Sacrifice and Sharing in the Philippine Highlands

Religion and Society among the Buid of Mindoro

Thomas P. Gibson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000324419
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethnische & Stammesreligion

This book is about the relationship between the Buid value system and their history of resistance to the lowland world.

1
Introduction

The plan of this book follows the development of my understanding of Buid culture and society in the following way. I found, and I believe it is a common finding among anthropological fieldworkers, that certain domains of Buid experience were more immediately accessible to me than others. Those aspects of Buid life which related to the immediate social and physical environment; to basic somatic and emotional experiences; and to the simpler forms of social interaction such as conversations about the foregoing, were not, on the whole, completely unintelligible to me at the beginning of my initiation into Buid culture. These aspects are treated in the first part of the book. But the underlying intellectual and moral assumptions about the way life is and ought to be are still not entirely clear to me and, perhaps, never will be. Nevertheless, I believe that I was able to achieve some degree of comprehension of these after two years, and hope I will be able to return to the Buid in future and acquire even more. What I call the idioms of Buid social organisation are treated in the second part of the book. The Buid also claimed to have sense experience of a whole realm which will forever remain closed to me: that of the invisible spirit world, a world of great concern to the Buid, interaction with which occupies a great deal of their time and energy. Even here, I feel I was able to achieve some understanding. This world is covered in the third part of the book. Now, one of the basic theoretical assumptions made in this book is that those domains of experience which are most accessible to an outsider also provide the raw material on which the members of a society draw for images, symbols, metaphors, or idioms, call them what one will, in constructing their more abstract concepts, and that the way to go about understanding religious, moral and cosmological beliefs and practices is to link them to the varieties of mundane experience with which they are associated by the people who hold them and carry them out. I try, then, to link the first, second and third parts of the book together in the final part.

The problems which were to dominate my field research and subsequent analysis were set for me from the very beginning of my contact with the Buid. Mine was not a carefully planned investigation of a limited domain of Buid life, plotted out in advance of immersion in their social and physical environment, with little prior knowledge of them, but a continuing struggle to come to terms with their fear of outsiders, and my fear of rejection by a group into whose care I had committed myself for longer than I had at first supposed. The problems I met with may best be summarised by presenting an account of my field experience.

My first trip to Mindoro took place in July 1979. Mindoro is the seventh largest island in the Philippines, lying just south of Luzon. It has a total area of some 10, 000 square kilometres, and a population of fewer than 700, 000. Geologically, it is part of the Sunda shelf which forms the base of the land masses of the Malay peninsula, Borneo and Palawan. According to Wernstedt and Spencer, its flora and fauna also exhibit closer affinities to those of Borneo than to those of the rest of the Philippines (Wernstedt and Spencer, 1967; but see Conklin, 1957: 27). The island is reached from Manila by a two-and-a-half-hour bus journey to the city of Batangas, followed by a further two-and-a-half-hour boat trip to the provincial capital of Oriental Mindoro, Calapan. Upon reaching Calapan, a host of cargadores descend on the ship and compete to carry one’s bags to the waiting buses, which set off as soon as they are loaded for points south, following the erratically paved ‘national highway’ along the coast. To the passengers’ right the mountains of the interior rise sharply up from the irrigated rice terraces of the coastal littoral, culminating in the towering peak of Mount Halcon, which rises over 2, 500 metres from the plain in just ten kilometres. On the densely forested slopes of this mountain live the still little-known Alangan tribe. Proceeding down the narrow coastal plain, the bus stops in a series of market towns, before following the highway inland to cross the Bongabon river by means of the reinforced cement bridge at Lisap. It is often said and, I think, firmly believed by local Buid and lowland Christians, that the construction workers brought in to build this bridge reinforced its huge cement piles with the bodies of small children abducted from the area so that it could withstand the force of the river in full flood.

