BAGUIO CITY—Unlike some of the world’s top museums, Museo Kordilyera at the University of the Philippines Baguio has no issue about artifacts looted by European colonizers that are now being returned to their places of origin.
Billed as the first ethnographic museum in the north, the three-story UP museum is “cocurated” by indigenous communities, who are invited to “work with and (help select) the exhibition (of items identified with their villages),” says museum director and anthropologist Annalyn Salvador-Amores. They can also “check the veracity of the information surrounding these artifacts before we open the exhibit to the public,” she adds.
In 2019, when the Museo featured “Feast of Merit,” an exhibition of “wealth, status and feasting” in the mountain region, “descendants of the ‘kadangyan’ (the more prosperous families) from Kiangan town in Ifugao performed the ‘himmagabi’ ritual at the opening,” Amores tells the Inquirer.
Pilot exhibit
Museo Kordilyera officially opened in January 2017 with an exhibit on the “batok” (traditional tattooing) of Kalinga, on which Amores produced papers and a book, “Tapping Ink, Tattooing Identities: Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Kalinga Society.”Ongoing since Oct. 20 is “Threaded Traditions,” where actual samples and archival photographs of Cordillera’s woven blankets are on exhibit. Earlier, in 2020 and despite the coronavirus pandemic, Cordillera weavers managed to put on display authentic woven fabrics and traditional garments for the exhibit “Handwoven Tales.”
As part of their work in this ethnographic museum, Museo researchers record culture by observing social interactions and how a group of people live their lives. All UP Baguio research projects that contribute to Museo exhibits begin by securing the free, informed and prior consent of Cordillera clans.
Rigorous debates are part of decision-making as far as displaying archival photographs are concerned. “Photographs of bare-breasted women with tattoos, of headhunters and even a headless Ifugao showcased not only the colonized subject, but also the ethnocentric eye behind the lens that regarded the Igorots as savages, barbaric and primitive,” says Amores in her 2015 paper, “Afterlives of Dean C. Worcester’s Colonial Photographs: Visualizing Igorot Material Culture, from Archives to Anthropological Fieldwork in Northern Luzon.”
Blown-up copies of Worcester’s prints are currently featured at Museo Kordilyera. Igorot photographs, Amores contends, are “substantial visual evidence of the Igorots’ way of life,” once people get past their colonial legacy. Worcester served as secretary of the interior in the American colonial government and had published his photographs in magazines like the National Geographic.
Scholarly work
Amores says UP Baguio has embarked on scholarly work to understand and preserve Cordillera culture. Their research also studies the continuing impact of indigenous Cordillera knowledge on 21st century Philippines, she adds.
In September, for example, UP Baguio began putting up a Landslide Knowledge and Management Center (LKMC), which would house all historic, anthropological and scientific data about landslides that have often visited the area.
The center will also gather old Igorot practices that helped mountain communities cope with fatal erosions, “a growing recognition of the role that indigenous knowledge plays in responding to calamities,” notes UP Baguio math professor Wilfredo Alangui, one of the faculty members tasked with building LKMC.Museum work, says Amores, “is a continuing educational task for cultural workers.” Which was why Museo Kordilyera continues to run museum management training and did so even at the height of the pandemic, she says proudly, adding that it’s all part of “studying and managing cultural heritage, and pursuing capacity building for museum workers.” INQ
