Ifugao Rice Terraces

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Before the light reaches the water it reaches the trees. On the crest above the highest pond-field, where the mountain runs out into cloud, stands a patch of forest that no map calls wild — a woodlot held by a family, worked by a family, and governed by rules the whole village keeps: the muyong, also named pukung or pinugo, the private forest that everyone depends on. Its roots hold the rain. Its litter feeds the spring, and the spring feeds the ditch, and the ditch feeds the topmost paddy, from which water steps down the mountain through hundreds of walled fields to the valley floor. At the foot of that first field, in a small raised granary of timber and thatch, a figure sits with its knees drawn up and its hands on its thighs, carved from a single block of hard wood and stained almost black. It is the bulul, and it is not a decoration. It is the rice-god of the household, consecrated and fed with blood, set to hold and multiply the grain. Forest, water, field, granary, god: the terraces are the visible middle of a system whose two ends are invisible, and both of them are sacred.

This is the landscape that the world knows from postcards as an amphitheater of green stairs climbing into mist, and photographs the way one photographs a wonder — as something impossibly old. The people who carved it are the Ifugao, one of the Cordilleran highland peoples of northern Luzon whom outsiders long grouped as Igorot, and their claim on the place is treated at length among the Ifugao. What the postcard cannot show is the quarrel now running through the same soil the tourists come to admire: whether these terraces are the two-thousand-year monument of the guidebooks, or something startlingly younger — and what it would mean if the antiquity itself turned out to be a colonial invention.

The carved mountain

The terraces cut into the slopes of Ifugao province rise, in the main clusters, between roughly a thousand and fifteen hundred meters above the sea, following the contours of the mountains rather than fighting them. They are wet-rice terraces — pond-fields, not dry benches — retained by walls of packed earth or dry-laid stone and kept flooded through the growing season by a gravity-fed irrigation that begins in the ridgetop forest and threads down field to field. The prestige crop is tinawon, a traditional rice grown only once a year, slow and low-yielding and bound to the ritual calendar; faster commercial rices grow elsewhere, but the terrace and its year belong to tinawon.

The property inscribed by UNESCO in 1995 as the Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras, listed as number 722 under cultural criteria (iii), (iv), and (v), was the first place ever entered on the World Heritage List in the category of “cultural landscape” — a landscape valued not as untouched nature nor as a single built monument but as the combined work of people and place over time. The inscription is not the whole terraced region, which is vast, but five chosen clusters in four Ifugao municipalities: the Batad and Bangaan terraces in the municipality of Banaue, the central cluster at Mayoyao, the terraces of Hungduan, and the Nagacadan cluster at Kiangan. The town of Banaue, whose roadside terraces are the most famous view and the busiest tourist balcony, is itself the gateway rather than a part of the inscribed property — a distinction lost on most of the visitors who photograph it.

Each cluster has its own form. Batad folds into a steep natural bowl above its village so that the fields curve back on themselves in a semicircle, the “amphitheater” of every travel article. Bangaan drops behind a small traditional hamlet of timber houses and granaries. Hungduan fans out across its valley in a broad radiating pattern that observers liken to a spider’s web. Above all of them sits the muyong, and it is the least visible and most essential element of the whole design. These are not public forests. Each is privately held, often attached to a particular family or descent line, yet they are managed by custom for the common good — cut selectively, replanted, protected from clearing — because everyone downslope drinks and irrigates from what they hold. The woodlots are also reservoirs of life: the muyong of the region are reported to shelter on the order of 264 plant species, many of them local and useful, so that the forest above the rice is at once watershed, pharmacy, timber-lot, and shrine.

The Batad cluster of the Ifugao terraces folding into its natural amphitheater above the village. Tyrel Fang-asan Faniswa, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The building of such a landscape by hand, without draft animals on the steepest ground and without the wheel, is a genuine marvel of engineering and social organization, and no revision of its age takes that away. The walls must be maintained every year against the pull of the slope and the burrowing of worms and eels; the water must be shared by rule down a mountainside; the labor must be mustered field by field by a community that also feeds itself. What is in question is not the achievement. It is the number of years the achievement has been standing.

The quarrel over two thousand years

The figure everyone repeats is two thousand years, and it comes with a poetry that the UNESCO citation itself supplies: the terraces are called there a system that “has survived for two millennia,” a memorial to the labor of “more than a thousand generations.” For a century that antiquity was the pride of the nation and the headline of the site. It was also, it now appears, a guess.

