Ifugao people

“ Why might their ancestors or those of others not have lived in such in ages past and left evidences of an earlier culture? Many Ifugao burials are in sepulchres on mountain sides and the practise is no doubt very old. Places like these and those of rock shelters in other lands have given fruitful results and might they not in these islands?6 I am having a pleasant time with these people. They are the wildest of any people that I have yet come across in Luzon. But like all wild people, they are cordial and hospitable. ”

“ These second Malay immigrants undoubtedly gained the principal part of their livelihood from agriculture, for which they needed little land. Why, then, is it hypothesized that any immigration drove another to the mountains? My own belief is that the first immigrants went to the mountains of their own volition for the reason that they had been a mountain people and a terrace-building people in their former home.
2 I use the word “district” to denote the inhabitants of one of the many smaller culture sections into which the habitat of the Ifugaos is divided. ”

“ The Spaniards punished these reprisals by making an expedition to Nagakaran in which they came off second best.7 They sent another and stronger expedition, which killed a number of people and which burned all the houses in the district. To this day the Nagakaran people have not been able to rebuild their houses—the large trees having long since been cut from nearby forests—and live in wretched shacks built on the ground. They blame the Kiangan people, saying that the latter invited the Spaniards into Ifugao. ”

“ These people have, until within a short time, made human sacrifices in order to propitiate their divinities. They live in Mindanao, near the Gulf of Davao.
“In order to prove that I endeavoured to make the proper investigation for the purpose of proving whether slavery really existed in this province, I have the honour to annex an affidavit by Agapito Telan, a resident of Ilagan, in which it appears that he sold Igorrotes of the Ifugao tribe to several residents of this town. ”

“ With the transfer of the Ifugao territory to the Mountain Province, the Filipinos were left in the decided majority. Later all of the Ilongot territory which had previously belonged to the provinces of Isabela, Tayabas, Nueva Ecija and Pangasinán was added to Nueva Vizcaya, in order that the members of this wild and primitive tribe might be brought under one provincial administration.
The Ilongots are a strictly forest-inhabiting people. Many of them have a considerable admixture of Negrito blood and live a semi-nomadic life. ”

“ Through countless generations the Ifugao who has survived and prospered has been the one who has carried his point, indeed, but has carried it without involving himself in serious trouble with his fellows. ”

“ His religion seems to be far more highly developed than that of the other non-Christian tribes.
Attempts made by Spain to colonize the Ifugao in the lowlands invariably met with failure. The Ifugao is a hillman, and loves his hills. He is of an independent nature and cannot stand confinement. A great many prisoners jailed by American officials have courted death rather than endure incarceration.
While there are well defined tribal divisions that mark off the various mountain-Malay populations of northern Luzon, the cultures of all of the tribes are basically similar. ”

“ Although the Ifugaos say that adultery and theft and arson are tabooed, nevertheless their attitude of mind is not the same as that toward things that are merely tabooed. It is the attitude of [14] the human mind toward things that are prohibited by law and by conscience.
2. Scope of customary law.—The customary law embraces that which pertains to property, inheritance, water rights, and to a great extent, family law and procedure. There is a certain amount of variation in customs and taboos throughout Ifugao land. ”

“ Lepanto Igorots, 35,000; total, nearly a quarter million. All these tribes inhabit the mountain ranges of the northern third of the island.
The habitat of the Ifugaos is situated in about the center of the area inhabited by the non-Christian tribes. In point of travel-time, [9] as we say in the Philippines, for one equipped with the usual amount of baggage, Ifugao-land is about as far from Manila as New York from Constantinople. To the northeast are the Wild Gaddan, to the north the Bontoc Igorot, to the northwest, west, and southwest the Lepanto and Benguet Igorots ”

“ Knowing that we were going to Mayoyao, some Ifugaos from that town had joined our party for protection. A delegation of Sili Kalingas waited on us during the lunch hour and politely asked to be allowed to take the heads of these Ifugaos, saying that they needed some fresh heads, and that it would save a lot of trouble if they could have these, so providentially brought to them by their respective owners. I explained to them that we really needed the Ifugaos, and they politely waived their claim to them in our favour!
Ifugao Constabulary Soldiers.
These men are brave, efficient, and loyal. ”

“ They are divided into a large number of hereditary clans, each of which has its own social and political organization. They are an agricultural people, and have developed their great stone-faced terraced rice fields to an extent probably not equaled elsewhere in the world. I do not believe that the physical type, language, or culture of these people is wholly a native development. The evidence seems to indicate that the present-day Ifugaos are the result of mixture, perhaps one or more thousand years ago, of several widely different native types with an incoming people of high culture. ”

“ In the process of dividing, the family unity—which is the dearest and most necessary thing in Ifugao society—would probably be destroyed by quarrels and squabbles. Even if an equitable division could be arranged, a great deal of the field would be taken up in dikes and division lines. It is a rare thing to find an Ifugao rice field as large as one acre in extent. ”

“ In Kiangan, before the establishment of foreign government, breaking the taboo in the presence of another and his female kin of the forbidden degrees is said to have been sometimes punished by the lance (see sec. 123) .
It is taboo for one who knows of a man’s death to ask a relative of the dead man if the man is dead. The breaking of this taboo is punishable by fine.
If asked, Ifugaos say that it is taboo to steal; to burn or destroy the property of another; to insult, or ruin the good name of another; to cause the death or injury of another by sorcery or witchcraft ”

“ We think of them as primitive people, but their history is more complex than our own. However, we are speaking of heads. Heads have always been of the greatest religious importance to the Ifugaos. They have been head-hunters for religious and economic reasons for centuries. First America, and then the Republic of the Philippines tried to stamp out the custom. ”

