Headhunter Itineraries: The Philippines as America’s Dream Jungle

“Headhunter Itineraries: The Philippines as America’s Dream Jungle” from The Global South, 3.2 (Fall 2009) Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez

Reprinted for “Empire’s Eyes: Colonial Stereography of the Philippines” Spring 2018

Copyright, 2009.

Courtesy of The Global South Indiana University Press

In Dream Jungle, Jessica Hagedorn explores different articulations of the visual “other” central to the formation of the American cultural nation while she remaps, with attention to colonial cartography, the U.S. South onto the American Pacific. She demonstrates how different technologies and discourses of display, violence and empire worked to produce the Philippines and Filipinos for global consumption as laborers and commodities. My paper looks at the forms of ethnic tourism in the Philippines in order to explore the continuities and discontinuities in how contemporary tourism embodies familiar colonial trajectories of discovery, conquest, conversion, and display. In doing so, I trace the history of the Philippines and of Filipinos within the overlapping cultural, social and political cartography of American colonialism in the Pacific and U.S.-driven development projects that focus on tourism in the global South. By focusing on the histories of pedagogical display within popular and academic anthropological discourses and practices, and their recirculations of certain narratives and visual tropes of the “native” in modern tourism, my project seeks to link the ambitions of the United States in the Pacific to the production of the U.S. South in the Philippines.

essica Hagedorn’s latest novel, Dream Jungle (2003), ties together two reality-based articulations of representation, culture and empire in the Philippines. The first, the production of Napalm Sunset, a Vietnam War film, references the calamity-plagued 1976–1979 shoot of Apocalypse Now. The second, the “discovery” of the “Stone Age” Taebo tribe in the mountains of Mindanao, in the Philippines, not-so-obliquely alludes to the 1971 “anthropological find of the century” of the Tasaday people.2 In what is ultimately an indictment of American neocolonialism, Hagedorn proposes the American postcolony as a site where shared hallucinations of imperial violence and dreams of 144

tropical desire are located. Dream Jungle maps the Philippines (and by association, Vietnam) as part of a long-standing and durable American imperial strategy: the violent acquisition of extraterritorial subaltern zones for the imperial center’s economic and political prosperity, and the creation of its own racial dark continent, populated by headhunting, dog-eating savages essential for the civilizing project. Set during the rise of the U.S.-backed Marcos dictatorship, the novel suggests important parallels between U.S. interventions in Vietnam and the Philippines, as well as the imperial fictions and formations of knowledge that legitimate and sustain structures and relations of dominance.

Linking the resilience of an ethnographic fantasy of the native in the former American colony to a cinematic war drama based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Hagedorn explores how articulations of Filipino savagery and primitivism are central to the formation of the American cultural empire.

In Dream Jungle, we come to understand how the intertwined tropes of nightmare and dream structure the American colonial project in the Philippines.

For Hagedorn, the violent trauma of military slaughter in the Philippines (even as it resurfaces in the re-enactment of Philippines-as-Vietnam) is transformed through the work of dreaming: the bloodstained soil of occupation becomes a racialized territory for discovery, uplift, and civilizing. Dreaming the Philippines as America’s jungle encompasses multiple acts of domination, erasure and imagination, reworking the nightmare of imperial brutality and theft into a fantasy of benevolence and assimilation. This alchemical property of dreamwork extends to the primary subject of colonial obsession in Hagedorn’s novel—the Filipino native as savage and primitive. Moving from the savage needing violent eradication and discipline (the nightmare) to the primitive needing salvation, conversion and conservation (the dream), this colonial project writ small on the body of the Filipino native parallels the larger material and ideological transformations that Hagedorn portrays.

What follows is not a textual analysis of Dream Jungle, but rather a meditation on the visual production of the “native” within colonial, ethnographic and tourist imaginaries as inspired by Hagedorn’s postcolonial re-imagination.

Taking my cues from the novel’s juxtaposition of different technologies and narratives of display, violence and empire, as well as from Hagedorn’s uniquely located position as a Filipina-American writer producing images about the Philippines for global consumption, I examine how contemporary fantasies of the Filipino native have been historically produced, disseminated and consumed, with specific attention to how these patterns inform the circuits of ethnic tourism in the Philippines today. How and why does the Filipino savage—the subject of American colonial hallucinations—pass from terrifying headhunter to disappearing, noble primitive? By way of a detour through the historical production of these nightmares and fantasies in the colonial and postcolonial Philippines, this paper looks at the emergence of ethnic tourism 145

in the Cordilleran village of Sagada in the northern Philippines in order to tease out how present-day tourist practices embody colonial trajectories of discovery, conquest, conversion, and display that are first dreamed and rehearsed on the U.S. continent.3 In what ways does ethnic tourism in Sagada rehabilitate the narrative of savage headhunter to a more palatable, manageable kind of native? What work, ultimately, does this rehabilitation carry out?

In tracking the shifting iconography of the Filipino native through Hagedorn’s text, American colonial ethnographic archives, and the tourist scenes in Sagada, this paper conducts a critical counterethnography. For Hagedorn, colonial and postcolonial optics operate on several overlapping levels: the colonial ethnographic eye, the filmic fictional imagination, and the literary/ tourist gaze. In this counterethnography, I examine the practices of “looking” that were established during the colonial ethnographic era and link them to the scopic regimes of the contemporary tourism industry. This counterethnography is also a mapping practice: it locates the history of the Philippines and Filipinos not only within the overlapping cultural, social and political cartographies of American colonialism in the Pacific, but also in the earlier and contemporaneous projects of U.S. nation-making on the American continent. These myriad colonial ways of looking—exported to the Pacific—acquired their coherence from the sedimented archive of earlier framings of racialized Others on the American continent, an archive which was then reaffirmed in the Pacific.

America’s Dream Jungle—as colonial nightmare and dream—is an expansive map of violence and racialization. This map, Hagedorn suggests, also understands contemporary ethnographic and tourist “rediscoveries” of the native and recurring militarizations of the tropics as instrinsic to U.S.-driven development projects that advocate tourism as the neocolonial economic panacea of the global South. The exportation, reproduction, and transformative power of this imperial visual methodology—and its attendant material and representational violence—are the subjects of this counterethnography.

In looking to the Philippines as the site of these imperial hallucinations of war and savagery, as well as the dreamscape of tourist fantasy, I also seek to draw links between the U.S. South and the Asia/Pacific, not merely as different zones of a broader global South, but as intertwined parts of a U.S. imperial cartography. In what ways are these Filipino native subjectivities part of the imaginative repertoire of the U.S. and global South? Considering Hagedorn’s text as a text of the U.S. South (even though its diasporic Filipina author is at home in urban New York and San Francisco) is thus an exercise in mapping out how historical colonial itineraries and mobilities play out in the present, and what this traffic in bodies, ideas and images enables. Grappling with what it 146

means to reconsider the canon of the U.S. South in an increasingly globalized world and a determinedly global-oriented American Studies, Kathryn McKee and Annette Trefzer ask: “How are global and transnational processes reflected and produced in literature, literary histories, and cultural practice that could be said to constitute a global South? How can the integrative global identity of the U.S. South be illuminated by its literature and our new ways of reading it?

