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The Changing Social Biography of the Bulul of Ifugao

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Abstract

This paper investigates the changing social biography of the ‘bulul’, a wooden ritual

idol from Ifugao, in the Cordillera region of the Philippines. It explores how the bulul

has acquired multiple, contrasting values as it has shifted context and location, both

within the Philippines and further afield to the western world. Their original use

within Ifugao as a ritual idol forms the starting point for the analysis; this uses

historical and ethnographic sources to understand their use and value within

traditional ritual practices. The discussion then moves to look at how the bulul has

been transformed and commodified into an object placed within museum displays,

acquired by galleries for sale to collectors, or replicated as a tourist commodity. The

idea of ‘authenticity’ is also addressed, taking into consideration the views of the

local Ifugao people about the appropriation of these ritual objects by collectors and

tourists as well as the motivations of tourists and collectors for acquiring them. In

short, the bulul provides an excellent case study for exploring how an object used

originally in a particular cultural and ritual context acquires different meanings and

values as it moves into the hands of tourists, gallery owners and collectors.

Key words: social biography; bulul; Ifugao (Philippines); authenticity; ritual.

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The Changing Social Biography of the Bulul of Ifugao

In this paper I will be looking at the ‘bulul’, a wooden ritual idol from Ifugao, in the

Cordillera region of the Philippines. I will explore how the bulul has acquired multiple,

contrasting values as it has shifted context and location, both within the Philippines

(within the local Ifugao region and in the Philippines more generally) and further

afield to the west. My initial interest in the bulul stemmed from observations made

during my dissertation fieldwork in the Philippines in the summer of 2014. The

research also draws upon secondary sources, including scholarly discussions,

museum catalogues, and websites of auction houses and art galleries presenting

bululs for sale to collectors.

Before turning to the study of the bulul figures, it will be useful to locate them briefly

within their cultural and geographical context. Ifugao is the name of both the ethno-

linguistic group and the province in the Cordillera region in the northern Philippines.

The landscape in Ifugao is famous for its rice terraces, sometimes described as

‘stairways to heaven’, which have been designated as a world heritage site by

UNESCO (UNESCO 2008). During the long period of Spanish control of the

Philippines, the Ifugao resisted their attempts to control the region, meaning that the

Spanish had limited influence over the local people. However, this changed after the

Americans took control of the Philippines in 1898, bringing Christianity to Ifugao. The

Christianization of the region was arguably one of the most significant changes in

Ifugao culture, but traditional Ifugao beliefs and practices have remained strong,

sometimes syncretizing with Christianity. More recently, Ifugao religious practices

have seen something of a revival, as they are considered to be a significant marker

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of the distinctive cultural and ethno-linguistic identity of the Ifugao people. In parallel,

however, rituals are also being harnessed for tourist purposes, turning them into a

theatrical display, as in the weekly performance of a rice harvest ritual in the town of

Banaue (Bulilan 2007). In this context, rituals are changed to suit tourist tastes, an

excellent example of this being the playing down of animal sacrifice (which, as an

offering to the ancestors, is a central element in all Ifugao rituals) as this might upset

the tourists. The local people involved in tourism are, therefore, responding to the

‘tourist gaze’ by commodifying traditions to attract and please visitors (Stronza 2001,

271; Urry 1990, 2001)

Turning now to the bulul, I will first discuss their original use within Ifugao as a ritual

idol, using historical and ethnographic sources to understand their use and value

within traditional ritual practices. I then move on to examine how the bulul has been

transformed and commodified into an object placed within museum displays,

acquired by galleries for sale to collectors, or replicated as a tourist commodity. I will

also touch on ideas of authenticity, taking into consideration the views of the local

Ifugao people about the appropriation of these ritual objects by collectors and

tourists as well as the motivations of tourists and collectors for acquiring them. In

short, the bulul provides an excellent case study for exploring how an object used

originally in a particular cultural and ritual context acquires different meanings and

values as it moves into the hands of tourists, gallery owners and collectors.

