Batawa: Constructing Identity through Country Music in the Philippine Cordillera

Media representations of the Philippine indigenous people Igorot continue to exoticize and freeze them in an ideal, primitive past. This paper foregrounds certain cultural products now being produced by the Igorot using modern technology and media. In these self-conscious products, where they exercise agency, how are they representing themselves? In such songs where they use their own languages, they construct who they are and what they have become. Using mostly American folk, rock and country melodies, they tell stories of how they are making sense of their experiences in an unevenly globalizing, runaway world