The wording of symbols: some notes on perception and description of ritual musical

instruments from the Philippines to New Guinea

Maria V. StanyukovichPeter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, Russian Academy of Science

St. Petersburgmstan@kunstkamera.ru

The 20th Congress of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association (IPPA)

Session ‘Archaeomusicology inSoutheast Asia’

Seam Reap (Angkor Wat), Cambodia13 January 2014

Outline• Traditional folklore, mythology and ritual use of musical instruments in Ifugao, the Philippines: the present-day situation

• Ritual clappers: lost mythological knowledge and surviving mythological connotations

• Gods of winds, musical instruments, Downstream region and the world of the dead

• Rituals of intimidation of women in New Guinea and the way musical instruments are described

The Philippines is one of the few areas where living epics are widely represented nowadays among the ethnic minorities of

hinterlands and the Moslem Southern areas.

◄Philippine Ethnic map

(after Blumentritt, 1890)

Филиппины – сокровищница устного эпоса. В последние 20 лет здесь собраны записи десятков живых традиций. Эпика сохранилась у горцев- язычников и мусульман. Территории, населенные равнинными народами, обращенными в католицизм еще на заре испанской колонизации, утратили свои эпические сказания.

▲Oral epics recored in last two decades

Northern Luzon is a treasury of epic traditions and myths

Only few traditional musical instruments have survived as ritual

ones

Kolot ritual Salamagi, Lamut, Ifugao, 2012

Bogwa (bones exhumation) ritual, Pal-ipal, Duit, Kiangan, 2012

Bogwa. Brass gong is one of the few surviving musical instruments – but it should not be played by women

The bangibang percussion bar, also known as wooden gong

Him-ung ritual, Amganad, Ifugao, 1995

The sound of bangibang is believed to start a new head-

hunting cycle

‘Their anger is still hot’

Ifugao musical instruments

• Survived and used in rituals Forgotten or used for entertainment only

Brass and wooden gongs

Ritual clappers are still used by mumbaki (priests and shamans), and kept by local lovers of

traditional culture despite the pressure of sects • .

Culture under pressure: singing Born again songs and ‘Christian’ Irish drinking

songs at the funeral

Epic singers and ritual specialists are marginalized

Distorted images mixing up him-ung death ritual

and rice harvest• .

..and depicting traditional Ifugao baltung in computer-game stylistics

.

Bamboo clapper• ‘The split tubular clapper

is a type of concussion idiophone where two flexible half-tubes strike together to produce a sound. A singular lateral cut from one end to near the end between two internodes of a piece of bamboo is made, and the object is held by one hand on its uncut end (usually an internode itself) and cast swiftly with a downward force to create the sound.’

• (Campos 2012)

Old Ifugao Clappers from St Petersburg MAE (Kunstkamera) museum

• The earliest clappers in our collections date back to 1937. They were collected by R.F. Barton in Bitu, Ifugao in the course of his fieldwork that resulted in publication of his famous “Autobiographies of three Ifugaos” (London, 1938).

• Barton worked in MAE for 10 years (1930-1940)

•

Papak clapper• The first clapper , papak (№ 5688-25) is a combination of a

musical instrument and an agricultural utensil . It is 2 or 3 times bigger than an ordinary clapper. Papak is attached to the top of a big (130 cm) digging stick.

• Papak was used by the Ifugao of Silipan (Halipan) area:– A clapper is used on the planting stick by the Silipanes as well as by

nearly all Philippine peoples that plant dry rice; its use doubtless helps keep the gang of planters busy, secures a more regular spacing in planting (since the planters try to keep their clappers sounding in unison) and alleviates the arduousness of the work itself.

– A clapper is used by the wet-rice Ifugaos in all their rice rites; it is made of bamboo, but an Ifugao will use no bamboo for the purpose except that brought from the Downstream Region. He makes special trips thither to obtain it and activates it by ritual when he makes it into a clapper. Thus, it appears that a work implement in the one place has become a ceremonial object in another where it is not used as a working tool. (Barton 1946)

•   Cf. Campos 2012: the clapper utilised to keep crows and pests away is then referred to as luppak.

• Two other clappers, used exclusively for ritual purposes (5688-26 and 5688-27) are called palipal and are much smaller than papak.

‘Animal face’Once opened, the two flexible half-tubes resemble a beak of a bird or

the open mouth of an animal, which is important for mythological connotations of the instrument.

 When the priest is posessed by a Tayaban, the flying monster, during the rice ritual, he rubs chicken fat on the ritual clapper and yells: Has come upstream Taiyaban, Son of Bulul at Nagadangan уa bebe-mo. I partake of the rice wine and I behold the sacrificial victim because that is what I delight in year by year. I anoint the granary clapper because that is my nature.

Correct that I encircle [he dances fantastically around the granary, stopping at each corner and extending the clapper toward the fields

andshaking it] this granary and I point over the fields eh-e-e-e-e-i-i

because ye are harvesting, ye earth people. [Returns to his place under the

granary,still possessing the priest, and continues]: I enter this granary and I lay down my dog [the clapper] because ye are harvesting, ye earth people; уа-bebe-mо Hiye-e-e-e-e-eh! (Barton 1946)

Mythological connotations of the ritual clapper

• The palipal clapper is also connected with the Downstream region.