The two-thousand-year age was never an archaeological finding. It originated in the early twentieth century with two American ethnographers, Henry Otley Beyer and Roy Franklin Barton, pioneers of Philippine anthropology whose reconstructions became the basis of countless textbooks. Neither excavated the terraces to date them. As the Ifugao Archaeological Project has since laid out, Beyer and Barton arrived at their number by estimating how long such an enormous quantity of hand labor ought to have taken, and by fitting the terraces into the migration-and-diffusion models fashionable in their day — the assumption that so grand a work must be ancient, carried in by an early wave of settlers. The two thousand years was extrapolated from awe, not read out of the ground.

The ground has since been read. Since 2012 the Ifugao Archaeological Project, directed by the UCLA archaeologist Stephen Acabado in collaboration with Ifugao communities and the National Museum of the Philippines, has excavated at the Old Kiyyangan Village near Kiangan and elsewhere, recovering nineteen radiocarbon dates from that settlement together with paleoethnobotanical evidence — the microscopic residue of what people actually grew and ate. The result is a story with a sharp turn in it. There is deep human settlement in the highlands, reaching back roughly a thousand years and more; but the evidence for irrigated wet-rice terracing does not appear until far later, only a few centuries ago. Before the rice terraces, the sequence points to taro. The transition to intensive pond-field rice — the terraced landscape as it now exists — falls at around the sixteenth to seventeenth century, which places its age nearer three or four hundred years than two thousand.

The timing is the provocation. It coincides with Spanish contact, and Acabado’s reading, set out in the study Older Is Not Necessarily Better: Decolonizing Ifugao History through the Archaeology of the Rice Terraces, turns the terraces from a relic of primeval isolation into an act of history. On this argument the Ifugao — who were never conquered by Spain, whose highlands the colonial state could not hold — responded to the pressure of the lowland conquest by intensifying, concentrating population, and building the wet-rice economy that could sustain a defiant upland society. The terraces become not a survival from before history but a strategy within it: a monument of resistance and consolidation, younger and, in a way, prouder than the myth allowed. The archaeologists are careful that this is a revision offered against the evidence, not a final verdict handed down; and many outside the digs, including tradition-bearers for whom the ancient dating is woven into identity, hold to the older figure. The honest description is that the age is contested — the popular two thousand years against a much younger archaeological reading — and that the contest is itself now part of the terraces’ story.

The god in the granary

Whatever their age, the terraces were never merely fields, and to see them only as engineering is to miss what they are for. They are the working floor of a sacred world dense with powers. The Ifugao cosmos is populated by ancestral spirits and by a great company of deities said to number in the hundreds, even the thousands — presences inhabiting the sky-world and the earth-world, the crops and the sicknesses and the hunt — and the whole agricultural year is a liturgy addressed to them. Rice is the holiest of foods, and it is held under guard.

The guardian is the bulul. Carved from a single piece of hard wood — narra or ipil — the bulul is a human figure, most often seated with the knees raised and the hands resting on them, sometimes standing, and frequently made in a male-and-female pair. It is at once an image of an ancestor and a vessel: as the National Museum of the Philippines sets out, the word names both a class of ancestral rice-spirit and the carving that houses it. A newly cut figure is not yet a bulul; it becomes one through consecration, a rite conducted by a ritual specialist that seats the spirit in the wood, after which the figure is kept in the alang, the rice granary, together with the harvest it protects. Over years it is fed — touched with the blood of sacrificed chicken or pig at the turning-points of the rice year and anointed with the grease of food offerings — until it takes on the dark, glistening patina that a good old bulul wears. That closed consecration and its words belong to the ritual specialists and the households that hold them; what is public is that the figure is made a god by rite, and set to make the granary full.

A pair of seated Ifugao bulul, the carved rice-granary guardian figures, in narra wood darkened by sacrificial offerings. Hiart, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0.

The rites of the rice year — the clearing, the planting, the transplanting, the weeding, the harvest, and the storing of grain — are the baki, and they are led by the mumbaki, the ritual specialists who know the invocations. The mumbaki is the Ifugao counterpart of the Tagalog catalonan and the Visayan babaylan, the office of the one who speaks to the spirits; but where the lowland specialists were most often women, the Ifugao mumbaki are more often men, elders who carry in memory the long recitations that summon the ancestors and the deities by name and genealogy. The most prestigious of the rites are reserved to the highest order of elder. To perform a baki is to recite a world: the myths of origin, the genealogies of the household and the gods, the deeds by which the spirits are moved to make the rice increase. These recitations are described here at the distance of the public record; they are not a manual, and the operative heart of them stays with the mumbaki and the community whose knowledge it is.

