Definition of Enemies.” In Studies in Borneo Societies: Social Process and Anthropological Explanation. Edited by G.N. Appell. DeKalb: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University. 92–126. Metcalf, P. 1996. “Images of Headhunting.” In Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia. Edited by Janet Hoskins. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 249–92.

161

162

Cutting Cosmos

Metcalf, P. and Huntington, R. 1991. Celebrations of Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meyer, B. 2010. “Aesthetics of Persuasion: Global Christianity and Pentecostalism’s Sensational Forms.” South Atlantic Quarterly 109(4):741–63. Mimica, J. 1996. “On Dying and Suffering in Iqwaye Existence.” In Things as They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology. Edited by M. Jackson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 169–95. Mitchell, W.J.T. 2005. What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morgan, G. 1997. Images of Organizations. New York: SAGE Publishers. Ortner, S.B. 1972. “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” Feminist Studies 1(2):5–31. Østergaard, J. 2009. Learning to Become an Alcohol User: Adolescents Taking Risks and Parents Living with Uncertainty. Addiction Research & Theory 17(1):30–53. Patterson, O. 1982. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1949. “A Further Note on Joking Relationships.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 19(2):133–40. Riches, D. 2000. “The Holistic Person; Or, the Ideology of Egalitarianism.” JRAI 6:669–85. Robbins, J. 1994. “Equality as a Value.” Social Analysis 36:21–70. ———. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2009. “Morality, Value, and Radical Cultural Change.” In The Anthropology of Moralities. Edited by M. Heintz. New York: Berghahn Books. 62–80. Rosaldo, M. 1980. Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1983. “The Shame of Headhunters and Autonomy of Self.” Ethos 11(3):135–51. ———. 1984. “Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling.” In Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion. Edited by R.A. Schweder and R.A. Levine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 137–57. ———. 1991. “Words That Are Moving: Social Meanings of Ilongot Verbal Art.” In Dangerous Words: Language and Politics in the Pacific. Edited by D. Brenneis and F.R. Myers. New York: New York University Press. 131–60. Rosaldo, R. 1980. Ilongot Headhunting 1883–1974: A Study in Society and History. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1986. “Red Hornbill Earrings: Ilongot Ideas of Self, Beauty, and Health.” Cultural Anthropology 1(3):310–16. ———. 2004. “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage.” In Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology. Edited by N. Scheper-Hughes and P. Bourgois. Oxford: Blackwell. 150–56. Sahlins, M. 1958. Social Stratification in Polynesia. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Sartre, J.P. 1969. Being and Nothingness. London: Methuen.

Bibliography

Scott, W.H. 1979. “Class Structure in the Unhispanized Philippines.” Philippine Studies 27:137–59. Sökefeld, M. 1999. “Debating Self, Identity, and Culture in Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 40(4):417–47. Stasch, R. 2009. Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place. Berkeley: University of California Press. Strathern, M. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1992. “Parts and Wholes: Refiguring Relationships in a Postplural World.” In Conceptualising Society. Edited by Adam Kuper. London: Routledge. 75–105. ———. 1996. “Cutting the Network.” JRAI 2(3):517–35. ———. 1998. “Social Relations and the Idea of Externality.” In Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage. Edited by C. Renfrew and C. Scarre. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. 135–47. Sykes, K. 2007. “Interrogating Individuals: The Theory of Possessive Individualism in the Western Pacific.” Anthropological Forum 17(3):213–24. Taussig, M. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2012. Beauty and the Beast. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thacker, Eugene. 2011. In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy. Vol. 1. New York: Zero Books. Tomlinson, Matt. 2009. In God’s Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Toren, C. 2001. “The Child in Mind.” In The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology Versus Ethnography. Edited by H. Whitehouse. Oxford: Berg. 155–179. Turner, V. 1970. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Valeri, V. 1994. “Wild Victims: Hunting as Sacrifice and Sacrifice as Hunting in Huaulu.” History of Religions 34(2):101–3. ———. 2000. The Forest of Taboos: Morality, Hunting, and Identity among the Huaulu of the Moluccas. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. van den Top, G. 2003. The Social Dynamics of Deforestation in the Philippines: Actions, Options and Motivations. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Vivieros de Castro, E. 1992. From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weber, M. 1958. “The Three Types of Legitimate Rule.” Berkeley Publications in Society and Institutions 4(1):1–11. Weiner, J. 2001. Tree Leaf Talk: A Heideggerian Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Willerslev, Rane. 2009. “The Optimal Sacrifice: A Study of Voluntary Death among the Siberian Chukchi.” American Ethnologist 36(4):693–704. Witt, Charlotte. 2003. Ways of Being. Potentiality and Actuality in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Woodburn, J. 1982. “Egalitarian Societies.” Man 3:431–51. Yang, S. 2011. “Headhunting, Christianity, and History among the Bugkalot (Ilongot) of Northern Luzon, Philippines.” Philippine Studies 59(2):155–86.

