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Dada Docot
J U D I E S

S t e ph e n B. Ac ab ado
C l e m e n t e . C a mpos a no
E ditors
Published by BUGHAW
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Copyright © 2023 by Stephen B. Acabado, Clement C. Camposano,

Ma. Ledda B. Docot, and Ateneo de Manila University
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Recommended entry:

Plural entanglements : Philippine studies / Dada Docot,

Stephen Acabado, Clement C. Camposano. — Quezon City :
Bughaw : an imprint of Ateneo de Manila University, [2023],
C2023.
xxii, 451 pages : 22.86 cm

ISBN 978-621-448-261-0 (pb/bp)

ISBN 978-621-448-262-7 (PDF [downloadable])

1. Philippines — History — Study and teaching. 2. Philippines—

Colonization. 3. Ethnology —Philippines. 4. Political anthropology —
Philippines. 5. Political culture — Philippines. I. Docot, Dada.
II. Acabado, Stephen. III. Camposano, Clement C. I. Title.

959.07 DS667.28 2023 P320230040

 CONTENTS

iX F OREWORD

Caroline S. Hau

xix PRE FAC E

1 IN T R O D U C TIO N

Extending the Conversation: Recent Explorations in Philippine Studies

Dada Docot, Stephen B. Acabado, and Clement C. Camposano

28 C HAPT E R1
Incorporating Indigenous Perspectives in Chronology Building:
Rejecting the Three-Age System in Philippine Archaeology
Grace Barretto-Tesoro and Stephen B. Acabado

58 CHAPTER 2
Textiles and Other Trade Goods:
The Philippines in Sixteenth-Century Global Trade

Kristyl Obispado

84 CHAPTER 3
Emergence of "Undesirable" and "Proletariat" Chínese
in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines
JelyA. Galang

114 CHAPTER 4
Foundations of Philippine Environmentalism:
Science, Citizenship, and Nationhood
Ruel V. Pagunsan
140 C HAPT E R5

Patterns of Panow:

Dimensions of Mobility among the Pantaron Manobo

Andrea Malaya M. Ragragio and Myfel D. Paluga

162 C HAPT E R6
Cordillera Cultural Revitalization
Analyn Salvador-Amores

182 C HAPT E R7

The Filipino Román Catholic Church in the Modern Era:

Aggiornamento and Beyond

Julius Bautista

214 CHAPTER 8

Space and Power:

Religious Worlding and the Rise of Iglesia ni Cristo

Jayeel S. Cornelia

242 CHAPTER 9

The Philippine Liberal Tradition:

A Short History in Four Phases

Lisandro E. Claudio

266 C H A P T E R10

The Bangsamoro as Imagined Futura

Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo

288 C H A P T E R11
Household Coping and Recovery Strategies from Natura's Wrath:
Rising from the Ruins in the Aftarmath of Haiyan
Majahi-Leah V. Ravago and Claire Dennis S. Mapa
320 C H A P T E R12
Beyond Dialogues:
Interreligious Initiatives in Troubled Grounds
José Jowel Canuday

348 C H A P T E R13
Postcolonial Monuments in the Hometown;
Decolonization and the Im/possibilities of Repair
Dada Docot

378 C H A P T E R14
Resisting Generosity:

The Balikbayan Box and the Crafting of Selves within the

Contemporary Transnational Filipino Household
Clement C. Camposano

400 C H A P T E R15
The Nexus of Assimilation and Transnationalism among
Filipino Migrants in the US and the Netherlands
Sharon Madriaga Quinsaat

425 AFTERWORD
Vicente L. Rafael

431 T H E E DIT O R S

433 T H E C O N T RIB U T O R S
437 IN D E X
 C H A P T E R 5

Patterns of
Panow
D i m e n s i o n s of M o b i l i t y a m o n g t h e
P a n t a ro n M a n o b o

Andrea Malaya M. Ragragio and Myfel D. Paluga

I N T R O D U C T I O N : PANOW IS A K E Y C A T E G O R Y IN
THE P A N T A R O N H I G H L A N D S

Bunlay, an elderly baylan (spiritual practitioner) from the village of

Nalubas, recounted this "origin story"^ in 2008:

So this is the story of how Magbabaya created the world.

Magbabaya looked out over his lama, or front yard of the
house, and thought that all these rocks are not good to see.
Magbabaya said, I will look for a way to make land. But all the
land was owned by the Ologasi, a giant, who ate anyone that
carne near him. So Magbabaya commanded the two kinds of
bees, called patyukan and tamoeng, and the bees went off to
where the Ologasi was holding all the land. The Ologasi paid
the bees no mind because they were just insects that alit on his
land. The bees got bits of the land and wore them like tikos, or
leglets. When the bees returned to Magbabaya, they took off
their tikos and Magbabaya started shaping the land between his
two fingers. But the land was not enough, so the bees went back
 and forth. They brought land by wearing them like tikos, until
Magbabaya said, that is enough, because now there is land all
over the earth. The rocks are now covered to a right measure.

