mckay 2005-rethinking locality in ifugao

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philippine studiesAteneo de Manila University Loyola Heights, Quezon City 1108 Philippines

Rethinking Locality in Ifugao:

Tribes, Domains, and Colonial Histories

Deirdre McKay

Philippine Studiesvol. 53, no.1 (2005): 459490Copyright Ateneo de Manila University

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Rethinking Locality in Ifugao:Tribes, Domains, and Colonial HistoriesDeirdre McKay

In the context of lfugao municipalities applying for ancestral domain, areview of the oral histories collected within a community of precolonial"migrants" allows this article to locate an indigenous group on quite adi ffe ren t terrain, one with no concrete locality or authentic identity tobegin with. Instead, this locality is forged through the resources providedby colonial histories, and is spreading out into different nodes, in an at-tempt to gain land and livelihood security. By tracing the history of thisgroup, the article shows how expectations of definitive precolonial geo-graphic identities- tribes on domains-are part of a colonial imaginary.The story of how one barangay came into being through engagementswith colonialisms e~emplifies~onef the many ways of becoming andbeing indigenous possible in the Philippines.KEYWORDS: Indigenous peoples, colonial history, Ifugao, migration,politics of representation

Familiar images of Corlllera landscapes and peoples that circulate, inthe Philippine m e l a and beyond, include those of an Ifugao womansitting at a backstrap loom, the rice terraces of Banaue, and dancers atthe Grand Caiiao in Bagulo. Texts that accompany these images fre-quently represent a world l s t an t from cosmopolitan Manila-a spaceuntouched by globalization, where life proceeds much as it always has.Using ethnographc data collected from withn communities in Ifugao,secondary sources treating colonial hstories, and newspaper articles onthe Ifugao rice terraces, this article suggests the importance of suchrepresentations by demonstrating how colonialisms continue to shape


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MCKAY / LOCALITY IN IFUGAO 461

cultivated for centuries, many date only to the mid- to late 1800s (Scott1974, 1976) and were constructed during a wave of in-migration dur-ing the late Spanish era, a mass movement caused by Spanish rear-rangements of peoples in the Ilocos, Cagayan valley, and plains ofcentral Luzon (Keesing 1962). Whde scholars tend to group the regon'sindigenous peoples together under the ethnic classification of Igorot,inchgenous groups on the Corddlera vary by language, culture, and dateof first settlement in the mountains. Ironically, the best known Igorotterraces (and arguably most often represented, perhaps because they aremost accessible from the national capital) belong to the indigenouscommunities of Ifugao, who mostly reject the appellation.

Postcolonial Representations of LandscapeThe heritage value of the Ifugao rice terraces is now internationallyrecopzed. In 1995 UNESCO designated the terraces of three contigu-ous central Ifugao municipalities-Kiangan, Banaue, and Hungduan-asa World Heritage Site.= Press coverage of the World Heritage listingdescribes Ifugao people as an "authentic, tribal culture," as the "oldestagricultural community" in the Philippines, and as representatives of aregional Igorot culture (Villalon 1995a, 199513). Augusto Villalon, ascholar and journalist, acted as the major public proponent of theWorld Heritage listing. Villalon (1995a) describes the terraces' value asfollows: "Our Corddlera brothers have yet to realize they're custodiansof a most precious symbol, and we have yet to thank them for keep-ing it alive." In this description, Vdlalon represents Ifugao culture andlandscape as the location of a generahzed Filipino precolonial past thathas symbolic and educational value for Phhppine society. It is ths sym-bolic past, rather than the contemporary Ifugao communities that main-tain the terraces, that serves to anchor the "we" of a postcolonialPl-dppine nationahsm in the terraced landscape.

The terraces, however, remain an economic as well as symboliclandscape. They are farmed by Ifugao smallholders who cultivate rice,usually for their own subsistence, rather than cash income. In contem-


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462 PHILIPPINE STUDIES 53 , no. 4 (2005)

farmers have become increasingly linked to the national and globalcash economy and the consequent changes in crops and livelihoodactivities have also transformed the conditions under which peoplework. Ifugao livelihoods can no longer be portrayed as pure subsis-tence, if that representation was ever accurate. The same infrastructureimprovements-roads and electricity-that enable tourism in the ter-races have seen significant numbers of local people turn away fromsubsistence rice cultivation to cash-based activities, includmg handcraftproduction, forest product extraction, and commercial agriculture. Thesechanges in local livelihoods, arising from increasing market integration,have set modern Ifugao economic strateges, whlch often involve mini-mizing the labor devoted to subsistence rice cultivation, agamst conser-vation priorities that would entail a sigmficant reallocation of labor intomaintaining and cultivating the terraces.

As a national symbol, the terraces are represented as in danger andin need of defense, yet it is the quotidlan activities of owners and cul-tivators of the terraces that are supposedly putting them at risk. Watershortages, worm infestation, and a lack of interest in rice cultivation arethe threats to the terraces enumerated by respondents in Ifugao. In2003, President Arroyo reportedly planned to send the army to helprestore the terraces (Gascon 2003). My respondents, however, describedthe threats to me with a wry smile, pointing out that their families'economic security must remain their first priority, and national effortsaimed at sustaining the symbolic values of their agricultural landscapeswill only succeed if and when their economic needs are met. Theywonder if the tourism development planned for the terraces can reallyfd the gap they experience between representations of the terraces andtheir d d y lives, or if tourism is more an economic fix for the regionaltourist center of Banaue and, more particularly, its new business elites.