A bulul is a hand-carved wooden figure made by the Ifugao people. The bulul figure

is a highly stylized representation of ancestors, and it is believed to be activated and

gain power from the presence of the ancestral spirit. Traditionally, the bulul is made

from the wood of the narra tree, a pleasantly scented hardwood with medicinal

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properties, though they are also occasionally made from stone. They vary

considerably in size, from around 40-50 cms up to almost life size, the larger ones

being used as house posts, and the smaller as more portable ritual objects. The

bulul has a wide range of uses within traditional Ifugao ritual practices. One of its

most important functions is as guardian of rice granaries, and it is used in a range of

ceremonies concerned with rice production and harvesting, which is the key

agricultural crop grown on the vast rice terraces (which are, as noted earlier,

designated with World Heritage status). The bulul is also used widely in rituals for

‘bountiful harvests, revenge, or for healing the sick’ (Buenafe, 2011). The creation of

a bulul involves rituals done by a mumbaki (local ritual practitioner) to ensure that the

bulul gains the blessing and power of the ancestors. The bulul is treated with care

and respect to avoid the risk of angering the spirits of the ancestors, who might

cause the owner to become sick. In other words, the bulul is an object imbued with

ritual power and, using Gell’s terminology, has agency (Gell 1998).

Bulul have two standard forms, which are on the whole regionally distinctive. In the

southern part of Ifugao they are made sitting down (Fig. 1), while those from the

northern part of ifugao are represented standing up (Fig. 2). The bulul are made as a

pair, one male and one female, as indicated by the genitals and sometimes by the

slightly larger size of the male. They are otherwise identical in other details of bodily

and facial form. They are often used as a pair within rituals. The seated bulul have

their arms crossed and resting on their knees, while the standing figures have their

arms parallel to their sides. More rarely, bulul may hold bowls or have outstretched

arms (carved and attached separately).

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When a bulul is used in a ritual such as the one during the rice-planting season, it

will have blood smeared on it from either a chicken or a pig depending on the wealth

of the community performing the ritual (Fig. 3). The offering of blood represents the

sacrifice to the ancestors. More specifically, the smearing of blood upon the bulul

symbolises the particular ancestor whom the bulul is meant to represent. As these

bloodstains on the bulul dry over time they darken and they create dark blood

patterns from the handprint from when the blood was placed on the bulul, creating an

overlapping pattern of handprints. They may also have stains on them from soot

within the house. Like other idols that have become fashionable as collectible ‘art’,

such surface ‘patina’ is valued as part of the ‘authenticity’ (and thus commercial

value) of the object, and is typically referenced in the seller’s description.

Unsurprisingly, blood and dirt may be deliberately added to make a freshly made

bulul look older and used, as reported to me by an Ifugao informant, and noted by

other writers as ‘fake patinas’ (Schoffel 1989; Steiner 1994, 106).

The bulul continues to play an active and important role within Ifugao culture and is

still used in ritual today. It is not, therefore, an object lacking a current cultural

context or detached from a living belief system. To illustrate this point, I briefly

describe a ritual that I was fortunate to witness during my fieldwork on July 23, 2014.

This was the dawat di bagol (receiving the deity) ritual in which the local mumbaki

rose to the higher rank of mumbagol; this was a very significant occasion as the last

time this ritual had taken place was almost fifty years ago. The importance of this is

that only a mumbagol can do the most important rituals. This long and complex ritual

requires several mumbaki from neighbouring areas to be present to recite the chants

in harmony with the beating of drums, together with several male and female

assistants. During the ritual they were seated for several hours within the rice

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granary (alang) together with the ritual objects, including the bulul. At the end of it,

two black pigs were sacrificed as well as several chickens. The sacrifice of pigs also

marks this out as a key ritual, and Remme has recently documented the importance

of pigs in Ifugao within the framework of human-animal relations (Remme 2014).

These rituals, as well as the larger harvest ritual, did go into decline in recent years

(as noted in the UNESCO 2008 report); however, the renewed attention to local

heritage and the revival of rituals may in turn mean that the manufacture of ‘proper’

bulul made with care and specifically for rituals (as opposed to tourist versions) may

increase, since almost every ritual in Ifugao would require the presence of a bulul

figure, representing the ancestors and asking for their blessing. One area that merits

closer study would be a comparison of bulul made for Ifugao ritual use and those

made as tourist products. While most of the tourist versions follow the traditional

form, they are often less carefully made and they seem to lack certain features such

as the carved and shaped details of the base on which the figure stands or sits.