Mobility is a subtle, yet crucial, theme in this story from the

Manobo of the Talomo River, in Talaingod town, in the Pantaron
Mountain Range in Southern Mindanao. What ultimately made the earth
possible to live in was not so much the actual creation of land (because
the land already existed) or that it had to be surreptitiously taken from
the fearsome Ologasi, but rather the patient movement of the bees to
gather it together so the Magbabaya could make something productive
out of it. The Manobo word that Bunlay used to describe the bees going
ofF on their task is panow, a term that encapsulates various notions of
geographical or spatial mobility, from "to leave," "to travel," "to flee," "to
expand," and, simply, "to go somewhere."
Studies of mobihty are productive to think about themes not
just of "subsistence" and "adaptation" but also of "territoriahty," "social
relationships," and "choice and decision-making" (see Sellet, Greaves,
and Yu 2006 for an indicative approach). While intersecting with these
themes, our fieldwork has made us aware of the singular importance of
panow as a point of departure to explore a particular sense of "mobihty"
that is linked to a way of doing life and viewing the world among the
Pantaron Manobo.
In Bunlay s narrative, the panow of the bees resonates, with precise
economy, with many other key elements of the everyday life and talks
weVe observed in the Pantaron highlands. The two kinds of bees, the
front yard of the house as a dwelling space, travelling back and forth
through the "world" (kalibutan) or over the "land" (tanu) made up of
"rocks" (dalama), and, finally, collecting soil until it "measures up"
(olog) to sustain life—this delimited set of terms and images are well-
embedded in the ethnographic realities of Pantaron. This brief narrative
portrays a lived sense of a spatialized world or worlds (and not so much
temporalized) that involves repeated moving from place to place, to make
a living, to marry, to build links, and to flee from dangers.
We approach panow here as a key category in a set of "pointers"
(tout d'indications; Mauss 1966, 273) or "heuristic" (un principe
fi uristi^^^ ' 274) that links a cluster of terms that assemble like a
j^aussian "system" (systéme; 147) of "total social facts / phenomena"
Q)hénoménes sociaux ' totaux', desfaits sociaux totaux; 147, 274,
^^pjjgsis in original). Method-wise, we hope that this chapter opens
a re-apP''^''^^^'^^^ ^^^^ "vintage" idea of "ethnology" (sensu Mauss),^
and even the work of demircating, in a much more modest scale here, a
comparative "field or región of study" {ethnologisch studieveld, sensu De
josselindejong[(1935) 1977]).-^
Without disavowing the colonial entanglements of these
approaches, we follow the spirit of Salazar's (1968) reassertion of the
valué of these anthropological tasks relative to the matter at hand;
the study of a demarcated región and a select category "for itself (un
domaine detudes pour soi; 242) and not vis-á-vis extraneous ends. How
is this to be done? Taking a category from within our domain of study
itself—as it relates both to itself and to others outside it—we show in
this chapter that panow ñames a durable "ethnic fact" (lefait ethnique;
241) in the workings of the Pantaron world. As a Maussian "pointer," it
highlights a dynamic thematic of Indigenous"* social life in the Pantaron
highlands. This multi-scaled mobility of panow—valued and repeatedly
reconstituted by Pantaron highlanders themselves—shows how panow-
linked habits and rituals (like the institution of the pag-ugpo, which
we will discuss below) have shaped the highlands durable orientation
to things "outside," like those coming from the lowland, colonial /
postcolonial "centers." In our concluding section, we will make explicit
the imphcations of this approach and view of panow highland dynamic
to the perennial colonial / decolonial problematic.

This chapter is based upon more than a decade of advocacy

and academic work with Indigenous Manobo communities who
identify the Pantaron Mountain Range as their domain (see Ragragio
and Paluga 2019), particularly (but not limited to) those from the
Talomo, Simong, Kapalong, and Salug Rivers. A significant part of
recent fieldwork (in 2014, and then in 2018-2019) was done in the
context of the Pantaron Manobo as bakwit, or the state of being
evacuees, in the cities of Tagum and Davao. Thus, many of the insights
here derived from their own reflections about their internally displaced
condition.
THR E E HI S T O R I C A N D P R E S E N T - D A Y D I M E N S I O N S
O F PANOW AHD I T S R E L A T E D T H E M E S

MOVING AROUND AND FORGING RELATIONSHIPS

Panow, as repeated mobilities within a defined space, which can, in

the process, also describe a "land" or a "world" where one belongs to,
captures well the Pantaron Manobo's sense of "sociality." When one is
in the highlands of Pantaron, the idea of "a series of walking to and fro
in, or to build, a world" is the proper counterpoint to what might be
called their "imagined community" (Anderson 1991) from an outsider s
view; or, perhaps more appropriately, their own foil to what Nurit Bird-
David's "scale"-sensitive framing would phrase as "the modern privileged
sense of society" (Bird-David 2017, 4; emphasis in the original). In the
following sections, we will outline panow as everyday mobilities in the
highlands to make a living and forge social links.