These representations of landscape-in thls case, the Ifugao rice ter-races-as symbolic of a precolonial and unglobalized authenticity arenot unique to the Philtppines. Slmdar attempts to locate the precolonialin particular landscapes characterize efforts to create postcolonial culturesof resistance around the globe. These representational strateges are part


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ing Irish literature, postcolonial theorist and literary critic Edward Said(1990, 77) writes:

P]f there is anything that radcally dstingulshed the imagination ofanti-imperialism, it is the primacy of the geographical in it. Imperi-alism after all is an act of geographical violence through which vir-tually every space in the world is explored, charted and finallybrought under control. For the native, the history of his or hercolonial servitude is inaugurated by the loss to an outsider of thelocal place, whose concrete geographcal identity must thereafter besearched for and somehow restored.To be native, in Said's definition here, is to have lost a local place to

imperialism and to search for an authentic and concrete geographicalidentity in response. Said's broader point is that uncolonized places onthe national landscape are recruited in the construction of postcolonialnation-states where people search for a native authenticity as a founda-tion for a new identity. In this search, supposedly uncolonized placesmetaphorically ground the new postcolonial nation in a somewhereuntouched by imperial power, a place that then serves as an authenticsite of resistance. Said calls this desire to seek out uncolonized placesthe cartographlc impulse.

The brief sketch of the Ifugao rice terraces offered above showsthe cartographic impulse at work on the postcolonial Philippine land-scape, projected onto the interior of the archpelago and the areas in-habited by indigenous tribes. By locating the national past in the Ifugaoterraces, the cartographlc impulse opens up into what anthropologistRenato Rosaldo (1989) calls imperiahst nostalga. By glorifying an h a -ginary past, imperialist nostalga devalues the present. Projected ontothe terraced landscape, an imperialist nostalgia favors the desires ofmetropolitan audiences for a pure landscape of hstory, rather than aterrain that reflects the economic interests of the contemporary cultiva-tors. Ifugao people, reading representations of themselves as unworthyor ignorant of the value of their own rice terraces, understand thatthis nostalgia on the part of metropolitan audiences poses challenges


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464 PHILIPPINE STUDIES 53, no. 4 (2005)

Representations of the terraces infused with thls nostalga seemed toproduce uneasy feelings in some of my Ifugao interviewees, and openthe question: Can this h n d of nostalgia actually provide the impetusfor dspossession? Many Ifugao communities consider t hs to be a realpossibility and now feel they need to formalize their legal entitlementsto the lands they occupy with the government. With the introductionof the Indigenous Peoples' kghts Act (Republic Act 8371 or IPRA) in1997, they have begun to engage with the National Commission onIndigenous Peoples (NCIP) and the ancestral domain certification pro-cess (for details, see Prill-Brett 2000; Hirtz 2003; Perez 2000). In thisnew era of claims for ancestral domain in Ifugao, the search for iden-tities to attach to local places has intensified and, thus, ethnic identitieshave proliferated. A case study of one such Ifugao community revealsthe complex relations of place and ethnicity that are currently at play onthe Ifugao landscape.

The Translocality of HaliapHaliap is a barangay in Asipulo Municipality, occupying the easternslopes of the Antipolo valley in the southwestern part of the provinceof Ifugao. In 1996 , Asipulo began the process of secession fromla n g a n , one of the municipalities covered by the World Heritage list-ing. Since the heritage listing was declared in 1995, but the final landarea of Asipulo was not transferred from l a n g a n until 1999, respon-dents in Hahap were of the opinion that Asipulo should continue to beconsidered as part of the heritage zone. However, Haliap is not particu-larly close to the tourism development centered at Banaue, and thisremains wishful thnhng.

Approximately fourteen hours from Mada , Haliap sentro is accessibleby jeep via a gravel road that runs from a junction along the Lagawe-Kiangan road towards the Asipulo municipal government seat atAntipolo. In most barangays, though, the farthest sitios still require sev-eral hours hihng. There is no telephone landline, but mobile phoneservice was introduced around 2000, following electrification in 1996.


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haps as spectacular as those made famous in photographs of Banaue,the heart of the heritage-listed landscape.People in Asipulo Municipality speak several indgenous languages ofthe Ifugao ~ u b - ~ r o u p s : ~uwalt: Hanglu10,~and Ayangan.6 The popu-lation of Hahap consists almost entirely of Ayangan speakers-a termthat they pronounce with an extra "d," as "Adyangan." The Fhpino andEnglish languages are taught through the school system, and the localmediascape includes radio, newspapers, books, and videos in these lan-guages. Ilokano, the language spoken in neighboring lowland provinces,is often used for local travel and marketing, although people generallyspeak the Tuwali dlalect as an Ifugao lingua franca. For Haliap, localpolitical divisions do not follow patterns of kinshp or land use. Manyresidents actually cultivate land in the neighboring barangay ofPanubtuban, whch has hstorically been the site of majority of the ter-raced pondfields. Haliap and Panubtuban form one contiguous area,and people living in both barangays consider themselves to be onecommunity.

Not all of the people who might claim rights to cultivate land lo-cally live in these two barangays. The community exhibits whatAppadurai (1995) calls translocality-a situation where locality, as astructure of feeling, is produced, in part, through extralocal and oftentransnational relationshps. In Haltap, intimate connections with emigrantcommunity members and circular migrants, as well as religious orders,NGOs and overseas visitors, have transformed what is represented bythe National Census as a bounded rural village into a rather cosmopoli-tan form of locality. On a 2005 visit to Haliap, my respondents werein regular text message and voice contact with outmigrant kin in otherareas of Ifugao; in the nearby provinces of Nueva Viscaya, Quirino,and Isabela; in the Corddlera regon's metropolitan center, Baguio City;in Manila; and in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai. The everyday lifeof the community is shaped by arrivals and departures of outmigrants,and people gather regularly to either welcome migrants home or sayfarewell to those traveling out to these sites of the extended village.People travel by bus to and from the homes of relatives in Isabela or


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or more jeeps through Nueva Viscaya to arrive in the citrus orchardsof Dilpio. Outmigrants from M a d a visit irregularly, bearing bags andboxes from department stores. Travelers carry agricultural products,goods, and stories back and forth across the region, and cash, lettersand more boxes of goods arrive periodically from contract workersoverseas.