• Matungulan -’Paybackables ‘ are a group of Gods that used to be the Ifugaos’ trading partners; they gave the humans the most essential objects (pigs, chicken, agricultural utensils) and taught them most important skills (terrace building, rice-growing).– Napulungot — “Clustered-Villages” Deities, a sub-group of the

Paybackables. <…> “Napulungot” (in Central Ifugao) meaning "Clustered," a term applicable because they are believed to live in villages clustered near the junction of the Bula River with the Magat (uninhabited country). –By the Kiangan people the group is called "Mahipngat" (meet-able, encounter-able). The group is almost as important in all agricultural rites as <…> Paybackables. Not only do they own the locusts (“their chickens” which they turn loose in great numbers about one year in six, but they are also connected with the granary- clapper used in agricultural rites and with the return of the souls of consumed pigs, chickens and rice to be reborn.

(Barton 1946)

Mythological connotations of the ritual clapper

• The Paybackables of Namtogan, a mythological place in a Downstream region, are believed to be descendants of a wet-rice Ifugao woman (who went down the river in search of a much-fancied lime tube that she had accidentally dropped into the river) and an inhabitant of the dry-rice downstream region. (Barton Mythology 1955, Myth VII.):

• Binongbong, one of these descendants, is a sort of supernatural dam across the river; he catches the souls of pigs, chickens and rice that come float ing down the river and returns them to his relatives, the Ifugaos—provided, of course, that he and his people be offered the proper sacrifice. Oltagon, his sister, is the owner of the ritual clapper, which was brought to the Ifugaos of Ampugpug by her brother, Taiyaban. – Mongahid, "Mover with a Pole"—he draws things out of the river by

reaching for them and pulling them in with a pole. (Barton 1946)• The ritual clapper is an instrument of Gods responsible for

multiplying life; it is used by ritual specialists for the same purposes.

Ritual clapper and the Gods of Wind

• All the music instruments are distributed between the classes of Ifugao gods, Ifugao pantheon being enormous. T.g. the Jew’s harp, all the three varieties of it, belong to the class of halupe - social-relations deities. The specialization of these “suggesting and harassing” deities is to control men’s minds and to suggest courses of conduct, the line of behavior.

• The ritual name of the clapper is Oltagon, derived from the name of its first owner. Clappers belong to the class of Puok – Gods of winds:

• Inoltagon inNunanud, "Like a Clapper, Wife of Self-Carried Downstream.“

•  Oltagon ud Kababuyan, "Clapper at Kababuyan," a woman who married a wind " and became a wind herself (Cf. Barton 1938 Philippine Pagans, pp. 106-111 ff.)

Ifugao hudhud topography and the Austranesian model of the world

• Ifugao model of the world, well-described in early sources (Villaverde, Barton et al) is typically Austronesian.

• The Cosmic River of Ifugao mythology • Firstly, it is a cosmic river that flows from the Skyworld to the

Underworld. The East-West orientation is connected to it. Every particular geographic area within the Ifugao cultural space has a local analogy of the Cosmic River embodied in the biggest local stream.

• Secondly, it is a River in the sense of World Cosmic Ocean, in which the human-inhabited Earth (Pugo) floats. These two ideas are being merged even within the limits of one and the same folklore genre.

• The space of Ifugao epics of rice, or the harvest, is organized into a non-completed circles with a kamalig longing bench in front of the hero’s house as a centre, and kadaklan – «The Big River» as the boundary of inhabited world. In mythological sense it stands for the Cosmic Ocean, but is described as an Ifugao wangwang – -“river, big tributary”. Kadaklan is a body of water surrounded by pantal - sandy river bed, ingrown with river reeds, tubtubuhan.

Hiking to the Nambawang - place at the confluence of rivers where the soul of the dead falls down from the rock into a river that will bring her to the

Kadungayan – the abode of the dead. 2012

When the soloist is performing the hudhud, her eyes are closed, as if she is sleeping. The mental picture that she has in front of her eyes is that of the river. She moves

downstream, jumping from one rock to another

The final point of the journey: the confluence of rivers

Nambawang – the round stone in the river, where the conductor of souls

places the linnawa when it falls down, to decide whether the soul returns or leaves (picture drawn by an epic singer,

2013)

Philippines and New Guinea• The Ifugao word puok means "strong wind." The deity of wind

is conceived as being ordinarily of human form and as causing winds by raising the arms, whereupon the wind issues from his or her armpits (Barton 1946: 35-36). Those connotations of palipal bamboo clapper with wind, coming out of armpits of a deity, strangely enough correspond to the description of sacred male musical instruments of some ethnic groups of New Guinea – flutes and gigantic bamboo tubes.

• Those instruments were being used in the (in)famous rituals of intimidation of women (New Guinea being one of two world centers, alongside with Amazonia, where those rituals were fully developed).

• Women were not allowed to see the sacred music instruments, but they heard the sounds produced. Here is an exoteric description of them, given by men to women:

• It is like a woman, same skin as you have, and wearing the skirt; it has holes under its arms and no eyes, though it has a mouth. The yell comes out of its armpits (Berndt R.M. Excess and Restraint. Social control among a New Guinea Mountain People. Chicago, 1962, p.68).

Thank you!