Ilongot Erotic

The Ilongot call themselves Bugkalot, and for much of the twentieth century outsiders knew them for one thing: they were among the last people in the Philippines to take heads. That reputation has lasted about half a century longer than the practice itself. The Bugkalot are upland farmers and hunters in the forested ridges where the Sierra Madre meets the Caraballo Mountains, in the provinces of Nueva Vizcaya, Quirino and Aurora in northern Luzon. They are a small people who stayed in the hills while Spanish missions and American administrators came and went below them, and lowland settlers came and stayed.

Life runs on swidden fields cut from the forest and planted with rice and root crops. Hunting wild pig and deer with dogs and fishing the rivers add to it. Households gather in small settlements linked by kin groupings, and a husband has traditionally moved in with his wife's family. Their language, also called Ilongot or Bugkalot, belongs to the Northern Luzon branch of the Austronesian family. It is a separate language from the Ilocano and Tagalog spoken around them, so many people speak one or both of those as well.

Much of what outsiders know about Bugkalot inner life comes from the anthropologists Michelle and Renato Rosaldo, who lived among them in the late 1960s and 1970s. They described a moral vocabulary built around liget, a charged mix of energy, anger and passion, balanced by beya, the knowledge and restraint that come with age. Headhunting drew on both. Young men felt they had to take a head before they could settle into adulthood and marriage. Older men described the rage that comes with grief as a weight they could throw off only by killing someone and tossing the severed head away. A man who had killed earned the right to wear red hornbill earrings. Words mattered as much as violence: bridewealth and disputes were settled through formal oratory full of veiled, indirect speech.

Headhunting ended in the 1970s under two pressures at once. Martial law under Ferdinand Marcos brought the threat of the firing squad for anyone who took a head, and evangelical Protestant missions won a wave of converts. Renato Rosaldo later wrote that many turned to the new faith partly as another way to carry grief. Christianity now dominates, though older ideas about forest spirits and spoken spells for gardens and hunts have not disappeared. The bigger fights today are over land. Logging, settlers and development projects have pushed into Bugkalot forest, and communities have filed ancestral domain claims to protect what remains.