Though they identify as "Hahap people," the inlgenous but trans-local livelihood strateges that connect them intimately to lowland areasmake it difficult for people to accept their classification as Igorot. In-stead, people described themselves to me as potential world-travelers,global subjects, and Fllipino nationals whlle simultaneously identifyingthrough their ethnicity, as Adyangan, or by their place of origin, as"Ihaliap" people, or, more generally, as "IPS" (indigenous peoples).

Ethnicity, like other axes of upland identity, is grounded in places,spaces, and bodies, allowing it to be geographically and historicallycontextuahzed and also contested. The Adyangan dlalect, for example,distinguishes Haliap people from their Tuwali neighbors. Both groupspractice terraced rice farming, but Tuwah characterize the Adyangan aslater arrivals in the Ifugao foothills and thus less expert terracers. Onmy first visit to Hahap, in 1992, my Tuwah respondents described theAdyangan as kaingineros ("shifting cultivators") and claimed that they, asa group, tend to be shorter, darker-shnned, and have curly hair. I ini-tially visited Haliap in the company of Tuwali hosts from the localagricultural college and I was assured that the community dld not havemany rice terraces simply because "they were Adyangan" and therefore"made kaingin." A survey of local land-use, however, revealed thatHaliap people were cultivating sipficant areas of terraced pondfields,dating back at least seven generations, w i h he area now demarcatedby the political boundaries of barangays Haliap and Panubtuban. Thisreputation as kaingneros, Adyangan respondents told me, was due totheir history of movement and current activities in "pioneering" newsettlements in nearby lowland provinces. Hahap migrants in these low-land frontier areas deployed "slash-and-burn" cultivation as a way toclaim and "improve" land that could then be planted with cash crops


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Tuwali neighbors did-and they rejected outright the idea that theywere somehow physically distinct from their neighbors.In 2005, one of my long-term respondents now worhng in HongKong, reflecting on his identity, explained to me that he had been akaingnero in Nueva Viscaya, an Ihaliap rice farmer in Ifugao, and wasnow "just plain Filipino" because he was working overseas and allbecause "that is what the people call me." In his experience, identitydepends on his location, often in ways beyond his control, and thissuggests that the contingent, multiple, and confhcting stories that createIhaliap identity are, like those of other place-based identities, continuallytahng on different forms across time and space. However, the Ances-tral Domain era (see Hirtz 2003) has provided a new impetus forattempts to definitively link identity to place.

In 1997, my Haliap respondents provided me with a copy of the1990 Socioeconomic Survey. They noted that ths was the first govern-ment document they had seen which listed Ifugao people as membersof one of over forty (mostly) place-based "tribes" belonging to fourlinguistic groups (see table), rather than only with the names of theHanglulo, Tuwali, and Adyangan Ifugao subgroups recognized inAsipulo. They were perturbed that, despite the important local differ-ences between the Adyangan and Tuwali groups, Ihaliap was listed as aTuwali-speaking tribe. Additionally, they pointed out that the neighbor-ing Hanglulo group, the Yattuka, does not appear at all, and Keley-iKallahan speakers who compose it are also listed as Tuwali. Readmg insecondary sources for local history, I found some of the other tribalnames that appear in this list stem from colonial era taxonomies andmore recent lingustic studes whde others are simply local place names.My respondents and I were ashng ourselves: why both this prolifera-tion and this confusion? To find some answers to ths puzzle, the hs-tory of the Ihaliap tribe, as told to me by my Haliap respondents, isworth examining in more detail.

Tribes and Domains: A Colonial History of Place


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Table. Four ethnolinguistic grou ps of Ifugao Province , listed by "tribe"Group Ayangan Tuwali Kalanguya Kalinga(Alfonso Lista Municipality)Tribe I Olilican Ilag-aw- Iddaya *

MunkanapeI Ihananga Ib un ne ItenecI Alimit Munkigo-a Itabu yI Guinihon MunalyonI Adyang Munga nu/Mungkalyo

Kele-eYattukaIpakawolIhaliapIboliwongIambabagDikkaloyIkamandagIbannawolIcambuloIgohangIhapo

* no tribes listed (au thor note)Source: Republic of the Philippines (1990)

of" or "resident of,'' whlle Hahap is the central Ifugao or Tuwali term.The Adyangan term, Holyap, is drawn from the English expression:"hurry up."' Tracing the hstory of Ihaliap requires worhng betweenoral histories, genealogical reckoning, and secondary historical sourcesthat summarize material from the Spanish and American archives. Thisexercise in historical reconstruction requires, in turn, an understanding ofthe limits of both oral hstories and colonial records. Many historiespassed down from one generation to the next were transmitted throughanimist religous ritual associated with the agricultural cycle and prestigefeasts. Religous conversion-particularly to Pentecostal and Iglesia ni


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Records for the Upper Cagayan area, including the Magat Valley-referred to by Spanish with the term I t y (for the middle-upper MagatRegon) and Paniqy (for the Ganano Valley area)-are partial and, cru-cially, difficult to verify on the ground against contemporary placenames (Keesing 1962, 269).

