Return to Mindoro: 40 years later, an anthropologist revisits his field site
On the ferry to Abra de Ilog, Northern Mindoro, I was wondering how I could possibly locate and find a village I had visited almost 40 years ago, in December 1969, and then again in March and April 1970. Probably the village would not be there anymore, the people I knew then would have died, their children and grandchildren gone who knows where. I had a vision of a new town with concrete buildings and electricity. Irrigated fields, maybe a factory? A concrete road certainly.
That little village was called Calamintao and was located on the Pagbahan River in Occidental Mindoro, south of the town of Mamburao. In 1969 and 1970 there was a regular commercial flight from Manila to Mamburao but not any more in 2008. Today one has to fly to San Jose very far south or just do as I did: take a bus to Batangas Pier, then a ferry to Abra de Ilog, then a van or a bus to Mamburao.
When I arrived in Mamburao, I found a pretty modern-looking hotel right away, quite a change from the little pension I used to spend the night in. When I asked the hotel manager if he knew anything about the Pagbahan river and a village called Calamintao, he said, “Sure, I am from there! Just take a tricycle tomorrow morning and you’ll be there in an hour.” So here I was, poised upon the well of history, looking down at an encounter with a 40-year-old memory.
Let me explain why I was so intent on revisiting this place. In 1969 I arrived in the Philippines as a French lecturer and aspiring anthropologist. Bob Fox, my mentor, had advised me to go to this part of Mindoro as he himself was involved in a research program for the National Museum in this particular area. So we went, my wife and I, in the designated spot, the village of Calamintao, gateway to mighty and distant Mount Halcon. There were two Mangyan groups living the area, the Iraya and the Alangan. Very little was known about them and no in-depth study of their customs and ways of life had been attempted so far. Anthropologists at the time, especially young and aspiring ones like myself, were intent on finding new facts about little-known tribal groups. What would the Iraya or the Alangan have in store for us to announce to the anthropological world?
Going to Calamintao involved riding a jeepney up to the Pagbahan River, south of Mamburao, and then walking. There was a trail along the river, the water was clear, birds of many colors and huge bright butterflies were everywhere to be seen. It took us an hour and half to get to Calamintao from the main road. The village was a cluster of thatched houses on stilts, located in the flat sandy river basin of the Pagbahan. There was a school and a kind of dormitory where we slept on cots provided by the school. The place had the status of a “farm settlement school.”
From there we — my wife and I — proceeded to organize explorations of the upper reaches of the Pagbahan River and up the slopes of mighty, cloud-shrouded, misty Mount Halcon. We went several times up the Pagbahan on treks that lasted about a week or more each. I have a very vivid memory of these treks and of what happened: the huge distances in difficult terrain, crossing the furious Pagbahan River on primitive bridges; the constant chanting at night of the marayaw by our companions; the leeches; the swarm of cockroaches invading everything, including the inside of mosquito nets at night and my morning coffee. So Calamintao was our base camp and there we tried to make sense of the linguistic and ethnic situation.
At the time I hardly spoke Tagalog. I had studied it for a while at the School of Oriental Languages in Paris but my skills were too poor to converse and conduct any inquiry. I had to rely on interpreters who spoke English. There were two in Calamintao — Mr. Cruz the schoolteacher and Mr. Tomas Pacifico, a senior Iraya gentleman who had gone to school and was referred to as “the Mayor.” Tomas Pacifico, with his sharp features, his piratical face and boundless energy, was our guide and mentor, a lively and humorous companion, and although he did not accompany us on our expeditions to the interior, he was our main informant and source of knowledge.
After few such expeditions we decided, however, to proceed and explore other areas in the Philippines. Complicated logistics involving food supplies, practical difficulties we met in establishing contact especially with the Alangan people who were shy and even hostile, a thinly populated highland area with an extremely scattered population, all that made fieldwork extremely problematic. I took many field notes, wrote a rather lengthy report, which I sent home, but I never returned to the place. My stay in Calamintao started to sink down among deeply buried layers of memory, acquiring the magical quality of some mythical experience, or maybe a remembrance of a former existence. Would the bright colors, the pure torrential waters of the Pagbahan and the elusive and mysterious people living there, still be found? I steeled myself against such expectations. Nothing would remain. Cosmic entropy under the guise of industrial devastation would have swallowed all.
