Songs and Gifts at the Frontier: Person and Exchange in the Agusan Manobo Possession Ritual, Philippines (review)

This ethnographic study focuses on performance genres of the Agusan Manobo, a highland people inhabiting the interior of Mindanao Island in the southern Philippines. While the Manobos of the Agusan Valley have conducted trade with outside groups for centuries, the encroachment of the logging industry into Manobo territory beginning in the 1950s radically transformed not only their natural surroundings (clearing large areas of rainforest) but also their way of life. In response to the influx of Visayan settlers from coastal regions-and the lifestyles and values brought with them-since the 1950s, many Manobos have abandoned swidden-based horticultural subsistence practices, settled permanently in towns, converted to Catholicism, and sought work as wage laborers.

Buenconsejo's monograph, then, is a detailed and often poignant account of people in an "out-of-the-way-place" (Tsing 1993) who confront the incursion of lowland settlers, capitalist markets, imported consumer goods, and their own subordinate status through musical and verbal performances that invoke supernatural beings. The author presents richly contextualized examples of these performance events, which range from myth-tellings to spirit possession rituals, and demonstrates how they draw upon an indigenous moral economy founded on reciprocity and mutual obligation rather than marketplace calculation and individual gain. Buenconsejo is careful not to characterize these performances as expressing "resistance" to Visayan domination but rather seeks to elucidate "how Manobo persons and group subjectivities are emergent across historical specificities and how agencies are envoiced despite the unequal political economy that the cross-cultural confrontation between Manobos and Visayans has entailed" (xiii).

Much of the book's text is taken up by detailed transcriptions and translations of Agusan Manobo songs and narrations recorded by Buenconsejo in the field. Buenconsejo describes the specific circumstances, real participants, and goals of these performances, several of which address him directly and comment upon his stated aim (frequently regarded with suspicion or disbelief ) of studying Manobo music and culture. Throughout the study Buenconsejo thus also reflects on his own subject position as an educated, "lowland" Christian Cebuano ethnically and linguistically related to the local Visayan settlers, and the impact this position had on his fieldwork encounters.

The book is divided into seven chapters. Chapter one, "The Rivers of Exchange," introduces the river town of Loreto, the study's main ethnographic setting, and outlines the town's and the surrounding region's long history of contact, trade, and conquest. The historical actors in this narrative include indigenous Manobos, lowland Visayans, Spanish Jesuits, and American soldiers; together their actions contributed to the development of "a highly syncretic colonial culture" (5) in the middle Agusan Valley. The chapter concludes with an account of the political economy and social topography of Loreto in the 1990s, detailing the various occupations, exchange networks, and leisure activities of its present multiethnic inhabitants.

Chapter two, "The Manobo Cosmos (Kalibutan)" departs radically from the chapter preceding it. This chapter consists primarily of structuralist analyses of three separate myth narratives (sugilen) performed by a Manobo storyteller. Through analyzing the content of these narratives, Buenconsejo introduces fundamental values of Manobo sociability, which include pity/compassion, reciprocity, and the mutual recognition of personhood. Central to the three myth narratives are spirits who interact with humans. The author writes, "Manobos' belief in these beings perpetuates the idea that the cosmos where human beings live is a place where they survive because human beings share and exchange gifts, not only with spirits, but among themselves" (32).

The following chapter, "The Diwata in the Pantheon of Manobo Supernatural Beings," sets the stage further for the performance analyses to follow. First, Buenconsejo describes the uneasy coexistence of spirit beliefs on the one hand and Christian piety on the other among town Manobos (including the local spirit mediums), characterizing their attitudes toward spirits (diwata) as continually oscillating between "commitment" and "disavowal" depending on the immediate context of...