What historians have been able to reconstruct from the avadable ar-chival materials indicates that the Spanish presence in southwesternIfugao was fleeting and never fully consolidated, as the continual fdureof missions during the eighteenth century attests (Keesing 1962; Scott1974). The Spanish entered the regon in 1591 and first attempted toconvert indigenous villages, and then to subdue scattered local popula-tions by force of arms. They then succeeded in removing some com-munities from the Cordillera foothills to lowland missions andhaciendas-redtlcciones-while starting short-lived missions, most com-monly in foothdl areas and river valleys. In response to Spanish incur-sions, people from the river flatlands around the Upper and MiddleMagat moved away from Spanish control (Keesing 1962), retreating tothe hills and displacing previous waves of migrants. Other people ranaway from the reducciones, returning to the uplands as remontados. In thefew areas more or less fully under their administrative control, theSpanish recorded local populations as Christian converts or non-Chris-tians (or injeles), regardless of whether or not they shared a commonlanguage or way of life (ibid.). The archival materials from the Spanishera thus do not offer much insight into the ethnic composition andhistory of the Ituy region (ibid.).8

Given the paucity of historical data in the archive, it is not surpris-ing that my searches found no record of the place names Haliap orPanubtuban in secondary so~rces.~ral histories also present interestingproblems in generating archival correspondences. Two older residentsof Haliap independently informed me that the name of their villagecame from the exhortations of a Spanish overseer, shouting at a localworker to "hurry-up, hurry-up." When I suggested that perhaps theymeant an American, because it was an English-language phrase, theygave me the sanguine reply: "It doesn't matter. They're the same thing.


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Paniquy. However, when they arrived at Ibong after several weeks ofhihng, they found their old fields had been occupied by rnissionizedIlocano-speaking Filipinos. These Christian Ilocano communities wereinfected with some form of contagious disease-"malaria," my respon-dents said.

The group who had left Adyang, led by a young woman, Bugan,then retreated back up the Lamut hver into the hills, "sailing across theland like a boat on the water," accordmg to Hahap elders who recalledthe phrase from traditional chants. Before departing Ibong for good,the men among her group took some Ilocano heads as a symbolic"payment" for the land they had stolen. The group then traveled fromthe western bank of the Lamut up toward what was then the mostwesterly Adyangan settlement at Bolog. Since some members of thegroup could claim hnshlp with Adyangan in Bolog, the Bolog peoplesuggested the migrants move into the next valley to the west, an areathen known to the Spanish as the Antipolo valley. When the Adyanganmigrants arrived in the lower reaches of the Antipolo valley, along theHagalap River (a tributary of the Lamut) in what is now barangayPanubtuban, they found the valley, "almost empty." Respondents re-ported that the lower valley, closest to Bolog, was unpopulated, whilethe upper valley had a Spanish-built cement kdn, some abandoned riceterraces, and a few rice fields cultivated by farmers from the Hangluloethnic group.Family histories detail how the Adyangan group "pioneered" thearea by buildmg an extensive system of rice terraces in the lower val-ley. Here, they b d t their houses from trees they felled on the forestedslopes leadmg down to the river. In the area they had cleared, they b d ttheir first rice terraces, watered by a creek from a spring they foundup the slope. Along the banks of the creek and above their house lots,they cleared land for swidden. Once they had established their presenceand secured their livelihoods by constructing houses and fields, thepeople held a ritual celebration. Led by munfahi (native priests) theyslaughtered pigs and chlckens in order to mun-tubtub (curse) the Ilocanosso that they would not become dl themselves. The settlers then called


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became the first name for their new locality. More people then camefrom Adyang to join them.With seven generations reported as the oldest lineage of inhabitants,it appears that this settlement at Panubtuban was made in approxi-mately 1875.1 Respondents provided differing accounts as to how"empty" their corner of the Antipolo valley actually was when theAdyangan group arrived. Some respondents claimed that their forbearscreated all the rice terraces themselves, de novo. Other respondents saidthat their ancestors had found empty fields to take over, the Hanglulocultivators having been taken down to the lowlands by the Spanish."Sull others claimed that their great-grandfathers had frightened away theHanglulo inhabitants with magic and ngqaw (headtahng warfare) orarranged marriages between Hanglulo and Adyangan chddren to createinterfamily relations. Meanwhile, the Adyangan community expandedthrough natural increase and the arrival of other settlers from Adyangand Adyangan settlements stretchmg westward from it along the Ifugaofoothdls. T h s began to create pressure to open adltional land and, astheir numbers increased, the Adyangan moved up the valley, taking overterraces near a Spanish cement kdn.I2 Thus, Adyangan obtained land inthe Antipolo valley through a whole series of strategies including aban-donment, marriage, violence, and trade.

Two accounts, offered by different local respondents, claim thatAdyangan ancestors purchased rice fields from Hanglulo speakers withthe trade of kalabaw-carabao or water buffaloes (Bubaluscarabanensi'-stolen from the Spanish settlements near Ibong in thelowlands. The carabao trade along the colonial frontier was part of aregional and interethnic trade in livestock. Reports of thts trade inlcatethe way in which the Asipulo valley, like the rest of the Cordillerasettlements, was always linked with the lowlands through complex net-works (Conkbn 1980). Before the Spanish incursions of the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries, indgenous trade and political and cultural ex-changes linked upland communities to those in foothills and plains. Inthe upper Cagayan Valley, shifting cultivators, as the forbears of theAdyangan most likely were, moved their settlements across extensive