It was at the Lisap bridge that I dismounted, having a letter of introduction to one of the tenants of a local landowner, Severino Luna, who had a ranch on the Siangi river just above the bridge. Luna had published a book about the life of a Buid youth, known as Bag-itan, with whom he had become friends during visits by the youth to his ranch in the foothills (Luna, 1975, see Map V). Telling the group of Christians standing around the shops precariously perched on the cliff next to the bridge that I was looking for the ‘Mangyan’, they pointed two Buid out to me. While the Christians were all dressed in what is best described as American-style clothing adapted to the tropics, the two Buid youths (who had come, perhaps, to buy some rice or cakes) were dressed only in filthy loincloths and had masses of matted hair roughly tied up with cloths. Even more striking was the contrast between the assertive manner of the Christians, who immediately approached and engaged me in conversation, and the manner of the Buid, who stood cowering beside the trail, and who became even more agitated when I approached them. They fixed their eyes on the ground, and refused to acknowledge the fact that I was asking them in Tagalog the whereabouts of Luna’s friend, Bag-itan. I later came to learn that it was impossible for me to engage even my best Buid friends in conversation while at this place of the luktanun (Christian lowlanders), for most Buid are in a state approaching panic when they venture into the lowlands. This is the image most lowlanders have of the Buid: an image of dirty, terrified creatures of the forest. The image the Buid have of the Christians is one of the central themes of this book, and I shall not go into it here except to say that it is equally negative, so much so that it is difficult for one having been closely involved with the Buid to write objectively about the Christians. In this book, I shall be dealing with the lowland Christians only as seen through Buid eyes. This will leave the reader with an extremely biased image of the lowlanders, I fear, but this book is, after all, about the Buid, and I can only apologise to the many Christians who showed me kindness when the Buid were still wary of my identity and motives.

My initial plan was to learn the local form of Tagalog, used as a lingua franca by both the Christians from different parts of the Bisayan islands and by the Buid, as a preliminary to learning the unrecorded Buid language. I planned to do this living among the Bisayan settlers in Siangi before moving on to live with the Siangi Buid. I soon realised, however, that the Siangi Buid are under intense pressure from the large and often violent Christian population which has taken over the flat land in their valley. The Christians in the mountains tend to be a rather lawless population and, indeed, many of them are there due to their record in the lowlands. Nevertheless, I spent three months among them, learning enough Tagalog from them to get by, and also acquiring some idea of their social organisation and values, which was clearly necessary for an understanding of the social environment in which the Buid lived. At that point, I felt that my association with the Siangi Christians had so compromised my standing among the Buid that I would have to work in another area. I persuaded a leader of the Buid in Fanuban to guide me to Ugun Liguma, where I found a youth from Fawa to guide me up-river to the mouth of the Ginyang (see Map IV). The confluence of the Ginyang and the Bongabon (known in Buid as Binagaw) rivers represents the extreme limit of Buid territory in the north. Only by chance was I allowed to spend the night in Ginyang, and the next morning I was brought back to Ugun Liguma and abandoned to my own devices. I made my way back to Siangi. From this trip, I decided that the best situation for fieldwork was to be found in Ugun Liguma. Ginyang, while constituting a more traditional region, is completely cut off from the lowlands whenever it rains, for it can only be reached by crossing the Bongabon river several times. The river can rise from a depth of one metre to well over two in a matter of hours, with a current so strong that it is uncrossable by even the most experienced Buid. They maintain rattan bridges on the upper reaches of the river where the banks narrow into sheer cliffs, in order to maintain communications during the rainy season. Ugun Liguma, on the other hand, can be reached, if by a rather circuitous route, without crossing the Bongabon, and is fairly easily reached when the river is fordable. Furthermore, the Buid up-river from Ugun Liguma continue to dwell in dispersed settlements each containing no more than two or three households, making the study of such exceptional events as births, marriages and deaths difficult. As a prominent geographer has noted: ‘the interior of Mindoro is densely forested and accessible only by a network of rough mountain trails, which instead of paralleling the ridges or valleys, persists across the grain of the topography’ (Wemstedt and Spencer, 1967: 429). Movement from one settlement to another is extremely difficult, especially in the rain, which turns the steep trails to mud, and can only be accomplished barefoot or with ice cleats strapped on to one’s shoes (Postma, personal communication). I decided that Ugun Liguma presented the best compromise between the more acculturated Buid settlements down-river and the more ‘pristine’ dispersed settlements upriver since the population of the Ayufay river valley was still in the process of aggregating into the large settlement of Ugun Liguma when I arrived. This had the added advantage of providing me with an opportunity to observe the process of population concentration as it occurred. Whether or not the new ‘barrio’ of Ugun Liguma would survive was still an open question when I left the field in September 1981.