The chant over the rice

Bound into the same year, and the same landscape, is the hudhud — a corpus of long narrative chants performed without instruments, a lead soloist answered by a chorus that takes up the line to a single recurring melody. The hudhud is sung at the labor and the passages of the rice world: at the sowing and, above all, at the harvest and the weeding of the fields, and again at funeral wakes and at the bone-washing rites for the dead. A full performance can run for days, for the corpus numbers hundreds of chants; the best known recounts the hero Aliguyon of Hannanga and his long, evenly matched rivalry with Pumbakhayon, a contest of warriors that ends not in a killing but in a peace sealed by marriage. Through the story run the genealogies, the customary law, the geography, and the beliefs of the Ifugao — a whole culture carried in the memory of chanters, mostly older women, and handed down by ear.

UNESCO proclaimed the hudhud a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001, and inscribed it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008. The recognition was also an alarm: the chant is learned in the fields and at the wakes, and both are thinning as wage labor, schooling in other languages, and out-migration draw the young away. To answer that, Schools of Living Traditions in the Ifugao towns now teach the hudhud to children directly from the elder chanters — a deliberate transmission, outside the fields that used to teach it on their own. The chant, like the bulul and the baki, is not a preserved artifact. It is a practice being kept alive by people who can see it might not keep itself.

Danger, heritage, and the icon

The terraces are living, and living things can fail. In 2001 UNESCO placed the property on the List of World Heritage in Danger, registering the pressures that were pulling the landscape apart: fields abandoned as farming ceased to pay, walls eroding and slumping without the constant hand-repair they need, the burrowing damage of giant earthworms and eels, the invasion of the golden apple snail, and the steady loss of the young people whose labor the terraces require. A terrace is only as old as its last repair; left alone, it does not become a ruin so much as a landslide. Conservation work over the following decade — watershed and muyong reforestation, support for terrace farming, management planning — was judged enough that in 2012 the World Heritage Committee removed the property from the danger list, a rare reversal, though the underlying pressures did not vanish with the listing.

Around the working landscape has grown a second life as national icon. The terraces have long stood for the Philippines itself — carried for years on the reverse of the twenty-peso note — and they draw the boast, unmeasured and much repeated, that the terrace walls laid end to end would reach halfway around the globe. Banaue and Batad are marketed as a wonder, sometimes as an “eighth wonder of the world,” and the tourism that results is both the terraces’ lifeline and one of their strains: it brings the cash that keeps some families on the land and the crowds that erode the balconies and tempt the fields toward concrete and souvenir.

The terraces also sit inside the larger religious history of the archipelago, and their place in it is peculiar. When Spain took the lowlands — Manila fell in 1571 — the friars set out to break the old worship: they smashed the images of the anito, recast the ancestral spirits as demons, absorbed the Tagalog high-god name into their preaching for the Christian God, and branded the lowland priestesses, the babaylan and catalonan who were overwhelmingly women, as witches and as aswang, a demonization of native and largely female religious authority that drove surviving practitioners into the hills. That whole campaign, and its afterlives — the aswang turned into a horror-film monster, the sky-creator Bathala absorbed into the Christian God, the fertility deity Lakapati reclaimed today as an LGBTQ+ and decolonial figure — belongs to the Tagalog and the Visayans whom Spain actually conquered. The Ifugao it never subdued. Their gods were never driven into hiding, because the highlands were never taken; the mumbaki still officiate in the open, and the bulul still sit in the granaries, in a continuity the lowlands lost. And here the irony sharpens. When American rule brought its ethnographers after 1901, the romantic dating they invented — the terraces as a primeval two-thousand-year survival — flattered the highlanders even as it erased what the archaeology now suggests is the truer and more defiant story: that the terraces were very likely built in the teeth of the same Spanish century, an upland people’s answer to a conquest that stopped at their mountains.

So the place a traveler climbs to photograph as changeless is the opposite of changeless. The muyong on the ridge is replanted by hand each generation; the wall below it is rebuilt each year; the bulul in the granary is fed each harvest; the hudhud is taught, now, in a schoolroom because the fields alone no longer teach it; and the antiquity that made the terraces famous is being counted downward, field by dated field, by archaeologists digging in the ground the tinawon grows in. Three or four hundred years or two thousand, the water still comes down out of the trees onto the highest paddy at dawn, and a carved god still sits in the granary at the field’s foot, waiting for the harvest it was made to keep.

→ Related: The Ifugao · The Tagalog · The Visayans · Bathala · Lakapati · Aswang · Bakunawa · Maria Makiling · Mount Makiling · Mount Banahaw · Tabon Caves