Babaylan Sing Back: Philippine Shamans and Voice, Gender, and Place
Grace Nono
Abstract
This book depicts the embodied voices of Native Philippine ritual specialists popularly known as babaylan. These ritual specialists are widely believed to have perished during colonial times, or to survive on the margins in the present-day. They are either persecuted as witches and purveyors of superstition or valorized as symbols of gender equality and anticolonial resistance. Drawing on fieldwork in the Philippines and in the Philippine diaspora, the book's deep engagement with the song and speech of a number of living ritual specialists demonstrates Native historical agency in the 500th yea ... More
Keywords: babaylan, ritual specialists, witches, superstition, gender equality, anticolonial resistance, Philippine diaspora, Philippines, Native historical agency, Philippine Islands
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2021 | Print ISBN-13: 9781501760082 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: May 2022 | DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501760082.001.0001 |