What becomes visible?” (McKee and Trefzer 683). This question of what becomes visible is crucial: in Hagedorn’s text, the connections—geographical, historical, and racial—that are put into play by U.S. imperial processes are brought to light.

Geographically, it is important to consider the Philippines as a site whose colonized history is as much shaped by the US South as the US West. For the most part, scholarship on American empire locates the West as the frontier of colonial economies and cultures. The U.S. westward continental march, the mythos of the West, and the seemingly ineluctable leap of imperial ambitions across the Pacific Ocean are the structuring elements to this gendered and racialized story of American empire. Richard Drinnon, for example, exhorts his reader to face west in order to make sense of the tradition of Indian-hating, which was then exported to America’s overseas possessions. Indeed, feminist cultural historiography has convincingly argued that the transfer of Spain’s island territories to the U.S. following the War of 1898 is a product of American masculinity seeking out new Western frontiers after Frederick Jackson Turner pronounced the continental wilderness closed.4 However, the U.S. South, geographically, historically, and metaphorically, is as important an archetype of American empire as the mythic West. As C. Vann Woodward pronounced in 1952: “[T]he South had undergone an experience that it could share with no other part of America—though it is shared by nearly all the peoples of Europe and Asia—the experience of military defeat, occupation, and reconstruction” (Vann Woodward 190). This shared history of military “pacification” and its administrative aftermath of economic reconstruction is a crucial complement to the paradigm of the Western frontier in understanding the colonial and postcolonial cultures of the Philippines. Thus, when Hagedorn locates the filmic staging of the Vietnam War in the Philippines, she not only recalls the actual Vietnam War(s), but also the Philippine-American War, the Civil War and the Indian Wars as training grounds for the American military, its weaponry, soldiers, and racialized rhetoric of security. Just as importantly, Hagedorn’s portrayal of the cinematic staging of the Vietnam War in the Philippines points to the ways in which such militarizations secure the U.S. South and the Philippines (among other global Souths) as economic colonies of the metropole. By analogy, then, the Philippines parallels the U.S. South as a territory of U.S. imperial expansion: first, under military occupation, followed by economic subjugation.

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However, rather than looking to the U.S. South for the historical origins or analytical metaphor of overseas empire, centralizing this U.S. South-Pacific Rim connection poses a more interactive relationship. As McKee and Trefzer suggest, the U.S. South is “a porous space through which other places have always circulated” (679). This project understands the Philippines as passing through the U.S. South both by analogy and geographically, as well as the U.S. South working as a critical reference for the Philippines colony and postcolony.

These geographies, are, if not exactly mutually constitutive, part of parallel, overlapping mappings. The militarized history, racialized taxonomies and plantation economies of the U.S. South are analogous to U.S. continental and transoceanic expansion in the Philippines. While these Souths should be linked and not conflated, their common histories produce provocative moments, subjects and places of reciprocity. Donald Nonini’s proposal to think of the U.S. South analytically not as a geographical fixed point that anchors “a multiplicity of transnational itineraries of persons, groups and images” but rather as the “itineraries, the sites along them, and the processes of mobility of people and images they trace out” is a useful point of departure (251). What itineraries, adventures, taxonomies and archives become possible and visible in the points of connection and movement between the U.S. South and the Asia/Pacific?

The colonial circuits of the U.S. (and earlier, Spain) on the North American continent and in the Asia/Pacific created routes and stopping points for settlers and soldiers. One of the first Filipino settlements in the North American continent was established in 1763 in what is now Louisiana. It was peopled by Filipino sailors who escaped the galleon trade. These Manilamen settled in Saint Malo, an area named after the leader of runaway slaves, who was hung after capture.5 Over a century later, in 1898, Southern soldiers (among them African Americans known as “Smoked Yankees”), who had honed their craft fighting in the Indian Wars, made up a significant number of the troops sent to pacify recalcitrant Filipinos. Many of the African American soldiers, as evidenced by their letters home, sympathized with the Filipinos’ fight for independence, based on racial sympathy against a racist occupying force.6 Shared histories of racial violence connect Southern blacks with Filipinos in the Philippines and in the diaspora. Nerissa Balce illustrates how these early colonial and military histories haunt the racial landscapes of both places: she argues that it is no accident that the escalation of lynchings of black men, women and children in the South occurred between 1899–1902, at the height of American military violence in the Philippines. Similarly, the overlapping racialization of colonized Filipinos, and later, of Filipino migrants to the United States, paralleled the African American experience.7 Thus when Hagedorn writes about the Philippines as America’s Dream Jungle, she recalls these hazy and overlapping historical coincidences that are not accidental, but rather forged by colonial domination.

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As a meditation on the Philippines as an extension and manifestation of the U.S. South, and the U.S. South as an elaboration of the Philippine archipelago, this project connects not only the coeval histories and colonial economies they happen to share, but also the racial logics they have in common. Is it productive to think about ethnic tourism in the Philippines as analogous to the U.S. South’s plantation economies? Conversely, what analytical possibilities open up when we frame the U.S. South as a dream jungle? For the purposes of this paper, I want to consider the militarily pacified and socially reconstructed U.S. South, with its “continuing experience of New World plantation colonialism” and its racially organized labor system, alongside the occupied colonial Philippines, administered by the metropole as a branch economy (Smith and Cohn 2). In both, the racial logics that sustained the social, cultural and economic fabrics of these spaces are updated and translated into the new plantation economies of tourism, settling into the uneven landscapes of modernity that are the legacy of the domestic and global U.S. South.8 The racial formations of the postbellum South—of African Americans in the perilous post-slavery landscape, of Native Americans and their forced relocations—inform and are informed by the bodily and discursive presence of Filipinos as the U.S.’s new savages and primitives. Likewise, the American racial experiment in the Philippines was a way to manage the unwieldy and socially messy questions of the domestic color line: Filipinos could demonstrate the impact of American civilizing prowess through their movement from savage other to assimilable (but not quite) primitive. Tourist regimes in the U.S. South and the Philippines (as part of the U.S. global South) follow the progression of the U.S. South’s racializations of Native American and African American peoples: from the extermination and slavery of savages to conditional incorporation (as primitives) through the economies of folk culture. Moving from nightmare to dream, these social and racial hierarchies transform into a charming folk culture for the consumption of cosmopolitan travelers. The following sections examine this passage from the nightmare of colonialism and violent racialization to the dream of development, civilization and tourism.