163

164

Cutting Cosmos

———. 2012. “State Recognition or State Appropriation?: Land Rights and Land Disputes among the Bugkalot/Ilongot of Northern Luzon, Philippines.” Southeast Asian Studies 1(1):77–108. Zahavi, D. 2001. “Beyond Empathy: Phenomenological Approaches to Intersubjectivity.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8(5–7): 151–67. Žižek, S. 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press.

INDEX

Note: page references with an f are figures.

A Abu-Lughod, Lila, 30 actualization, 132 Adangsel, 87 Agamben, Georgio, 62, 132 agriculture, near-subsistence, 3 alcohol, 141; aggression due to, 23, 24; influence of, 15, 16, 17; wine, 22–25 Amerindian Aché, 131, 149 ang-béteng (negative emotion), 29, 36 angégetáget (bad atmosphere), 40 anger (ligét), 26, 27, 31, 33, 45, 99, 100; relation between knowledgeautonomy (beya) and, 33 anonymous society (ta-pom), 66, 67 anthropological imaginaries, 53 Anzac Day, 146 Aristotle, 132 art, death in, 116 Art and Agency (Gell), 53 assertion, 13 assertive individualism, 2 Australia, 146 Austronesian languages, 48 authority, 39; of Wagsal, 19–22

autonomy, 17, 32, 66. See also knowledge-autonomy (beya); key value among Bugkalot, 37; mansasadile (demonic and enigmatic being), 46, 152; of men, 153; performing, 33–37; of power, 146–51; in relation to masculinity, 45 autopoiesis, 59–61 ayog (magic powers), 73, 87 ayog’en, 73, 82, 86, 89, 92. See also shamans B bad atmosphere (angégetáget), 40 balabag, 96. See also headhunting (ngayó) barangay status, 4 Barth, Frederik, 93 Bataille, George, 97, 98, 108, 120, 121, 128 beheadings, 58. See also ngayó (headhunting) Belle, 105 Berger, Peter, 92 be’tang (shape-shifting spirit), 70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 92, 93

166Index

betel nuts, 19, 22 beya (knowledge-autonomy), 2, 16, 17, 25, 28; people without, 29, 42; performance of, 34, 35f; relation between anger (ligét) and, 33 Bible, 103, 141. See also Christianity big man systems (Papua New Guinea), 9 boar, 39 bragging, 25, 40, 41 bridewealth (lango), 5 Bugkalot: definition of, 1–2; fears, 58; history of, 55; life trajectory of, 46 Butler, Judith, 42 C candy, 22; in diets, 4 cannibalism, 120 carabao, 20, 78, 80 celebrations, ta’gem (a male dance), 34, 35, 36 chaos, 17, 68–95; cosmization, 92–95; grass and spirits, 85–89; link between childhood and, 70; magic, 82–85; shaman, 89–91; shape-shifting, 71–73; storytelling, 76–78; Tó’paw, 91–92; unimportant stories, 73–75; wilderness (gongot), 78–82 Charismatic Christianity, 139 Charlie, 83, 84, 85 chieftainship, 132. See also power childhood: emotional domain of, 125; link between chaos and, 70 childrearing (peseséken), 68, 69 children, 68, 69; command (tuydek), 30; maturation of, 69; unpredictability of, 69 Christianity, 7, 26, 57, 97, 102, 103, 107, 109, 110, 118, 139, 143. See also Pentecostal Church; Charismatic, 139 class structures, 9 Clastres, Pierre, 131, 132, 133, 146, 149, 150, 151, 158 Cohen, Anthony, 10 colonization, 6 command (tuydek), 30