Bululs are passed down in families due to them being family idols. Typically, the

older statues have beetle holes made by insects in the granary. These idols are

considered by western standards to be more valuable as they are older. But the

people in Ifugao perceive the figures differently, since during my fieldwork I was told

that two ‘proper’ bulul were both just as valuable as each other, even though one

was made several generations ago and the other was made recently. What mattered

to their users was that they were made with the correct rituals so they are properly

connected to the ancestors. This neatly captures the way that the bulul, like other

objects, may be differently ‘valued’ according to their different uses and

commodification.

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This point can be further developed in relation to the perceived differences between

bulul made and used in Ifugao rituals and those produced for the tourist market.

From the western perspective this is often presented in terms of an opposition

between the authentic and commercial ‘souvenir arts’ with the latter cast as inferior

and ‘degenerate’ (Phillips 2006, 443). Phillips, however, argues that souvenir art, as

the product of traditional societies responding to the tourist gaze (and purchasing

power), should be studied and valued in its own right and not only as the ‘residue’ of

older traditions (2006, 449). Interestingly, the Ifugao do not think about or classify

the bulul according to western categories. Bulul used for rituals and for sale to

tourists might be made by the same carvers, but what makes the bulul ‘authentic’ for

the Ifugao is the additional ritual processes by which it is connected to the ancestors.

In the absence of these rituals, I was told that the bulul has no special value and

there is no problem with selling them to tourists. Buenafe, however, also reports

interviewing a mumbaki who criticized the sale of bulul as treating ‘heritage as

garbage’ while at the same time acknowledging economic realities (Buenafe 2011,

136), suggesting a complex and varied set of responses to this issue.

In the larger towns like Banuae, bulul are popular items in the tourist shops. Whole

shops may specialize in a range of wooden tourist items. Some modification for the

tourist market can be observed in the making of smaller versions of the bulul, more

suited for transporting home in a suitcase for use as an ornament and material

memory of the trip, and as noted earlier, there is some degree of simplification and

loss of detail. Translation of the bulul into a tourist object and being sold at

international exhibitions is reported from as early as the 1920s (Dutton 2013, 63),

when so-called ‘primitive art’ was already widely appreciated in the west,

incorporated into museum displays, and inspiring important modernist movements in

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western art (Duncan 1991, 101; Svašek 2007, 99). A well-known shop, mentioned in

many travel books and blogs, belongs to Greg Sabado in Baguio. He sells wooden

objects that he has both made himself and also collected in his multi-roomed shop

(Fig. 4), and he also has a small museum where he displays a collection of Cordillera

artefacts that he says he is preserving ‘for the next generation’.1 Visitors to this

particular shop thus see the collected or curated objects as well as those available

for sale within a single space.

While tourist or souvenir bulul may be characterized in terms of multiple replications

for tourist consumption, there are other contexts, outside of the original ritual uses in

Ifugao, which fit Kopytoff’s model of a ‘yearning for singularization’ (Phillips 2006,

447). These are museum collections and commercial spaces such as art galleries

and auction houses, where the authenticity, age and quality of the artefact attract

added value.

Most major museums have galleries devoted to non-western arts, and many have

bulul in their collections. Duncan mentions that traditional or ethnic arts are

sometimes mixed in with modern art (1991, 101), a curatorial decision which reminds

the viewer of the inspiring role that African and Oceanic arts, for example, played in

the creation of modernist western art, but also undervalues or even ignores the

functions and roles of the artefacts in their ‘home’ contexts. Typical museum

catalogues or labels offer factual information on material, size and form, plus

approximate date and the source of the piece. This information on provenance rarely

preserves details on its local Ifugao history, but focuses on its western social

1 http://www.travelbook.ph/media/articles/baguio-shopping-guide (accessed 29/3/2015)

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biography, in the hands of patrons and collectors. Bulul are also sought after by

collectors and as such are valued as ‘art objects’ and offered for sale by auction

houses, galleries and, in recent years, online through Etsy or Ebay. In common with

the museum context, value is attached to the ‘authenticity’ of the object, and the

language used in the catalogues or sales patter gives a clear indication of what gives

added value.

