The Commanding Amigo and Its Spirit Embodiment: An Inquiry into the Relationship between Manobo-Visayan Compadrazgo Social Relationship in the "Modern" Manobo Cosmology and Ritual

Jose S. Buenconsejo

doi:10.22801/svn.2014.6.1.161

The entry of the logging industry in the once heavily forested riverine middle Agusan Valley where aboriginal Manobos live meant the entry of the material practice of wage labor into this out-of-the-way place. Wage labor converted the once relatively isolated, subsistence animist Manobos into laborers of the expanding capitalist regime. A symptom of modernity, this wage labor also accompanied the coming of Visayan settlers (also loggers paid by wage) who introduced indigenous Manobos the compadrazgo social relationship. This friendly relationship across ethnic identities legitimated social ties and is a social material practice represented in recent bilingual Manobo possession rituals where the Visayan spirit is incarnated along with Manobo spirits. To understand the idea behind spirit embodiment, I explore Manobo ritual as mimesis or poeisis. This representation is shaped by concrete material realities as much as these realities, in turn, are reconfigured by ritual practice. In the older Manobo cosmology, which is based on subsistence economy and dependent on the forest and rivers, individuals have an externalized self (as manifest in the idea of twin soul), in which the inner vital principle is co-extensive with a spirit double in cosmos. Manobos imitate the perceived workings of nature in ritual so as to control them in times of illnesses. In contrast, the mimesis of the Visayan spirit is based on a different political economic set up with its attendant asymmetrical interpersonal relationship. By symbolically representing the Visayan patron as friend, Manobos are able to negotiate the predicament of their subalternity in local modernity.

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