Scope and Content
There are approximately 140,000 Ifugao living in scattered districts over some 170 square miles in northern Luzon. They are agrarian farmers who have perfected a system of sustainable rice terracing uniquely suited to the heavy rainstorms and rugged terrain of northern Luzon, Philippines. In their tribal society, rice is more than a basic sustenance; it also serves as a medium of exchange and a signifier of status. Rituals, ceremonies, and events are tightly interwoven into the Ifugao people's daily lives. The characteristic richness and diversity of the Ifugao agriculture, religion, and music is strongly evident in The Harold C. Conklin Philippine Collection, which includes what arguably is one of the largest, most comprehensive set of audio recordings on the Ifugao in existence. It documents continuity and change in some of the most important features of Ifugao culture over the course of forty years.
The recordings chronicle a wide range of Ifugao ceremonies, events, rituals, and sub-rituals, with much of the collection divided between strictly oral, strictly instrumental, and combined oral/instrumental field recordings. Field recordings document, for example, mythical or genealogical recitations, women's rituals, chants, invocations, rice harvesting, storytelling, children's games, language exercises, voice letters, interviews, and discussions. While a handful of the recordings are in the languages of Buhid, Hanunóo, Ilongot, Kallāhan, or English, the majority are recorded in the Ifugao Baynīnan dialect, one of the twenty-three dialects spoken by the Ifugao. With regard to geographical coverage, the documentation comes from twenty-seven of approximately one hundred and fifty agricultural districts, thereby providing a respectable sampling of the Ifugao. Therefore, due to its topical, geographical, and temporal scope, the recordings not only capture the exact details of ritualized Ifugao ceremonies, they situate them within the larger cultural context. Additional recording locations in the Philippines include: Tukukan, Nueva Vizcaya-Dupax del Sur, Nueva Vizcaya-Kakidūgen, and Mindoro Oriental.
Conklin began making original field recordings of the Ifugao in 1961. He used a combination of tape recorders (Fi-cord, Nagra, Sony, and Uher), recording formats (discs, reel-to-reel tapes and cassette tapes), and recording speeds (1 7/8, 3 3⁄4, 7 1⁄2, and 15 ips) in the course of his field work, adopting new technologies as they became available. Recordings on 5-inch reel-to-reel tapes and sixty-minute cassettes are the predominant original formats in this collection, which totals 262 first-generation sound recordings.
All recordings were originally given three distinct numbers by Conklin. In this system, the first number denotes the year, the second denotes the reel or cassette number, and the third denotes the side of the reel or cassette as noted (example: original field recording 61.5b is the B-side of the fifth recording made in 1961). With the exception of twenty-four recordings made in 1955, 1960, 1965, 1966, 1970, and 1977, Conklin is the primary recordist or interviewer for all of the original Ifugao recordings.
A copy of Conklin's own Philippine Collection Catalog and Expanded Contents, which provides item-level descriptive data on original field recordings, is included in this collection. The prefatory material in Conklin's Catalog lists recording locations, languages, and individuals (interviewees, interviewers, and recording operators), provides a key to his abbreviations and symbols, and indexes specific field recordings by instrument, ceremony, event, and ritual. This is a useful resource that can be used in conjunction with the AFC 2001/007 Reference Concordance to facilitate use of the audio materials. The Reference CD Concordance lists the original field recording number, the corresponding CD, track duration, date of original recording, original format, and track content description. In addition, the database for this collection allows for term and phrase searching using Ifugao terms found under the Appendices.