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Overview
Drawing on fieldwork in the Philippines and in the Philippine diaspora, Grace Nono's deep engagement with the song and speech of a number of living ritual specialists demonstrates Native historical agency in the 500th year anniversary of the contact between the people of the Philippine Islands and the European colonizers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781501760099 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2021 |
| Pages: | 252 |
| Sales rank: | 593,287 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Introduction1. Who Sings? A Baylan's Embodied Voice and its Relations2. Shifting Voices and Malleable Bodies3. Song Travels: Mumbaki Mobility and the Relationality of PlaceWhat People are Saying About This
I am reading Grace Nono's Babaylan Sing Back as an ecumenical Protestant liturgiologist and practitioner of liturgical contextualization and indigenization. This work is priceless in its intent to resurface the "primary" babaylan in the circle of babaylan discourse dominated by the voices of non-native, middle class, diaspora babaylanes and culture bearers. Her going down into the radix of a living office is a piercing critique of our mainstream practice of appropriating the indigene in our cultural work. Babaylan Sing Back is flesh and blood tales of the ancestral home/land-based babaylan rising from the margins to decenter the politics of representation. In its envisioned aftermath is the widening of the circle that fosters a more radical communion between the "primary" and "secondary" babaylanes. The widening of this circle, more importantly, extends the spatial and spiritual reach of the babaylan to disturb the wider world into engaging the politics of an earth rising towards its healing. Long had been the wait for a grounded treatise that can root the ongoing indigenization of liturgical rites and music in Philippine churches in the storied tradition of resistance to the colonization of our native soils and souls. While established religion or the church is remote to the interests of this book, liturgiologists, liturgists, and church musicians find in the rising of the embodied voices of the babaylanes a "textual" companion to retrieving what is essential and liberating to human rites and ritualizations.
Grace Nono's Babaylan Sing Back is a deeply empathetic account of indigenous women healers in the Philippines. Nono's powerful reflections on religion, voice, gender, and place deserve a wide audience.
This is a beautifully written and profoundly decolonial book that should be essential reading across the fields of Indigenous studies and the anthropology of religion. Grace Nono upends assumptions that have too often turned Native ritual specialists in the Philippines into symbols or consigned them to a distant past. Her interlocutors, instead, actively struggle with the spirits and reshape ritual practices to meet the needs of their communities today.
I write as an Agusanon-Manobo teghusadan (conflict mediator/peace advocate) who hails from baylan (shaman) and tribal leader ancestors. "Gudgod" is the spirit's journey to trace the cause of an illness or problem and to negotiate the medicine or solution. Babaylan Sing Back is an act of mediation because the author bridged different standpoints, perspectives, and histories that have been written down, that have not been written down, that have been heard, that have not been heard, through the painstaking process of "Gudgod," listening, and expressing through writing the different convictions, without discrimination, towards peace and reconciliation.I have great respect for my fellow-Manobo who are in this book, for their rights to express themselves, and for their differences from other Manobos and other Indigenous Peoples. This respect is ingrained in the values of my elders and is the foundation of peace. I also respect the wisdoms that are expressed here, especially those that have come from elders who have passed on, for these are their inheritances that my people and I now consider sacred.
In this dense ethnography of babaylan, or ritual specialists, from the Southern and the Northern Philippines, Grace Nono offers a valuable account of Native agency and epistemology. Against the grain of urban-based, middle class and diasporic appropriations of the babaylan, Nono shows how Native ritual specialists are varied in form, complex in their politics and mobile in their locations. She emphasizes their contemporaneity, the embodied power of their voices and their historical relevance to current discourses about decolonization. Nono's book is bound to enrich our understanding of comparative Native and Southeast Asian Studies.
Babaylan Sing Back is timely and important. Grace Nono integrates narrative flair with ethnographic detail to contribute significantly to the development of new perspectives in the academic study of religion. Her vivid descriptions of babaylan provide the reader with a deep understanding of the lived situations in which these indigenous voices and songs emerge and make sense. Stylistically and ethnographically this book is without parallel.
In this valuable work, Grace Nono highlights living babaylan and outlines for the reader complications in how they are perceived by various audiences.
Rarely have I encountered a more informed, honest, and hopeful book that examines colonialism, how to respond to its ravaging effects, and why that is important. Babaylan Sing Back by scholar-performer Grace Nono, is a careful and nuanced look at shamans and shamanism as it is practiced in the Philippines and in Philippine diasporic communities today. Examining current religious, social, and feminist constructions of Philippino shamanism, and informed by decades of ethnographic research, Nono invites us to listen carefully to the babaylan, and to sing back with the hope of truly meaningful change.