Cutting Cosmos

Masculinity and Spectacular Events among the Bugkalot

Henrik Hvenegaard Mikkelsen

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781785337710
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

For the first time in over 30 years, a new ethnographic study emerges on the Bugkalot tribe, more widely known as the Ilongot of the northern Philippines. Exploring the notion of masculinity among the Bugkalot, Cutting Cosmos is not only an experimental, anthropological study of the paradoxes around which Bugkalot society revolves, but also a reflection on anthropological theory and writing. Focusing on the transgressive acts through which masculinity is performed, this book explores the idea of the cosmic cut, the ritual act that enables the Bugkalot man to momentarily hold still the chaotic flows of his world.

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.

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, 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 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:

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 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, 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 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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Of Mist and Men
• Chapter 2. Impartial Man
• Chapter 3. Chaosmology
• Chapter 4. Ngayó
• Chapter 5. Power without Chief
• Bibliography
• Index