Dream Jungle, while mostly set in the 1970s during the halcyon days of American support for dictator Ferdinand Marcos, recalls earlier moments of racialization put into play through ethnographic adventure, photographic documentation, and war violence. In 1898, following the Spanish-American war and the Treaty of Paris that ended it, the Philippines was transferred, like so much real estate, to the United States. Much to the chagrin of the Filipinos, the United States decided its mission was to uplift and Christianize its little brown brothers, rather than grant them the independence for which they had fought against 149

Spain.9 This resulted in another war in the Philippines, followed by over four decades of American colonial rule.10 Dream Jungle’s reinterpretation of the Philippine-American War is one of constant repetition and restaging, where the “real” wars of the global South are played out over and over again. For Hagedorn, this recurring nightmare, the repeat-fire military action, is both a symbolic and material link between different loci of the global South, and is a constant companion to U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century.

Violent projects, like the protracted war that took place to “pacify” the Filipino people at the turn of the twentieth century, need both justification and distraction, particularly when undertaken by a nation that itself was founded on fighting off the colonial yoke. Nation-building and defining events, such as the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and other expositions like it, became powerful and spectacular rationales for imperialism during a time when this foreign policy was hotly debated in the United States.11 Juxtaposed with the commodities and technologies of the modern European and American world, the displays of exotic cultures, performances and peoples emphasized the evolutionary gap between civilized and savage, working to create an exotic dreamscape that belied the harsh realities and vicious hallucinations of colonial violence.

If we consider the midwestern Missouri—as a former slaveholding state, part of the Louisiana Purchase, and populated by migrants from the South—as a Southern state, the layered colonial and racial geographies that play out during the exposition are profound. Laura Wexler, writing about Jessie Tarbox Beals’s photographs of the St. Louis exposition observes that “the fair’s geographical juxtapositions align the future of the Philippines with the new racial order of the American South” (284). Wexler suggests that in seamlessly merging the imagined, reconstructed exoticism of the Philippines (and other foreign places) on top of the South’s geography, Beals presented the colonization of the Philippines and the American project of “uplift” as parallel to the reconstruction of the American South, both of which are framed as progressive endeavors. Fairgoers superimposed the familiar racializations of the South onto the new brown savages of the US empire. The visual tropes of empire were rehearsed in the space of the U.S. South, which was hospitable to such racial taxonomies. At the same time, the visiting colonial subjects—safely detained in their reservation, and catalogued, studied and gawked at—operated as comforting templates for the unsettled racial narratives of the postbellum South. Confined in their reservations, the potential threat of the Igorot headhunter was diffused by putting him in his proper place. As an exhibit of domesticated savagery, he not only justified the colonial endeavor, but also its success. For fairgoers, the Igorot—headhunter, dog-eater, and quintessential savage turned exotic primitive—was the perfect other.

The St. Louis Fair served as a kind of rehearsal for the American public’s 150

consumption of its colonial commodities: preparation on the domestic front for its global imperial venture.

Its displays were not limited to foreign cultures: the proper place of domestic others was a terrain of debate for fair organizers and participants. Native Americans, once corralled in their Indian territory reservations, were a prominent presence, as were African Americans, who fought for a place in the “civilized” exhibits. Held a scant five years after the U.S. took over the Philippines, and with the Philippine insurrection (as it was called) officially put down but still alive, the St. Louis World’s Fair was the nation’s first opportunity to display itself as a colonial power. With its Filipino “reservation” as the centerpiece, the fair illustrated the US’s obsession with its new colonial possessions, and in particular, its fascination with the Igorots, its imported savage colonial subjects.

It brought the physical evidence of the Filipino dog-eating headhunters into a safely corralled, eminently photographable domestic space, providing titillation, anthropological objects of study, a familiar racial taxonomy, and a constant reminder of the moral rightness of the US imperial project.12 As a space where these racially charged meanings were contained, managed and contested, the exposition functioned as preparation for tourism. The St. Louis World’s Fair was, in the final analysis, a tourist event. American domestic consumption of the experiences of the World’s Fair practiced the tourist gaze in a tourist destination, identifying the proper subjects, objects, and places for tourism. This developing tourist imaginary looked to the new colonial possessions and the folk cultures of the US and global South for its itineraries.

Such itineraries, as they were in the World’s Fair, were initially blazed by soldiers and ethnographers. The kind of ethnological display of Filipino bodies at the St. Louis Fair, as well as the circulation of National Geographic narratives about the new U.S. possessions in the Pacific, rested on a romantic vision of discovery as well as on a foundation of colonial and anthropological authority.

Marianna Torgovnick, writing about the ethnographer whose “mission is to find territories where primitives have not yet or only sparingly come into contact with Euro-Americans,” such as Claude Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques or Margaret Mead in Samoa, effectively ties together the travel of anthropologists to a familiar narrative of “going primitive” and “getting physical” (Torgovnick 177, 228). With its masculinist stories of discovery, science and adventure, the legacies of imperial anthropology laid out the visual and written scripts for past and contemporary anthropological/touristic encounters. Imperial itineraries trod by colonial ethnographers, along with other scientists, mapped out routes into the hinterlands of new colonial possessions and outlined new racial, sexual and cultural geographies. In Dream Jungle, Hagedorn notes these itineraries as a kind of constant imperial fever: the metropole’s obsession about the untouched, pristine native. In short, the anthropological project operated as an imperial academic dream, recasting the troubling nightmare of colonial vio151

lence into a different story, and supplying the racial grammar for ethnic tourism as its successor.

These anthropological itineraries and the kinds of knowledge they produced, I argue, are the basis of the ethnic tourism industry in many former colonial possessions today. Merging seamlessly with developmental narratives of uplift, particularly during the Cold War, colonial anthropological accounts framed the Philippines and its indigenous peoples within a zone of contact, discovery and benefaction. Today, histories of display within popular and academic anthropological discourses and practices, once central to the colonial endeavor, lend their legitimating authority to the rearticulations and recirculations of certain narratives and visual tropes of the “native” in modern tourism. The cultural authority of anthropological pedagogies, with their ideologies of uplift and progress along with their technologies of display and meaning-making, are central to the enduring archive of native imagery that drives ethnic tourism’s success. Anthropological and touristic reliance on the visual image as a technology of evidence rests on the assumed availability and accessibility of the native body. Framed, displayed and made visually decipherable in various media, it is the perceived transparency of this body that enables the way it comes to be understood as standing in for a whole culture.

For the Philippines as well as the U.S. South, certain populations were racialized as displayable, visually transparent, and consumable.

In the years following the St. Louis Fair, the American public kept abreast of the progress of its colonial project via the visual and written narratives of popular scientific magazines such as the National Geographic, which provided a kind of compact, pictorial World’s Fair periodical. As one of the more widely circulated, popular, pseudo-scientific and visually arresting sources of knowledge about the Filipino (and the rest of the savage world in general), the National Geographic played a significant role in the “sheer knitted-together strength” of the cultures of U.S. imperialism (Said 6). The circulation and consumption of the National Geographic magazine had a potent effect in shaping the American public’s imagination about the world “out there,” made especially digestible due to its “long tradition of travelogue as its sends out its staff on expeditions to bring back stories and photos of faraway people and places” (Lutz and Collins 1). The National Geographic’s success lay in its ability to transform the imperial nightmare of violence (and the barbarism of the West) into a dream of distant cultures and non-Western peoples. Packaged in the glossy pages of the magazine, the romance of the explorer and the expertise of the anthropologist could be claimed by everyone at home.