EVERYDAY MOBILITIES IN THEIR

"ECONOMIC" LIFE

The need to move around within a domain, of varying scales, related to

what the literature has called "shifting cultivation," "rotational / swidden
farming," or "rice cultivation" (upland riziculture) has already been
documentad previously for the so-called Ata Manobo (Bajo 2004; Gloria
and Magpayo 1997; Industan 1993; LeBar 1975; see Ragragio and Paluga
2019 for the reasons why we prefer the ñame "Pantaron Manobo").
Together with processing abacá as a "cash crop,"^ the main forms of
economic activities in the Talomo and Simong áreas are a mixture of
tending gardens {pamula), making swidden clearings (kamot), and
hunting (using dogs, panganup). The sites for these activities are always
of varying distances from their houses; there are fields where they have
sepárate huts in which they can stay for days or weeks as they work
in those áreas. Periodically, these habitational movements entail the
transfer of the whole village to an entirely new location (but still within
the borders of the villages "territory"). Nalubas (the village of Bunlay
and many of our other closest interlocutors) has transferred at least
four times since 2007, and one of these transfers occurred when one
of their leaders (datu) died from an accident, a practica that was also a
precolonial custom in many parts of the Philippines (Scott 1994).
Partly related to agricultural needs—specifically, the preference
to plant assorted rice varieties or to store their seeds—is the frequent
case of visiting other villages and even communities on another river-
system to be able to obtain these rice varieties. Visits in general are called
panombaloy (literally, visiting the house) and they can extend for several
weeks or months at a time. More than once it had happened to us that
a person we were looking for had gone to visit a relative elsewhere, and
no one was quite sure about when he or she was coming back. At the
evacuation center in Davao City, each evacuee village lived in a long
house divided into rooms for each family. Our interlocutors would joke
that they were on a panombaloy whenever we saw them sitting and
passing the time at the long house of a different village.
This mobile life is also reflected in their technological material
culture. A stark example is their development of a metal forge that
can be disassembled and carried like a backpack. It looks and works
precisely like a "Malayan forge" (as it is called in classic descriptions),
except for its size and how it does not need to permanently be implanted
in the ground in order to function. Needless to say, a skilled metal
forger can easily travel with his apparatus from one village to another
whenever needed.

MARRIAGE PRACTICES AND MOBILITIES

The Manobo of the current parental and grandparental generation

recount how, in the Pantaron, a series of movements by families
and grooms and brides revolve around getting married. Seeking
potential spouses and agreeing to a match (through discussing duwad
or bridewealth) entail visits by the young man's family to that of the
young woman's. During the wedding itself, the groom travels with his
family and other guests to the house of the bride, where wedding rites
are performed, after which he is left behind (the Pantaron Manobo are
matrilocal) by his family members, who must travel back to their own
village by the end of the day.
Mobility is even more marked after the wedding with a pair of
obligatory visits backto the groom's residence. The first of these visits,
callea pauli' t gimukud, takes place a few days after the wedding. Pauli't
gimukud literally means "letting the soul / image [of the groom] come
home" and this was supposed to protect the young man from falhng ill.
On this journey, he brings with him "giñs"** (such as chickens) that his
father-in-law has provided for him to bring to his family, and when he
returns to his wife's village (sometimes as soon as the next day), he also
takes something back that has been prepared by his parents in turn.
The second formal visit takes place weeks, if not months, later
but this time, it is both the groom and bride who make the journey
together. This second visit is called pamanoik (panoik is "to climb
up") and aside from the bride and groom, a younger relative or two of
the bride (such as a younger sibling) also comes along. The couple's
group again brings gifts for the young man's family, and they are also
expected to bring gifts back home. However, unlike the quick pauli't
gimukud, the pamanoik could last for months because of the diñiculty
in gathering a suitable gift to take back. This is because objects that are
transferred are expected to increase in valué from the first visit to the
second. While chickens can be exchanged at the pauli't gimukud, at
the pamanoik families could be preparing pigs, large quantities of rice,
or horses (see the additional discussion about this below). As long as
the groom's family has not yet collected an appropriate amount, the
young couple (and their companion) could not yet return to the young
woman's village. What these visits at the beginning of a couple's Ufe
signal is that marriage relations between bride and groom and among
in-laws are established and strengthened as much through movement,
journeying, and (temporarily) relocating themselves as with the giving of
bridewealth or gifts.

TAMUK AND A WIDE VIEW OF THE LAND

An important means by which goods circuíate (and relationships

are forged) between upland communities is the practice of tamuk^
(Paluga and Ragragio 2019). At its core, tamuk can be compared to
what Mauss described as "gift prestations" in the "circulation of goods"
among Oceanic / Austronesian groups but with a crucial difference: in
the Pantaron, this spirit of "obligation" to "give, receive, and finally to
reciprócate" (Mauss 2016, 197) is not initiated by a bountiful giver but by
parties who askfor help, perhaps because they need to pay bridewealth
or penalty for a crime or if their house / family simply fell on hard times.
Tamuk is to ask for objects of valué, usually from another village, that
may not be sufFering from the same unfortunate circumstances as the
asker. Objects of valué asked for in tamuk in the Pantaron include
chickens and pigs, with the horse carrying the highest ordinal valué in
exchange.*
This practice, mediated by a datu, through time, assumes a
complex, crisscrossing web of inter-village tamuk-obligation relations
among villages across the Pantaron highlands that are not bound by
current political borders. In 2012, Paluga (coauthor of this chapter),
while traversing the Pantaron from San Fernando, in Bukidnon
province, to Talaingod, in Davao del Norte province, ran into a datu
going in the opposite direction for tamuk transactions.
These movements that characterize different domains of Pantaron
Manobo living—subsistence, craft specialization, marriage, and asking
and giving assistance—facilitate the visualization of a wide expanse of
áreas where one can forge linking or delinking relations, depending
upon the circumstances. Oral tradition provides the Pantaron Manobo
of a channel by which they can get a handle of this spatial expanse. One
such example is a gungutan, an epic-like narrative but one that is not
chanted, from a Talaingod eider named Malorag. His story is about three
brothers who lived in (married into) three sepárate communities and
a series of undertakings by the three that depict, in a typically "heroic"
style, Manobo pursuits such as hunting, finding a spouse, engaging with
spirit guides called abyan (or bantoy), and waging battles. These trace
routes of character movements from upstream Kapalong River (in Davao
del Norte and Agusan del Sur provinces) down to Simong and Talomo
(in Talaingod) and then to the land of the Tagabawa (what he called "Apo
Sandawa," referring to Mount Apo) as its southernmost extent, and then
back north to San Fernando (in Bukidnon). The story ends there, when
the communities are taken to "the land with no death" via a heavenward
journey called baton (discussed more below).
We wish to note some features of this story that further highlight
expressions of mobility by the Manobo. First is that their matrilocal-
residence arrangement facihtates the dispersal of men across wide

