The Passion Event: Time, Aesthetics
and Perspectives in Ifugao Sacrificial
Rituals
Paper presented at Bergen Seminars in Social Anthropology, November 5 2014
Introduction: ‘The passion event’
One evening, the square in front of the municipal hall of the small highland VILLAGE OF
BANAUE was filled with row upon row of plastic chairs. Several women, men and children
had occupied some of them, while others had sought shelter from the light drizzling rain in the
door openings of the shops aligning the street. Earlier that day, many of them had paraded
through the street from the upper part of the village down to the village square. The prospect
of things to happen had drawn people from afar, and I too had been summoned. This was
something I should experience, I had been assured by Belen, a woman working as a pastor in
one of the Pentecostal congregations that had arranged the event.
A large white film screen had been tied to the municipal hall, and we could soon
watch what was, according to Belen, horrible things, pure suffering as it were or the ‘ultimate
sacrifice’ (Blanes 2013, 422). The film that had been put up to show was no less than Mel
Gibson’s THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST which depicts the final hours of the life of Jesus
Christ, his suffering and crucifixion, with – to some critics at least – excessive imaging of
explicit violence. It did not take long before Belen began shaking her head and trembling
slightly. As I glanced towards her, I could see tears running from her eyes, and her lips kept
1
moving, emitting what I recognized as her form of praying. She was clearly into the film, but
managed to turn towards me and told me comfortingly, ‘if you can’t take it, it’s OK’.
This was surely making an impact, and the passion story depicted on the screen in
front of us seemed no longer a story from a distant time and place. Its forces were here and
now, in the present, and for many of the people there, it would hopefully have the desired
effect of redirecting the lines of flight followed by the forces at work in this society. As I will
argue in this paper, the screening of the Passion of the Christ film was no ordinary ‘movie
night’. It was rather a ritualized film screening that attempted to enter into the generative
forces of the world, shaping, diverting, and re-directing what was a society held to have gone
astray, as it were.
I will make that argument by an analysis of Ifugao ritual practices that focuses on their
ontologial effects and particularly how rituals are ways of entering into a particular virtual
space-time from which actualizations of new or different relations and separations between
entities may emerge. I do that by drawing on Bergsonian notions of time and Deleuzian
cinema theory and by looking into how the combination of various aesthetic practices is
conducive to engendering transformations in the state of being of entities. I will suggest that
an understanding of the virtuality and temporality of Ifugao rituals challenges us to rethink
certain assumptions regarding time, transformation and conversion also within the
anthropology of Christianity and that it opens up for understanding what we, by drawing on
the work of people like Isabell Stengers and Marisol de la Cadena, could call the
‘cosmopolitical’ qualities of events like this.
The actualities of the rally
To situate this event, let me say a few words about the state of affairs in this Ifugao society.
Ifugao is a PROVINCE OF THE PHILIPPINES situated in the Cordillera Mountains
in the Northern part of Luzon. The Ifugao who populate this province number about 160 000
2
and inhabit villages spread around in the steep mountainous landscape, some connected to the
main tarmacked road running through the province, but many only accessible by dirt roads or
by foot paths. In these more remote villages, wet-rice cultivation in the age-old extensive
system of irrigated rice terraces combined with swidden horticulture in gardens situated high
up in the surrounding escarpments is the main occupation. Villages situated along the road are
more accessible and have consequently drawn a significant number of international and
national tourists who come to enjoy the view of the terraces and the experience of what is
known nationally as a culture of former headhunters. Although the Catholic Church is present
in the area and has been so for quite some time, the area is also known as a stronghold for
traditional animistic and ancestor oriented practices characterized by rituals in which spirits of
various sorts are invited to come to the house where the ritual is held to receive offerings like
chickens, cloths, money, spears and most importantly pigs. During the latest twenty years or
so, various Pentecostal congregations have slowly gained converts here, and it was these who
had arranged the film screening that rainy evening. As I will get back to, the Pentecostals tend
to shy away from any situation that involves the actualization of the spirits – which they see
as demons – and this form of counteractualization often take the form of the enactment of a
different space-time than what is done in the animistic practices. I mention this only briefly
here to point towards the temporal aspects of the encounter between Pentecostalism and the
spirit oriented practices, a temporality that I wish to look closer at towards the end of this
article.
Now, the DRIZZLING RAIN that some people sought coverage from that evening
was, if anything, certainly untimely. This was the dry season, but the latest years the dry
season had delayed its arrival for a few more weeks every year, and this year, it seemed to
have missed out altogether. For many of the villagers these climate changes were detrimental
since the never-ending precipitation severely threatened their rice harvest. For those others
3
who were in one way or another involved in the tourist industry, either as lodge owner,
woodcarvers or trekking guides, the bad weather kept their source of income away. The few
roads leading in and out of the village were frequently closed due to landslides, and the heavy
clouds and fog hindered the few tourists who found their way there to enjoy the view. But the
weather had more shattering implications than that. During a torrential rainstorm, a big
landslide had submerged two houses, killing two families, nine persons in total.
In addition to this terrible disaster, several other unexpected deaths had occurred. In a
period of about one month, five people in the village had died of suspicious causes. Two of
these were murders, both a result of a predictably unfortunate combination of excessive gin
drinking, gun fighting and encounters between opponents in decades old family feuds.
Rumors of impending revenge swirled, and the pastor of my ‘home church’ had to rush to the
house of one of the perpetrators to perform a deliverance ritual, thus forestalling the revenge
avoidance rituals offered by the traditional ritual experts.
According to many of the villagers, all these deaths and climatic problems
demonstrated that the state of things in the village were not as they should be. A part of this
negative turn of events was also the fact that many of the rice terraces of the valley had now
began to collapse. What previously used to be a valley known for its IMMACULATELY
MAINTAINED RICE terraces was deteriorating. With the tomona’’s receding influence, the
terraces were no longer being planted according to schedule, and rice production in Ifugao
had become increasingly unpredictable and unproductive. All this threatened the continued
existence of the rice terraces since they demanded constant usage in order to be productive,
and with no rice terraces, who knew what the future would bring.
What has this got to do with the screening of the Passion of the Christ? Well, the film
screening was the end point of a form of action taken as a joint effort by the various Protestant
congregations in the village. Despite all the friction between them, they had united in the
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attempt to interfere in the frightful future towards which their village was headed, which was
according to them nothing but the frightening End-time.