Photography’s amenability to mass circulation in printed media such as travelogues, guidebooks and magazines such as the National Geographic brought the distant project and dream of American colonial uplift into the homes of everyday Americans. As a medium that emerged concurrently with the formal 152

U.S. empire in the Philippines, the visual technologies of photography highlighted by these media were instrumental in rationalizing and producing an iconography of savagery, a narrative of civilizing, and evidence of the successful disciplining of the native body.13 In the Philippines, photography further produced a visual colonial archive that corroborated the Filipinos’ status as a racially inferior people incapable of self-government and badly in need of civilization.14 Plate after plate of Filipino “types” was offered as proof positive of the kind of backwardness that existed in the new colonies—a backwardness that cried out for American intervention, but one that also made it attractive to ethnologists as a laboratory of the development of the human race.

The Igorots of Northern Luzon, considered the most uncivilized of the Filipino peoples by the scientific ethnographic community, became the exemplars of Filipino indigeneity in the colonial process of systematic photographic documentation. Photographic layouts of the Igorot “headhunter” in the pages of the National Geographic, as well as in Beals’s photographs of the St. Louis exposition, functioned as scientifically vetted postcards, illustrating and explaining the titillating drama and romance of cultural contact to Americans at home. Thus armchair tourists could vicariously join the imperial adventure by consuming narratives of ethnographers venturing into the savage tropics.

The production of the “Igorot” as the quintessential savage native set up an enduring iconography of savagery and its eventual domestication that continues to have currency in the present.15 While formal American colonial rule has long since dissolved, the imprints of material and discursive practices of empire continue to bracket the kind of place that the Mountain Province occupies in tourist imaginaries. In the remote town of Sagada, the colonial fantasy of the Igorot continues to resonate in its nascent tourism industry, even as his domestication is what makes the tourist industry possible. A similar structure exists in the U.S. South, where the plantation economy has shifted into a different kind of export economy that still retains the racial logics of slavery.16 Indeed, these racial logics are exactly what drive the tourism in these places: the histories and imaginaries of colonial racial projects are repackaged as ethnic tourism. Anthropologists had their role to play in this conversion as well, helping to outline and produce the categories of folk culture in the region.

As part of “local color,” folk culture—particularly African American—became a resurgent presence in the region’s identity. Imperialist nostalgia—mourning for that which one has destroyed—shapes the tourist interests in these localized, racialized “folk” as representatives of a disappearing, simple past. In Sagada, the Igorot headhunter—long since a figure of the past—is resurrected as a tourist attraction. The ease of this resurrection—or rather transformation— from headhunter to native performer is due to the work already conducted by the colonial visual archive. The following sections describe this body of work and the work of embodiment it performs.

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One of the more significant players in the production and popularization of the “discovery” and “civilizing” narratives about the Igorot peoples was an American ethnologist and Secretary of the Interior of the Philippine Islands, Dean C. Worcester. Worcester’s dual location in the discipline of anthropology and in the colonial administration embodied the intimate relationship between science and empire, lending added weight to his authority in representing Igorot cultures to the greater American public. His story is an exemplar of not only the politics of science in the service of empire, but of the abiding legacies of discourses of anthropology in structuring present-day ethnic tourism. In particular, Worcester’s use of colonial photography framed, and continues to frame, the Mountain Province and its people in ways that are today rearticulated and coopted by the contemporary photography and art scenes. His Igorot iconography is particularly influential in the ways that Sagada continues to be portrayed today. The texts that accompanied this photographic archive operated as travel narratives, masculine accounts of adventure through the last remaining wildernesses.

Significantly, Worcester was a great contributor to the National Geographic.

In the early 1910s, Worcester published a series of National Geographic articles on the “wild men” of Northern Luzon, feeding public curiosity about the discovery and civilizing of the savage “non-Christian” tribes in their very own anthropological laboratory. Of the vast number of photographs taken and published about Northern Luzon peoples, a significant majority follows certain conventions that were reinforced not only by scholarly articles, but travelogues, guidebooks, and other kinds of media published about the still largely unknown territories. In the pages of National Geographic, as well as his encyclopedic tomes, The Philippine Islands and Their People (1899) and The Philippines Past and Present (1914), Worcester set down and shored up a visual lexicon of native bodies. He returned again and again to two particular icons: the headhunting Igorot warrior and the bare-breasted Igorot woman. Fixed in his colonial gaze, these two icons of savagery and primitivism became emblematic of the Philippines and the kind of biological and cultural space it was for the civilized world.17 The headhunting warrior who is converted from mortally dangerous savage (the nightmare) to performing native (the dream) embodies the narrative logic of the colonial project. The bare-breasted Igorot woman (always the dream) supplements this civilizing story, a value-added exotic and erotic fantasy whose presence softens the violence of the colonial project.

Accompanied by an official photographer of the Philippine government on his ethnographic journeys, Worcester laid out a scholarly and authoritative treatise in the pages of the National Geographic on the various Igorot peoples he encountered: “I have visited the wild man’s territory in northern Luzon 154

annually for the past 11 years, and these photographs have been obtained on my early inspection trips” (Worcester 1912, 833). Here Worcester reinforces the notion of photography’s documentary value—its seeming claim to the most unmediated representation of “reality,” which lent itself to its authority as a representative medium. As an ostensibly authenticating, objective “eye,” photography was deemed (particularly by anthropologists and ethnologists in the service of the US empire) as a truly authoritative recorder of its “discoveries.”

Holding out the “basic epistemological premise” of visual equivalence, photography’s guarantee of truest representation gave it a central role as the technology of cataloguing and recording the newly accessible “ethnic museum” of the Philippines (Albers and James, as quoted in Vergara 8). Worcester, as the operater of this mechanical recorder of “true” life, was extended the same kind of detached, scientific authority.

Worcester’s ethnographic narratives also positioned the Philippines as a site for multiple visits: a kind of permanent World’s Fair exhibit with the added spice of discovery and danger. His repeated forays into the wild mapped out a masculine adventure story of the kind that would make Theodore Roosevelt popular. Establishing the U.S.’s own tropical getaway, Worcester anticipated the economies of desire that tourism’s display of peoples and places would eventually fulfill. These initial framings of the Philippines within the colonial peripheries of the metropole produced a destination, a spectacle in preparation of the flows of global capital that imperial economies would bring. Playing the role of intrepid explorer to the hilt, Worcester neatly turns the scientist into colonial adventurer, setting up an enduring myth for the future tourist industry.

Certainly, the intrepid expeditions of the colonial anthropologist opened up the Philippine wilderness in imaginative as well as practical terms.