P A T T E R N S O F P /Í/ V O V V I 147
áreas, where they fulfill the traditional mala roles of leader, warrior, and
spiritual practitioner. Several locales can thus immediately claim links
with each other that could, as in the gungutan, result in coordinated
movements across space and even into the heavens. Second, the spatial
expanse evoked in the story 1) contains actual (not fantastical) places
and 2) is not treated as exclusive territory over which power relations
play out or are exerted. Their repetition in gungutan and other forms of
oral tradition is basically to visualize possible (and perhaps to remember
actual past) movements through spaces that serve as settings for Manobo
preoccupations that were just as significant in real life as they are in an
epic story. These are preoccupations that both link various communities
together (through marriage and sharing of resources) as well as cut
those linkages (through battle or abandoning people). This way of
relating to space and movement then challenges us to rethink notions
of ancestral domains and reified borders in a way that is only possible
with communities who are highly mobile and have a significant degree of
social egalitarianism.

FLEEING FROM SOCIAL GRISES

Historically practiced not just in Mindanao but throughout the

Austronesian-speaking world (Salazar 1997), the mountain-refuge or
ilihan strategy entails withdrawing towards predetermined places of
refuge in geographically interior and/or elevated áreas.' A vivid historical
instance of this was described by Jesuit missionary Saturnino Urios in
a letter in 1895 (in Arcilla 1998, 409). Urios narrated how, one day after
what he thought was a successful conversión campaign in the north of the
Davao región, "the whole world went back up the mountains at dawn
the following day, burning crops, devastating plains. Moros mixing it
up with Mandayas, Mandayas with Agtas, then with everyone else—war
with Spain!" in a show of unrest that seemed to foreshadow the outbreak
of the Philippine Revolution the following year. From this, we can also
glean that the Pantaron highlands was not the exclusive domain of the
Manobo (here identified as "Agta") but was accessible to others such as
the "Mandaya" and the "Moro."
We have no primary or eyewitness accounts from the "native"
point of view of the workings of an ilihan-style evacuation, but we can
compare a recent ilihan evacuation event as recounted by leader Datu M.
and his wife, R., from Davao del Norte province. In 2003, an inter-family
conflict became a íull-hlown pangayaw (revenge kilHng or traditional
warfare) across villages from Kapalong to the borders of Bukidnon.
Their entire village decided to take refuge in their ilihan,^" moving there
at nighttime to avoid detection. Upon arriving, each family built their
own housing and worked together to clear the surrounding brush so that
any attacker coming from afar may easily be seen. Wood and bamboo
fencing were also put up for added protection.
Though a situation of conflict, pangayaw and living in the ilihan
were still bound by "rules of engagement," the most important of which
concerned women's mobihty While warriors called bagani periodically
left for offensive forays, it was the women who more frequently left the
ilihan to return to their fields and gather food. Warriors were not allowed
to kill or hurt women for the precise reason that since women were in
charge of food procurement (to feed both those who took direct part
in combat and those who did not), targeting a woman will open the
floodgates for women-killing. This will therefore make it impossible for
villages to gather food. Everyone knew that this is assuredly fatal not just
for the male warriors but for all the members of the villages involved,
and so no one sought to start it. This was a rule that developed out of the
particular circumstance of their economic subsistence.
This particular pangayaw / ilihan episode lasted for more than
a year and was only contained when the Communist Party of the
Philippines-New People's Army (CPP-NPA) revolutionary guerrillas
present in the Pantaron range mediated a settlement, after which the
affected families moved back to their villages. This then conforms to
the "traditional" mountain-refuge strategy of evacuating to the ihhan
triggered by endogenous causes (kin conflict) but with a deviation in the
conflict's final resolution (intervention of a non-Manobo entity).
Another mobile strategy to respond to crisis is to créate new
clearings, or open new sites of dwelling, either within or outside a
group's claimed territory. A village or kin-group can likewise fuse with
another settlement that had previously been able to establish itself in
another área. A contemporary example of a "new-clearing" and "fusión"
is the case of the Matigsalug Manobo resettling in Compostela town,