“ Usually both sexes sleep together in these dormitories. Naturally, too, there is a great deal of sexual intercourse each night, for sexual intercourse takes the same place among the Ifugaos that embraces and kisses do in the courtship of some other peoples. The nature of the female human being, says the Ifugao, is to resist the advances of the male. He naïvely points out that the hens, the cows, and, in fact, the females of any species resist the male in this respect, notwithstanding they may be quite as anxious for the sexual act as the male himself. ”

“ The Ifugaos, who bear a strong resemblance to the Japanese, inhabit a territory in central Nueva Vizcaya, and in the south of Isabela, mostly between the River Magat and the Rio Grande, but they have a great many hamlets on the left bank of the Magat. They cultivate rice, camote, and other crops, but prefer to live by robbery whenever possible. They are persistent head-hunters, frequently at war with the neighbouring tribes, or amongst themselves. ”

“ Most of the Ifugao’s myths have either been invented or if not invented, changed, for the purpose of affording an analogy to the solution of the difficulties or misfortunes that confront men today. The Ifugaos have a myth telling of a great flood, whose only survivors were a brother and sister—Balitok and Bugan. In chagrin and shame because her brother has gotten her with child, Bugan flees into the East Region to seek destruction from the terrors there. ”

“ Remember that in a country where a living must be eked from a tough, stony mountain-side with a wooden spade, the means to life handed down from the sweat of former generations is a thing as sacred, as it is precious.
Besides these considerations, there is the principle on which Ifugao society is based: The family exists principally for the youthful and future generations of it. ”

“ A rice field is a thing so dear to the Ifugao, and so necessary and useful to him, that such attempts are extremely likely, however, to come to naught.
If the matter be not arranged otherwise, the seizer of the field sends a body of men to spade it, holding in reserve an armed force of kinsmen and relatives to protect and maintain the spaders if they be attacked. The other party emerges with an armed force to drive the spaders away. The two parties meet. If one be greatly superior in strength, the other usually retires, and surrenders the field. ”

“ Here at Kiangan, the earring consists of a spiral of very fine brass wire.
It is pertinent to remark that the Ifugaos treat their women well; for example, the men do the heavy work, and there are no women cargadores. In fact, the sexes seemed to me to be on terms of perfect equality. The people in general appeared to be cheerful, good-humored, and hospitable. ”

“ Powerful individuals in a district are rather glad to have a seizure made of their property, since they can nearly always manage to come out winner in the finish. Thus in the case above, B, if a powerful individual, probably collects two or even three carabaos or their equivalent value from C, and besides he receives thirty pesos patang. It would seem that the obligation rests on every Ifugao—notwithstanding there is no political government—so to conduct himself as not to involve his neighbors in trouble with individuals of inimical or semi-inimical districts ”

“ Obligations of father to bastard child.—The father of a bastard must give his child a rice field if he has a field unassigned. He must also give the mother an oban, or blanket, with which to carry the child after the Ifugao fashion on her back. The value of this gift is principally in its constituting a formal recognition of the child.
The mother’s rights are enforced by her kin. To a certain extent the same is true of the bastard’s rights. A man is never forced to marry a woman against his will—an Ifugao woman would be ashamed to ask such a thing. Such a marriage, too, would not be congenial. ”

“ The price that a child brought his parents varied from five pigs to five carabaos. There was no difference in value between a male and a female child. A slave was most valuable at the age of eighteen or twenty. Some men were slave dealers, and carried great numbers of children to Nueva Vizcaya and Isabela. In those parts a slave was worth from five to twenty carabaos.
Among the Ifugao a slave was absolutely the property of his owner. ”

“ Were the crime a less disgraceful one, the father’s kin would probably contest his penalty.
The family unity must at all hazards be preserved. Clemency is shown the remoter kin in order to secure their loyalty to the family group. A large unified family group is in the ideal position of being “strong to demand and strong to resist demands.” The family is the only thing of the nature of an organization that the Ifugao has, and he cherishes it accordingly. ”

“ Had he not done so, some meat-hungry, hot-headed Ifugao might easily have stuck a bolo in his side during the scramble and its confusion; and immediately some five hundred or more Ifugaos would have been right on top of the carcase, hand-hacking at it with their long war-knives, and it would probably have been impossible ever to find out who gave the first thrust.
“The old men who had performed the feast, after things had quieted down somewhat, began scolding and cursing those who had run away with the meat. ”

“ Ifugao parents are singularly impartial in the allotment of the family property to their children. That some children are not loved more than others is unbelievable; but it is exceedingly rare that any child is favored above another in property settlements, except by the law of primogeniture. There is always a lot of talk in connection with the assignment or inheritance of family property—in the matter of [55] talk the Ifugao is not different from other Malays. ”

“ The Ifugao child, even at the age of ten or twelve, begins to look upon his parents’ property as his own, or at least that portion of it that will fall to his share. A little later, he becomes independent—he does not obey his parents unless he wants to do so. He is fully as likely to command them as to obey them. And the parent is under the obligation early to allow the children to displace him from his possession. He must turn over all his property to them as soon as they are able to marry or care for themselves. Should there be but a single field, he assigns it to his eldest. ”

“ The Ifugao has the remnant of a peculiar belief that a child may be begotten by two fathers. They say, for example, that if A and B, two men, are having sexual intercourse with a woman, Z, and that if it is settled by fate that A and B each shall beget a child of the male sex, Z will conceive and the child may be the son of both of them. But if A is fated to beget a female child, and B to beget a male child, the semen of the one undoes that of the other, and the woman does not conceive. ”