Worcester’s articles are very much in the fashion of expert travel guides. In a 1911 National Geographic essay, “Field Sports Among the Wild Men of Northern Luzon,” Worcester establishes a practice of framing the Philippines as a colonial destination for the American public: “I invite you to take a trip with me, in the imagination, through northern Luzon, in order that you may see for yourselves . . . .” (221). Such expeditions, he makes it clear, are made possible by the sacrifices and bravery of the colonist, whose civilizing project is described in touristic language. Instead of ambushes, Worcester has created tours, instead of headhunters, he has hosts and tour guides. As a travel narrative, his writing portrays the anthropological adventure as a masculine venture of penetration and discovery, setting a model for ethnic tourism to follow.

To produce a proto-tourist narrative of “discovery,” Worcester and others like him delved deeply into dearly held and well-established indices of race and gender. Worcester’s focus on the racialized and gendered body operates on and reinforces logics of the native’s essential transparency. The archive of Igorot iconography that Worcester eventually builds is based on “physical 155

foundationalism”: the power of the somatic as an epistemological basis for truth (Desmond xiv). Worcester’s texts, as well as his photographs, insist on and illustrate the native’s utter knowability because of his or her absolute corporeality.

Laid bare to the ethnographic gaze, and observable through the sheer array of specimens, Igorot peoples were reducible to “natives” because of their bodies. In a follow-up article titled “Head-Hunters of Northern Luzon” in 1912, Worcester also emphasizes the Igorot potential for violence in the photographs which illustrate his text: “The Ifugaos, like the Kalingas, have until very recently been inveterate head-hunters. When I first entered their territory in 1903, many of their houses were ornamented with fresh human skulls . . . .” (882). Despite this explanatory note, headhunting in all its gory (but scientifically observed) detail dominates his articles, with accompanying illustrations of headless Igorot and war parties, as well as photographs of Igorot men with weapons for scientific classificatory purposes. The photogenic poses of Igorot men as specimens of savagery became self-evident markers of the extent of their barbarism as well as the slow but steady inroads of civilization. In these portrayals, Worcester casts himself as a colonial hero, one whose courage in the face of mortal danger makes possible the taming of the savage.

As a readable, accessible visual marker of difference, the icon of the wild man reduced a vast and diverse territory with a long and complex history into an easily digestible and highly entertaining shorthand for the civilizing mission of colonialism. The kind of excess corporeality that ethnological fascination with headhunting suggests played into colonial scientific notions of biological difference. Indeed, Worcester pays close textual and visual attention, almost homage, to the size, musculature, and other indices of classification in his descriptions. Even as he describes in detail the savagery of headhunting practices that he himself has pronounced as waning, he continues to anticipate the lasting fascination with the native body (and its potential for violence) in Western culture. In short, Worcester frames both the tourist and the native as the future of anthropology in the American colony. Tracking the transformation of the savage into the primitive, Worcester thus also performs the double move of concealing the colonial nightmare into a tourist dream, displacing the violence of the former (and its transformation) onto the Igorot headhunter.

In his National Geographic articles, Worcester produces a way for the savage to provide lasting entertainment value. Channeling the native’s latent barbaric energy away from warlike behavior to still culturally authentic activities like dances and games, Worcester outlines an anthropologicaltouristic continuum of displaying and seeing the native. Focusing on the sheer physicality and embodied nature of native life and culture, Worcester transfers the visceral visuality of headhunting to the more muscular viewability of dances and games. Describing the Bontoc dances (the American-approved substitution for head-hunting), he states: 156

The perfectly developed brown bodies of the dancers are naked save for handsome blue and scarlet clouts and an occasional boar’s tusk arm ornament with its horse-hair plume. Not a man has an ounce of superfluous flesh. There is a beautiful rippling play of perfect muscles under clear skin. (“Field Sports” 226)

About a game of tug-of-war, he testifies: “Both teams have dropped exactly together and now how they pull and how their perfectly developed muscles stand out!” (“Field Sports” 241). Worcester’s photographs of the various games and dances that he and other colonial officials have ruled the better substitute for headhunting elaborately focus on the fleshliness of the headhunter—his muscles, his expanse of skin, the body now under the discipline of a completely different set of rules.

Assuring the reader of the ethnographic value of dances and games (as opposed to, yet recalling the physicality of, headhunting), Worcester’s pictorial and written narratives link notions of the iconic racial and gendered body with the spectacle of performance to produce an acceptable native authenticity for future visitors. Worcester emphasizes the value of photography in rendering the native into an ethnographic (and touristic) icon: “Take a snap-shot at them with a fast camera, develop the plate, and you will find that the positions of the hands and feet of any given dancer correspond very closely with those of every other” (226). Capturing the native body’s corporeality as proof of authenticity and difference, Worcester’s photographs laid out a practice of seeing that is instrumental to contemporary ethnic tourism. “Taking a snap-shot” of the native, Worcester paved the way for tourists to represent their narratives of discovery, preservation, and exploration through the understood transparency of the native body in a photograph. In doing so, he renders the Philippines and its inhabitants firmly within a colonial optic and a touristic imagination. Worcester’s photographs and texts lay out the future of tourist itineraries. Modern desires to take the path less traveled are shaped by the figure of the intrepid explorer, literally risking his head for the advancement of science and nation.

While feeding an appetite for sometimes-visceral visual images of the violent and barbaric Filipino who was being civilized by American influence, Worcester was also attentive to the erotic needs of his audience (assumed male). The almost-inevitable, obligatory photographs of bare-breasted brown women compose the other half of Worcester’s anthropological archive. His photographs of young women are standardized examples of the fantasy of the half-naked native girl/woman stripped down for the visual consumption of Worcester’s Western audience.18 With an almost Gauguin-like wistfulness, Worcester frames native women as objects of desire whose unselfconsciously bared physical attributes signal a truly natural state. The ready availability of native female flesh, commodified and circulated, laid out the imperial project 157

in gendered and racialized terms.19 In these photographs, scientific objectivity trumps societal conventions: because they were seen as uncivilized, images of bare-breasted women from the colonies were allowed in the classroom and drawing rooms of the American public.20 As figures of the archetypal “natural” woman, Igorot women framed the simultaneous need for a civilizing hand while “proving” the “natural” place of women in a primitive society in scientific terms (and ostensibly in the United States, where “unnatural women” manned the feminist movement).