It is worth mentioning again that for the Ifugao the bulul must be cared for as an

object that has agency and connections to the ancestors. This resonance with ritual

use is important to the collector also, but because it makes the object more

commercially valuable. I have collected sample data from a range of sellers in

Europe and the United States, and these give a vivid sense of the prices that the

bulul can fetch (up to €€25,000 at a Christie’s sale in June 2014, for a standing bulul)2

and the terms repeatedly used to imbue the bulul with value for the collector, such as

‘museum quality’, ‘authentic’, ‘years of wear’, ‘patina of use’, ‘extremely primitive’.3

I believe that the way in which the bulul are commodified for the art market is well

represented by a gallery in Manila owned by Maria Closa, and advertising itself as

‘Arts Primitifs Antiquités’ on the wooden sign outside. This is of special interest as it

is located in the Philippino capital yet fully embraces western art values. It is also

interesting to view the elegant and enticing layout of the gallery (Fig. 5) in relation to

2 www.christies.com/lotfinder/sculptures-statues-figures/statuette-ifugao-bulul-ifugao-figure-bulul-hingyon-5808071-details.aspx (accessed 15.3.2015)

3 e.g. https://www.etsy.com/ie/ l ist ing/212505500/rarehttps://www.etsy.com/ie/ l ist ing/212505500/rare --originaloriginal -- i fugaoifugao --bululbulul --

statuestatue --hugehuge (museum quali ty); (museum quali ty); https://www.etsy.com/ie/listing/194651137/authentic-ifugao-ritual-wild-boar?ref=shop_home_active_23 (years of use; authentic; very old).

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the more chaotic and cluttered shop discussed earlier in Baguio (Fig. 4); together

they capture the divergent settings in which bulul travel outside their local, Ifugao

context into a wider transnational world as consumable souvenirs and ‘art’ objects.

The gallery has a website and the owner presents herself as follows:

‘Since then, her sense for the trade had led Maria Closa to establish a

woven basket enterprise fifteen years later. Her pioneering spirit would

further find artistic authenticity with the ethnic tribes in the north and

south of the Philippines. For the love of her work, Maria Closa would trek

the mountains for days, exposed to the challenges of nature, just to

acquire adornments, accessories, and wooden sculptures,

especially "bululs" - rice gods believed to bring good harvests. She fondly

remembers her experiences during the eighties: surviving the cold

mountain rains, pestered by strange insects, sleeping in a house made of

native materials, witnessing tribal rituals, and eating oddly-preserved

meat and drinking "tapuy" - an organic rice wine.’4

This extract from the website raises a number of issues. Firstly, that the information

given is not accurate. As noted in my discussion, bulul are connected to the

ancestors, and so are not ‘gods’. Second, their use is far more complex that ‘bringing

good harvests’ (a view perhaps influenced by a Christian perspective), as they are

used in many stages of rice production and storage, and invoked in other types of

rituals such as healing.

4 http://www.mariaclosa.com/about-1/ (accessed March 15, 2015)

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The extract also sheds light on the attitude of this particular dealer (who is not from

Ifugao and lives in Manila). Rather like earlier colonial travellers and explorers she

portrays herself as travelling into the untamed and dangerous lands of Ifugao to

acquire rare, tribal objects that are pure and unaffected by the outside world. If we

did not know that this quote came from a modern website, it would not be out of

place in a much older piece of travel writing, a colonial gaze on the ‘natives’. As I

learned during my own fieldwork, there are tensions within the Philippines with the

people of the north being exoticized by those in the south of the country as more

untouched by the west (as noted earlier, they were not conquered by the Spanish)

but also more primitive (and less westernized). Some galleries (and earlier writers)

refer to the Ifugao as “Igorot’, and it was explained to me that this is considered a

pejorative term, equated with ‘noble savage’ and used (wrongly) for all the peoples

from the Cordillera. In this case, even the sign for the gallery (‘arts primitifs’) evokes

this ‘othering’ and romantic exoticizing of the Ifugao and their cultural products by a

lowland Philippino gallery owner and dealer.