I returned to Ugun Liguma in October 1979 only to find that it was empty, the inhabitants all having returned to their swidden houses. The leader of the settlement, Agaw, had formed a smaller settlement some years earlier on the banks of the Ayufay and it was there that the greater part of the Ayufay Buid were now staying. I continued on to Ayufay, and Agaw let me sleep in his house, but while I was out for a walk on the third day, he and his family quietly disappeared. My situation was saved only by the fact that there was one Christian family in the settlement which had come to sell salt, sugar and other items to the Buid, who had just been paid for their maize harvest. This family knew of me through relatives in Siangi. They agreed to look after me and gave me a small hut of my own to sleep in. This arrangement took the immediate pressure of my presence off the Buid. It would probably not have been tolerated had I been directly dependent on them at the beginning.

The first few months were difficult. Not only did I contract malaria and dysentery from inexperience, but the Buid are highly suspicious of outsiders, particularly tall white ones. I had been prepared for this by a previous fieldworker, Pennoyer, who had been ‘evicted’ by one Taubuid community (see Appendix I). It was not until a year later that I learned that I had been regarded as a witch (aswang) when I first arrived. Aswang beliefs are current among the Christians as well as among the Buid. They are inherently evil human beings capable of taking on animal forms in order to prey on the flesh of other humans (cf. Lieban, 1967: 66 ff.). It appears that the Buid had associated me with the American Protestant missionaries who had been working out of the settlement of Batangan for many years, and who were the only whites the Buid had ever encountered. These missionaries subscribe to a fundamentalist version of Christianity and make a point of suppressing all manifestations of the traditional religion as soon as it is in their power to do so. Above all, this involves the suppression of animal sacrifice, which, as I shall show later in this book, is the primary means by which the community of the living maintains its internal unity and defends itself against spirit attack. The Buid interpreted the missionary attack on animal sacrifice as an indication of their alliance with, or at least similarity to, the evil spirits. As I interpret it, the Buid identified the missionaries (and myself) as aswang because it is the only category which covers both humans and spirits. It is actually quite peripheral to their central concerns with the spirit world, and may in fact be a borrowing from the Bisayans, as I never heard it raised in any other context.

Gradually, beginning with Agaw and with Gaynu, who was to become my best friend and informant, these suspicions began to break down as I persisted in my attempts to learn the Buid language and culture, and to participate in their rituals. What my actual purpose was never became clear to many, and was perhaps only fully understood by Gaynu, who accompanied me to Manila a year later. There I showed him the National Museum with its carefully labelled artefacts from mountain groups all over the Philippines. It was not until some six months had passed that I began to collect any real information, or even to make a proper start at learning the language. It was only after a year that I made the final step toward full acceptance by the Buid, when Agaw himself decided that as I spoke their language and supported them in all their dealings with the Christians, it was no longer right for me to go on eating with the Christians. He suggested that I take my meals with his family, and I did so until my departure fourteen months later. By this time, I was told, I was no longer a luktanun ‘alien’, but Buidyadi, ‘also a Buid’.

Several factors were decisive in my eventual acceptance by the Buid. The first was the presence of the Bisayan family who had exceptionally good relations with the Buid, and who were willing to look after me during the first months. Without them, I think I would have been boycotted into defeat. The second was the determination by Agaw to hold his community together and open it to contact with the outside world. The third was Gaynu, whose intellectual curiosity overcame his suspicion from the first, and who accepted me as fully human during the most difficult period. Finally, the arrival of my wife Ruhi in July 1980 served to humanise me even to the most conservative. Not only was she close to the Buid in physical appearance, being Pakistani, but she established an immediate rapport with the spirit mediums. She stayed with me in the field for more than six months, and her success in gaining the confidence of the Buid could later be measured by the enthusiasm with which the Buid greeted several other visitors I brought them. These included Dr Harold Conklin, Dr Maurice Bloch and my brother, George.