The municipal elections were approaching AND POSTERS OF POLITICAL
CANDIDATES seemed to fill every lamp post and house wall in the village. The members of
the congregations had attempted to convince the mayor that something needed to be done, but
with no success. He was of the opinion that the village had benefitted greatly by his rule,
pointing for instance to the steps the village had taken towards modernity by the newly
introduced ban on spitting the red saliva from betel nut chewing in public places. The
diverging views on the village’s developmental direction had thereby forced the
congregations to join forces for arranging the so-called ‘Banaue Great Awakening and Gospel
Concert’. Referring to it as the ‘prayer rally’, the participants would draw upon the forces of
God to interfere and redirect the society in which they were living. The prayer rally had
started in the early afternoon with the aforementioned parade, followed by an outdoor Service
in the square and now, in the evening, the screening of the Passion of the Christ film.
It might have been a series of coincidences that led to the screening of this particular
film, but the passion story has actually played a central role in Philippine political history
since Spanish colonization. Reynaldo Ileto for instance writes about how the passion story,
the Pasyon, implicitly inculcated the popular peasant uprisings against Spanish occupation in
the late 1800s. He argues that the narration of Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection
‘provided powerful images of transition from one state (…) to another,’ (Ileto 1989, 14) e.g.
darkness to light, despair to hope, death to life and so on, and that the powerful
suberversiveness of these images of transition was drawn upon for mustering support among
the masses1.
1
In a more contemporary context, Fenella Cannell shows how reading the pasyon is understood by the
Bicolanos (southern Luzon) as the act of giving a gift, directed not to the Church but to the local cult
figure Ama Hinulid, ‘the dead Christ’, who is able to mediate between the visible world of living
humans and the invisible world of darkness and death (Cannell 2006).
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As mentioned, also in Ifugao, the screening of the passion story had an evident
political side. After much negotiation, the mayor had reluctantly permitted them to arrange the
prayer rally. Allegedly, he was worried that the rally would reflect negatively on his abilities
to solve the problems by political means. Several of the leaders of the different congregations
were campaigning for office, also for mayorship, so the mayor stood a lot to lose and others a
lot to gain. As an official guest, the mayor had to show up, but when he did, he arrived a bit
late of course and with disdain written all over him. While all other speakers and singers had
dressed up in the formal white silk shirt known as barong tagalog, the mayor showed up in
jeans and denim jacket, clearly breaking with his usual formal attire, and clearly showing
disrespect for the rally.
This event could, then, clearly be analyzed in terms of pragmatic or realist politics,
thus demonstrating the contemporary forms of religio-political entanglements in the region.
However, as has been pointed out by Mario Blaser (2009) and Marisol de la Cadena (2010)
for instance, politics may also be about how entities are brought into being, how they are
transformed and who are allowed to take part in politics. In this particular case, the event
could be approached as a form of ‘cosmo-political’ event, an event that deals with the
constitutive forces of cosmos and which, through the intervention in both the emergence and
extinguishment of entities within this cosmos, is also deeply political. Raymond Ileto refers in
fact to this aspect of the pasyon as he points to how the political subversiveness of the pasyon
reading was indeed due to its direct access to and intervention in the flow and transition of
forces deemed to have effect on the state of things in the here-and-now.
I will attempt to use these ideas about the ontological effects of the passion rituals as
an entrance point into exploring how also other Ifugao rituals could be understood as such
interventions as they, by various aesthetic means, effectuate a temporary convergence of
spatial and temporal differentiations and by that allow the reshuffling of temporal and spatial
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differentiations, for instance by making past into future and future into past. To do that
properly, I will need to give you some basic data about my field site and the people I have
been working with there.
Human-spirit relations
The Ifugao share their world with numerous kinds of ‘other-than-human beings’ (de la
Cadena 2010), which I refer to here for the sake of brevity as spirits. These include ancestor
spirits, nun’apuh, place specific pinādeng spirits, and a host of other spirits associated with
meteorological phenomena, particular illnesses, protection spirits and a large number of
various mythical characters.
Ifugao human-spirit relations have much in common with Descola’s (2013) definition
of animism as an ontology in which humans and spirits have a shared interiority and a
different exteriority. What unites humans and spirits is the lennāwa, a most tricky form of
concept which sometimes refers to a general life force, sometimes to a form of soul substance,
and sometimes even to consciousness as such2.
Both spirits and humans have lennāwa. Both also have bodies, odol, but for humans
the body of spirits is normally invisible. It is the lennāwa-odol relationship that defines what
kind of life form the lennāwa takes. The lennāwa of humans may leave the body and thereby
engage in a shared world with the spirits, which occurs for instance when one dreams. One
then often encounters other lennāwa and other spirits. This common interiority entails that
there is a potential for a shared social field between humans and spirits.
However, spirits may fluctuate between potential and manifest states of becoming. In
much everyday life, humans do not interact with spirits, but occasionally spirits make
themselves known, they make themselves manifest by taking on bodies different than their
2
It has thus a lot in common with the Chewong ‘ruwai’ for those who knows Signe’s work.
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own, or by showing themselves for humans in dreams. The shared sociality between humans
and spirits is thus only a potential that is sometimes and in some contexts realized.
The manifestation of spirits is for humans a hazardous affair. On the one hand, for
human to have health and live well, including having successful yields in the rice fields, the
spirits have to be satisfied. They need to be taken care of and the need to be given whatever
they wish for. When people die and are turned into ancestor spirits, the BONES OF THE
DEAD are stored in burial caves where they must be kept dry and clean and exhumed for a
secondary burial. One must also follow the traditional conduct for living – like maintaining
and rebuilding destroyed rice terraces and observing taboos for instance – for them to be
satisfied. And from time to time the spirits have to be invited to receive offerings.
I will come back to a more elaborate description of these rituals later, but basically
what happens is that a group of experts call the spirits to come to the house and give them
chickens, pigs or other forms of offerings to propitiate them or to exchange lennāwa with
them. These experts are called mumbā’i and are men who have trained secretly for years to
learn all the names of spirits, their associated chants and myths and have received
authorization by these spirits to conduct rituals.
THE MUMBĀ’I get the spirits to come to the house and thus effectuate a
transformation of the spirits from a potential to a manifest state of being. However, such
manifestations of spirits are potentially harmful to humans. With the presence of spirits within
the human domain, there is always the risk of that the spirits lure with them the lennāwa of
humans and thus enforce a life threatening separation of lennāwa and odol. The rituals must
therefore be controlled and restricted in time and place. A whole array of rules and regulations
concerning the temporal and spatial organization of the rituals must be followed and
subsequent to the rituals taboos must be observed. The vital conjunction of humans and spirits
that needs to take place for life to be sustained is potentially lethal and this is the source of
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what I call the ontological dynamics of Ifugao rituals. Spirits fluctuate between different
states of becoming, and they need to do so. A complete realization of the potential for a
common social field of humans and spirits is dangerous. So is the complete potentialization of
it.
