The Ifugao

← Encyclopedia

At harvest a figure is lifted down from its place in the granary. It is a squat human form the length of a forearm, carved from a single block of narra and stained so dark by years of handling and smoke that the grain barely shows — the knees drawn up, the hands laid flat on them, the face broad and still. It has a name and a genealogy, and it is not lifted down as an heirloom. A ritual specialist has spent the night reciting: the myth of Humidhid, who cut the first of these figures from a great tree; the line of the household’s dead; the invocations that call the rice-spirit back into the wood. Now the figure is given the first of the new rice wine, and a smear of blood from the pig killed at daybreak is worked across its mouth and shoulders. The god is being fed. Outside the raised granary the mountainside falls away in flooded steps, hundreds of walled pond-fields stacked one above another into the cloud, and every grain drying in the loft behind the figure came up out of them. The people who carved both the god and the mountain call themselves the Ifugao.

The earth people

The name is their own, and it says what they are. Ifugao comes from ipugo — the earth, the hill, the ground of the fields — and from the people as i-pugo, the ones of that ground: earth-dwellers, mortals, the human beings as distinct from the spirit powers who share the world with them. To be Ifugao is to be, precisely, of the soil and among the living, over against the ancestors and the deities who are not. It is a modest self-description for a people who built one of the most ambitious agricultural landscapes on the planet, and it is exact.

They are an Austronesian people of the Central Cordillera, the mountain spine of northern Luzon, concentrated in the province that bears their name in the Cordillera Administrative Region, with its capital at Lagawe. A 2020 national census counted them, aggregating those enumerated as Ifugao with the Tuwali and the Ayangan subgroups, at 309,816; the Kalanguya are reckoned among them as well. The subgroups differ in dialect, in dress, and in the details of custom, but they share the terraced valleys and the ritual world those valleys turn on. They are not Tagalog and they are not Bisaya. The lowland peoples of Manila Bay and the Visayan seas — treated in their own places among the Tagalog and the Visayans — met the Spanish in the sixteenth century and were, within a few generations, conquered, congregated into mission towns, and largely Christianized. The Ifugao were not. Across roughly three and a half centuries of colonial rule the highlands turned back every serious attempt to take and hold them, and that single fact of history shapes everything that follows: it is why the old religion here is not a reconstruction pieced out of hostile chronicles but a practice one can still watch.

Traditional Ifugao stilt houses with pyramidal thatched roofs in the village of Bangaan, below the terraces. Dan Lundberg, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

A younger monument than it looks

The terraces are what the world knows first, and the thing the world is most often told about them is wrong. For a century the guidebooks and the schoolbooks have called the pond-fields of Ifugao two thousand years old, a monument raised by “more than a thousand generations,” a survival out of deep prehistory. That figure has the ring of settled fact. It was, in origin, a guess.

The two-thousand-year age was never dug out of the ground. It was extrapolated in the early twentieth century by two American ethnographers, Henry Otley Beyer and Roy Franklin Barton, the pioneers of Ifugao study, whose reconstructions became the foundation of the textbooks. Neither excavated the terraces to date them. They reasoned instead from awe — estimating how many centuries so vast a quantity of hand labor must have taken — and from the migration models fashionable in their day, which assumed a grand work had to be ancient, carried in by an early wave of settlers. The number was read out of the size of the achievement, not out of the soil.

The soil has since been read, and it tells a shorter and stranger story. Since 2012 the Ifugao Archaeological Project, directed by the archaeologist Stephen Acabado in partnership with the Ifugao scholar Marlon Martin, the local heritage organization Save the Ifugao Terraces Movement, and the National Museum of the Philippines, has excavated at the Old Kiyyangan Village near Kiangan and recovered a run of radiocarbon dates together with the microscopic residue — pollen, phytoliths, starch — of what people actually grew. Deep highland settlement reaches back a thousand years and more; but the earliest layers yield no rice. They point to taro. Intensive irrigated wet-rice terracing, the flooded landscape as it now stands, appears only much later, on the order of the sixteenth to seventeenth century — which places the terraces nearer three or four hundred years old than two thousand.