community meetings (pogon), 21 condition, 150 conflict-breeding inequalities, 147 conflicts, 23, 24; avoiding, 34 connections, 17 cookies in diets, 4 cooking, materials used for, 3 Cordillera Mountains, 7 cosmization, 92–95 cosmology, 2 Csordas, T.J., 62 cut ones (pinotogan), 112 cutters (momotok), 114 cutting (pámotok), 34, 97, 98, 131, 133–36, 138, 143, 154–58 D dances, ta’gem (a male dance), 34, 35, 36 Daniel, 102, 103, 106 David, 111 death in art, 116 de Castro, Vivieros, 3, 133 demonic and enigmatic being (mansasadile), 43, 46, 47–48, 51, 52, 94, 95, 105, 138, 152, 158. See also Táno; concept of, 52, 53; embedded detachedness, 59–61; headhunting (ngayó) and, 52, 126–28; origin of, 57; presence of, 54–56; set apart, 61–64; social detachedness, 59, 60, 64; social distinction, elimination of, 56; unpredictability of, 65 Denmark, 11 dépyang (lack of maleness), 30–33, 100 De Quincey, Thomas, 98; on murder, 115–17 Derrida, Jacques, 154 detachedness, 46, 66; embedded, 59–61; if living organisms, 61; social, 59, 64 detachment, 47 diets, 4 dima memomotok (the ones who cut), 108 dima o’avet (the strong ones), 136

167

index

Dinwag, 74, 75 distance, concept of, 62 divinity, 63 dogs, 78 dominance, 2, 8–12 Douglas, Mary, 94 dreams, interpreting, 155 drinking session (jammin), 15, 16, 23, 25, 143; conflicts, 23, 24 ducks, raising, 78 Dumont, L., 11 duty to speak, 149 E egalitarianism, 2, 8–12, 13, 40, 130, 135, 151, 156. See also power; Anzac, 146; ethos, 143–46; fierce, 41 elders, 25, 136–39; as mediators, 22; punong barangay (official head of the district), 37 embarrassment of men, 25–27 embedded detachedness, 59–61 emotions, 8 equality, 145 estate, 150 ethics, foundation of, 125 ethos of egalitarianism, 143–46 Evelyn, 19, 22, 37, 38, 45, 118, 119, 138; conversations in kitchen of, 74; gaze of others, 26; men affected by gaze of other people, 28; stories of ngayó (headhunting), 119; why men become politicians, 148, 149 events, 28, 138. See also beya (knowledge-autonomy) extroverts, effect of alcohol, 24 F face (ga-nop), 98, 124 face, losing, 123 the facilitator during community meetings (purun), 10, 21, 148 families, dependence on, 20 “Family Matters,” 26 family structures, 4, 12

Far Eastern Broadcasting Company, 26 farmers, migration of, 80 fear, showing signs of, 30 fears (Bugkalot), 58 fierce egalitarianism, 41 fighting, 16 Finn, Gerard, 7 fishing, 4 food, preparing for women, 84 forced generosity, 149 forest, 78. See also wilderness (gongot) French Revolution, 122 Freud, Sigmund, 155 G ga’ek (grass), 87, 88, 90, 91 ga-nop (face), 98, 124 gathering, 4, 9 gaze of others, 26, 51, 64, 65 Gell, Alfred, 53 gemapó (leader), 39, 40, 80, 81, 130 generosity, 149 Gill, Lesley, 140 gin, 22 God, concept of, 63, 64, 142 gods, lack of, 70 Goffman, Erving, 124 gongot (wilderness), 17, 70, 78–82. See also chaos Gonzalo, 85 Graeber, David, 61, 62, 137, 152, 156, 157 grass and spirits, 85–89 “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage” (Rosaldo), 98 H hardening of the body, 27 Harrison, Simon, 120, 121 headhunting (ngayó), 8, 47, 51, 96–129; acceptance of, 101; blood stains, 102–6; as cathartic experiences, 99; cessation of, 131; demonic and enigmatic being (mansasadile) and, 52, 126–28; De Quincey on murder, 115–17; end of, 109; as fulcrum