I approach therefore Ifugao human-spirit relations as a dynamic and shifting field of
sociality in which humans, animals, and spirits move in and out of this sociality according to
how they are enacted in practice. This transformational character is not restricted to spirits,
however. The slippery character of the lennāwa-body relation means that for humans to
remain manifest human beings they must engage in constant efforts at stabilizing their human
becoming. There is, however, always the potential for becoming Other, for losing one’s
lennāwa and eventual becoming a nun’apuh, an ancestor spirit. I have therefore in my work
attempted to approach Ifugao ontology as a fundamentally shifting field of unfolding relations
with effects in terms of the state of being of the entities involved. Both humans and spirits can
be understood as assemblages that come into being and transform through particular relational
practices.
Perspective differences
I should also add here that the notion of perspective differences is quite important in humanspirits relations in Ifugao. Humans and spirits basically perceive the world the same way, but
the worlds that they see are different. For instance, what humans see as wild pigs and rats, the
pinādeng spirits see as domestic pigs and domestic chickens. And spirits can see human
beings as prey.
The notion of lennāwa is what potentially unites the different perspectives. It is by
being attached to the human body that the human perspective emerges. The dissipation of this
relation – as occurs in dreaming and illnesses – entails also perspective changes. Maintaining
a human perspective is important for the sustainment of life for humans and is done by
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enacting relations with other humans and spirits in such a way that they do not threaten the
lennāwa-body relation.
Enacting perspective differences to other-than-human beings is therefore vital for
sustaining life. A chance encounter with a spirit will however always entail a temporary
sharing of a common perception of the world, a form of what Michael Carrithers calls
‘consensibility’, which carries with it a risk for the human being of becoming overpowered by
the perspective of the Other. Such a perspective transformation would have bodily
consequences, and is experienced as illness, the drying out of the body, and in some cases
impotence. Various ritual and everyday techniques are applied in order counteract such
perspective transformations. Carrying a piece of ginger on one’s body is one example. This
makes it harder for spirits to smell humans. One can also HANG A PARTICULAR
PROTECTIVE PLANT over one’s ear in order to avoid hearing the voice of spirits. In both
cases, we see that Ifugao perspectivism is very much a multisensorial one in which not only
vision, but also the olfactory and auditory senses play a crucial role as well. As I argue in a
forthcoming article in the Norwegian Journal of Anthropology, the world constituting
perspectives are located in different forms of aisthesis, that is sensory perceptions of the
world, and as we shall see, these sensorial differences are at the core also in the sacrificial
rituals.
These perspective differences also conjoin with temporal and spatial differentiations
between humans and spirits. Although spirits and humans inhabit the same cosmos, spirits
inhabit different parts of that cosmos than humans. They also move around much more freely
than humans. The spirits also belong, from a human perspective at least, to a different
temporality. They are associated with the past, and in their potential state of becoming they
are for humans present as past, as memory. But this past is not one which is separated
successively from the present as moments on a linear time line. I will suggest that a different
10
notion of time is useful here, since the past of the spirits is somehow co-extensive with the
present.
And furthermore, rituals the spirits are transformed from a potential to a manifest state
of being and this transformation implies also a temporal transformation. This transformation
is engendered by the dynamics of the aesthetic practices of the rituals. These open up for a
temporary dissolution of perspective, temporal and spatial differences, and actually establish a
particular ‘space-time perspective’ which is neither that of humans nor that of spirits, but
rather form a totality of all potential perspectives, a sort of ‘view from everywhere’ (Holbraad
and Willerslev 2007) that belongs to the ritual itself. In order to understand how these
processes work, I draw on ideas regarding temporality and ritual dynamics that emerge from
the philosophy of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, particularly the latter’s works on cinema.
Duration and perspectival effects of the cinematic machine
The perspectives, temporalities and spatialities of spirits relate in Ifugao to human
perspectives, temporalities and spatialities in a particular way. They are distant, of a different
time, i.e. associated with an mythical and ancestral and see the world differently. They are,
however, nevertheless co-existent with humans. Pastness and spatial distance of spirits relate
thus to the presentness of humans not as a past that has passed and a space that is another
place but rather as a coexisting virtual dimension of the actualities of the human domain. In
addition, the transformative potential of human becoming means that this co-extensiveness is
also an alterity which is traversable.
Now, this co-existence of differentiated temporalities invites us to consider encounters
between them within a theory of time in which ‘time erupts as “durations”, i.e. convergences
of different temporalities within one rhythmic configuration’ (Nielsen 2011, 399). Within
such a durational notion of time, past and present do not, as Delezue writes, ‘denote two
successive moments, but two elements which coexist: One is the present, which does not
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cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but through which all
presents pass’ (1991, 59). The relationship between past and present is thus the result of an
emerging qualitative differentiation rather than quantitative, linear sequentiality (Nielsen
2011, 399). Time is therefore not a linear succession of moments like pearls on a string.
Rather, time splits itself continually into past and present or to put it otherwise, ‘it has to split
the present in two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched towards the future
while the other falls into the past’ (Deleuze 1997, 81)3. Morten Nielsen (2011) argues that in
such durational time, the relations between past, present and future may be internally
reversed, and shows how certain practices (in his case anticipated failures of house-building
in Maputo, Mozambique) can be considered as durational assemblages as they connect or
converge different temporal flows. I will suggest that ritual practices in Ifugao can be
understood as such durational assemblages too and that the particular aesthetic dynamics of
these rituals allow an entrance into the configurative processes of these converging or perhaps
rather emerging temporalities. I draw here particularly on Deleuze’s cinematic theory in
which he demonstrates how post-WWII cinema provided a form of imaging that depicted time
directly4.
In pre-WWII cinema, time was imaged through movement. It was by combining
different forms of movement-images and making connections between perception, affection
and action that time was depicted. Time was thereby depicted indirectly through action, as in
BUSTER KEATON’S ROLE in The Cameraman where the girl telephones the hero, who
rushes (i.e. movement-image) into New York and is already at her place when she puts the
receiver down (Deleuze, Cinema I, 179). Time is also here imaged through for instance
3
Similar arguments could be made about the future, as we find it in recent works by people like
Hirokazu Miyazaki (2004, 2006), Vincent Crapanzano (2004), Ghassan Hage (2003) and Marilyn
Strathern (2005) on how future emerges in the present as for instance anticipations, hope or other
forms of imagined futures
4
Here I am strongly influenced by the anthropological use of Deleuzian philosophy by Kapferer
(2013, 2007, 2007).
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dream-images, and these time-images were most often clearly demarcated as dreams. One
would know it if a dream-image was presented.