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fiver and traded both with the Ifugao rice-terrace builders on theheights and the Isinai, Gaddang, Ibannag, and Ilongot peoples in thefoothdls, on the flatlands, and along the river. Long before the region'sethnic groups became known as Christians or Ygorotes to the Spanish,o r by terms such as "Christian Gaddang," "Pagan Gaddang," andIgorot, as they were to the Americans, they were part of a long-dis-tance trade network. Spanish mission activities in the region were nodoubt incorporated into ths network at the same time as they displacedit. Scott (1974) reports that trade in livestock stolen by uplanders fromthe frontier mission settlements resulted in the spread of the carabaoand the plow through communities that had previously ulled their riceterraces with wooden spades. This transformation occurred all over theCorddlera in a matter of decades and mostly appears to have predatedthe arrival of the Spanish missions themselves. Thus, we could envisioncolonialism as having a bow-wave-to keep with the maritime meta-phors of Adyangan migration-that rearranged uncolonized communi-ties in terms of trade, technology, and land occupancy often longbefore most people dwehng in such communities ever saw a Spanishpriest or soldler.

For the Adyangan raiders involved in at least some of these raids,theft of livestock served as a status-enhancing form of payment ex-acted from the Spanish for the use of their former lands. As oneHaliap man explained to me:

First, we just lulled the carabao and carried the meat. Then we sawthat it could be done to lead the carabao back. That was our pride,to kill many carabaos for meat when there was a death. That's howwe were rich, sharing the meat. Then we saw the plowing and werechallenged to try that, too. But that, using the plow, was only afterthe Japanese war.Elders in a neighboring Hanglulo community, Amduntog, verified

this Haliap account of carabao rustling. When I asked from whereAmduntog people originally got their carabaos, the reply I receivedfrom my two "local hlstory experts" was "from the Ayangan, through


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nities of Bagabag and Bayombong justified Spanish punitive forays intoIfugao that began in 1748. Oral histories also narrate Spanish attacks onAdyangan villages to the east in whch houses were burned and peoplescattered.

The first mention of a settlement called Panubtuban in the colonialrecords occurs in the correspondence of the American colonial regme.First Lieutenant Bates writes to Captain Thompson, Senior Inspectorof Nueva Viscaya (Bates 1904, cited in Jenista 1987, 42), that threemen and two women from "Panitubang" [sic] were en route to theMagat River when they were attacked by assailants-"Igorots" [sic]-hiding along the trail. A woman named Imuc was killed with spearsand her head taken. Her companions returned the body to her relativesin Panubtuban. Bates was about to visit Panubtuban to begn an inves-tigation of the headtahng, having learned that the culprits apparentlywere people from Banhitan [sic]. His comments reveal many of thechallenges faced by colonial administrators: "if I succeed in getting theguide I will leave here on the 31st. I cannot inform you how long Ishall be on the trip, not knowing where the place is, but will stay outuntd I find it and wdl try to capture the outfit . . . that committed themurder."14 Bates' letter describes the Antipolo valley as a zone of con-flict where the neighboring Adyangan groups of Panubtuban (proper)and Banhitan were, apparently, m a h g ngayaw on each other. Read intandem with my respondents' accounts of theft and conflict, his de-scription suggests that the valley had long been a contested space whereboth people and places shlft, vanish, and reemerge with new names.

It appears that interaction with the American colonial project ofroad bu~ldmgoffered the community a modern name-Hahap--whichwrites over the histories of carabao rustling and headtahng warfare(ngayaw). Renaming villages in thls fashon not only made incllgenousspaces legible to American governance but also reworked spatial rela-tions across the mountains, by redefining new local centers and relegat-ing previously dominant areas to the periphery of colonial relations(Conkhn 1980; Scott 1974). In the reports of American colonial offi-cials, the inaccessibihty of remote settlements was cast as a feature ofthe natural landscape and evidence of the primitive status of these


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colonial creation of particular places with amenable leaders and moreaccessible geography as centers of governance and religious worship.These spatial relations were naturalized by colonialism. Haliap respon-dents, themselves sull at least 6 kdometers from a fully paved road, sullspeak of "far-flung" barangays in the same terms: as if someone hadhurled these communities into being, far from the road, rather thanconstructed a road that made some places peripheral and others centralin local geographies.

Construction of the road by the Americans was the first step inrendering a disorderly and irregular past into a disciplined, "progres-sive," and "modern" present for my respondents. The road markedthe end of ngayaw and thus of living in fear of their neighbors. Thecolonial records report that, by the 1930s, the road network allowedthe American presence to maintain a general semblance of control overthe local populations (ibid.). Old conflicts over landgrabbing andresources were put aside and the "warring tribes of the Antipolovalley" described by Bates were pacified. By thts time the Adyangan ofPanubtuban had long given up hope of reclaiming the lands along theMagat fiver. Instead, by the 1950s and 1960s, Haliap people were us-ing the newly-constructed American road system to seek additionallands to settle elsewhere in the Upper Cagayan valley. Here, the historyof Adyangan inmigration ends, and that of outmigration begins.

Contemporary movements of Haliap people and local strugglesover land, however, remain underpinned by memories of late-Spanish-era population movements. In the early 1990s, a neighboring Tuwali-speahng community of FLangan Municipality made claims to part ofPanubtuban as their traditional pastureland. The claimants consider thePanubtuban Ayangan to be migrant shfting cultivators who "squatted"on what was originally Tuwali territory. Cattle were introduced to thearea through the Spanish, so this claim perhaps originates in a periodbefore the arrival of the Adyangan migrants, but after the first Spanishincursions. However, people living in Panubtuban and Hahap have sincebuilt and maintained an extensive rice terrace system. These improve-ments allow them to claim that they are not "just kaingineros" as


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tors had left seven generations ago. For hlm, accepting a name "fromthat place" would play right into the hands of the Tuwali claims toPanubtuban as pasture land. Since the IPRA requires indlgenes to havecontinuously lived in or occupied a territory since "time immemorial"(Hirtz 2003; Perez 2000, 12), and the NCIP seeks documentation of atleast six generations of continuous inhabitation for indgenous status,15entering the official records as the Ihahap tribe may eventually offer thecommunity a stronger claim to land.

