CORDI 101

• Cultural appropriation


  The 'taking – from a culture that is not one's own – of intellectual property, cultural expressions and artifacts, history and ways of knowledge'
• Forms of cultural appropriation

  • Subject appropriation
  • Content appropriation
  • Tangible object appropriation
• Subject appropriation


  Representation of culture by an outsider
• Content appropriation


  Outsider presenting cultural property as their own or utilizing pieces of cultural property for their work
• Tangible object appropriation


  Outsider taking physical items from the culture
• There is a power imbalance in cultural appropriation since the one taking something comes from the dominant group who lacks understanding of the historical context that influenced the thing that was taken from the marginalized group whose history has been marked by exploitation or oppression
• The taker from the dominant group will not give credit to his source, not respect the cultural meaning attached to the thing that was taken, and not use the thing according to how it should be but in any way he wants that may just reinforce stereotype against the marginalized group from whom the thing was taken
• Past representations of the Igorots allow us to read them back as we take back the images and provide a glimpse of the figurations of Igorot identity prior to contemporary distortions, such as those engendered by increased encounters with tourists who wish to pose with authentic 'natives'
• These representations provide a venue for critical examination to allow for a deeper appreciation and awareness that contributes to the self-determination of the Igorots in the contemporary period, i.e. enabling the reclamation of the Igorots as symbols in contemporary discourse and debates on ancestral land claim and ethnic identity
• The Igorots as the Other in colonial representation can be positively valued in contemporary research. Colonial records have been vital in re-examining how Igorots were represented in the past, and how these materials are used in popular modes of representation and recuperation of Igorot identity in the present
• The way these representations contest each other provides an entry into the examination of disjunctions of local and global processes, as well as further interrogation of authoritative ethnographic representation and anthropological knowledge of the Igorots
• While cultural appropriation once served the interest of colonial administrators, its products can also become resources – contested as they may be – for cultural knowledge in the post-colonial era
• Representations of Igorot culture are highly contestable and undergoing change: these representations provide a venue for critical examination that allows deeper awareness of Igorot culture
• It is sometimes the case that the native people themselves have selectively appropriated symbols from other cultures
• The prevalence of issues around Igorot representation, commodification, and cultural appropriation is indicative of the continuing challenges we face in representing Igorot culture
• The term Igorot was in the past considered to be derogatory, but it is now invoked as a declaration of pride in one's roots, and as a means to access resources under the Philippine nation-state
• The representational system – whether sounds, written words, photographs, film, electronically produced images, musical notes, even objects – is a means to stand for or signify other people's concepts, ideas and feelings that exist in a culture
• There are various media in which these representations take place – in writing, photographs, commodities, and museum exhibitions – which are all part of the process of representing culture and what Appadurai and Breckinridge have described as the global culture ecumene of the contemporary world
• The task is to understand how these have come to represent Igorot culture or have brought 'Igorotness' as a hybrid process of cultural reproduction to the world through a variety of practices and discourses, in particular when knowledge is rooted in local constructions and exposed to the world as an empowering representation or an oppressive misrepresentation
• The former (empowering representation) is brought about by thorough collaboration with cultural bearers, while the latter (oppressive misrepresentation) is generally brought about by commodification and cultural appropriation with the advent of tourism and modernity among other factors
• Appropriation


  The making of a thing a private property … taking as one's own or to one's own use
• In the case of cultural appropriation, the 'taking – from a culture that is not one's own – of intellectual property, cultural expressions or artifacts, history, and ways of knowledge', members of one culture take something from another cultural context and put it to some use within the context of their own culture
• Members of the public copy and transform cultural products to suit their own tastes, express their own creative individuality, or simply make a profit. Some cultural products can be freely shared with the public; others are devalued when appropriated by the majority culture
• Commodification takes place when cultural products are appropriated
• While commodification and appropriation are seen as negative practices in the contemporary period, Scafidi argues that: 'cultural products do, however, provide a starting point for recognition of the source community as well as a means of allowing outsiders a degree of participation in and appreciation of that community'
• Not all appropriation and commodification from other cultures is morally questionable. Ideas are freely transferred from one culture to another; and the Internet has facilitated global spread
• The case of batok (traditional tattoos of the Kalinga) will serve to illustrate this. Batok involves community-generated, place-based traditional tattoos, and practices that have tremendous economic and social value in the village. Yet when these are appropriated, Buscalan, a remote village in Tinglayan Kalinga in Northern Luzon, Philippines (the source community) has little control over the use and spread of designs
• Traditional cultural practitioners attest that the communities of origin are generally unable to prevent the appropriation of their designs through legal action
• The potential effects of cultural appropriation on source communities and on the products themselves span a range from the destructive effects of misappropriation, to the beneficial results of consensual appropriation
• Dean Conant Worcester became the bureau chief of the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes (renamed the Bureau of the Ethnological Survey in 1903) during the American colonial period and took an interest in the archipelago's tribal peoples
• Worcester mistakenly used the term Igorot to refer to all the ethnolinguistic groups living in the mountains of the Cordillera, including the Kalinga, Ifugao, Bontoc, Isneg, Kankanaey and Ibaloy
• Worcester compiled an extensive photographic record of ethnic groups, producing about 16,000 black-and-white photographs between 1898 and 1913 found in different repositories in the United States
• Worcester's approach to the photographs was based on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas of race and evolution, his photos reflect paradigms of social evolutionism, racism and colonial paternalism
• Worcester was able to obtain an enormous number of Igorot artefacts, and produced a forty-five-minute film entitled Native Life of the Philippines that featured elements of the Igorots' way of life
• Cordillera identity


  Political affiliation
• The film was not screened in cinemas in Manila. It was virtually forgotten for over a century, until it was recently discovered in the archives of the University of Pennsylvania
• Political creation and division of Mountain Province

  1. Establishment of Mountain Province in 1908

  2. Division into 7 sub-provinces

  3. Governor and lieutenant governors appointed
• Most Americans sent to the Cordillera were designated as lieutenant governors in charge of sub-province governance
• The indigenous voice is different from the 'exploitative' description of the images. According to them, 'it is good to have a record of the past, because we refer to them if we are doing right or wrong'
• Boundary realignment in 1920

  1. Alilem, Amburayan, and Lepanto dissolved

  2. Boundaries between Mountain Province and lowland provinces redefined

  3. Tagudin, Langagan and Allacapan transferred to other provinces