For various reasons, modern cinema changed after the Second World War and began
using a different form of dynamic that imaged time directly. In Italian neo-realism for
instance, (Rosselini, Visconti, Fellini), we see a different kind of filming, which presents us
images that float outside the consciousness of any particular character, which Deleuze refers
to as ‘free-indirect vision’. They are removed from the sensory-motor schema of perception,
affection and action of human bodies that we find in pre-WWII movement oriented films. In
the classic opening scene of FELLINI’S 8 ½ for instance, we find the main character trapped
inside his car. His movement in space has stopped, and he is unable to turn perception into
action. What we get instead is a dreamlike coexistence of present and past durations, of
memories, depicting thus time directly, although we do not know what is past, what is present,
and what is future. This indiscernibility comes particularly to the fore in the use of various
forms of mirror-images, as in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI in which the virtuality of the
mirror-images almost absorb the entire actuality of the character creating what Deleuze
describes as an ‘indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary, or of the present and the past, of
the actual and the virtual,’ (1997, 69).
The post-WWII form of image combinations establishes a consciousness that is
beyond human consciousness, it enables us to perceive the world otherwise, and implies an
opening up into time itself. In this durational notion of time, time flows5 and past, future and
present are not successively separated. The past and the future penetrate into the present and
co-exist with it not in actuality but as virtual to it and in the form of memory and desire
(Vitale 2011, Hodges 2008). The modern cinema’s direct imaging of time allows then an
entrance into the virtual, and it does so partly by achieving the breakdown of the sensory-
5
See Hodges (2008) for a discussion of the role of notions of fluidity within anthropological theory.
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motor schema and by establishing an indiscernibility of the imaginary and the real. It is by
means of the dynamic relations between images – the montage – that this is achieved. It is the
cinematic machine and its ability to overcome the limitations of normal perception that
accounts for this effect of post-WWII cinema. So, Deleuze’s cinema theory argues that the
dynamics of imagings of cinema opens up for the establishment of a consciousness, or a
perspective, that is beyond the human, which draws or invites the audience into it. In a
perspectivist sense, the perspective offered by post-WWII cinematic dynamics is not a point
of view that a subject has, but rather, as Deleuze states in his book The Fold, ‘a subject will be
what comes to the point of view’ (2010, 21).
Furthermore, the montage of images in post-WWII cinema allows a break from the
actual and an entrance into the virtual and into the sphere of potentiality, from which
temporal, spatial and other forms of differentiations and relations can emerge. The break with
the limitations of normal perception, the imaging of perspectives that are no one’s except the
cinematic machine’s own, enforces such a break with the actual. One is offered a perspective
of ‘perspectives Otherwise’, to put it that way.
That the passion story that evening was presented in the media of film, may invite us
to think the event through these kinds of theoretical approaches. But the particular rendering
of the notion of the ‘image’ in Deleuze’s philosophy invites us to think more broadly on the
cinematic machine as operative also in other contexts, and as Kapferer (2013) has suggested,
rituals are already cinematic in dynamic and have in fact anticipated some of the potentials
realized by cinema. The notion of image here must be understood not as a representation of
reality but rather as constitutive of it. As Claire Colebrook states it, for Deleuze life is
perception, or a virtual power to relate and to image. World constitution, a rather fragile and
ongoing relational process, is a form of imaging, and entities emerge as effects of relational
imaging. This is exactly what happens in cinema. The power of the cinematic machine to
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connect and redistribute images lies then not in its representation of a reality, but through
how its dynamics make entities emerge through the connecting and redistribution and recombinations of different kinds of images. This is why Deleuze cinema theory is both about
cinema and at the same time about processes of emergence or becoming.
These ideas about time, duration and the cinematic machine thus allow me to explore
the dynamic imaging of Ifugao rituals as ways in which to enter into and transform temporal,
spatial and perspectival configurations. I will do that by analyzing in some detail Ifugao
sacrificial rituals so let me provide you now with some ethnographic images.
Ifugao rituals
Ginnaw, an old woman living in the central sitio of Babluy had decided that the time had
come for having a pāhang, a blessing ritual where she would ask the spirits for help in
securing the health and prosperity of her relatives after her death. After having worked in her
fields and mountain gardens her entire life, she was now getting weaker and did not expect to
live much longer. At ten o’clock one evening, FOUR MUMBĀ’I and a few other men, me
included, gathered in Ginnaw’s wooden native house to commence the ritual.
Only a small oil lamp provided light for us sitting on the floor with our backs to the
walls and soon the mumbā’i commenced their invocations. Long lists of hundreds and
hundreds of names of various types of spirits were mentioned, and they were asked to come to
Ginnaw’s house to take part in the feast. While the mumbā’i were invoking the spirits, they
squatted with their body tightly together, eyes closed, and invoked with a whispering voice
and TAKING SIPS OF RICE WINE every now and again. When the spirits had arrived, they
loosened up and we all took a break while chewing betel nuts, chatting and joking. This
relaxed atmosphere changed again as the mumbā’i went on to invoke the ancestor spirits, the
nun’apuh, of Ginnaw and her husband. Names upon names of ancestors as far back as the
mumbā’i could remember were mentioned and told to come.
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Then followed more invocations, including the bagol, which is an invocation of the
two first inhabitants of the village and their descendants. During these invocations various
myths were also chanted, for instance one about the matūngul spirits which relates a story
about how the matūngul spirits caused earthquake which resulted in the destruction of all the
rice terraces. Another myth tells the story of how the mun’alātung, that is the spirit of
lightning, is captured by a tree in the human domain. I will come back to this, but note here
that the bagol, matūngul and mun’alātung chants and myths were not told in their
completeness. During this part of the ritual, only the first part of these myths is chanted. The
continuation of them follows later.
The invocation of all these and additional spirits I cannot mention here had the effect
of bringing them all to the house of Ginnaw. When they arrived, the mumbā’i were
temporarily and very briefly possessed by them. The mumbā’i sense this possession through
their ability to remember all the names, chants and myths, and through the bodily sensation of
having goose bumps and uncontrolled body movements. They become also able to see things
that other men present with normal perception cannot see. They are for instance able to spot
things that are hidden, which was often joked about as their suspicious ability to see bottles of
gin hidden by the owner of the house.
When all these spirits had been invoked and arrived at the house, the ritual box which
you can see here in the middle was opened. The pun’amhan as it is called, is opened only
during rituals and contains a collection of miniature rice bundles smeared with blood from
previous sacrificed chickens, some old betel nuts, leaves and lime, a small coconut cup of rice
wine and in some cases tiny age-old pieces of meat. Thereafter, THREE CHICKENS WERE
KILLED and their blood was let into a small plate. A feathered was dipped it in the blood and
put in the pun’amhan.
