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Acknowledgments 1. The Last of the Shamans, Gédéon Programmes Production, distributed by Europe Images International, 1 Rond Point Victor Hugo, 92130 Issy-les-Moulineaux, France. anne.littardi@europeimages.com. This 56-minute feature was released in 1998. Introduction 1. As opposed to what I call the central highland area, a definitely more mountainous habitat (between 500 m and 800 m in elevation). 2. Names of famous shamans having lived one to three generations ago in southern Palawan. 3. In May 2001 I checked with an informant from the Mekagwaq area on possible cases of suicide in this area and found seven cases, all male, over the past ten years. Apparently there has been an increase in the number of suicides in recent years, but reaching a definitely much lower rate than in Kulbi. Chapter 1. The Kulbi-Kenipaqan River Basin and Its People 1. Various other fancy ethnonyms can be found in the literature, like Palawano, Palawanun, Palawanin, Pinalawan, etc. 2. I have arrived at the higher figure by multiplying the number of river valleys on both coasts by an estimated average number of people in each. E. Brown (in Eder and Fernandez 1996, 99) questions the figure of 60,000 given earlier by Revel-Macdonald but does not suggest any other estimate and provides no reliable figure of her own. The 1995 census of the National Office of Statistics gives 633,584 as the total population of the province of Palawan, 6.10% of which are Palawan natives, thus bringing their number to 38,648. This figure is probably inaccurate and underestimates the real number of the total Palawan population. The 1995 census puts the Palawan population of the five municipalities where they live (Bataraza, Brooke’s Point, Quezon, Rizal, and Espanola) at 36,006—according to percentages given in the census. If one applies the 1995 percentages to the 2000 census, the total Palawan population of these five municipalities comes to 43,949. 3. Foreign visitors are frequently asked, “And in your country, are there any Palawan people?” This could point to the concept of “Palawan-ness” as being mainly defined by a way of life shared by upland-shifting agriculturists everywhere in the world. 269 Notes 4. Some items of dialectal variation were used to name other groups, hence the name Kinarawa applied to people who used the morpheme karawa (instead of kaja or kara). The ethnonym Keney found in the literature originates from the pronoun ke and the interrogative particle nej, or possibly the adverb ne plus -i, as in “Ambe ke nej?” (“Where are you [going]” or “Where are you now [going]?”) This linguistic trait of the upland people from around Mount Mantalingajan was found so distinctive that it was presented to visitors as the name of an upland people and gave rise to the belief that the so-called Keney were a distinct tribe. Other ethnonyms or quasi-ethnonyms like Tau’t Deram (People of Many), Tau’t Ljew (People from the Other Side), or Tau’t Batu or Taw Batu (People from the Rocks) had a more or less successful career. 5. The use of the ethnographic present is somewhat questionable as many communities blend into the mainstream Christian lowland culture and as departures from the common ancestral rules become more numerous. Even in places like Kulbi and Punang, where intermarriages become more numerous and the influence of immediate Christian and Muslim neighbors is more pressing, most of these rules still apply. Among the many new trends I noticed in recent periods of fieldwork (2001–2002), one is a transformation in the kinship vocabulary, with, for example, the English-derived word for “uncle” (ungkel) replacing the kin term maman. 6. Most notably in the Singnapan Valley and Kandawaga Valley on the west coast (Macdonald and de Vallombreuse 1994). 7. Actually Whitehead was stranded, and he lived in a Chinese store, an excellent vantage point to observe the nexus of commercial dealings between the Muslim traders and the indigenous people. 8. The last category, that of the “wildest” kind of natives, did reflect the existence of groups living—as some still do today—in the more remote valleys of the central mountain range, at an elevation of 500 meters and above. Such upland-dwelling groups are absent from the Kulbi-Kenipaqan area, except for a few scattered families. 9. Barangay (or balangay) is a Tagalog word meaning “community, group, crew (in a boat)” (English 1986). The...

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