Tribe is another English word and thus not an indgenous Filipinoconcept to begin with. Thus, to understand why new tribes are ap-pearing on the landscape now, it is useful to revisit the way in whichtribe entered colonial history. Igorot, the regonal ethnic identity whichHahap people usually reject, occupies a conceptual space that mobiltzesa simplified framing of identity dependent on particular regimes ofrepresentation and contestation-what LI alls the tribal slot (Lt 2000, 6after Trodlot 1991). Across the globe, the tribal slot has emerged whenthe apparatus of government takes up the classifications produced byacademics, missionaries, and travelers in order to administer peoplespreviously found outside the state's sphere of influence. In the Philip-pines, the Igorot tribal slot has been produced through a very particu-lar set of representations. American coloniahsm described the Igorot viacomparisons, not with other Southeast Asian upland dwellers, but withNorth American indlgenes: "Indians." Whlle historical trajectories else-where may be sufficiently distinct to allow a separation of national orethnic minorities from colonized indigenous peoples (Karlsson 2003), inthe Phlhppines the conflation of the Igorot with Indlans means that thetwo categories have become coincident.

As an extensive literature attests, the term Ygorot entered the Spanishlanguage during the colonization of the northwestern coast of Luzonas a reference to the peoples of the uncolonized uplands immediatelybeyond the Ilocos regon (Afable 1995, 12), and later came to identifypeople living on the Cordrllera Central of northern Luzon (see Scott1974 and map). The word Igorot itself signals a displacement, a stand-ing away from a place of orign, specified in most general terms. I-


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dwelling in the uplands, few people ever described themselves asIgorot. Instead, ethnic identities have operated in multiplicity and atdifferent scales, both village and regonal (Keesing 1962). Local identi-ties, relating individuals to settlements in particular barangays or munici-palities, have always prevailed at the regonal level but have not, untilrecently, been tribal.

The new American colonial regime took over the administration ofthe Cordillera after the Spanish-American War and the purchase of thePhilippine islands from Spain. The first American administrators simplyapplied the Spanish distinctions they had inherited to local groups (Fry1982), in another example of Trodot's (2001, 26) legbhty effect. Withlittle time to undertake studies of language and culture, and facing in-tense pressure to produce an administrative map of the Cordillera,American administrators found Spanish categories expedent for localgovernance (Fry 1982;Jenista 1987). However, with the commencementof American administration, religious distinctions between local peopleswere soon superseded by modern scientific classifications of naturalhistories, human physiques, and their relationship to moral character(Bean 1910; Vergara 1995.) In the second decade of American rule,these new racial taxonomies were deployed by a cadre of Americanethnologists. Americans classified natives on the assumption that theypossessed distinct and specific characters or natures according to theirgroup and geographical setting. This produced hierarchies of place-based groups as physical types (Vergara 1995), whlch then fit into aglobal and comprehensive scheme for ordering native peoples. TheAmerican administrators in charge of this classificatory technologyadopted a paternalistic and protective attitude toward peoples on theCordillera (Fry 1982;Jenista 1987) and, at the same time, imported thecategories of America's own experiences of internal colonization. Thlswas how the American concept of tribe entered the Philippines andbecame applied to the apparently place-based groups of the Corddlera.Tribe was used on the Great Plains to dstinguish between the legiti-mate natives and outlaws, describing as real Indian groups who coulddemonstrate locahsm and rootedness in a particular place and leadership


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tions of locahsm, rootedness, and indvidual Ladershp. On the Cordil-lera, the intention was to develop a benign administration (Paulet 1995;Jenista 1987) that would ease the way for the inevitable incorporationof indgenes into the nation-state and the loss of their distinct identity.

American colonial officials thus reclassified the regional and place-based ethnic identities they encountered as Igorot tribes and the resultingPhdippine tribal slot reflects its hybrid Spanish and American hstory. Ithas produced a tribal landscape layered with iterations of earlier classi-fications that favor local centers that had closer ties to missions, colo-nial administrators, and scholars. In the case of Haliap, the currentNCIP listing for Ifugao subgroups describes the Asipulo valley as theterritory of the Hanglulo tribe, with no mention of Tuwali or theAdyangan presence." T h s is so despite the third-term mayor being aPanubtuban Adyangan, Jose Jordan Gullitiw. Respondents attribute thlsdescription to a tradition in which Hanglulo peoples have been"closer" to the regional seat of political power in Tuwah fiangan andthe provincial capital in Lagawe than have Hahap Adyangan.

The ideas of localism and rootedness behind the category of tribealso inflect attempts to recogruze indgenous rights to land. The currentancestral domain process under the NCIP relies on a circular argumentthat assumes land and people are inseparable. As Perez (2000, 18) ex-plains in her analysis of the IPRA, the definitions in current Philippinelaws set out: "ancestral domains.. . delimited by indigenous cultural com-munities who are defined by their ancestry; or, indigenous culturalcommunities.. .contained by ancestral domains which are defined by theirprior settlement by indgenous or autochthonous populations." The law,although well-meaning in its intention to recognize a special connectionbetween people and land, requires conditions of both ancestry andboundedness that many groups, particularly those rearranged by theSpanish along the nineteenth-century colonial frontier, may not be ableto meet. The wording of IPRA, in fact, reiterates the old Americanconceptuahzation of tribes as having legtimacy through historical settle-ment in a single, clearly bounded, place that is a "domain."