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In the same time, fire was lit in the hearth. As the smoke spread through the room, it
got harder and harder to keep our eyes open while plucking the feathers of the dead birds. The
chickens were singed in the fire, producing a strong smell of burned feathers, a smell which is
called munapīit and is held to be particular attractive to spirits. While the munapīit smell was
at its most distinct, a mumbā’i held a chicken up and recited the hapud, a chant in which the
spirits are asked to smell the aroma of the offering and give blessings to the family. The
chickens were then cut open, and the shape and COLOUR OF THE BILE SAC as well as the
patterns that form in the coagulated chicken blood that was let into a plate earlier, were
carefully inspected. This was a very crucial moment in the ritual since the spirits are thought
to communicate their eventual acceptance of the ritual through these signs, and in case of an
inauspicious reading of them, the rest of the ritual would have to be cancelled and postponed
for a later day. The relief was great among us this time when the bile sacs were revealed.
Their colour and size were auspicious. We could continue the ritual.
After an hour or so, the chickens were ready to be eaten, and we gathered again inside
the house. The chickens were cut into pieces and placed on top of a small basket filled with
boiled rice. Before we could start eating, however, the gonob rite had to be performed. This is
an invitation once again of all the spirits mentioned earlier to come and eat together in the
house of Ginnaw. This meal in the middle of the night concluded the first part of the pāhang.
The second and third day sections
Early the following morning we entered the house again and placed the rice wine jars in the
middle of the floor. The mumba’i would now repeat the invocations there before bringing
with them the pun’amhan down to THE KOLHODDAN, the outdoor part of the house where
the ladder comes down. In the house yard outside the kolhoddan lay the pigs Ginnaw had
bought for the occasion, and on a string next to the house hung two red-and-black pieces of
cloths. While other men present beat a rhythm on wooden sticks or metal gongs, they started
17
invoking the spirits again. At this time, one of the mumbā’is got possessed by Ginnaw’s
deceased husband and Ginnaw’s daughter who had dreamt about her father lately could
thereby talk to him and tell him to stop causing her problems.
The mumbā’i soon got visibly drunk, not a surprise after them having drunk cup after
cup of rice wine throughout the night and continuing to do so now during the morning rites.
To the rhythm beaten on metal gongs, ONE OF THE MUMBĀ’I STOOD UP, PUT ON A
DŪLAW, a headdress of a woven band of bamboo adorned with chicken feathers. He danced
with his hands over the jars for a short while, took the dūlaw off and sat down again. A
moment later, one of the other mumbā’i did the same thing, but this time with a spear and the
inabnūtan, a ritual backpack of woven bamboo. In short dances such as these, wearing
combinations of these ritual paraphernalia, the spirits evidence their presence again and again
through the possessed dancing bodies of the mumbā’i. At one point, ALL THE MUMBĀ’I
STOOD UP AND DANCE in a circle while singing about the reason for the pāhang ritual.
They pleaded the spirits to bless the family of Ginnaw and to receive her lennāwa when the
time for her death eventually would come.
The next step in the ritual is the rite called ēwel. So far, the mumbā’i had danced over
the jars in the kolhoddan. Now they turned their attention towards the pigs, and with more
beating of gongs, the mumbā’i danced again with the headdress, the backpack, and the spears,
but this time towards and over the pigs. One of them also put on the backpack and the
headdress and received a piece of glowing wood. Without any signs of pain from the burning
wood, he danced towards the pigs. He touched them with the glowing wood and finally threw
it at the pigs. This was the mun’alātung, the spirit of lightning.
In this manner the mumbā’i moved back and forth between the kolhoddan and the pigs
LAYING IN THE YARD. The ēwel section thus consists of a movement of the spirits from
the area of the kolhoddan and over to the pigs, a movement which is sometimes imaged by the
18
waving of hands, as one can see here and by the serving of rice wine to them through pouring
it on the pigs.
The next rite is of crucial importance for the rest of the ritual. Buja, one of the
mumbā’i was now GIVEN A ROOSTER. He gently patted it, blew tenderly on its head and
carefully tried to let the rooster lie still on the large pig’s back. The atmosphere became rather
tense as Buja grabbed a spear and started to dance in front of the animals. He moved towards
them and struck the rooster lightly with his spear, causing it to take to its wings and fly a
couple of meters away from the pig. This indicated that the spirits accepted the offering, and
that they were responding favourably to the petition made to them earlier6.
The perspective of all perspectives
With the spirits now having been called to the house, down to the kolhoddan and transferred
over to the pigs in the house yard, a particular ontological situation was established. The
distinctions that usually separate humans from spirits were now dissolved. They were all here
and in the here and now, and they were all manifest to each other.
Normally, the differences between humans and spirits are conceptualized spatially,
temporally, and through the sensorial differences that account for the perspective differences
between them. While living humans inhabit the Luta, the Earthworld, spirits belong to other
parts of the cosmos, the Skyworld, the Underworld, the Upstream and the Downstream
regions.
In the rituals, however, these spatial differentiations are modified in such a way that
the spirits are brought into the world of humans, and specifically the house where the ritual is
held. A major part of the invocations of the mumba’i consist of naming the spirits and telling
them where to go. The mumba’i practically provides them with a travel route to help them
A different name for this sub-ritual is umīdaw, which refers to the omen bird īdaw mentioned earlier.
This name might suggest that the rooster serves as an īdaw omen from the spirits.
6
19
find the house where the ritual is held. The specific invocations must be performed, but they
alone are not enough. In addition to these, the sound of the gongs, the smell of the burned
chicken feathers, and the sour taste of the rice wine, and the sight of the red and black cloths
hanging outside, the movement of mumbā’i from inside the dark house, down the ladder and
over towards the pigs, the affections of possessed mumbā’is combine as a montage that draws
the spirits as well as the mumbā’i and the other men present to the house. It is thus the ritual
multisensorial machine, the montage of images, that establishes a perspective on its own, a
perspective which is neither that of humans nor that of spirits, but something in between or
rather a perspective encompassing all potential perspectives, an ‘any-space-whatever’ as
Deleuze calls it. In this way, the ritual dynamics offers an entrance into the virtual, the zone of
pure potential.
It is interesting to note here that THE KOLHODDAN AREA of the house is the place
around which the ritual activities revolve. It is to here mumbā’i bring the spirits, and it is from
here they transfer the spirits over to the pigs. The kolhoddan is at the threshold between the
house yard and the house, and is also the place where the ladder comes down. The kolhoddan
is also known to be a place where spirits may hang around in the everyday. One should for
instance refrain from sitting on stone mortars or ladder steps early in the morning as one risk
sitting on and thus enrage a spirit. The kolhoddan is a place where the non-differentiation
between humans and spirits is always potentially present.
In addition to this spatial difference, the spirit realm is also of a different time.
Ancestor spirits are referred to as ‘people of the olden times’ and the myths and chants about
the spirits relate their activities to an unspecified mythical time so that the spirit realm is
clearly associated with the past in one way or another7. The spatial relocation of the spirits
7
Interestingly, this association between spirits and the past has become even more pronounced with
the introduction of Christianity and modern education and tourism that combine to forge a new layer
of temporalization in Ifugao animism, making it into ‘tradition’ and a window into the past.
