From Being to Becoming: Protests, Festivals, and Musical Mediations of Igorot Indigeneity

Abstract

Case studies that highlight the complex musical lives of Igorots, a minority group from Northern Philippines, remain sparse in ethnomusicological studies on Philippine indigenous music. Due largely to colonial racial logics and postcolonial nationalism, scholarship on Igorot music has been driven by essentialism and an attachment to cultural purity; it refuses consideration of indigenous people as agents who engage contemporary realities. My dissertation confronts these issues by illuminating conflicting expressions of Igorotness demonstrated through past and present discourse and the case studies of two Igorot groups who performed in protests and festivals in the Philippines in 2017 and 2018. Compelled by clashing politics, diverse audiences, internal community frictions, and subjective desires, members of both groups grappled with their identities through musical performances in public and intimate settings. From their enactments, Igorotness emerged as at once commemorative, politically pointed, unconstrained by “tradition,” and radically transformed. Adapting postcolonial analysis and theories on indigeneity, performance, and practice through historical critique and ethnography, I demonstrate that Igorotness is less a fixed category of difference than it is a field where identity is constantly contested. This work challenges dominant scholarship by disrupting canonical expressions of indigenous musical identity. It attends to musical performance as a tool for dialogically engaging various forms of Igorot self-awareness, and pieces together discrepant narratives to reveal a wide-ranging sense of human dynamism. I foreground Igorots’ intricate trajectories and struggles for self-determination as seen in their musical lives.

This dissertation’s chapters evoke dialectic tension, rupture, and continual emergence—each succeeding narrative unsettles those before it and carves out new possibilities for representation. Chapter One examines selected writings and scholarly-artistic movements from the Spanish and US colonial eras to the early twenty-first century. I investigate the influence of colonial and postcolonial cultural politics on the knowledge production of Cordillera music while outlining epistemic shifts in a gradual overcoming of essentialism. Then, I discuss contemporary Igorot musical practices, beginning with Igorot protest music, its hybridity, and historical and ideological footings in Igorot knowledge and Philippine leftist politics in Chapter Two. Chapter Three complicates this narrative, focusing on the cultural ensemble Dap-ayan ti Kultura iti Kordilyera (DKK) to reveal the vulnerability of Igorot protest musical practices to misreadings and disapproval by varied audiences. Analyzing opposing performance strategies that DKK employed in response to these issues, I demonstrate how both overt and unconventionally oblique references to Igorot activism strengthen political legitimacy. In Chapter Four, I turn to musical displays in state-sponsored indigenous community festivals. Tracing the practice’s evolution from tactical exercises that supported US imperial control to celebrations of official self-governance, I portray festival performances as symbols of continuity and resistance that serve to reclaim Igorot heritage. Chapter Five unveils how festivals counteract grassroots notions of division, difference, and autonomy, and constrain Igorot self-expression. Delving into the experiences of delegates from the municipality of Sagada and an intimate, impromptu musical moment that affirmed their syncretic realities, I dismantle idealizations of festivals as spaces for Igorot empowerment.