Headhunting, Christianity, and History among the Bugkalot (Ilongot) of Northern Luzon, Philippines

Recent studies describe Southeast Asian headhunting traditions as mediating historical memory and the shifting patterns of dominance and subordination in local and national politics. This article shares these concerns, but differs in its focus on headhunting in the context of conversion to Christianity among the Bugkalot, or Ilongot, through the influence of the New Tribes Mission since the 1950s. Anthropologists, missionaries, and converts view headhunting and Christianity in oppositional and mutually exclusive terms, but this article suggests that their relationship is far more complex, entangled, and ambiguous. In their encounter with the New People's Army in the late 1980s, Christianity provided the Bugkalot a metanarrative of change, even as their relationship to the state was altered.