P A T T E R N S O F P/Í/V O V V I 1 4 9
Compostela Valley province under Datu J., whose community, as of 2013,
lived for about a quarter of a century in lands traditionally belonging to
the Dibabawon and Mandaya Indigenous groups, almost two hundred
kilometers away from their town of San Fernando, Bukidnon." They had
been support workers of the Valderama logging company concessions
since the 1980s (see Edgerton 2008 for a discussion on large-scale legal
logging as a major economic feature of post-World War II Central
Mindanao) and reached Ngan village in Compostela town by the 1990s.
When logging activities were halted in the mid-1990s, Datu J. and his
companions decided not to return to Bukidnon but instead remain in
the last Valderama área where they worked. Though their efforts to
establish themselves would periodically be interrupted by spates of state
aggression, during comparatively peaceful intervals, their community
attracted other relatives and friends from Bukidnon to fuse with them
(this is perhaps indicative of even poorer conditions in other áreas,
when a still-unstable settlement is considered preferable). Though
Datu J.'s community was on land that was, strictly speaking, registered
under the Certifícate of Ancestral Domain Title (CADT) of the local
Mandaya organization, the Matigsalug residents were on amiable terms
with the majority population of poor peasants in the área regardless of
ethnicity. These positive relations were helped largely due to Datu J.'s
leadership capabilities in this increasingly multiethnic border región.
This was further manifested in 2013 when, after Datu J.'s community
bore the brunt of increased military operations, four other lesser-affected
villages (of mixed Indigenous and Bisaya peasants) evacuated with
them in solidarity to the center of Compostela town to draw attention
to their plight.

This 2013 evacuation is an example of an urban-refuge form

of displacement, where, instead of withdrawing away into ihhan,
endangered groups head towards population centers instead. In local
parlance (both in Manobo and in Bisaya), the term for seeking refuge in
urban áreas is bakwit, a loan word that is onomatopoeically derived from
the Enghsh "evacúate." Not only does bakwit refer to the experience of
displacement, but it also refers to the event of evacuation, the act itself,
and the persons doing the evacuating (or the evacuees). From a long
view, Manobo bakwit is a kind of "cultural synonym"—that is, working
broadly within the cultural logic—of panow, albeit more oriented toward
the state-making politics of "national" lowland centers.

L O WLAND LINKS AND ENGAG EMENTS

Atnong the communities we work with, bakwit is a modern phenomenon

linked to the entry of extractive companies into their domain, such as
the Alcántara and Sons logging company, or ALSONS, which held an ,
Integrated Forest Management Agreement (IFMA) with the state agency
the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). It
is incorrect (and perhaps romanticized) to say that the Manobo were
categorically against the logging operations from the beginning. Local
communities were also logging (albeit on a much smaller scale) and
some initially worked as guides and guards in exchange for cash—which,
back then, was already becoming a needed resource. However, they
began to notice that their children began to become ill and that their
drinking water began to taste diíferent. They also began to notice that
Bisaya settlers did not move their settlements once they had established
it and claimed absolute rights over their land pareéis, something that
did not accord with Pantaron Manobo usufruct arrangements. These
were the first indicators that what was happening to their forest had direr
consequences than first anticipated.
In the early 1990s, a datu originally from the Langilan River
named Guibang Apoga called on his other fellow datu and bagani
from the other river systems in Talaingod to forge a collective stance
against ALSONS. This took the form of declaring a pangayaw against
the company as well as evacuating to Davao City, where they were able
to widen their networks with urban-based support groups, the church,
and local and national media. Up until today, leaders agree that this
pangayaw has been a success in the sense that ALSONS eventually pulled
out of the Pantaron área, and consider this a watershed in their recent
history of engaging with non-Manobo entities.
Twenty years later, in 2014, the Manobo of Talaingod evacuated
again toward Davao City in the middle of intensified counterinsurgency
operations. Similar to their bakwit in the 1990s, support groups prepared
logistical, financial, and campaign needs. One leader told us that, even
if they had wanted to, they were unable to practice their traditional
response of pulling back to ilihan deeper into the Pantaron Mountains
because even those áreas had been penetrated by mihtary personnel.

