Babaylan Sing Back: Philippine Shamans and Voice, Gender, and Place

Abstract

Given the title of this book and its well-known author, one can definitely be forgiven for any initial trepidation when approaching it as a serious academic publication. The Philippine babaylan (shaman) has become rather politicized recently, as the practices of Indigenous minority communities, many of whom retain some shamanic practices, have been appropriated by mainstream Filipinos seeking to “decolonize” themselves and reconnect with ancestral heritage. Especially prominent is the movement built around the babaylan as a proto-feminist icon of anticolonial resistance. This process has effectively dampened the Indigenous voice while brightening already-privileged mainstream majority voices as interlocutors of Indigenous representation. The author herself, Filipino pop singularity Grace Nono, whose esoteric musical style is inspired profoundly by Philippine native musical traditions, has long been associated with this trend.But the academic reader can be reassured that, from beginning to end, Babaylan Sing Back explicitly and unambiguously locates the babaylan/shaman squarely within the context of modern-day Indigenous minority communities of practice. Nono additionally grounds these communities and practices exclusively in the lived experiences of its modern practitioners and participants as members of marginalized Indigenous communities. Last but not least, Nono pays attention to how competing ideas about gender structure both the formation of the featured ritual specialists and their later positionalities, which in turn inflects the resulting embodiment of the ritual practices (including oral traditions) themselves.This particular contextualization is what makes this work an important contribution to the literature on Indigenous peoples, modern shamans, and oral traditions. Nono is already known for working with Indigenous artists, but what is remarkable here is how she manages to weave into a relatively brief text so many of the cultural, relational, religious, gendered, and discursive complexities embodied by individual ritual specialists vis-à-vis their specific communities of practice. Thus the stories of ritual specialists here are neither victimologies nor romances but dynamic portraits that bring out both their individualities and shared intersectionalities as key culture bearers of marginalized Indigenous minority communities.Embedded consistently throughout the text is a precise critique of those from outside of Indigenous communities who have commodified “babaylanism” as a tool for self-indigenizing and self-actualization. She acknowledges that “the construction of the archaicized, nationalized, and valorized babaylan as symbol of power available for all to appropriate has proved to be a rallying point for many urban and diasporic gender scholars and activists, themselves battling patriarchal and heteronormative colonial regimes,” but reminds the same audience that “the denial of Native ritual specialists' embodied contemporaneity and the appropriation of the babaylan title by subjects of greater privilege are considered by some as seriously offensive” and “demonstrates for some the complicity of feminism with colonialism” (7).The book consists of three stand-alone chapters that explore very different aspects of babaylan formation, practice, and identity. The first chapter, “Who Sings?,” presents the experiences of two Agusan Manobo women baylan, following one over the years from her novitiate to her current practice. The core elements of shamanic practice in the Philippines are introduced here but are deliberately complicated by the impact of the very real ills of the past and present (colonialism, religious conversion, etc.). Nono's treatment of the fascinating interplay between competing Christian and Indigenous texts, doctrines, practices, and human-spirit relations is particularly well done here and elsewhere in the book.The second chapter, “Shifting Voices and Malleable Bodies,” introduces us to T'boli women and Blaan transgender practitioners within the context of broader, contemporary conversations about gender. The first half explores the power dynamics of T'boli polygyny and how the Tudbulul sung epic, in which customary law is conveyed through the fantastical adventures of its eponymous hero and his relations, continues to inform gender ideology in a way that undercuts substantially any argument for proto-feminism being a defining characteristic of Indigenous shamanism. The second half focuses on two Blaan transgender men practitioners, opening up a spirited discussion of how, as nungaru, they embody the malleability and persistence of gender ideologies in changing times.The third and final chapter, “Song Travels,” takes us to the Indigenous diaspora through the portrait of Lagitan, an Ifugao mumbaki now based in Ohio whose formation and practice were structured by his positionality as an immigrant and visible racial minority in the colonial metropole. Lagitan's encounters with anthropologists, white neo-shamans, and other problematic figures might cause readers to question his inclusion. But here Nono asks the reader to consider the full spectrum of postcolonial realities that modern Indigenous shamans must contend with to sustain their practices.Beautifully written and substantial ethnographically, Babaylan Sing Back is a profoundly satisfying read. In embracing her unique positionality as an artist, Nono makes a solid intellectual contribution to the study of both oral traditions and Indigenous peoples in the Philippines. She also manages to work her way past the persistent contentiousness of “babaylanism” across the multiverse of Philippine cultures to compel us to witness modern shamans in all their complexity. We could certainly find fault with this book for being yet another representation of the Indigenous minority voice by yet another non-Indigenous author, but the author's presence in the text provides a clear delineation between her voice and that of the women and men she foregrounds in the book. As Nono states in chapter 2: “They need no other contemporary women to embody them as though they are not, themselves, embodied and historical. They need no other women to idealize them as though their conditions mirror the egalitarian past untainted by historical exigences that elite feminists imagine the precolonial times to be. They need no other women or men to save them, as though they do not have their own moral and other resources to address their needs. And yet, they also do not wish to be simply left alone” (104). And this is indeed a book that makes room for Indigenous babaylan to begin singing back.