Rather than using "tribe," my respondents use the term "Adyangan


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yers, and hstorians to document the injustice of state laws that apply tothe resources of the uplands and inviting social scientists to describetradttional patterns of land occupancy, spiritual connection, cultivation,and resource extraction, in order to establish the distinct indigenouscharacter of new place-based tribes to compensate for groups notlisted or listed inaccurately. This more overt opposition is combinedwith strategies of accommodation, in whch the existing laws are usedto register traditional interests in land with the state. This is the coursecurrently being charted by Asipulo Municipality where the concept ofdomain is reduced to existing barangay boundaries.

Thinking about the ways in which the government recogruzes indtg-enous identities and places returns us to the representations of Ifugaolandscapes with whch we began. Such representations matter becausethey continue to frame the tribal slot and, thus, delimit the ways localpeople can become legible to government. To illustrate this point, Idraw an example from the national newspapers people receive inIfugao. Th s quote comes from the Pbih)pine Daib Inquirer,18where oneof the paper's Manila-based columnists refers to "vanished civihzations"in mapficent landscapes, reinforcing a distinction between a metropoli-tan "us" and an Igorot "them":

Even today, in places like Sagada and Bontoc and Ifugao, and lessknown, remote places along the way that were already Igorot havensperhaps millennia ago . . . one senses the ancient presence of avanished civilization. Peering at pictures of these mountain peoplestaken by anthropologists at the turn of the 19th century, in vistasthat rival in physical and natural beauty anything in America orEurope, one cannot but develop a pride and sympathy for theIgorot peoples that make our latent prejudce toward them puzzling,despicable and self-demeaning. (Bocobo 1999, C2)

This narrative is relayed along colonial conduits of power, situating thereader in the imperial center, as the recipient of the reports of anthro-pologists on what is now a "vanished civilization." In order to under-stand Filipino indigenes, and their possible anticolonial resistance, the


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Like the American Indan, the Igorots are a people dsplaced fromtheir ancestral lands by irresistible waves of a new dspensation. Butunlike the American Indan at the hands of white settlers, and quiteunbeknownst to many Filipinos, the Igorots never succumbed to ei-ther the Cross or the Sword of the white conquistadors of Spain.(Ibid.)

The contradictions within this second section stem from the conflictingideas that the Igorot are like Indians in that they were dsplaced fromtheir lands, but then the Igorot I d not actually succumb to colonial-ism. By representing Igorot as formerly sovereign and currently dispos-sessed, the inhabitants of places like Sagada, Bontoc, and Banaue arerepresented as displaced from the lands they occupy. This same narra-tive structure may be farmliar from the examples of the cartographicimpulse and imperiahst nostalgia offered earlier. In this quote, the ongo-ing occupation of Igorot or Ifugao tribal lands by contemporary in-habitants is rendered a blight on the landscape because it frustrates thefantasy o f a "vanished civilization." O n e can easily imagine ho w dis-turbing it is for a resident of translocal Haliap to read this, a reminderof an unbridgeable ethnic difference from fellow Filipinos and accountof disentitlement to land and livelihood, in the Sunday Lifestyle pagesof the Phiiippine D a i ' Inquirer.

As Said would suggest, this narrative is a single example within abroader Iscursive picture. Its argument is echoed both by quotes fromVdlalon on the heritage of the terraces, above, and, more recently, theIrectives of President Arroyo. During her 31 December 2005 visit toBanaue, the president was reportedly offended by the "increasing num-ber of modern structures marring the beauty" at the World HeritageSite and ordered the secretary of the Department of Environment andNatural Resources to find a relocation area for the "squatters" (Ilagan2006). The people whose housing has so offended the president areactually the customary landowners of Sitio Awan-igd. The Departmentof Tourism now refers to them as "informal settlers," because they donot have formal government land titles, even though they are recog-


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common across the rural Phhppines-rather than renew the cogon roof-ing on their "native" houses. Now the president wants them to be re-located to "improve the beauty of the rice terraces because it is akey destination" for tourism (ibid.). This attempt to purify the terraceslandscape fits Rosaldo's formulation of imperialist nostalgia perfectly.For once, I imagine people readng &us story in Haltap do not envy thegovernment attention directed to Banaue.

The circulation of such narratives in the contemporary mediascapedoes give people cause to thmk their rights to land may be threatenedbecause the politics of representation matters. The cartographic impulse,the imperialist nostalgia it enacts, and the particularities of the Igorottribal slot all threaten to open up the regon in various ways as a va-cant terrain for nationalist development. By portraying the Cordilleralandscape as empty of contemporary people (who matter), full ofresources to be exploited, and as the location of valuable symbols tobe celebrated, the media enacts strateges of internal colonization that,in turn, can open the way for resource extraction and the displacementof people "on the ground."'9

We need to recognize that there are many histories and ways ofbecoming and being indgenous in the Philippines, and each is predi-cated on different relationships between peoples, localities, and land.Although they make a tangential claim to heritage status, people inHaliap know that current efforts to conserve an Ifugao heritage land-scape focus mainly on Tuwali sites, and increasingly this may be asource of relief rather than envy. And whde they may be represented ina variety of ways-as migrants, as kaingineros, as Filipinos abroad, asIfugaos-they know all of these identities can be dangerous in somecontexts. What we can draw from regional history is the lesson thatrepresentations of indigenous localities as outside or beyond colonialhistories serve to undermine indigenous peoples' ability to negotiateclaims to land, livelhood, and autonomy within the nation-state.