V I S I O N I N G A G O O D LI F E IN A N O T H E R W O R L D

Panow, in the widest imaginative sense, also informs the Manobo

socio-cosmological view of life, death, and resolving a crisis. While
the Manobo distinguish between the world of the living and the world
where the dead go (called Somolow), they additionally possess a three-
tiered socio-cosmological picture that consists of "this world," or tanu or
ingod; "the world above" or kadusunan; and "the world below" or Ingod
to Muybuyan (literally, "Muybuyans world")."- Unlike the Somolow,
the Kadusunan is the "land where there is no death" and a possible
Pantaron ManoSo option, when faced with a crisis, is to try to access the
Kadusunan via two successive events called pag-ugpo and baton.
Pag-ugpo (literally, "to stay [in the house]") is a gathering of
one or more villages where they wait together for the baton (literally,
"to ascend"), or the heavenward journey to the Kadusunan, to occur
in order to "escape the troubles of this world." This upward journey
is to be done via a "vessel" called a salimbal, which is described as a
house (or sometimes a "boat" or "platform") that is lowered down
from the heavens with a rope and puUed back up after everyone had
gotten on board.
During the pag-ugpo, people gather around the panubaran,
a large ritual structure that is usually built at an elevated área some
distance away from the main cluster of houses. The days are overseen
by baylan and foUow a pattern: mornings around sunrise are for quiet
gatherings for the spirits to "see" them, with only the baylan saying
prayers or performing ulaging (epic chanting) in expectation that the
baton may occur, while afternoons and evenings are given to tasks
and relaxation and epic chanting. This routine is supposed to "boost"
their morale and, indeed, this time is recalled as one with a heightened
sense of anticipation that the baton is about to happen. Working like
an institution of panow, pag-ugpo can be taken as a "movement of
the whole, the living aspect, the fleeting moment" when Pantaron
communities "take full sensory consciousness of themselves and their
situations" (Mauss 2016, 194) during a state of grave anxieties.
 Pag-ugpo can last for weeks or months and is recurrently
practiced when communities sense danger or a crisis. Almost all of our
interlocutors have experienced at least one pag-ugpo episode: recent
examples they recalled were in 2017, after a paramilitary member shot
at their school and wounded a teacher and a student, and in 2018, in
an evacuation center in Tagum City a few months before we arrived for
fieldwork. The practice can, then, be said to be cyclic, even if its onset is
contingent on specific events and is therefore temporally un-patterned.
Each pag-ugpo is drawn to a cióse, quite rationally, when nothing
supernatural happens and the baylan determine that "it is not yet time"
or that "something unseemly for the spirits happened so they will not yet
help US ascend." Instead, each person must return to their own village
and are exhorted to enliven their agricultural production. Even if they do
not necessarily conclude with the awaited baton, these episodes revolve
around the anticipation of journeying to "the land with no death" and
provide an occasion for people to gather momentarily and then disperse
with a sense of reinvigoration back to their respective villages.

PANOW D Y N A M I C S A N D
THE S H A P I N G OF THE H I G H L A N D S

As an everyday term, panow is uttered in everyday contexts as varied

as walking and travelling (hipanow), going to another house / village
to ask for material help (tamuk), transferring to an elevated place for
safety during violent conflicts (ihhan), and to travel to the "other world"
(baton). Taking off from the salience of panow in highland life allows
US to reimagine space and territoriality in ways beyond formal mapping
and documentation by government and academic institutions that erase,
rather than enhance, internal Manobo usages and meanings of space.
If we follow these lines of panow, say, if one walks, village-by-
village, from east of the Pulangi (in Valencia, Bukidnon), crossing
San Fernando, then into Talaingod, and ending just to the west of
the Libuganon River, one does not see such sharp linguistic and
cultural divides between communities that are distinguished in formal
registrations as "Matigsalug," "Tigwanon," "Ata Manobo," and "Langilan."
Instead, what one sees is a sort of continuum of mutually intelligible

P A T T E R N S O F P/Í/V O V V I 1 5 3
F i g ur e 1. C o m p o s i t e m a p s h o w i n g a) t h e d i s t r i b u t i o n o f M a n o b o - s p e a k i n g g r o u p s
in M i n d a n a o ( m a p s o u r c e : W il < im e di a C o m m o n s ) ; b) T h e m o u n t a i n o u s h i g h l a n d s o f
C e n tr a l M i n d a n a o (r o u g h i y c o i n d i c i n g w i t h t h e " P a n t a d o n B i o g e o g r a p h i c R e g i ó n ; "
m a p s o u r c e : G l o t t o l o g 3 . 2); a n d c) t h e P a n t a r o n Z o n e a n d i t s m a j o r ri v e r s a n d r e p o r t s
o f " A t a " by J e s u i t s ( á r e a s in d a rk g r a y a r e n a m e d l o c a t i o n s , w h i l e t h o s e in l i g h t g r a y
á r e a s are w i t h ñ a m e s f o r m o r e g e n e r a l á r e a s ; á r e a s n u m b e r e d 1, 3, a n d 5 are a s
n a m e d , w h i l e g e n e r a l á r e a s are l a b e l l e d 2 ( t o w a r d A g u s a n ) , 4 ( t o w a r d M a t i) , a n d 5
(t o w a r d M t . A p o ); m a p s o u r c e : Davao City, Philippine Islands, U n i t e d S t a t e s A r m y M a p
S e r v i c e , 1 9 5 4 , c o u r t e s y o f t h e P e rr y - C a s t a ñ e d a L i b r a r y M a p C o l l e c t i o n , U n i v e r s i t y
o f T e x a s L i b r a rl e s , h t t p s : / / m a p s . l i b . u t e x a s . e d u / m a p s / a m s / p h i l i p p i n e s / t x u - o c l c -
6539351-nb51-4-450.jpg)

languages and cultural practices broadly familiar to those in this part of

the highlands (see figure 1).
We are not suggesting absolute uniformity, but, by and large, the
people we have worked with in these áreas would underline that "we
can understand each other s language," that "people there (across the
river or mountain) are also like ourselves, Manobo," or that "we have
relatives in that área." Genealogical data comprehensively sampled from
upstream Talomo villages shows that their relatives, as recalled five or
six generations back (in our estimate up to the mid-nineteenth century),
link the river-systems of Kapalong, Langilan, Tigwa, and Salug—
crisscrossing the above-mentioned reified "ethnolinguistic groups." Datu
Guibang Apoga, a known Talaingod figure whose paternal roots are
from Langilan (presently in Kapalong municipality), has simply stated
that these river systems and the people in them all share one "ingod"
(domain) or "tanu" (land).
The time depth of this highland coherence, geographically
differentiated from the Bukidnon plateau in the west and the Agusan
marshland in the east, could be implied in an impression written
by American anthropologist John Garvan (1931, 5) (albeit in a
colonial frame and languaging) of this área and its dwellers which he
also called "Ata":