The timing is the provocation. In the study Older Is Not Necessarily Better: Decolonizing Ifugao History through the Archaeology of the Rice Terraces, Acabado and Martin argue that the shift to wet rice was not a slow inheritance from prehistory but a deliberate act of history, and one timed to the Spanish arrival in the lowlands below. Faced with the pressure of the conquest, on this reading, the highlanders concentrated their population, intensified their farming, and built the terraced economy that could feed a defiant upland society — turning the mountain itself into infrastructure for resistance. It is a revision offered against the evidence, not a verdict handed down, and its authors are careful to say so; many tradition-bearers, for whom the ancient dating is woven into who they are, hold to the older figure, and the honest description is that the age is genuinely contested. But it reframes the whole monument. The site is treated at length among the Ifugao rice terraces; what matters for the people is the twist the digging exposes: that the very antiquity outsiders admired may be a colonial invention, and that the truer story — terraces built in the teeth of the Spanish century, by the one Luzon people Spain could not take — is younger, and prouder, than the myth allowed.

The thousand-named world

The terraces are the working floor of a sacred order of extraordinary density. Where the lowland pantheons come to us through the filter of the friars who recorded them in order to destroy them, the Ifugao cosmos was described by ethnographers who could sit with living priests, and what they found was vast. The world is layered into six regions: the Skyworld, Kabunian; the Earthworld of the living, Pugaw; the Underworld, Dalom; and the eastern, western, and spirit realms — Lagud, Daya, and Kadungayan — that lie beyond the horizon and beyond death. Through all of them moves a company of powers the ethnographers struggled even to count: ancestral spirits and nature-deities, the anito in their multitudes, named individually in the ritual recitations, running in the older reckonings well past a thousand. Deities of the sky and the rivers, of the crops and the hunt, of each named sickness and each named blessing, are addressed each by name — which means the whole agricultural year is, in effect, a liturgy, and the man who knows the liturgy is indispensable.

He is the mumbaki, the ritual priest, and the rites are the baki. The mumbaki is the Cordilleran counterpart of the Tagalog catalonan and the Visayan babaylan, the office of the one who can speak to the spirits and be answered; but where those lowland specialists were most often women, the Ifugao mumbaki are more often men, elders who carry in memory the immense recitations a baki requires. To perform one is to recite a world: the myths of origin, the genealogies of the household and of the gods, the deeds by which the spirits can be moved, chanted through a night to summon the named powers and set food and rice wine — the baya — before them, with the sacrifice of chickens or pigs at the center. The rites follow the rice: the clearing and the planting, the transplanting, the harvest and the storing of grain. Alongside them run the honga, the rites of healing and of thanksgiving, called when sickness comes or when a debt to the spirits must be paid. These recitations are set down here at the distance the public record keeps them. They are not a manual, and their operative heart — the exact words that seat a spirit, the closed knowledge of the highest order of priest — stays with the mumbaki and the community whose inheritance it is.

The god fed in the granary

At the center of the rice year sits the bulul, and it is the clearest thing the Ifugao made. Carved from a single block of narra or ipil — the narra associated in Ifugao cosmology with health and prosperity — the bulul is a human figure, most often seated with the knees raised and the hands upon them, and characteristically made in a male-and-female pair. As the National Museum of the Philippines sets out, the word names at once a class of ancestral rice-spirit and the carving that houses it: the figure is both an image of an ancestor and a vessel the spirit can inhabit.

A newly cut figure is not yet a bulul. It becomes one through consecration, a rite conducted by the mumbaki that seats the spirit in the wood — and it is here that Humidhid returns, the figure named in the myth as the maker of the first bulul, who in the ethnographers’ telling cut eight pairs from a great tree, gave them names, and killed pigs in a feast to honor them. The priest recites that myth over the new carving and anoints it with the blood of a sacrificed pig; thereafter the figure is kept in the alang, the raised granary, with the harvest it guards. Over the years it is fed — touched with blood at the turning-points of the rice year, offered the first rice wine and rice cakes, worked with the grease of the offerings — until it wears the dark, glistening patina that a good old bulul carries, the sacrificial record of every harvest it has kept. What is public here is the shape of the thing: that the figure is made a god by rite, set in the granary to hold and multiply the grain, and fed. The words that do the seating are not.

An Ifugao bulul, the carved rice-granary guardian, in wood darkened by generations of sacrificial offering. Hiart, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0.

That figures of this kind now sit behind museum glass is itself part of the story. The bulul is among the most collected of Philippine objects; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and others hold fine old examples, prized for their carving and their patina — the same patina that is, to the household that made them, the residue of a god being fed. A bulul in a granary is a working deity; a bulul in a vitrine is an artifact of it, admired for exactly the marks that record what it was for.