20
therefore goes hand in hand with a temporal ‘present-ing’ of them. The sight of mumba’i
getting possessed by them, seeing them dance and hearing them talk, and seeing them
communicate by other means such as by making the rooster fly during the ayum rite testifies
to their presence. They are normally of a ‘time otherwise’, but this temporal distinction is
dissolved or at least allowed to coexist with other durations. By effectuating a ‘convergence
of different temporalities within one rhythmic configuration’ (Nielsen 2011, 399), the ritual
dynamics offers an entrance into the virtuality of duration. Time is there in its total
potentiality, which as we shall see later opens up for the rearrangement of past, present, and
future differentiations.
In a Deleuzian sense, then, one could perhaps say that the ritual consists of a montage
of images – movement images, affection images, sense images and time images – that
establish a kind of virtual time-space in which the world constituting spatial and temporal
differentiations between humans and spirits are dissolved. One enters into the zone of the
Open or as Kapferer states it, ‘a place of indeterminate reoriginating intensity of pure
potential – a virtual that is yet to be actualized’ (2013, 32).
The ritual box, the pun’amhan, may be of interest here. The opening of the pun’amhan
enables conjunction of past sacrifices and the present one, the mixing of the blood becomes a
form of coexistence of durations. With its miniature collection of the major components of
life and relationality – rice, blood, meat, and betel nuts – all from various pasts, the
pun’amhan is like the ‘world or time total in a box’. Opening it opens up for a direct
engagement with time.
The ritual as a place of indeterminate intensity of pure potential is underlined also by
the SENSORIAL EXPERIENCE OF INDISTINCTION. The alternation between the intense
and concentrated invocations and the joking and relaxed atmosphere during the betel chewing
breaks, produces an indiscernibility of the imaginary and the actual. The very short
21
possessions, often only a few seconds, do the same. One might also argue that getting drunk
actually is conducive to this as well, as is the way one is engulfed in the smoke and not least
the smell of burned chicken feathers. During the dancing outside the house, the use of the
headdress, spears and backpack by the mumbā’i, who otherwise do not change much, creates
a clear atmosphere of indiscernibility. Who are the mumbā’i now? The body of a human and
the lennāwa of a spirit? How are they able to hold a glowing piece of wood without feeling
pain? And some even asked, how were they able to remember so many names and chants
while being so incredibly drunk? The indiscernibility of the short and partial possession of the
mumbā’i is in a way an intensity of pure potential, of becoming and transformation. In a
perspectivist sense, this indiscernibility offers a multiplicity of potential perspectives. The
perspective of humans and the perspective of the spirits are present at the same time,
reflecting or mirroring each other, as a form of crystal reflection, which for humans is a
mirroring of their potential alterity, their transformation into spirits. This is a form of mirrorimage that could be compared to what Ghassan Hage calls the ‘non reflexive mirror’ (2012,
297), which returns us an image (of ourselves) in which we do not recognize ourselves, but
showing us what we may become.
As you might have noticed, the ritual invocations by the mumbā’i are repeated in
various rites at various times. These invocations, their accompanying short and partial
possessions and the change in atmosphere between concentrated, whispering invocations and
relaxed, playful breaks are in a way a play on differences, on differences between human and
spirit perspectives. The repetition again and again of these images of differences might be
understood as offering a point of view on difference in itself.
The de-actualization of the differences between the domain of the humans and the
domain of the spirits, and between past and present, that constitute the virtual space-time of
the ritual means that what is offered is the world in its spatial, temporal and perspective
22
totality. From this virtual space, the world is about to become, and to become actualized in a
new way.
It is interesting to note here that it is towards the pigs the whole ritual movement so far
has been directed. As I have made clear in my recently published book Pigs and Persons in
the Philippines, pigs play a very central role in this society, and so also in these rituals. The
whole movement of the mumbā’i and with them, the spirits, is directed towards the PIGS
THAT LAY WITH THEIR FEET TIED WITH VINES IN THE HOUSE YARD. The most
explicit expression of this movement is of course the rite called ēwel, the transfer of the spirits
to the pigs. The spirits are there, on the pigs, they speak through the pigs, and the attention of
all the spectators is on the pigs. These pigs are at the same time closely associated with the
family sponsoring the ritual. Sometimes the pigs have been born and bred in and around the
house. They eat the same kind of food as humans, often left overs of sweet potatoes for
instance, and the mythical explanation for the use of pigs as sacrificial animals is that they
serve as substitutes for humans. It is also vital that the pigs are so-called ‘native pigs’, i.e. that
they have been raised according to the ‘ways of the ancestors’. This distinguishes them from
the ‘commercial pigs’, which due to the way they have been fed and treated, are inapt as
sacrificial animals. In a way then, the world in its total potentiality is funneled into the pigs.
This notion of totality is also reflected in the fact that the pigs may be substituted by
other things, most commonly a couple of chickens, which you can barely glimpse here
through the chicken basket. The most important thing is that the number of animals is
considered amin, complete, and if one uses chickens as substitutes, they must be a rooster and
a hen, that is a complete couple. In principle, anything could have been offered as long as the
offer is amin. It is therefore noteworthy that when the ritual dynamics now changes from
effectuating a de-actualizing entering into the virtual in the first part of the ritual to a phase of
re-actualization of the world, the killing of the pigs is what starts the whole thing.
23
Re-actualization
We left the ritual description after Buja had managed to let the rooster lie still on the pigs. The
rooster communicates by its flight the acceptance of the ritual by the spirits. They have been
brought to the pigs and they find their size and numbers amin and acceptable.
The tense atmosphere during the rooster rite, suddenly dissolved into a friendly fight
as the man appointed to the task signaled that the pigs were ready to be killed. HOLDING
THE PIGS BY THEIR LEGS while blood gushes from the wound and into a pot and the
squealing of the pigs eventually subsides.
The killing of the pigs enacts the first and perhaps also the prime division or
differentiation in this re-actualizing phase of the ritual, namely that between life and death.
The sight of the life giving red blood, which would later be eaten by Ginnaw and her closest
relatives and the transformation of the squealing sound of the pigs, images this differentiation.
When all the pigs were dead, the carcasses were placed back to back in the kolhoddan.
The mumbā’i gathered again around them and performed a series of invocations and chants to
the effect of bringing the spirits back to the kolhoddan and to ask them to protect and bless the
family. A bundle of rice, a cup of rice wine, and three different plants were placed on the pigs
while the mumbā’i CHANTED THE HĀLIT, a chant in which they relate a story about the
successful rice cultivation by two mythical figures, Wigan and Būgan. The plants are
addressed too, and for instance the hangānga plant is asked to multiply the family’s children,
pigs and chickens. The plant will later be planted in a rice field, and combined with the hālit
chant, they are held to influence positively on the future outcome of the family’s agricultural
efforts.