Ostensibly illustrating Worcester’s scientific ethnography of the tribal variations in Igorot dress, the photographs of these women gave proof to the kind of Western fantasy of idyllic primitive life. Contrasted with their bloodthirsty and warlike men, these half-clad women are framed in frontal shots, with no other “props” other than the clothes they wear, except perhaps some jewelry, or tattooing. Worcester’s text is less dramatic, as if to allay any suspicion of non-scientific interest: “The dress of the women almost invariably consists of a narrow skirt reaching from the waist, where it is fastened by a girdle, to the knee, and open up one side. Upper garments are practically unknown except in regions where the inhabitants have come much in contact with Filipinos” (Worcester 1912, 896). Nudity is of scientific interest here, an index of innocence and naturalness: “In the more remote villages upper garments are not ordinarily worn by women and girls…” (912). Nerissa Balce, in describing what she calls the “erotics of the American empire” (89), proposes that the visual availability of the breasts of the Filipina savage were markers of conquest and domination, the literal exposure of the colonized people to the West. Here the breasts are the markers of the colonial dream, a soft-core pornography that writes over the sexual, gendered and racial violence of American colonialism.

Photography, in particular of landscapes and “native” bodies, remains one of the key ways in which Sagada is visualized today. Worcester’s icons, such as the headhunter and the bare-breasted native woman, are the visual guideposts that mark ethnic tourism in the Mountain Province at large, and particularly in Sagada. These anthropological pedagogies—rife with narratives of the disappearing native, continuing discourses of uplift and durable icons of the accessible, knowable native body—contour the contemporary tourism scene in Sagada. The visual cues about racialized and gendered differences—which structured the intelligibility of earlier photographs like Worcester’s—show up again in the continuing visual representations of Sagadan life, which themselves play a central role in contemporary tourism in Sagada. As the exemplar of how Worcester’s legacy plays out under postcolonial conditions, Eduardo Masferré 158

and his photographs of Sagadan life take up where Worcester leaves off, drawing deeply from the repository of native iconography that Worcester produced in his colonial career.

Photographer Eduardo Masferré (1909–1995), a Cordilleran-Spanish native of Sagada, was instrumental in the production of an updated archive of Igorot life that nonetheless promises a kind of Worcesterian ideal, and in turn, plays a large part in stimulating ethnic tourism in the area. Specifically based in Sagada but including other sites in the Mountain Province in his photographic repertoire, Masferré, like Worcester before him, was a major player in structuring the ways that native life could be viewed. Borrowing the kinds of ideological and visual conventions laid out by Western ethnographers, Masferré’s photographs do not veer far from Worcester’s. While Masferré’s representations of Cordillera life came to define the character of Mountain province tourism at large, they also, more specifically, formed the core of Sagada’s tourism industry. Because he was associated with and considered a native of Sagada, Masferré had the authority of a native informant, which was linked positively to his somewhat outsider status as half-Spanish and Western-educated. Bridging both worlds, Masferré had access to and understood the intimacies of Cordilleran life, as well as what made them photographically attractive to outsiders.

Between 1934 and 1956, Masferré documented the traditional lifestyle of Sagadans during a time of cultural change brought about by the accelerating incursion of the outside world. His project was to create portrayals of “Filipino life unaffected or little affected by the incursion of Western culture” (B. Dao-as 2). Masferré’s landscape photographs were indeed panoramic masterpieces of Cordillera topography, but it was his portrait work that brought his photography to the attention of Westerners, and eventually to Filipinos. Working in the dramatic and nostalgic register of black and white photography, Masferré produced a body of Igorot portraiture that was meant to record and document the disappearing native. Whether posing Igorot men and women as wise elders, inveterate warriors reminiscent of headhunters, or insouciantly nubile maidens, Masferré’s beautifully shot photographs function as artifacts of a life world that was ostensibly moving further and further away from understood notions of native authenticity. These portraits are treated as rare documents of an authentically native past, and function as an index of how everyday life in Sagada and its environs has strayed from or remained true to this vision.

Displayed today on the walls of the Masferré Inn in Sagada, or sold in postcard or book form, many of these photographs gesture toward a definition of the native wrought purely in the terms of colonial anthropology. These are the photographs to which contemporary tourists have access and that structure their expectations and perceptions of coming to Sagada.

While Worcester documented natives for the armchair explorer, the circu159

lation of Masferré’s oeuvre coincided with the rise of modern tourism and actually brought in the amateur ethnographer/tourist. Although he started taking photographs early in his life, recognition of his work did not come until much later and began with foreigners, who were the first to see and collect his prints.

His first exhibit was held in Manila in 1982, followed by a tour to Copenhagen (1984) and Tokyo (1986) and more exhibits in Manila and large cities in the Philippines. In 1988, E. Masferré: People of the Philippine Cordillera, a book project of his work, was published and copies circulated to schools and libraries in the Philippines. In 1989, he became the first and only Filipino to be invited to exhibit his work at Les Recontres International de La Photographie in Arles, France, one of the most prestigious exhibition sites for photography in the world. His photographs have since been collected and archived by the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., which purchased and exhibited 120 of his original prints in the American National Museum of Natural History. An exhibit based on reproductions of these photographs continues to circulate in the United States and Europe. The popularity of Masferré’s work with “foreigners” and the ease with which it fit in already established forms and forums of exhibition allude to the consumability of its familiar imagery.

Shot by a native, with “natives” as subjects, his body of photographs elides the obvious labels of voyeurism, fetishism and exoticism more easily applied to Worcester even as they circulate in exactly those registers. “Foreigners” embrace Masferré for his mastery of photographic technique as much as for his nostalgic landscapes and portraiture of “authentic” Sagadan life authored by a native himself. This is no mere tourist snapshot, but a legitimated and loving documentation of a primitive, disappearing life world—ripe for exhibit and preservation by no less than the Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Following the approval by international arts and sciences institutions, Filipinos themselves became avid consumers of Masferré’s work. Where before Manilans and other lowlanders had distanced themselves from the possible taint of the “primitive”—located spatially and discursively in the Mountain Province—upon approval from the international world, they joined in the accolades of Masferré’s work. Following the discovery of the Tasaday in the 1970s and coinciding with a resurgence of nationalism in the early 1980s, Masferré’s photography was valorized as representing “true” Filipinoness, an indigeneity untouched by the influences of colonialism and globalization. The Philippines, as former colonial property and continuing neocolonial subject of the United States, assumes its place as the U.S.’s particular South. As such, during the age of developmentalism, when tourism, among other economic solutions for fast cash in struggling economies, the global South, the Philippines and Sagada become the sites of the American picturesque. Masferré’s photographs fit neatly into the social and economic needs of the Philippines as a tourist destination and a tourist economy.

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His body of work produced the past as a foreign country. Drawing from the established and familiar archive of colonial icons about how native life was to be framed, Masferré portrayed mountain peoples as close to nature, authentically “native,” and (thus) half-dressed. His subjects were “men in G-strings and turbans or other head gear; the women often bare to the waist with a locally woven skirt around their hips” (B. Dao-as 4). This required effort and mediation on his part. As one of his Sagadan contemporaries put it, Masferré would often go into more remote areas so he could find more pristine cultures, as he considered local Sagadans as already corrupted by civilization.