I have covered these details of my field experience at such length because they help to place the sort of data I gathered and the sort of issues I address in this book in the proper light. I was given only the vaguest accounts of what I did not observe and question as it happened. The Buid are not given to theorising about their social system, nor even to contemplating hypothetical social situations. Some of them, such as Gaynu, are a good deal more interested in metaphysical speculation than others. While of interest in itself, this propensity does not aid the researcher in elucidating the actual principles of social behaviour in concrete situations. I hope that I was able to observe enough particular events during my two-year stay in order to construct a general model of Buid society. The Buid have no such model themselves.

A central concern of both the Buid and of this book is their relationship with the outside world. The questions to which this book is intended to supply some answers were posed for me at the very beginning of my fieldwork: the Buid live within one day’s journey from Manila, yet seem to have persisted as an autonomous culture and society into the latter part of the twentieth century; they are extremely suspicious of outsiders, yet never show any signs of aggression or violence towards them; they would normally be classified as a society’ at the ‘tribal’ stage of social evolution, yet my attempts at applying the ‘genealogical method’ as a key to understanding their social organisation led nowhere; they are continually meeting in large groups to discuss serious matters, but seem never to quarrel; and they seemed to be completely obsessed with the invisible world, many of the men spending night after night chanting quietly in the darkness.

In Chapter 2 I describe the general historical context in which Buid society has developed over the past few centuries, although we know nothing of the Buid themselves before the Second World War. This history accounts for their survival and enclavement within the larger Philippine nation, for the existence of parallel, distinct, yet interdependent societies in the highlands and lowlands of Mindoro, In Chapter 3 I describe the traditional Buid environment and economy, showing how they contrast with those of the lowlands, and how they are currently being transformed as a result of Christian penetration and cash cropping.

In Chapter 4 I describe the lack of importance of the idiom of kinship in Buid social life, and the idioms of companionship which take their place. The marital relationship, its initiation and dissolution, constitutes the key to Buid organisation, as the most important type of companionship. In Chapter 5 I describe the emergence of corporate groupings, based on residence in large-scale settlements, and the consequent transformation of the traditional system of social organisation.

In Chapter 6 I describe Buid spirit mediumship, with its peculiar emphasis on the collective apprehension of the spirit world, and on the need for cooperation in driving off the predatory spirits. In Chapter 7 it describe the various forms of animal sacrifice practised by the Buid, culminating in the sharing of meat with the spirits of the earth, the source of all human and crop fertility.

In Chapter 8 I draw out the parallels between the human and spirit worlds, and between collective participation in social and religious activities. I show that collective ritual has provided a model for the conduct of the corporate affairs of the new settled communities, and that the mystical dangers which stem from communal division serve as an effective incentive for the maintenance of social solidarity now as in the past. Finally, in Chapter 9, 1 venture some speculations concerning the way in which Buid society and religion have developed as a result of enclavement within vastly more powerful societies for the past four hundred years.

I
The Historical and Economic Context

2
History

An understanding of the early history of the Philippines before the American occupation in 1898 is essential for explaining the survival into the twentieth century of the various highland groups in Mindoro as autonomous societies. This period is covered in a summary fashion below. In the second part, the policies of the American and Republican governments of the Philippines towards the ‘non-Christian’ tribes are reviewed, and the post-war histories of Mindoro as a whole, of the municipality of Bongabon, of the Buid within that municipality, and of the Ayufay Buid are briefly recounted.

The Pre-American Period

… the first actual mention of the Philippines seems […] to date from the tenth century, when certain traders from Ma-i, the present island of Mindoro, brought valuable merchandise to Canton for sale, in the year 982 (Beyer, 1979: 26).

This suggestion was made by Beyer in 1921 and has been adopted by subsequent writers (cf. Majul, 1973: 39). The identification of Ma-i with Mindoro has been challenged, however, and it is now held by many to refer to the whole of the northern Philippines. There is a less debatable reference to Mindoro in a fourteenth-century ...