Cultural Retreat

Returning home feeling sick after an extended coverage in the Mountain Province. Exhaustion, having to get up early and sleep late, the heat, and eating mostly meat. But in those mountains you get a lot of time for yourself. No cell phone signal, no internet, and no noisy traffic. Just friendly people still following the old Agricultural Calendar. That's why Sadanga was dubbed as "a living museum".

Not much photos, mostly video is what I got coz the LGU and NCCA wanted a video documentary of their Fvegnas. The rest of the Media people weren't able to come so my coverage would be what a one man team can get. Not a complete angle and just using a power shot for the video but I guess I got the most important parts and the result came out ok. The video tittle, Fvegnash 2008, a Sadanga show of undying legacy will be out next week. It showcases their different customs they presented during the event.  Karareng (nose flute), Ullalim, Uggayam,  Tinaroyod, Darngek/Ayegkha and other cultural presentations.

Watching them perform revives an old passion I gave up years ago. To create a documentation of our dying cultures before they are completely forgotten, while there are still people practicing our customs.

I started a book on “Igorot Mythology” six years ago after I read the Aenid of Virgil and the Greek Mythology. I believed there was a way our story can be told also in such a manner by collecting all the myths and legends throughout the Cordilleras. And true enough, each place has a story to tell that are consistent to other tribes. All what’s left is to stitch them together and correlate each story to find out what we Igorots really believed in in the olden days. 

Studying our mythology and our diverse customs will help us understand what we are as people. And if you try to live in those places, if you look hard, you will find out that we were not as ignorant as the first travelers and conquerors labeled us to be. In the urban areas, we are adopting the segregation of garbage that our ancestors had been doing for centuries. And that’s just one of their systems that are very orderly. The most important of those is when they follow their stablished agricultural calendar that blends well with nature.

Coming up soon in my blog will be the Agricultural Calendar cycle of the Mountain Provinces and the difference in every municipality.

Some of the books that I read

Here's my online bookshelf

They Eat Like Us??????

I have written this a long time ago but kept forgetting to put it in my blog. My reaction on the eating habit of Luc Gallardo who used spoon and fork and was regarded as disgusting by the school principal (http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/storyPage.aspx?storyId=37803)


Her mom Maria Theresa Gallardo was told that her son should be punished for eating with spoon and fork. He was prejudiced and was forced to eat alone in another table every time he eats like a pig. That's using the fork to push the food into the spoon. What the.... I just ate like that last night at the Bulaluhan. I haven't yet seen any pig in my place that eats with spoon and fork. At least in the Philippines they behave like pigs (see the picture of a pig made in the Philippines).


And what about eating with your hands or with Chopsticks? If that's how you were raised and that's the most comfortable way for you to eat, you have to change it in that part of the Planet. But in our part of the world, we cook pork, (that's pig's meat :-), into delicious dishes like sinigang, binalsig nga inanger, and also bulalo. Like what Mrs. Gallardo said, how indeed can you eat those delicacies with a fork and a knife? I pity this Principal Bergeron and his co-teachers who haven't tried our appetizing dishes.


One day I'll go and see how Principal Bergeron's pig dine. That would be a very good photography subject. In that part of the World, pigs eat with spoon and fork. They EAT LIKE US?

At least not all Canadians think the same way. This is what the Canadian embassy said after the incident: "To assert one's eating practices, which after all are most proper and which have become part of one's cultural identity is, in fact, encouraged under the Canadian immigration policy on creating a Canadian mosaic rather than a melting pot.

There's one pig I'd like Norman Bergeron and Martin Bertrand meet, Hannibal Lecter's pig.