168Index

of Bugkalot society, 99; history of ritual violence, 106–12; as necessary step into manhood, 133; physicality of prestige, 121–25; reason for, 100; to reduce shame, 32; the Rosaldos on, 98–102; secrecy of, 103; as transgression, 117–21; victims, 112–15 headhunting knife (tek-yaden), 96 hermits, 57. See also Táno Herzfeld, Michael, 154 hierarchies, 12, 151, 156, 158; anger (ligét) caused by, 31; social structures, 30 history of ritual violence, 106–12 Homo sacer, 62 horticulture, traditional forms of, 4 households in Ki-tegen, 4 hunting, 4, 9, 37–40 Hussein, Saddam, 122 I idols (Catholic), 62 Ilocano, 18 “Ilongot Headhunting: 1883–1974” (Rosaldo), 99 income, 20, 22 individualism, 2, 140 industrial logging, 6 inequalities, 11 J jammin (drinking session), 15, 16, 23, 25, 143; conflicts, 23, 24 Japanese army, 107, 108, 109, 111, 113 Jenkins, Richard, 11 Jimenez, Alberto Corsín, 53 Johnny, 103, 104, 107 K kadangyang (leaders), 10 kade-degi (pathetic), 25 Kakidugen, 8 Kapferer, Bruce, 58, 145, 153, 154 killings: as part of tradition, 107 (see also ngayó (headhunting)); rituals, 8

Ki-tegen, 4; administration of, 5; being expelled from, 20; drinking session (jammin), 15, 16; households in, 4 knife fights, 16 knowledge: acquired through direct experience, 74; peneewa, 74 knowledge-autonomy (beya), 2, 16, 17, 25, 28; people without, 29, 42; performance of, 34, 35f; relation between anger (ligét) and, 33; in relation to masculinity, 17 Korowai (West Papua), 60, 144, 145 !Kung (of Botswana), 41 kuya, 44 L labor, sexual division of, 38 lack of maleness (dépyang), 30–33, 100 land: rights, 3; transformation of, 81 lango (bridewealth), 5 laws, 21 leader (gemapó), 39, 40, 80, 81, 130 leaders (kadangyang), 10 leadership, 13, 21 lebutan (liar), 75 Lee, Richard, 41 Levinas, Emmanuel, 124, 125 liar (lebutan), 75 Life Magazine, 113 life trajectory of the Bugkalot, 46 ligét (anger), 26, 27, 31, 33, 45, 99, 100; relation between knowledgeautonomy (beya) and, 33 Linda, 27, 28 literacy, 21, 32 livestock, 78 logging, 6, 79 Luke, 58, 59 Luzon, 1 M magic, 82–85 magic powers (ayog), 73, 87 a male dance (ta’gem), 34, 35, 36, 40, 47, 52, 101 Manambu (Papua New Guinea), 120

169

index

manga’ngadá’ngadáng (bragging), 40, 41; embedded detachedness, 59–61 man in the mountains, 48–52 mansasadile (demonic and enigmatic being), 43, 46, 47–48, 51, 52, 94, 95, 105, 138, 152, 158. See also Táno; concept of, 52, 53; ngayó (headhunting) and, 52, 126–28; origin of, 57; presence of, 54–56; set apart, 61–64; social detachedness, 59, 60, 64; social distinction, elimination of, 56; unpredictability of, 65 Marind-anim (Southern New Guinea), 113, 116 Marion, Jean-Luc, 62, 63, 64 marriages, 5. See also weddings Martial Law Period, 148 Marxism, 10 masculinity, 2; autonomy in relation to, 45; fulfillment of ideals of, 136; importance of headhunting to, 131; inability to live up to masculine ideals, 22–25; knowledge-autonomy (beya) in relation to, 17; ngayó (headhunting) in relation to, 98; subjectivity of term, 42; triadic relationship of, 65–67 Massim mortuary ceremony, 54 May (elderly woman), 68, 69 McKinley, Robert, 113 mediators, elders as, 22 Megarian School, 132 Melanesian anthropology, 53, 54 men. See also masculinity: affected by gaze of other people, 28; autonomy of, 153; challenging each other, 40; command (tuydek), 30; embarrassment of, 25–27; hardening of the body, 27; labor, 38, 39; lack of maleness (dépyang), 30–33; ngayó (headhunting) (see ngayó (headhunting)); in state of oscillation, 43; strength of, 19; ta’gem (a male dance), 34, 35, 36;