A careful distinction must be made between the term Atas

and the racial designation Ata, for the former are, according
to Doctor Montano, a tribe of a superior type, of advanced
culture, and of great reputation as warriors. They dwell on
the northwestern slope of Mount Apo, henee their ñame Atas,
hataas, or ataas, being a very common word in Mindanao for
"high". They are, therefore, the people that dwell on the heights.
I heard of one branch of them called Tugawanons, but this is
probably only a local ñame like Agusanons, etc.

Needless to say, such an expanse of the región that we cali here the
"Pantaron highlands," as defined by its rugged central mountain range,
would have tended to facilítate sharp divergences or ethnogenesis among
houses and communities if not counteracted by the varied and multi-
scaled mobilities of panow.
The spatial effects of panow, in fact, might have even "overflowed"
at certain times from the confines of the Pantaron and into contiguous
áreas. From 1877 to 1896, the Jesuit missionaries in Mindanao reported
no less than twenty topical references on the "Atas" from broadly
disparate áreas surrounding the Pantaron, which we present in table 1 (a
list of all mentions related to "Ata" in the Jesuit Letters).^'
But the image of "scattering" in only an outward direction from
the Pantaron should not be overemphasized because, as Urios observed
in 1895, a range of groups was also able to access the Pantaron as a
refuge during times of unrest. As such, we take it reasonable to say that

P A T T E R N S O F PANOW \ 1 5 5
T a bl e 1. L i s t o f " A t a " r e f e r e n c e s in J e s u i t L e t t e r s

Source, place where letter was written,

Location reference and comments
date, and page numbers in Arcilla 1998
Quirico More, Davao, 11 May 1877,
Libuganon River
9-11
Mateo Gisbert, Davao, 17 November
Tuganay
1881, 43-44
"most numerous but the least known,"
Mateo Gisbert, Davao, 22 May 1884,
occupying the slope of Agusan, Bukid-
86-88
non, Pulangi, and parts of Mount Apo
In "constant war" with "Moros" in Quirico More, Davao, 2 lanuary 1885,
Caraga uplands área 106-18
"beheved to be the most numerous"
found "in the interior mountains, in
Mateo Gisbert, Davao, 20 February
the mountains, rivers, and forests
1886, 147-49
far from the coast with no roads"; no
definite place mentioned
Part of tribes resettled in Davao, Mateo Gisbert, Santa Cruz, 22
Sigaboy, and Mati February 1888, 173-74
Some are photographed in Dahao, luán Doyle (on board Francisco Reyes),
Toril, Davao 30 May 1888, 183-96
Serving as guides in the "grand Eusebio Barrado, Mati, 7 lune 1892,
cordillera starting from Apo" 274-76
The "Mandaya" from Libuganon are Saturnino Urios, Tagum, 24 October
fearful of them 1892, 282-85
The "ata-as" "are Manobos in Samal Saturnino Urios, Davao, 16 August
language" 1894, 366-71
Living with "Moros" and "Mandayas" Saturnino Urios, Davao, 9 November
in Tagum 1894, 389-92
Saturnino Urios, Oran, 25 lanuary
Tuganay uplands
1895, 405-9
Matias Roure, Sigaboy, 4 February
Iho River
1895, 418-20
Saturnino Urios, Davao, 7 March 1895,
Mount Apo área
432-33
Saturnino Urios, La Asunción, 8
Astorga and Malalag
November 1895, 471-74
laime Estrada, Davao, 13 November
Malalag
1895, 475-76
Resettled with "Guiangas" in Calinan, Saturnino Urios, Davao, 8 lanuary
Davao 1896, 489-90
Saturnino Urios, Davao, 5 February
Toril ("Lipadas"), Davao
1896, 494-97
luán B. Llopart, Mati, 27 May 1896,
Mati
501-03
panow, both as a Hved category among the Pantaron Manobo and also
as a concept this chapter unpacks, is an important dynamic shaping
lifeways in the highlands. It could durably serve as a sociocultural base,
a broad condition, or a conceptual horizon to approach any causal story
in Pantaron history, from, at the very least, mid-nineteenth-century
colonial-period "dispersions" and "convergences" (as witnessed by
the Jesuits) up to the present "movements" associated with economic
"displacements" and political "evacuations."

