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91 4 The Spiritual World of the Kulbi People Is There a Palawan Religion? In this chapter I shall discuss matters that are usually considered part of what is called “religion.” In the Palawan language the word for “religion,” egama, is of Sanskrit origin and should probably be considered a foreign notion applying to world religions, like Islam and Christianity, and ill adapted to belief systems of the kind discussed here. When asked about their beliefs and ritual practices, people prefer to speak of customs handed down by their ancestors (adat et kegurangurangan ). By so doing they merge all sorts of habits and notions that in a Western sense have no religious meaning—for instance, rules of etiquette or judicial matters. To describe the spiritual world of a culture such as the Palawan, there are actually many reasons to use the word “religion” with great caution. The complex and integrated belief systems known as “religions” in the sense of organized religions with their fixed codes of ethics, theodicy, and eschatology, not to mention a clergy structured like a bureaucracy, simply have no equivalent among people like the traditional inhabitants of the Kulbi-Kenpipaqan area. In a true sense, then, there is no Palawan “religion.” For one, beliefs may vary tremendously from one person to another, and there is little or no dogmatic unity, no canon to speak of. A list containing names and identities of spiritual beings taken from one informant rarely matches exactly the list given by another. Ritual practices pertaining to healing, the formulas and prayers used when curing someone, differ from one healer to another. Conflicting answers will be given to the question of the exact number of “souls” (kurudwa) that each person possesses. Speaking of the ritual specialist, the beljan, one should also be warned against comparing it to the concept of “priest,” borrowed likewise from organized religions . The beljan is not a sacred person having a superior status; his calling as 91 92 part one: pal awan culture and societ y a healer does not entail a regular salary or full-time activity. Actually, there is an interesting detail concerning the use of “beljan.” During my investigations, when I asked someone who had been referred to me as beljan if indeed he was a beljan, the answer was almost always “no.” The reason is that the word suggests the notion of “expert in matters of the unseen,” “religious virtuoso” in the Weberian sense, a certain sense of superiority and mastery. Thus it is out of shyness and a fear of being boastful that healers and experts in ritual matters refuse to call themselves beljan, in the same way Westerners might avoid using, out of modesty, the title of “Master.” In Palawan society, moreover, everybody is a healer in some way; everybody knows something about the plants that cure and the prayers that restore health. The very idea of a “priest” as it is used in the Catholic Church, for instance, is absolutely irrelevant when applied to the Palawan beljan. The Western idea of religion is also associated with the concept of “faith,” which I find difficult to use in the Palawan context. People believe in a certain number of propositions—for instance, there are divinities, a Supreme Being called Empuq, “the Lord,” creatures living in the forest, recipes and powers harnessed by shamans to heal people, and so on—but not in the sense associated with what the West would call “faith.” I find equally difficult, if not downright improper, the use of the concept of “sacred” even in its strictly Durkheimian sense of “separated” and “forbidden.” Kindred notions, like the mystical, the numinous, the ecstatic, and so forth, do seem irrelevant also, at least concerning the culture studied in these pages. For instance, a number of elements that the West regards as core aspects of any religion, such as myths explaining the origin of the world, have no religious meaning in the Palawan context and carry no “sacred” value, nor, again, do they entail any position of “faith.” For the Palawan people, myths are not true stories coming from the ancestors, but simply stories that were in truth told by the ancestors, and not invented by the present narrator (see Macdonald 1988a). The concept and reality of death is another aspect of the spiritual life of people in general that is the object of religious attention. I discuss it here and and later in this chapter because it bears on...

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