CULTURAL UPBRINGINGS: The Ilongots concept of liget and the Batanguenos way of celebrating the fiesta as mirrors of culture

and propagation of status By Katrina Hirang-Olave

Central to the explanation of the meaning of liget for the Ilongots is their own concept of the heart. For the Ilongot, the heart is a physical organ which is the source of vitality and will, from which all thoughts, actions and emotions emanate from, or relates to, at the very least. The heart is an organ which is said to animate the body. Without it, life ceases to exist. Similarly, breath (niyek) or rather, conscious breath propels the heart to move and flow, delving deeper and deeper into emotions and unconscious thoughts, and to be a man of breath can be furthermore translated into being a man of liget. The word liget suggests connotations such as energy, anger and passion manifested in specific physical processes realized through feelings of enthusiasm, agitation, passivity and violent action. Liget, on its own is taken to mean unrestrained vitality or a potentially disruptive force. Thus there is the percieved need for beya or knowledge evident in an Ilongots claim that they do not do things out of liget alone. Knowledge is needed to form a dialectic relations between beya and liget, to form a juxtaposed relationship between civility and unrestrained vitality, between a state of sociality and one of opposition and withdrawal. Liget mediated by beya consists of concentrated action. This form of liget is what makes babies, forces one to do work, determines killers, etc. This liget is a kind of creative energy, that of an affective and organized way of feeling and thinking. But when this beya is absent, liget is most associated with chaos, separation, confusion, anger. Another notable quality of this liget is that it is derived externally and have potentially powerful consequences. An example is when men suddenly find out that other men, who they treat as equals have more than they have, or can do more than they ever can. Two cultural practices that relate to liget are hunting and dancing. In hunting, the crucial means of subsistence of the Ilongot community, liget often appears in both its form: the form regulated by beya and the chaotic liget derived form external sources. Creative energy is manifested in hunting through the presence of mind of the Ilongot, such as when an Ilongot claims to be full of liget when he hunts for the reason that he does not fear the forest; or for the motivation of at the thought of the eating game, due to liget. But a man can also make a fool of himself when his fellow hunters outdo him on hunts. His liget rises leading to stir angry thoughts in the heart, which will ineviatbly result to escalated envy and severe misfortunes. The cultural practice of dancing is more reflective of the concentrated liget. The people are fascinated with the way the dancers body moves, the way it is held together gracefullyarched backs, bent knees and outsretched arms. Liget is concentrated in the dancers face, her body intricately dressed in red bandannas and blouses. This kind of aesthetic focus is a creative channeling of anger, strength, and passion.

From experience, there would have been a great deal of words to encapsulate what liget entails; there is no one word which will be sufficient. One translation would be libog (to denote the kind of liget concentrated as the male sperm) which denotes a strong sexual urge or desire. It can also be translated into kapusukan which is being impulsive, with a certain degree of stregth. Where liget as strength is concerned, malakas seemed insufficient as it may be taken to mean as physical strength only. Liget as anger can be direclty translated to galit, without losing its fidelity to the context. As is evident, there is no one Tagalog equivalent such as liget to comprehensively embrace all what is really meant by the Ilongot term. The way the Ilongots used the terms liget or beya, for me, is a vivid reflection of the link between culture and language. Language is a means through which humans express, interpret and transmit culture. Language is where objects of cultural significance are concretized and subject to intricate rules of grammar, phonetics, and syntax. A particular language is rich because also of its context. As in the case of the Ilongot, their language is that which can be directly related to certain cultural practices, that which emanates from the heart; and that which has actually a life of its own. Political systems and culture The Ilocanos and Ilongot have different political processes. The Ilocanos in Pertierras ethnography are heavily involved in national politics while the Ilongots are quite isolated from it. The existence of parties, factions, elections, political disputes, and elite alliances and influences made the Ilocano political situation closer to that of the Philippine state in comparison to the Ilongots. Initially, there were two factions in Zamora: Bato and Luna, or the northern faction and the southern faction respectively. These two factions are separate and distinct in their interests, evident in their party divisions. During the 1967 elections, the Bato faction supported the Liberal party; the Luna faction, the Nacionalistas. The involvement of Ilocano politics to that of the national State was evident in the political transition from the old system to a new one decreed by Fredinand Marcos after Martial Law. As Marcos pushed for the creation of new legislative bodies, elections for the Sanggunian were held in Zamora. The distribution of power at that time was heavily in favor of the Bato faction, although the party divisions became less distinct when the candidate for Mayor (who came from Bato) chose a vice-mayor candidate coming from Luna. This is in close resemblance to Marcos ploy, when he left the Liberal party to join the Nacionalistas before his persidency, which then proves that the new political order brought about by the Martial law radically dismantled the former structure of local politics, transforming it to a new structure. In the case of the Ilongots, their isolation from national politics lead them to base their identities from the knowledge (beya) accumulated and developed throughout their lives rather than from political alliances. Concretely, for the youth, a sense of importance and mutual acceptance comes from having a peer group. It is easier to gauge that from their egalitarian way of life that the Ilongots would have deep, politically-related disputes such as the Ilocanos. Where a high degree of social stratification is absent, there is also a simpler political structure.