C ONCLUSIÓN:
P>1A/01V A N D T H E I D E A O F E T H N I C I T Y

What can the Pantaron Manobo panow tell us about indigeneity and
shaping an approach towards "ethnicity"? The framing of "Indigenous
peoples" (or their "indigeneity" and "ethnicity") as figures that toggle
between a) relative marginality (if not isolation and pristineness) and b)
resistance and/or dialectical appropriation reveáis itself to really be the
two sides of the same approach in the sense that both marginality and
resistance always evoke the question, relative to what?
The approach of our study is a) to view mobilities in relation to
a local category (in this case, panow) used in the highlands in such
contexts and b) how panow links to other patterns and activities in their
lived realities. What is being bracketed (not prohibited) by our approach
is the almost habitual "need" to ask how such a locus or an agent fares in
relation to any hegemonizing "center" (lowland and/or colonial); almost
always, the results of such a query would be analyses that tend towards
describing / explaining in terms of the polar themes mentioned above. We
approach panow in this chapter without any pre-given and preferential
concern on whether or not the Pantaron highlands and its peoples
did orient their lives mostly to oppose, run away from, or make any
dialectical acts in relation to non-highland structures and activities. Our
interest is not mainly whether or not Pantaron has shown any dialectical
relation to "power centers"; what is of greater concern is to grasp how
panow assembles several patterns and dimensions of Pantaron Ufe.
Pantaron life, of course, has always been "entangled" with the
elements and forces that can be generically labelled as "Moro" (or the
"Islamized groups"), "Christian," "colonial," and / or "Bisaya settlers"; as

P A T T E R N S O F P /Í A / O V V I 157
such, things and ideas coming from these fields are not absent in the
highlands, as in any other places. But, to take a metaphor, the point is
not only to ask how an instrument or two finds its way into an orchestra,
or how an element or two finds its way into the "ethnos" of panow, but
on the durable playing of the symphony, the enactment of panow as
a coherent theme, whether or not the lowland / colonizing centers are
lending their ears.
For US, this mode of doing "society" is one that has, in the varied
invocative instances and practices given above, never been about doing
an ethnic / civihzational style that is "outsider"-focussed (whether such
outside is grasped as "colonial" or "lowland Christian" or by other
configurations) even as, in some moments, panow could appear to be
doing such.
Method-wise, our ultimate concern is in crafting a finer frame
responsive to approaching an object or a domain of study that is simply
"for itself We want to open fresh vistas and research questions on the
highlands so that our understanding of its peoples ably grasps its range,
dynamics, and even contradictions. Understanding panow is, in our
view, one such entry-point.

NOTES

1 The Manobo term is pang-gugud (a "story" or "narrative") or kasaysayan

("history"), located in a time "before Tolalang," a prominent protagonist
in their chanted ulaging ("epic") narratives.
2 See also Caille (2007) for the argument that Mauss's classic ethnological
work, The Gift {Essai sur le don; first pubHshed in 1924), should properly
be accorded the valué of outlining a "paradigm" (paradigme) for
anthropology.
3 See also Blust et al. (1980) for updated engagements along this line.
While also informed of Allerton's (2013) critical "reaction against
neostructuralist traditions," our approach renews the heuristic
importance of key local categories, more visibly represented in oral
narratives, as pointers to grasp both the phenomenological imaginarles
and realities that are inextricably socio-symboHc (Lacan 2013).
4 Although working for a different theoretical end, our emphasis on
Indigenous mobility and centering on a durable construal oí panow may
 align this study, by comparison and contrast, with the Minangkabau's
dynamics of rantau (Barnard 2015). But we will not tackle this in-depth
here.
5 From the 1970s onward, selling rice (called "Ata rice" by lowland
"Bisaya" settlers) and logs (by floating them downstream into the nearest
population centers) are earlier forms of commodity-oriented activities
for some áreas of the Pantaron.
5 There is no exact term for "gift" (in the English-language sense); the
usual term in such contexts is the verb bogoy, "to give something!"
7 Tamuk or its cognates can also be found in other Manobo and
contiguous non-Manobo Indigenous groups in Mindanao.
8 The high esteem for horses are shown in other ways, such as being the
prominent motif on boat lutes (kuglung) made and played across this
área of the Pantaron (Brandéis 2019).
9 The Proto-Malayo-Polynesian word *qilih means "mountain" and its
cognates in Philippine and Central-Malayo Polynesian languages mean
shelter, remote área, fortress, or mountain retreat (Blust and Tressel
2018).
10 The place where the ilihan is located has a ñame, meaning that this
was a marked and familiar location to them, but we will keep the ñame
confidential.
11 An expanded discussion of this case is included in the paper "W hy Do
Indigenous Communities Resort to Voluntary Evacuations?" that we
presented at the lOth International Malaysian Studies Conference in
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Kota Kinabalu, in 17 August 2016.
12 See Gibson 2005 for an ethnological view of three-tiered Philippine-
Eastern Indonesia cosmologies; Salazar (1968, 245) endorsed such an
approach but centered the inquiry on forms of anitu-centeied cosmology
shared by the "Taiwan-Philippine-Sulawesi axis" {laxe Formose-
Philippines-Célebes), opening this as part of a "privileged domain"
for "comparative inter-ethnic researches" {un domaine privilegié des
recherches comparatives inter-éthniques).
13 The appellation used in Arcillas translation is consistently "Agta" but a
preUminary survey we did of the original publications of the Jesuit letters
shows that of the several passages we were able to lócate in the original
versions, all except for one of these use "Ata" (instead of "Agta"). We
therefore use "Ata" here to reflect the original usages.
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