Reciprocal mobilities : indigeneity and imperialism in an eighteenth-century Philippine borderland

Abstract

History is usually associated with the flow of time, with chronology in the abstract. But among late twentieth-century Ilongots, one of the Indigenous communities living in the borderlands on the island of Luzon in the Philip-pines, history was “mapped onto the landscape, not onto a calendar.” Events were rooted in precise memorable places; the temporal was spatialized. As swidden agriculturalists who regularly moved their residence and gardens, what Ilongots remembered were “the places where they had ‘erected their house posts’ and ‘cleared the forest.’ Walking and movement activated their history. As they walked along paths, they saw and recalled the places they had inhabited and cultivated. History was a stroll through a landscape full of sites of memory. House posts, trees, secondary forest growth, and the location of a hunt were their historical sources. For Ilongots, their social life and history were “unpredictable and improvised”; sometimes, they walked “single file along paths that shift in direction,” but at other times, they ran “like wild pigs.”4 Although Ilongot society and history were tied to the landscape, they were very malleable and could go in many different directions, concentrating in particular places or dispersing over a wide area. The anthropologist Renato Rosaldo summarized the Ilongot sense of history in the following manner: “The perspectival sense of the past held by Ilongots is consistent with their view that social life is determined by what people make up as they go along; societal processes, in other words, are seen more as improvised than given, more meandering than linear, more mobile than stationary.” If the Ilongot themselves viewed history in such a fashion, perhaps we could benefit from adopting a similarly improvised, meandering, and mobile history of borderlands.