This desire for traditional ‘authentic’ art is readily seen on other gallery websites in

Europe and in the United States. One site claims that it will provide the buyer with a

letter of authenticity to prove that their bulul were made in the traditional way.5 As

discussed earlier, the Ifugao and western perceptions of authenticity are so sharply

divergent that such a statement of ‘authenticity’ is meaningless, since it is the ritual

process and use that gives a bulul value within Ifugao. So the only way to show that

it was a ‘real’ bulul for sale would be to have documentary evidence, such as a video,

of it being made and used. It is also very difficult to demonstrate the age of a bulul,

5 http://www.african-art.net/southeast-asian-art/asian-articles-list-by-ethnie/ethnicity/5 (accessed 30.3.2015)

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hence the vague dates or the claim to have come from a collection, which provides a

date of acquisition and thus a minimum date for its manufacture. Furthermore, the

desire or craving for the authentic object has, as for many artefacts and antiquities,

generated a market in ‘faked’ (in other words, made with a deliberate intention to

deceive) bulul which are artificially and artfully aged by smearing them with blood

and burying them for a while in order to create the desired ‘patina’ of repeated use in

rituals (Steiner 1994, 106).

Established auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s focus less on claims to

authenticity; presumably the credentials of the house itself are sufficient guarantee,

though provenancing to previous owners is valued as is typical of the art market.

Like the Maria Closa gallery, online galleries (such as African-art.net,

tribalartasia.com or oceanicartsaustralia.com) emphasise the artistic qualities of the

bulul, casting them within a western way of viewing and valuing. Sellers on Etsy and

Ebay seem to use the strongest language; for example, one Ebay user with the

telling seller name of ‘primitifstuff’ writes of a bulul as having ‘years of use and patina,

wow!’6

Over the past century, bulul figures, in common with many artefacts from traditional

cultures, have acquired a complex set of social biographies. Beginning as embodied

and ritually powerful objects (and still used as such today), they have also acquired

new social and economic meanings: educating the public in museum displays;

satisfying the consumerist needs of the tourist for a tangible memory that evokes the

Philippines and the towering rice terraces of the Cordillera; and meeting the desires

of the collector to possess a supposedly unique object which has been ascribed

6 http://stores.ebay.ie/primitifstuff (accessed 30.3.2015)

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aesthetic and commercial value through western eyes. For the western audience

the artistic form is highly valued by both museums and galleries, and a good

example of this is the designation of a seated bulul holding a bowl as a ‘artistic

masterpiece’ by the Virtual Collection of Asian Masterpieces.7 The caption informs us

that the ‘sensibility and the strength of the sculptor show great maturity’, thus

focusing on a universalizing concept of it as a ‘work of art’. Here is it useful to come

back to Gell’s theory of art and agency, which reminds us that to take art as a purely

aesthetic category is to ignore and undervalue the crucial role of ‘art as a system of

action intended to change the world, rather than encode symbolic propositions about

it’ (Gell 1998, 6). This perspective suits the bulul well, as they are - in their Ifugao

context - objects with ritual uses that become physically inscribed through handling

and pouring of blood onto their wooden bodies. The bulul only acquire economic

value or capital and become ‘art objects’ outside of the Ifugao context, and yet their

age and ritual usage are important components in the construction of those western

values.

Within the complex range of social lives of bulul discussed here, the shift from local

to global involves a repositioning in terms of values, from object with agency to

commercially valuable art object to be looked at rather than used. Inherent in this is a

set of contradictions: that the western consumer values the bulul for its contextual

use (the age, the patina), yet that is completely lost as the bulul travels out of Ifugao,

losing its ritual agency and becoming a work of art.

7 http://masterpieces.asemus.museum/masterpiece/detail.nhn?objectId=10218 (accessed 30.3.2015)

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Asia and the Pacific: Sustainable Tourism and the Preservation of the World

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John Urry, 1990. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage. John Urry, 2001. Globalising the Tourist Gaze. (Cityscapes conference Graz, November 2001) (http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/079ju.html: accessed 15/12/14).

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Figures

Fig. 1: Standing pair of bulul Fig. 2: Seated pair of bulul (Figs 1- and 2: http://www.sothebys.com/en/search-results.html?keyword=bulul)

Fig. 3: Ifugao ritual with including bulul (on the left behind a sheaf of rice), July 2014.

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Fig. 4: Tourist shop in Baguio with bulul and other wooden items (http://heart-2-heart-online.com/2011/01/08/sabados-handicrafts-baguio-city/)

Fig 5: Gallery of Maria Closa in Manila (bulul on display either side of panelled door)

(http://www.mariaclosa.com/gallery/)