A Living Shamanistic Oral Tradition:

The most ancient genres of oral literature date back to the time when one ritual specialist performed the functions of epic singer, shaman, and priest. Once studied in Siberia and Central Asia, these ancient forms are better preserved nowadays in insular Southeast Asia (Stanyukovich forthcoming). The Ifugao hudhud oral tradition, which I have been studying for the last two decades, is the core of ritual and ideology among highlanders of Northern Luzon, Philippines. The Ifugao are wet-rice cultivators who until the early twentieth century practiced headhunting, preserving their traditional society with no political and very loose territorial organization. The hudhud meets all the standards typical of heroic epic patterns, including plot structure and formulaic style (Stanyukovich 1983). At the same time it is a highly archaic combination of heroic epics and shamanistic narratives. The hudhud characters are regarded as ancestors and incorporated into the male pantheon as part of the Hulupe class o