Abstract

This article is based on oral history interviewing and fieldwork in San Mariano, Isabela in 2004, following in the footsteps of 19th century naturalist Carl Semper and William Henry Scott, who visited the area in 1975 and described some aspects of the culture and rituals of a group they called Catalangan. At the time of our research, they were referred to as Catalangan and Kalinga, and had discontinued the ritual cycle. We argue that conversion to Christianity among these groups post WWII should be understood as a political process, whereby groups outside the mainstream of lowland culture and political institutions become integrated into Filipino society. In our research, we focused on reconstructing the rituals these groups used to conduct through repeated conversations with elders, and the particulars of the process of conversion. This brought to light the mechanisms through which Indigenous peoples’ own ways of life became devalued, and lowland Filipino culture became the standard to aspire to. Christianization, in this analysis, is both a cultural and a political process. The dynamics of this process originate in Spanish colonialism and are linked to changes in livelihood, notions of landownership and land use. Distinctions first introduced by the Spanish, between Christians and non-Christians (Infieles), still reverberate in contemporary Filipino culture, and overlap with binaries such as ‘uncivilized’ and ‘civilized’ linked to the global persistence of coloniality. Finally, as we show towards the end of the article, the process of conversion is linked to another type of ‘conversion’ introduced by capitalism: from subsistence-based swidden farming (kaingin) to cash crop farming and the spirals of debt and loss of land this often entails.

Keywords: Indigenous Peoples, Northern Sierra Madre, Ritual change, Conversion to Christianity

DOI: https://doi.org/10.64743/FLWN5938