The next morning after my return to Mamburao I hired a tricycle for the day and went to Calamintao. There was a feeding road leading to Calamintao from the main road and it took us half an hour to arrive, spending the best part of the short trip going along irrigated fields and irrigation canals, crossing cattle ranches. At first I did not recognize the village and it seemed farther away from the river than I remembered it; but the landscape was the same. One of the first persons I met, a gentleman who introduced himself as a pastor, had a kind welcoming manner and I told him that I actually had been in that place a long time ago. “I knew an old man who was the mayor then,” I said. “Ah, this was Tomas Pacifico. He was my grandfather. But you should meet my mother.” A few moments later I was introduced to a lady who told me: “Yes, I am Tomas Pacifico’s daughter. So you are MacDonald. I remember your wife; her name was Nicole.” I could hardly believe it. Moments later, older persons came to meet me and reminded me they were members of our expeditions. Yes, they said we went to this place, and that place. Did I remember Alibuktot or Balangkatao? And did I remember so-and-so? Mundo and Masangaon, our Alangan companions? This one and that one had passed away. Of course, Tomas Pacifico and Mr. Cruz were no more, but it seemed that the memory of my stay in Calamintao was intact. The community, numbering around 20 families, now formed by two new generations, was the same, albeit a renewed community. The village, I was told, was in exactly the same spot as before. “We are the same people, just one community like before,” said the daughter of Tomas Pacifico, “and yes, we are pure Iraya people.” There were no signs of change, no electricity, no concrete roads, no factories, no modern stores, even the relatively new school building looked ancient. Cosmic entropy had bypassed Calamintao. I just could not believe it.
As my Tagalog is now fluent enough to insure a reasonable level of communication, I indulged in endless questioning, word-list gathering and anthropological queries. In my recollection of the Iraya culturescape, three items were prominent: the reliance on a wild yam called nami’ (botanists refer to it as Dioscorea hispida), which requires slicing and soaking the tubers to remove toxins before consumption; the gathering of wild honey; and the chanting of marayaw, a kind of incantation used by medicine men to ward off evil spirits (or so I was made to believe but its description has not been made yet). Did they, even as recently as 2008, gather nami’? Yes, they did; very much so. Was wild honey gathered? Yes, very much so, of course during the dry season when flowering trees were in bloom. Was everyone converted to Protestantism and Catholicism? Yes, very much so, but the marayaw was still performed every night.
What else? Other elements of their material culture like rattan belts for the women, or elements of their old hunting and gathering way of life, were still present. I could pick up the threads of my anthropological quest of 40 years ago as if it was yesterday. I was in a time warp.
Let me conclude with a few afterthoughts. I must certainly remain very cautious. Change has occurred in Calamintao. Intermarriages with other lowland Christian communities, the presence of missionaries, new economic and political circumstances, easier and faster transportation, radio and television, demographic pressure, education, and new markets have been factors of transformation, maybe not immediately visible. Nothing remains absolutely unchanging. Iraya is certainly not spoken as it was in the early ‘70s. The “purity” invoked by Tomas Pacifico’s daughter is to be understood in a sense that is not narrowly genetic. The “farm settlement school” is now under a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title with a tribal administration supervised by the NCIP. However, considering the imminent demise predicted for such tribal culture as the Iraya (basically a hunting-gathering, foragers’ culture organized in nomadic or semi-nomadic bands, showing signs of Negrito inbreeding), considering the shifting and elusive nature of their society — not based on enduring corporations of any sort — the resilience of the Calamintao community with its strong “Iraya” identity, with the stubborn persistence of its cultural, economic and ritual activities, is a powerful reminder that small marginal cultures show an extraordinary degree of resistance, continuity and vitality ordinarily denied them.
There is another aspect of this experience I will retain as unique and important. Unknowingly, in spite of a short stay and rather unremarkable cohabitation with the Iraya people, I was made part of their history. They remembered everything about me. The memory of these groups is their history and their history is also their cultural identity. I don’t know whether they were really surprised to see a long-gone foreigner come out of the depths of their village oral archives, but I certainly was part of their collective memory. Caridad, the daughter of Tomas Pacifico, was among those old enough to remember me, but she must have been a few years old at the time. So they must have, through many conversations, enshrined the memory of my passage. There were others, to be sure, like Hazel Page, a Canadian missionary, a remarkable person who spoke Iraya fluently, about whom they also remembered everything. Here again I was struck by the precision of their oral history, spun across three generations. The Calamintao community is thus a self-contained historic community, with its memory, its culture, its own narrative, its sense of being part of the world. We are also part of their world but maybe as mere signs of their own history: anecdotal building blocks in the construction of a different, separate identity we know very little about.
