Ifugao Erotic

The Ifugao named themselves after the hills: i- for the people of, pugo for the high ground. They live in the Cordillera Central of northern Luzon, in a province that carries their name and in the valleys around it, and what identifies them most immediately is a piece of engineering. Terraced pond fields climb the mountainsides behind walls of stacked stone and packed clay, irrigated by channels drawn from woodlots called muyong that individual families own and tend above their fields. The forest holds the water, the water feeds the rice, and a household that neglects its trees loses its crop, which makes land tenure and watershed management the same decision. The terraces were long advertised as two thousand years old. Recent excavation around Kiangan suggests something more interesting: most of the wet rice terracing is a few centuries old and expanded quickly in the seventeenth century, as people moved upland and the Ifugao converted a defensible highland into a rice economy while Spanish garrisons below failed, repeatedly, to hold the mountains.

There is no single Ifugao language. Tuwali, Ayangan, Amganad, Batad and Mayoyao are close relatives inside the Cordilleran branch of Austronesian, intelligible to each other at the edges and not in the middle, which is roughly how Ifugao society ran: kin group by kin group, village by village, with no chief above them and disputes worked out through a mediator called the monkalun. Wealth was public and expensive. A kadangyan family earned its standing by hosting feasts, and the proof was the hagabi, a massive carved lounging bench hauled home from the forest by the whole community. Most Ifugao are Christian now, Catholic or Protestant, but the older religion did not vanish underneath it. Ethnographers recorded well over a thousand named deities and ancestral spirits; mumbaki priests still recite for harvests, illness and funerals, and carved bulul figures stand in granaries as guardians of the rice, fed with blood and rice wine. The hudhud, a long chanted epic led by one voice and answered in chorus, belongs to harvest, to wakes, and to bogwa, the exhumation and rewrapping of a relative's bones years after burial. General Yamashita surrendered at Kiangan in September 1945. The pressure now is quieter: young people leave for Manila and for work overseas, terraces go untended, and the ones that remain are photographed by everyone who comes to Banaue.