Social stratification Marvin and Harris defines social class as a group whose members posses similar amounts of power within a stratified society. Power in this definition depends on the distribution of resources as well as the access to it. For Raul Pertierra, social class is fundamentally a group of persons who occupy a similar or equivalent position in a system of production. Furthermore, two elements make up class: reciprocal rights of members and access to the corporate resources. There is the existence of a corporate unit, and in Zamora, the corporate unit usually is the family participating in a common estate. The definition of class applied to the Ilocanos are economic in nature, yet not wholly so. It does not assume a developed market situation where labor is a commidity; rather it assumes a system of production and social organization with unequal distribution of resources, power and political preeminence. Two of the three major social classes in the case of the Ilocanos are the tenants and the agricultural laborers. TENANTS The tenants have limited access to land, but their access is also limited for the main rice crop. Most of the tenants are sharecroppers, that is they keep only 50% of the rice harvest minus other agreed expenses, while the other half is claimed by the owners. This class has two categories: tenants with sufficient lands and tenants with marginal or insufficient lands. AGRICULTURAL LABORERS Since members of this class do not have special skills nor own a parcel of land, they take on employment on a daily basis or exchange their services for payment. People in this class have no regular income, and even in the peak season, their earnings are never enough for daily subsistence. As a result, these people are permanently indebted to their patrons. They try to keep ties to wealthy landowners or established tenants. 3 The Ilongots on the other hand do not follow such a stratified system. Theirs is a highly egalitarian way of life. Government-appointed headman have no authority whatsoever, and the Ilongots do not recognize any difference in class or status. 4 Swidden agriculture can only find traces of class inequality/differences between unmarried youth (who labor in the homes or gardens of adults) and their married seniors; between women cultivators and men who choose garden sites. But since the Ilongot society is described as simple, and since their is always plenty to eat yet no visible storable surplus, the Ilongots do not see the need to own land. In fact, they do not claim exclusive rights to land. For them, perhaps, the forests, rivers, land is not common property. Nobody owns it, thus it is only a question of access to resources. 5 Status is different from class in terms of consciousness. Membership in a certain status category rests on concious perceptions by members and non-members of the appropriate status for that category while membership in a certain class is unconciously assumed. Classes are differentiated by the economic baseor the members relation to the system of production while status considers economic as

well as non-economic factors. The definition of status then, according to Pertierra is the association with complex interests and orientations that usually generate a feeling of community among its members. One source of status for Ilocanos is social worth or value. Thus, one can say that the distinction between classes is not purely economic in nature but it includes characteristics, classufying whether members of a status category are desirable or undesirable, prominent or subordinate. Such is the case of the dichotomy between nabaknang (wealthy and prominent) and napanglaw (poor and lazy). For the Ilongots one source of status is bertan (knowledge) or skill. Those who are reputed to be higher in status are those who have mysterious power; can see into the future; heal the sick and commune with unseen powers; as well as those who can outdo their fellowmen in hunting activities. The Batangueno and the fiesta The elite in a certain provinces, or on small villages are very concentrated as compared to those in the city. The lines are visibly drawn and those who are considered as elite have certain close ties with each other. The conception between those who are elite and those who are not are actually manifested in certain traditions and rituals. One example is the Lipa (Batangas) Fiesta. One distinct activity which actually distinguishes the elite from the non-elite is the Rigodon de Honor, a traditional waltz performed at the town plaza on the eve of the fiesta. Colorful Maria Claras grace the bodies of the women, while the men are clad in traditional barong. Participants are rarely pragmatic for this event; they ultimately splurge for their dresses, anticipating snide comments and criticisms of the audience. Indeed, those who were included in the list of participants, handpicked themselves by the head of the event are those which have some degree of wealth, those who are prominent, and sometimes, those who are good-looking. The rehearsals themselves are not held on the town. Participants flock to Forbes Park to attend weekly rehearsals. This fiesta tradition is reflective of how a certain status category propagates their status with such consciousness. Indeed, for one to stay in a certain status group, they must reproduce it. Another notable factor is that while these elite in Batangas may seem like they are gods to their locality, when taken into a larger contextor a larger locality, such as Manila their achieved / ascribed statuses seemed to melt into nothingness. Amongst all the Manila elite, these Batangenuos may be just visitors from the province. In a sense, what this tells us is that status is highly dependent upon (1) how a certain group propagates or reproduces that status and (2) the context or locality where the status is consciously recognized.