Other chants and invocations are performed at this point as well. These chants are
continuations of the chants begun earlier, and while the first parts of the bagol, matūngul and
muna’lātung chants related the arrival of the first inhabitants of the village, the destruction of
24
the rice terraces and the capture of the spirit of lighting in a tree in the human domain
respectively, the continuation of them during this part relates all the stages of rebuilding the
terraces and the release of the spirit from the tree. These are chants of rebuilding the world in
a way which provides fruitfulness, agricultural success and are tales of the re-establishment of
differentiations between the domain of the humans and the domain of the spirits. During this
section, one of the mumbā’i PUTS FIRE TO THE GRASS ROOF before putting it out again
immediately. This will protect the family against future calamities thus resituating these
potential future calamities into the past.
These chants relate stories from the past, but by chanting them in the ritual, these pasts
events are turned into future. Chanting stories of past solutions to similar problems facing the
family arranging the ritual is held to change the future by re-situating that past solution in the
future. Past becomes future, and the anticipated future – with its potentially devastating results
– becomes past. The ritual engagement with time allows for the refiguring of the relations
between past, present and future. In Ginnaw’s case, the memory of protective and fruitful
effects of actions in the mythical past would become her and her family’s desired future.
This engagement with time occurs together with a re-actualization of the world, partly
through the chants and partly by other ritual actions. What followed now was a series of rites
that entered into the process of the emergence of world constituting differentiations.
The time had now come for butchering the carcasses of the pigs. The visitors gathered
around the kolhoddan, because this is the place where the BUTCHERING MUST TAKE
PLACE. Anywhere else is tabooed. A man selected by Ginnaw was responsible for the
cutting which follows a clearly defined pattern. The pieces of meat that emerged from the
pigs’ bodies were divided into pieces, some of which were cooked and served at the common
meal that ended the ritual and some were given out as wānah, which are cuts of meat that are
given to the relatives of the family arranging the ritual. They will receive the cuts, divide them
25
again and distribute them further to their relatives. This meat distribution is one of the most
important practices of kinning (Howell 2003) in Ifugao society. Through giving meat to their
bilaterally recognized relatives they can activate kin relations that would otherwise remain
only potential. And by avoiding reciprocating cuts of meat they have received earlier or by
giving the exact size of meat, they can actually de-activate such relations. From the virtual
space-time of the first part of the ritual, emerges then the re-actualization of kin
differentiations through the cutting of the pigs, the division of the Whole as it were.
Another differentiation is done here as well, and that is the crucial differentiation of
humans and spirits. This has already begun by the reversal of the movement of the spirits, that
is back from the house yard to the kolhoddan. This movement continues in the rite that
followed, the alatip.
For this rite, the mumbā’i ascended up and into the house again, and there they set
about to invoke the spirits to join them. The mumbā’i were given a bowl of boiled rice and a
piece of roasted fat from the pigs, and while holding the bowl up in the doorway, they told the
spirits to smell the aroma of the roasted meat, to eat with them and depart from there after
that. With that done, they put the lid on the pun’amhan again and put it away8.
While they were performing the alatipi, none other than the mumbā’i were allowed
inside the house, and all the rest of us had to wait until the mumbā’i and the spirits had
finished their meal before WE WERE SERVED RICE and small pieces of boiled meat. This
8
Some reflections are needed here on the relations my argument on time here has to transactional
understandings of sacrifices. I find Ruy Blanes’ (2013) argument about seeing sacrifices not as
transactional but as having to do with experience and meaning and their particular ideologies of time
inspiring, but at the same time I want to acknowledge both the communicational and transactional
aspects of these rituals. I see however the transaction or exchange here primarily as an enactment of
difference, a form of differentiation between giver and receiver rather than as process of some sort of
reciprocity. This also sheds an interesting light on the kinning practices of exchanging pig meat. The
fluctuation of debt relations created by the requirement of giving more or less than what one received
in order to continue the relationship in its actual state, indicates that a core aspect of exchange is
differentiation. The giving of an equal share amount to identification, which is the annulling of the
emergent effects of differentiation. The killing of the pigs releases a virtual component (lennawa) and
an actual one (odol) which sets in motion a series of similar temporal, spatial and perspectival
differentiations.
26
common meal ended the ritual for most of the visitors, although the mumbā’i would conduct
the ending rites in the evening, and the morning after to ensure that the spirit had left the
house properly.
These rites of differentiation ensured that the spirits were transformed back into their
own domain, a differentiation which is most important to make for the human beings
involved. The virtual space-time of the ritual is potentially very fruitful since it allows an
entrance into the world constituting processes, but it is also highly dangerous. The temporary
immersion into the world in its potential totality carries with it a risk of unsuccessful reactualization of humans. This is particularly so in healing rituals which are very similar to the
one described here, but also in all other rituals in which human-spirit differentiations are
dissolved.
The need for this differentiation is also vital for the observance of taboos after the
ritual. Producing sounds that may invoke the spirits – playing gongs and mentioning their
names for instance – must be avoided. Neither is one for a few days allowed eat fruit, fish,
and vegetables, which are all held to smell similar to the smell of burned chicken feathers,
munapīit, a smell which is indicative of the non-differentiation between them. The number of
days required to observe these taboos varies according to how one is related to the arranging
family, thus adding a temporal dimension to the kin differentiations.
This means that the last part of the ritual is all about re-actualizing entities, of reactualizing differentations, and this is done by temporal means, by giving different cuts of
meat to different kinds of people, by spatial movement – the spirits are taken up and into the
house and from there on into their own domain – and by sensorial means. Roasted meat is
served to the spirits, something which is never eaten by human beings, not even outside
rituals. Humans eat boiled meat.
27
For and against the Otherwise
Based on these ideas, one could say that these rituals enact a ‘re-actualization from out of the
space of the virtual’, to cite Kapferer once again. It is in this way that I understand these
rituals as ‘events’, that is as ‘critical sites of emergence’ (2010) or as creative crucibles of new,
hitherto unrealized potential. The dynamics of the ritual opens up for entering into the world
constituting processes of emergence and becoming and by that ‘opens up numerous pathways
into various potential futures’. They are therefore all about becoming, of forming and
transforming the relations that constitute entities, and of modifying the temporal flows in
which they are implicated.
