Kankanaey Erotic

Ask a Kankanaey where they are from and the answer tends to be a town on a mountainside: Sagada, Besao, Mankayan, Buguias. They are one of the Igorot peoples of the Cordillera Central in northern Luzon. They are highlanders who stayed largely outside the colonial order Spain built on the lowland coast, and they still set themselves apart from their Ilocano neighbors below by language, ritual obligation and a long habit of holding their ground. Their country spans western Mountain Province and northern Benguet and reaches into the uplands of Ilocos Sur and La Union. It splits into two broad divisions. The northern Kankanaey, often called Applai, work stone-walled rice terraces among the pine ridges around Sagada and Besao. The southern Kankanaey of Benguet have turned much of their steep ground over to vegetables, and the cabbages, carrots and potatoes trucked out of Buguias stock markets across Luzon. Mankayan sits on gold and copper that local miners were working before the Spanish came looking for it, and communities have fought the large commercial mining that followed for decades. The Kankanaey language belongs to the Cordilleran branch of the Philippine languages and is a close relative of Bontoc. Its northern and southern forms differ enough that linguists often count them separately. Most speakers also use Ilocano, the trade language of the north, along with Filipino and English.

Kankanaey religion is layered rather than replaced. American Episcopal missionaries reached Sagada in 1904, and the Anglican church is still a fixture of town life there, with Catholic and Protestant congregations across the rest of the homeland. Even so, animals are still offered during begnas and the other community rites that follow the farming calendar. In many northern villages the dap-ay, a stone-paved gathering place where elder men deliberate and hold ceremonies, still matters in village life. Death customs are usually what outsiders notice first. Around Sagada the dead were traditionally seated upright on a wooden chair through a long wake, then laid to rest in coffins stacked inside limestone caves or fastened to cliff faces. The practice has thinned but not vanished, and the hanging coffins of Echo Valley now draw a steady stream of tourists that the town manages through local guides. Quieter traditions are easy to find once you look: etag, salt-cured smoked pork saved for feasts, flat gangsa gongs played at celebrations, and cloth woven in red, black and white that comes out for special occasions.