ABSTRACT
This chapter relates one anthropologist’s ongoing experience with active collaboration with the indigenous Lumad community in the course of an ethnographic study examining the history, development, and present-day challenges of traditional political authority figures among the Higaunon in northern Mindanao. In addition to multi-sited ethnographic field research, the project in question has also included an effort to preserve Higaunon oral traditions as well as the complete genealogy of one descent group from which key “founder” ancestors of the Higaunon people are said to have come.
This chapter will focus on the internal debate over heritage and identity among the Higaunon Lumad that has emerged over the course of my ongoing study. This internal debate reveals contested indigenous understandings of “culture” itself, including what “Higaunon culture” might potentially encompass, what mattered/matters/will matter in terms of heritage, and how these in turn construct for them quite divergent conceptualizations of “Higaunon-ness.” Specifically, I focus on the differences in engagement with and attitudes towards cultural preservation and “reinvention” at play across different descent groups, different generations, and between urbanized and rural communities. The influence of government schooling, Christian conversion, and mainstream Filipino popular culture on this debate will also be addressed. The article discusses the ethnographic, ethical, and epistemological advantages of actively involving communities in research design, the process of obtaining informed consent, data collection, analysis, and the (re)presentation of ethnographic knowledge itself.