tog nod (working for future wife’s family), 5; young men as slackers, 20 Mendez (Pastor), 118 Metcalf, Peter, 123 migrants, 5 migration of farmers, 80 Mimica, Jadran, 102 momotok (cutters), 114 monarchies, 12 morals, 145 murder, 110. See also ngayó (headhunting); cannibalism, 120; De Quincey, Thomas, 115–17 mythology, lack of, 70 N Nangitoy clan, 77 naw-naw (prayer), 77 near-subsistence agriculture, 3 negative emotion (ang-béteng), 29, 36 New People’s Army ( NPA), 7 ngayó (headhunting), 8, 47, 51, 96–129; acceptance of, 101; blood stains, 102–6; as cathartic experiences, 99; cessation of, 131; De Quincey on murder, 115–17; end of, 109; as fulcrum of Bugkalot society, 99; history of ritual violence, 106–12; mansasadile (demonic and enigmatic being) and, 52, 126–28; as necessary step into manhood, 133; physicality of prestige, 121–25; reason for, 100; to reduce shame, 32; the Rosaldos on, 98–102; secrecy of, 103; as transgression, 117–21; victims, 112–15 nonhierarchical relationships, 130 Nueva Vizcaya Agricultural Trade Center (NVAT), 80 O occupations, 25. See also income official head of the district (punong barangay), 4, 37, 147, 148

170Index

the ones who cut (dima memomotok), 108 order, 150 Other, 58, 60, 62, 73, 116, 124, 125 outcasts, 19 P pacification, 6 Pagada, 111 pámotok (cutting), 34, 97, 98, 131, 133–36, 138, 143, 154–58 Papua New Guinea, 120, 140, 151; big man systems, 9 pathetic (kade-degi), 25 Pauline, 139 pecking orders, 30. See also hierarchies peneewa (personally attained knowledge), 74 Pentecostal Church, 24, 55, 73, 109, 139–43 personhood, 8 peseséken (childrearing), 68, 69 physical violence, blame of alcohol, 23 pinotogan (cut ones), 112 pogon, 143, 144, 147 politicians, respect for, 147 populations in the Sierra Madre Mountains, 7 positions, 150 possessive behavior, 151 potential, 151–54, 157 potentiality, 132 power, 13, 130–38; autonomy of, 146–51; characteristics of man of, 137; cutting (pámotok), 131, 133–36, 154–58; elders and the cosmic singularity, 136–39; Pentecostal Church, 139–43; sameness, 133; sovereignty, 151–54; without a chief, 132 public storytelling, 153 punishment for wrongs, 147 punong barangay (official head of the district), 4, 37, 147, 148 purun (the facilitator during community meetings), 10, 21, 148

R Rafael, 71, 72 raiding parties, 50 Ramon, 111 Ray, 44, 114; sleep arrangements, 44, 45 reading, 32 red headband (tableted), 36 relationalism, 140 relationships: nonhierarchical, 130; triadic relationship of masculinity, 65–67 reverse pyramid of power, 33f, 35f rice, transportation of, 3 ritualized transgressions, 97, 101. See also headhunting (ngayó) rituals, 2, 47; cannibalism, 120; history of violence, 106–12; killings, 8 ritual violence, history of, 106–12 roads, 3, 6 Robbins, Joel, 11, 140 Ronny, 28, 104, 105 Rosaldo, Michelle, 8, 30, 31, 41, 45, 96, 123, 131, 133, 134, 146; death of, 98, 99; on headhunting, 98–102 Rosaldo, Renato, 8, 75, 96, 107, 121, 123, 130, 133; on headhunting, 98–102 rumors, spread of, 50 running away (to look brave), 20 S sacredness of mansasadile (demonic and enigmatic being), 62 safeguarding of potentiality, 157 Sahlins, Marshall, 11 sameness, 133 Sara, 141 sari-sari stores, 22, 38 Sarte, Jean Paul, 29, 30 Scott, William Henry, 9, 114 Second Coming, 140. See also Christianity self-assertion, 2 set apart, 61–64 shamans, 73, 82, 89–91; visiting, 85