Because Sagadans at that point wore clothes, he ventured farther into the mountains to Saganga and Kalinga to find examples that would fit his perception of the authentic native: “He would find the bare breasts and young girls. This was no longer a practice in Sagada. Only the old women would take their shirts off after work” (B. Dao-as interview). However, because native bodies are interchangeable, these portraits came to stand for Sagadans, as well as generally Igorot. Playing with and into anthropological definitions of native physicality as evidence of their authenticity, Masferré produced a body of work not far removed from Worcester’s.

Like Worcester, Masferré’s shorthand costume for authenticity was often nakedness. The bared body as native constitutes an anthropological convention of transparency. Among his more recognizable photographs is of a barebreasted Kalinga girl insouciantly smoking a cigar. This “Kalinga beauty” was a prime specimen of Igorot womanhood, departing only from Worcester’s interpretation of “natural” as submissive. In his photograph, she is unfettered—by clothing as well as middle-class Filipino social mores. She is the epitome of the “past as a foreign country.” Eminently viewable and consumable, the “Kalinga beauty” portrait invites the viewer to gaze his fill, to take in the bare skin and sassy smile as part of the corporeal landscape of nativeness to which he has access. Her availability and transparency are part of the package that presents her as truly “native.”

Drawn by Masferre’s evocative black and white documentation of the Igorot native, with its nostalgic nods to colonial iconography, tourists came to Sagada to rediscover the headhunter, and perhaps to catch a glimpse of the “Kalinga beauty.” The recognition, circulation and consumption of his work within the cosmopolitan circuits of world art, as well as its legitimation by institutions like the Smithsonian, shaped subsequent tourism in Sagada.

Exhibited in various international and local venues and published in book form, his photographs have been instrumental in creating more recent waves of tourists from these areas. This is how present-day tourists consume the photographs and the natives themselves. The continuing production, circulation, and consumption of Masferré’s photographs today revolve around Western tourists who value these images as representative of how authentic natives 161

should look and act. Masferré’s photographs provide them with access to native life through his own voyeuristic fetishism of his mother’s people.

According to one of his descendants, Masferré’s photographic archive plays a central role in generating interest in native life among tourists “inquisitive about the life of people here” (Masferré). Following Masferré’s photographic expeditions, European tourists “try to travel to Kalinga and Ifugao.

[In Sagada], they will see the book and want to get souvenirs or the book itself.

It is a big part of tourism in Sagada, in the Mountain Province and the Philippines. It contributed a lot to Philippine culture. Even the museum in Bontoc, we gave some of the photographs to them” (M. Masferré interview). Masferré’s photographs produced and satisfied this tourist longing to experience the dreamy romance of cultural contact. A familiar visual conceit he followed was the anthropological framing of the clothed outsider—himself—against a backdrop of half-naked natives; another was that of the natives gathered around the camera. In these photographs, Masferré plays the familiar role of ethnographer, locating in this proto-tourist pose the proper place of native and tourist. In the same frame as the native, Masferré is the clear foil, dressed in khaki expedition gear in contrast to the natives in their loincloths. Outside the frame, Masferré more actively plays the role of tourist/ethnographer. Playing into nostalgia for the idyllic native, Masferré’s photographs frame the possibilities of cultural contact for tourists, suggesting a Worcesterian ethnographic adventure for their tourist itineraries.

Today, tourism in Sagada is for the most part circumscribed by the kinds of anthropological itineraries set out by American missionaries-cum-anthropologists, where tourists are largely driven by a desire to see the much-documented native. The ethnographer logics that rendered the Philippines an ethnic laboratory inform the kind of tourism that the Mountain Province taps into. Mountain Province tourism is usually signified through mention or visual image of the Banaue Rice Terraces, a designated UNESCO World Heritage site. Built by hand over the course of two thousand years, they represent not only the Igorot people’s ingenuity in producing arable lands in a mountainous region, but also mark their all-important ties to the kinds of tradition that the tourist industry finds so attractive. What is significant, however, is that tourism development in surrounding areas (in other smaller villages, like Sagada) has also tapped into this idea of heritage and tradition and has done so through recourse to the colonial archive of the “native.”

In the small and remote village of Sagada, a ten-hour drive by bus through winding mountain roads from the summer capital of Baguio (itself another six-hour drive from Manila), tourism has a surprisingly significant presence.

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Known for its hanging coffins, a burial practice specific to the region, Sagada also boasts beautiful scenery and underground rivers. However, Masferré’s oeuvre, as a native Sagadan, is perhaps the biggest draw for tourists who go off the beaten path and brave the long journey. In Sagada, Igorot practices that are a matter-of-fact part of daily life of Sagadans become a tourist commodity, sought out and expected by these contemporary cavaliers. That is, the touristworthiness of Sagada lies in its ability to deliver the “native,” something both exploited and resisted by Sagadans themselves.

When I interviewed Sagadans about the kinds of encounters they experienced with tourists over the years, the overwhelming majority pointed out what they saw as a crucial difference.21 European tourists—who dominated in the 1980s—approached Sagadans with questions about customs, clothing, festivals, belief systems, while the more recent influx of middle-class Manilans demanded to know, “Where are the natives? Where are the headhunters?” However different in tone and attitude, essentially the same kind of anthropological curiosity underpins both sets of questions. Drawing from a long-established colonial anthropological vocabulary, contemporary tourists to Sagada continue to come because the promise of authentic native life is held out by a range of parties such as the Philippine Department of Tourism, “insider” tourist word-of-mouth, and Sagadans themselves. Specifically searching for the privileged anthropological subject—the Igorot headhunter—tourists become part of the long line of consumers of the authentic native.

Tourism in Sagada today is largely characterized by successive waves of travelers looking for native culture. Holding on to familiar narratives about the native that were put in motion by Worcester and later Masferré, tourists come armed with a certain set of expectations and desires. They are drawn by visual and textual representations of Sagada that suggest that a National Geographic kind of experience is available. Indeed, Masferré’s work is circulated and consumed today in ways that are reminiscent of Worcester’s. In particular, his portraiture of Igorot peoples echoes the familiar conventions of seeing that Worcester established. In Sagada, familiar technologies of display produce new visual cultures that have reference to a particular framing of indigeneity that is no longer (and arguably has never been) around to be seen or experienced. A certain kind of tourist then came to Sagada expecting to be allowed access to people’s houses, ceremonies and everyday lives as a matter-of-fact part of his touring experience. One Sagadan resident states: “There are some who ask about particular customs like paying respects to the dead, doing a night vigil. There are some who are interested and attend, observe the ceremonies in the village, join in and pay respects to certain places” (I. Dao-as interview). In general, these early tourists were amateur ethnographers, eager to be able to observe pristine native culture in the Mountain region. In the 1950s and 1960s, European tourists began to trickle in by bus, stimulating the be163

ginnings of tourism. During that stage, Sagada had not yet opened its doors to the tourist industry, and tourists would find accommodations through informal networks. In the late 1970s, Sagada appeared as an official destination in foreign guidebooks and began to draw visitors who wanted contact with “local” people. Subsequent waves of tourists played on these anthropological itineraries and pedagogies, from lowlander Manilans to European backpackers.