The chant, and the women who keep it

If the mumbaki holds the rites, the other great inheritance is held mostly by women. The hudhud is a corpus of long narrative chants, performed without instruments — a lead soloist singing the line and a chorus answering it back to a single recurring melody. The chants are sung at the labor and the passages of the rice world: at the sowing, above all at the harvest and the weeding, and again at funeral wakes and the bone-washing rites for the dead. A full recitation can run for days. According to UNESCO, which proclaimed the hudhud a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001 and inscribed it on the Representative List in 2008, the corpus runs to more than two hundred chants, each of some forty episodes, and is thought to reach back before the seventh century. Its best-known story follows 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 marriage that binds the two lines.

The narrators, UNESCO notes, are mainly elderly women, and they hold a key place in the community as its historians and its “preachers.” This is the ground of a real authority: in the ritual sphere the wife typically leads the chant, and the women who carry the hudhud carry with it the genealogies, the customary law, the geography, and the beliefs of the whole people — a library held by ear, and by women. Through the story runs everything an Ifugao needs to know about being Ifugao, and the primacy of rice through all of it.

Headhunting belonged to this same world, and it should be neither hidden nor sensationalized. In the past a warrior’s standing, the settlement of a feud, the honor of a lineage, and the ritual protection of the community could turn on the taking of heads, an institution embedded in law and prestige rather than in cruelty, and one shared with their Cordilleran neighbors. It was largely suppressed in the early twentieth century under American administration, the same colonial power whose ethnographers were at that moment inventing the terraces’ false antiquity. It is a closed chapter of the culture, named here in its own terms and given no more than its proportion.

What the highlands kept

The organizing fact of the Ifugao is a negative one that turned into a treasure: they were never fully conquered, and so they never lost what the conquered lost. To see the size of the inheritance, one has only to look down the mountains. When Spain took the lowlands — Manila fell in 1571 — the friars set out to break the old worship at its root. They smashed the images of the anito and recast the ancestral spirits as demons; the sky-creator’s name, Bathala, they absorbed into their preaching for the Christian God; and the lowland priestesses, the babaylan and catalonan who were overwhelmingly women, they branded as witches and as aswang, a deliberate demonizing of native and largely female religious authority meant to discredit the old religion, with friars such as the Dominican Diego Aduarte recording idols confiscated and burned. That campaign, and its long afterlives — the aswang turned into a horror-film monster, the dual-gendered fertility deity Lakapati reclaimed today as a decolonial and LGBTQ+ figure — belong to the peoples Spain actually subdued, and are told with the Tagalog and the Visayans. The point for the Ifugao is the contrast. The mumbaki is the highland cousin of that suppressed priesthood — and where the babaylan was driven into hiding or into the shape of a witch, the mumbaki was never driven anywhere. He still officiates in the open. The bulul still sits in the granary. The gods were never sent underground, because the ground was never taken. The Ifugao are, in this exact sense, a living archive of a Philippine sacred world the coast largely lost.

In the modern era the terraces became the emblem of it. In 1995 the Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras were entered on the UNESCO World Heritage List as the first property ever placed in the new category of “cultural landscape” — a place valued neither as wild nature nor as a single monument but as the joint work of people and mountain over time — inscribed in five clusters: Batad and Bangaan in Banaue, Mayoyao, Hungduan, and Nagacadan at Kiangan. In 2001 the same body added the terraces to the List of World Heritage in Danger, registering the forces pulling them apart: out-migration, the abandonment of fields that no longer paid, mechanization, and the slow erosion of walls that need constant hand-repair. A decade of restoration was judged enough that in 2012 the Committee removed them from the danger list, a rare reversal. The hudhud has followed a parallel arc of recognition shadowed by loss: honored by UNESCO even as the hand-harvest it accompanies frays, its chanters aging, its transmission now propped up by Schools of Living Traditions that teach children directly what the fields once taught on their own.

None of this is a museum. Most Ifugao today are Roman Catholic, and they are also, in the same lives, the people who feed the bulul at harvest and chant the hudhud over their dead — a living syncretism, not a pagan survival clinging to a Christian surface. Banaue sells the view to travelers who photograph the terraces as changeless, when the mountain is the opposite of changeless: the walls rebuilt each year, the woodlots on the ridge replanted each generation, the antiquity itself now being counted downward by archaeologists digging in the ground the rice grows in. What holds through all of it is the thing the opener began with. At the foot of the field, in the loft of the granary, the dark figure is lifted down when the grain comes in, and given the first of the wine and a touch of blood, and set back among the harvest it was made to keep — a god still fed by the earth-people who carved it, in a highland the conquest never reached.

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