171

index

shame, 27–30, 31, 65; headhunting (ngayó) to reduce, 32; lack of maleness (dépyang), 32; overcoming, 29 shape-shifting, 71–73 shape-shifting spirit (be’tang), 70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 92, 93 Siclab, 82 Sierra Madre Mountains, 1, 2, 134; affect of roads on, 6; hunting trips into, 4; population in, 7 Simon, 55, 56, 141 skulls, 113 slackers, young men as, 20 sleeping arrangements, 44, 45 social detachedness, 59, 64 social distinction, elimination of, 56 social groups, 13 social relations, 53, 54 Society of Others (Stasch), 144 Southeast Asia, 79 sovereignty, 151–54 Spanish-American War (1898), 6 spectacles, 28, 138. See also beya (knowledge-autonomy) spiritness, 93 spirits, 94; disturbing, 71; in the forest, 78 (See also wilderness (gongot)); grass and, 85–89; inaccessibility of, 79; lack of, 70; transformative character of, 73 stability, 70 Stasch, Rupert, 60, 144, 145 state, 150 storytelling, 76–78, 135; public, 153 Strathern, Marilyn, 53, 54, 154 strength of men, 19 the strong ones (dima o’avet), 136 T tabénged (red headband), 36 ta’gem (a male dance), 34, 35, 36, 40, 47, 52, 101 Talikaw, 55, 56, 57, 152; detachedness, 66 Táno, 48–52; detachedness, 66; as a hermit, 57; social relations, 54

Tapdet, 108, 109, 112 ta-pom (anonymous society), 66, 67 Taussig, Michael, 157 taxes, 7 Tebdey, 71, 72, 75, 93 tek-yaden (headhunting knife), 96 tobacco, 22, 141 tognod (working for future wife’s family), 5, 23 Tó’paw, 58, 59, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91–92, 104, 105, 106, 110, 112, 117, 118, 119, 128 Toren, Christina, 60, 61 Tóse, 17–19, 81, 102, 103, 112, 135; flaws (discussion of), 19; gaze of others, 26; history of headhunting, 114; inability to live up to masculine ideals, 22–25; lack of maleness (dépyang), 32; marginalization of, 23; outcome of murders, 111; punong barangay (official head of the district), 37; social situation of young men, 41; sympathy for, 19; Wagtail’s search for, 19, 20 Tóse’, 100 transformation, 70. See also chaos (gongot); of character of spirits, 73; of land, 81 transgressions, 97, 98, 101, 112, 128, 135, 156. See also headhunting (ngayó); headhunting (ngayó) as, 117–21 triadic relationship of masculinity, 65–67 Tukbaw, 75 tuydek (command), 30 U Urapmin, 140 V vegetables: growing, 20, 21; transportation of, 3 victims (of ngayó), 112–15 violence, 98. See also headhunting (ngayó); desire toward, 30

172Index

virtuality, 151–54, 157 visibility, loss of, 43 W Wagsal, 18, 19, 25, 45, 74, 86, 87, 88, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 118, 148; appointment of Ray as responsible for wellbeing, 44; authority of, 19–22; communication skills of, 22; community responsibility of, 21; magic, 83, 84; mansasadile (demonic and enigmatic being), 50; shape-shifting spirit (be’tang), 73; stories of ngayó (headhunting), 119; visiting a shaman, 85 weddings, 5; tognod (working for future wife’s family), 5 Weiner, James, 120 West Papua, 144, 145; Korowai, 60

wilderness (gongot), 17, 70, 78–82. See also chaos Williams, John, 115 wine, 22–25 witchcraft, 83. See also magic women: command (tuydek), 30; going to church, 140; as inferior to men, 139; labor, 38; portrayal of, 38; preparing food for, 84 Woodburn, James, 9 World War II, 6, 7, 55, 107, 134 Y young men: hardening of the body, 27; shame and, 65; as slackers, 20 youth (social category of), 17, 18 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 97