It is only by situating localities within both colonial histories andcontemporary representations that we can understand contemporarylivelihoods and claims to land. In Haltap, instead of a hstory as a tribe


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rain, with no concrete or authentic s i te of or igin. Their local i ty isforged through the resources provided by coloniahsms, and place-basedcolonial categories and representations offer the possibility of maintain-ing their current entitlements to land and resources. With this history,Haliap is not a place that was destroyed by coloniahsm and then recap-tured by local resistance. Instead, it has become a locality through amutually constitutive exercise of power between colonized and coloniz-ers. By enter ing "Haliap" (hurry up) as the official place na me in thegovernment records , Ihal iap people in fact disrupt expectat ions ofprecolonial authenticity and offer resistance to the cartograpkc impulse.

The Haliap case is a singular example and, of course, not paradig-matic for all mountain communities. It does, however, fracture Said'sdescription of the restoration of a concrete geographical identity as thedefinitive work of anti-irnperiahsm. Instead, it leads us to conclude that,on the Cordtllera, the idea of an authentic and precolonial geographicidentity is itself part of the colonial imaginary. The history of Haliapsuggests that, rather than destroying locality, coloniahsms have incited itsproduction in novel , mult iple, and, now, cosmopoli tan forms. TheHaliap example points us toward a rethinhng of the forms taken byindigenous localtty and perhaps questioning the history and cultural 1-versity that might be lost through accepting too easily the ltmits inherentin categories of tribe and domain.NotesMy thanks to Ihaliap hosts and respondents, in Asipulo and beyond; to all thoseat [email protected] who let me join in; to Fr. Wilfred Vermuelen in Solanoand Manila; my colleagues, Ben Smith and Monique Skidmore, for their helpfuleditorial comments; and to Sandra Davenport, at ANU, who helped with editingand formatting.

1. Local history and migration history interviews were conducted in Banaue,Kiangan, Asipulo, and Haliap outmigration areas during participant observationand interview-based fieldwork in 1992, 1995, 1996-1997, 1999, 2002, and 2005.Media monitoring was conducted simultaneously in the locally available printmedia.2. UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organi-


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3. As per the details currently reported by the National Commission on Indlg-enous Peoples, www.ncip.gov.ph/resources/ethno~detail.php?ethnoid=54,c-cessed 5 September 2005.4.Tuwali comes from the word for "certain" or "real" in the dialect shared bya group of central Ifugao communities. For an explanation of names, see Afable1989, 87-1 14.

5. Hanglulo is elsewhere referred to as covering Keley-i Kallahan speakers inAsipulo's barangay of Antipolo and the 'Yattuka" language spoken in and aroundAmduntog (Steffen 1997).

6. Adyangan means "from Adyang"-Adyang is a locality in the municipalityof Banaue, near the headwaters of the Alimit River, a tributary of the Magat.7. The Tuwali name is the official name of the community.8. Ituy is the Adyangan term for "here," as in "this area," but it may be a term

that was widely shared among the languages of the region.9. Thanks to Father Vermuelen for access to materials from the Dominican ar-

chives in Manila.10. Calculated from data collected in 1992 using 17 years as the average time

between generations.11. Lim (1978) reports that the Spanish records indicate people from the

Antipolo valley were brought down to the lowlands in a reduction in approxi-mately this time period. By 1850, the mission at Bagabag was recorded as control-ling a number of mountain settlements (Keesing 1962, 294).

12. The kiln would likely be a remnant of the Spanish mission at Kiangan,which began in 1793. My respondents reported that their ancestors had seen a fewSpaniards at first, but they left the area during the first few years of settlement atPanubtuban. The remains of this kiln are located close to what is now the Itumbridge, on the north bank of the Hagalap River between the Tuwali Barangay ofDuit and in the former Haliap sitio of Mapitpitut. Mapitpitut is now BarangayMapit of Kiangan, though it is still an Adyangan-speaking area.

13. Father Vermuelen, personal comment, 8 June 1996.14. Banhiton is likely the contemporary Panubtuban sitio Banganon.15. Aileen Paguntalan (Anthrowatch, Manila), personal comment, 8 September

2005.16. Goht occurs throughout the Phhppine islands and is variously rendered as

guluf, gu&, and gohd, depending on the local language.17. As per the details currently reported by the National Commission on Indlg-enous Peoples at wwu:ncip.gov.ph/resources, accessed 5 September 2005.

18. In Haliap, people regularly purchase the Phibppine Duib Inquirer in Kianganand Lagawe. When I sojourned in the barangay in 1996, I bought groceries


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Fry, Howard. 1982. Histoty of the Mountain Province. Quezon City: New Day.Jenista, Frank. 1987. The white apos: American governors on the Cordillera Central.

Quezon City: New Day.Gascon, Melvin. 2003. 240 ex-rebels tapped for repair of rice terraces. http://

www.inq7.net/reg/2002/jm/lO/re-8-l.hm,ccessed 1 0 Dec emb er 2003.Hirtz, Frank. 2003. It takes m odem means to be traditional: O n recogntzing indig-

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Scott, William Henry. 1974. The discovery of the Igorots: Spanish contacts with thepagan~ f northern Luxon. Quezon City: New Day.. 1976. On the Cordillera:A look at the peoples and cultures o f the MountainPmvince. Manila: MCS Enterprises.. 1994. Barangg: Sixteenth-centuty Phi~ijpine ulture and son'eg. Quezon City:Ateneo de Manila University Press.

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TrouiUot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. Anthropology and the savage slot: The poetics andpolitics of otherness. In Recapturing antr3ropohg: Working in the present, ed. Rob-ert Fox, 17-44. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

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mckay 2005-rethinking locality in ifugao

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