Songs and gifts at the colonial frontier: The aesthetics of Agusan Manobo spirit-possession ritual, Philippines

This is a study of music in the context of exchange and reciprocity—broadly encompassing what have been conventionally subsumed in Western discourse as the “economic” and the “expressive” (or the “arts”). It is a long narrative about cross-cultural, social relations between the Agusanen Manobos—descendants of the original inhabitants of middle Agusan Valley—and the Visayan immigrants who have settled into the research area in massive numbers since the 1950s. This “invading” local immigration came after the rainforests had been cleared between 1950s–1990s, displacing the aboriginal Manobo culture to assume the status of “refugees” in the present. In this work, I will examine the ethnographic context of “traditional” Manobo unaccompanied song (ted-em) and the aesthetics of ritual seance in which such expressive is enacted. This project will therefore investigate the contexts of a changing Manobo mythological thought about exchange and reciprocity and explore how this thought has adapted to a changing material reality. I will argue that this reality finds concrete and immediate articulations in expressive behavior, particularly in contemporary interpersonal meetings where such exchanges take place among families, kindreds, and even with close and distant Visayan neighbors. These exchanges are not just about performing formalized sociability, communicative routines of politeness which thus reproduce the proper decorum of meeting strangers such as spirits and guests in ritual and everyday life, but these exchanges, more importantly, speak about how social relationships are negotiated, how Manobo persons and group subjectivities are defined, and how agencies are expressed despite the historical-material, unequal reality that the cross-cultural confrontation between Manobos and Visayans has entailed