Now, although PASTOR BELEN and her other Pentecostal friends had redefined the
spirits as demons and were deeply suspicious of anything that had to do with dealing with
them, one could find in their rituals as well, the Sunday services, a similar form of aesthetic
dynamic that allowed entrance into the processes of emergence of the world constituting
differentiations and relations. I have no time to go into descriptions of these rituals with the
same amount of detail about Pentecostal rituals here and now. I will do that in the book I am
working on, and there I suggest how these rituals are ways in which God is made manifest
through various relational practices. I have elsewhere suggested that for Ifugao Pentecostals,
God is introduced as a potential in the world, but the actual manifestation of him is enacted
through the aesthetics of the Sunday service and the exchange that participants engage in with
God. A central part of the service is the testimony in which the audience is invited up to the
lectern to testify the intervention of God in their lives. By telling the story of how God has
saved them, helped them through problems of transformed them, they demonstrate the
potentiality of God and the particularly the Holy Spirit’s existence. But the testimony section
must be understood as part of a wider ritual dynamic that serves to transform God from this
potential state of being to becoming actualized in the here and now of the service. Testifying
28
the acts of God is most often referred to as ‘giving’ or ‘sharing’ and people talk about going
up there on the stage and talking into the microphone as a form of gift. Sometimes they will
not tell a story at all, but give to God by singing a song or saying a prayer for instance. This
parallels much of what Cannell has described on reading the pasyon, the passion story, by the
Bicolanos of lowland Philippines. Cannell argues that the reading of the pasyon must be
understood beyond its semantic content but rather through what the act of ‘reading’ actually is
here. By reading the pasyon – and giving testimonies we might add – in their particular way,
they direct the reading ‘as gift’ towards a particular conceptualization of Jesus who will then
reciprocate with acts of healing.
The testimony thus establishes an exchange relation between them and God and
evidences the potential presence of God in human lives. In sum, then, the testimony section
contributes, as Susan Harding suggests, ‘aims to separate the novice listeners from their prior,
given reality, to constitute a new, previously unperceived or indistinct, reality, and to impress
that reality upon them: making it felt, heard, seen, known, undeniably real’ (1987, 169).
This is followed up in the following section, namely the part of the service called
praise and worship. Most of the Pentecostal congregations in Banaue have their own band,
consisting of an electric guitar, an electric bass and a drum kit. That these must be electric
instruments is stressed as the sound of the instruments is supposed to suffuse the room
properly and reach out of the open windows. The sound of electric instruments and the
atmosphere they create are often mentioned as one of the main differentiating features of the
congregation, contrasting it to both the Catholic Church and the Evangelicals, whose music
the Pentecostals describe pejoratively as ‘only solemn hymns.’ During the praise and worship
section of the service, people stand up and hold their hands up, sway from side to side while
following the lyrics projected on the front wall by an overhead machine. The praise and
worship leader would often instruct people to clap their hands and dance so as to ‘magnify the
29
presence of the Holy Spirit’. The songs are sung over and over again, and the long repetitive
succession of songs contribute to ‘building up an atmosphere of divine presence’ (Lindhardt
2011, 9). In the middle of the praise and worship, the singing takes a break while the band
continues to play a kind of background music. The participants then close their eyes and begin
to pray individually. This is the moment in which God’s presence become most experientially
available to them. The praying is done in an odd mix of English language interjected by
occasional words in Ifugao. It is commonly held by these parisioners that proper prayers
should be done in a fluent manner, with words streaming without any hesitation. Many of my
Pentecostal informants had a hard time speaking English in more informal settings, but they
prayed in English with a vocabulary that they admitted they did not always understand. The
ability to pray in that manner – fluently, in a language that is not theirs – is one of the prime
ways of experiencing God. These prayers were thus forms of what Bakhtin (2008) called
heteroglossia, i.e. a double-voiced discourse, and they were thus events in which both the
speakers and God emerged as interlocutors.
And remember Pastor Belen’s crying and praying to the sight of Jesus’ suffering:
Often this praying is accompanied by weeping. The praying person will stop often end their
praying by wiping the face of tears, and the fluidity of the praying is often broken up by
instances of crying. They would often relate their crying to feeling ashamed before God, of
regretting one’s sins, but crying could as often be provoked by feeling overwhelmed by the
joy of being with God, out of thankfulness for he had did in their lives and for the prospects
he offered in terms of a future in which they would be saved.
I have no time to go into more details about these rituals. Here it suffices to say that
the Sunday services also by their own ritual dynamics set up a space-time in which God
becomes present. The rituals thus contribute to the becoming of God, his actualization as a
vital force in the world.
30
There is, however, an additional temporal dimension here as these Pentecostal rituals
are directed not only towards the emergence God but also, and importantly, against the
potential manifestation of spirit-cum-demons and their influence. Conversion is here an
ongoing relational process that transforms God into a manifest being but which at the same
time works against the manifestation of relations with spirits or demons. The Pentecostal
Sunday services evidence a striking montage of images that effectuate the emergence a
Christian world in which the Otherwise of the traditional practices, what they referred to as a
‘pagan’ past, were there as a virtual ‘always on the verge of the actual’ (Ingold 2006, 11-12).
The ritual practices of the Sunday services were in this regard temporalizing the Otherwise, of
‘pasting’ that dreadful Otherwise which threatened to actualize and ‘presenting’ the forces
that would direct their future towards salvation9.
The prayer rally and screening of the passion on the village square that evening was,
then, an attempt to try to change the anticipated future of their society, and I would suggest
that approaching this passion event as an event as suggested above, underlines its involvement
in the temporal re-configurations out of which different future could become actualized.
According to pastor Belen, the present actualities were unbearable. A different future simply
had to be actualized.
References
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovitch. 2008. The Dialogical Imagination. Translated by Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations. New York: Schocken.
9
It is here that I think Deleuzian notions of time has something valuable to offer in terms of rethinking
the assumptions of time inherent in many approaches to conversion within the anthropology of
Christianity. In an article discussing the perils of thinking in terms of continuity when dealing with
Christians who emphasize conversion as a radical rupture with the past, Joel Robbins is only partly
right, I think, in arguing for taking the Christian model of time an one that can be radically disrupted
by certain kinds of events that, as he quotes Benjamin (1969, 261), ’make the continuum of history
explode’ (2007, 12). In my understanding of conversion in Ifugao, the relations with the past allows
such explosions, but it is an explotion that not operates linearly, but as an emergent process of
’pasting’, ’presenting’ and ’futuring’ in which the past is not left behind but is enacted as qualitatively
different.
31
Blanes, Ruy Llera. 2013. "Time for self-sacrifice: Temporal narratives, politics and ideals in
African prophetism." Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology no. 79 (3):406-429.
Blaser, Mario. 2009. "The threat of the Yrmo: The political ontology of a sustainable hunting
program." American Anthropologist no. 111 (1):10-20.
Cadena, Marisol de la. 2010. "Indigenous cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual reflections
beyond "politics"." Cultural Anthropology no. 25 (2):334-370.
Cannell, Fenella. 2006. "Reading as Gift and Writing as Theft." In The Anthropology of
Christianity, edited by Fenella Cannell, 134-162. Durham: Duke University Press.
Crapanzano, Vincent. 2004. Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical
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