The myth of a kind of unsullied native life drew different kinds of tourists who pursued and continued the visual and textual romance of contact. In the late 1970s, following the cosmopolitan trails blazed by the pioneering European ethnographer/tourists, a small but critical number of Manila’s middle- and upper-class disaffected youth fixed on Sagada as a kind of communal, inspiringly authentic Filipino space, where a kind of indigenous spiritualism still existed and could feed their artistic endeavors (and revive their urban weariness). A self-conscious artist colony of sorts, this early group of Manila Filipinos used Sagada as a backdrop to a back-to-nature appreciation of universal human themes. In fact, it was the appearance of Sagada in visual and textual form in a “counterculture” arts magazine published by this group that also contributed to the influx of future tourists. This set of artists continued to harness particular tropes of native life, a Filipino version of a move toward primitive art that initially flourished in the more accessible city of Baguio.22 Masferré, who was still active then, was appropriated by this group, who then circulated and borrowed freely from his archive. Indeed, Masferré’s photographs appeared in a poetry journal edited by one of the key figures of this arts movement in the early 1980s: captioned “alien landscapes.”23 This recirculation of Masferré’s Sagadan imagery within a neonationalist, hip counterculture— particularly of Igorot men as warriors and of young Igorot women as nubile and spirited—prompted a resurgence in visitors to Sagada. The rearticulation of Worcester’s native icons continued to hail tourists who saw themselves as valuing ethnic cultures and stepping off the beaten path. Recalling the kind of scene that Sagada meant for his group of friends, writer Albert “Krip” Yuson said that they sought out Sagada because it was “a haven for us. Baguio was kasawa na” (Baguio was spoiled already) (Yuson). For Yuson and others like him, Sagada represented that elusive frontier where the possibility of discovering your own native (and playing one) remained: the ultimate tourist’s dream.

Even as they have grown into middle-age and mainstream acceptance, this group used and continue to use Igorot iconography in their art, stimulating further domestic Filipino and international tourists’ interests in the region as a haven for the “native” and continuing the rearticulation of Worcester’s ways of seeing and understanding the “native.”

The European backpackers that Yuson and others identified with also came for a particular experience of Sagada. While they had made Sagada a 164

place to be, the backpackers began “coming in to consort with each other,” marking Sagada as their own territory (Anon.). One observer states: “It was clear that they were here only to consort with each other, bitch about how they were cheated at the last place. ‘Can we see natives doing anything authentic?’”

(Anon.). Because it had been framed within a geography of the natural and the scenic, tourists likewise treated Sagadan people as part of the landscape that they had a right to experience. Foreign tourists who came to enjoy the environment’s pristine air and unspoiled natural beauty resented having their movements and their adventures mediated by the residents of Sagada. The idea of “walking anywhere without getting bothered” flowed over to a protest on the part of foreign tourists to “leave everything as is” when the village was deciding whether to either close down or restrict access to local caves due to tourist destruction of stalactites and stalagmites for souvenirs (I. Dao-as interview). An untrammeled access to Sagada as a natural environment, as well as its peoples (as part of that scenery) was the ideal, reflecting the kinds of accessibility and knowability suggested by the archives of Worcester and Masferré.

This brand of “playing native” led to a kind of entitlement: During the 1980 dantuy (religious ceremony) the old men sent out postings for proper ritual behavior, as the tourists were treating the rituals in Sagada as a “side show,” and resented having to bring offerings. The postings listed proper behavior such as not moving or photographing during particular prayer ceremonies, and laid out other kinds of rules that had been unnecessary before (Anon).

Sagada had been officially invaded.

Interrupted by clashes between the National People’s Army and the Philippine military in the late 1980s, which drove out the foreign backpackers, tourism in Sagada has started anew and brought in a different kind of tourist in search of the same kind of idea. Once vetted by European and upper class “alternative” Filipinos, Sagada became the destination, and the new Manila tourists invaded in the mid 1990s seeking to fix on a kind of metropolitan vision of “natives” against which to locate their middle-class selves. Their expectations of finding “natives” were and are fueled by an ignorance long-held and cherished by lowlander Filipinos who view themselves as more advanced, by the framing of Mountain life as undeveloped and backwards, and by the complicity of Sagadan tourism in tapping into the photographic archives of Igorot cultural life. However, their archive remains that of Worcester’s—who in the service of colonial anthropology produced the Igorot as the most primitive of Filipinos—and Masferré’s—whose rearticulation and recirculation of colonial anthropological iconography and pedagogies underpins the contemporary vocabularies of tourism in Sagada.

These days, visitors come to watch Begnas rice harvest festivals and attend weddings in the hopes of being able to observe what remains of native life as they’ve imagined it, as they’ve seen (and continue to see) in photographs, heard 165

by word of mouth, or accessed on the internet. One Filipino tourist came for the “cultural trips [and] hanging coffins,” which hold the remains of Masferré’s subjects. He says, too, that he likes to “challenge myself to try new things” and Sagada represented a kind of ethnic and natural frontier for him to cross off his list (Anon.). Another tourist frames her visit through a lens of nostalgia for a small-town childhood that has since been dismantled with her family’s outmigration to urban centers and around the world. For her, Sagada is the “only place in the Philippines where lives are simple and comfortable” (Anon.). Foreign tourists who have returned to Sagada point out that set apart from the tourism of beaches that often dominates Philippine tourism: “I like more wild and less traveled by places” (Anon.) delineating tourism in Sagada from the sun, sea and sand tourism that characterizes the tropics. In Sagada, she suggests, it “doesn’t feel overpopulated. It’s a little more wild.” Venturing to Sagada and Banaue in particular, this tourist was drawn to the “mountains and geography, the topography. It’s a hint of something not Catholic, some complex religious . . . culture” (Anon.).

This insistence of Sagada as the repository of a unique otherness—separate even from the Philippines’ mainstream tourist offerings—dominates the views of contemporary visitors. This dogged clinging to a Sagada romantically framed by Masferré’s black and white vision persists despite the reality of Sagadans as cosmopolitan citizens. While they are steeped in Igorot tradition, they defy stereotypes about what this might mean. Sagadans are, by and large, well-educated, with many speaking better English than middle-class Manilans due to the historical influence of American missionaries. Many are well-traveled, participating in a global service economy that has drafted many Filipinos as domestic workers and seamen. Yet, visitors continue to see Sagadans within a limited frame of intelligibility, and local Sagadans, well aware of what kinds of expectations tourists have, work with these expectations when they need to.

Within this tourist circuit, Masferré’s photographs continue to play a vital role. According to a long-time Sagadan native: “Tourists appreciated the native pictures. You cannot see these things anymore unless you got to Saganga and Kalinga” (B. Dao-as). Their continuing circulation structures the kinds of expectations that different tourists have of life in Sagada and in particular, its knowability and accessibility. Referencing Worcester’s work in carefully staging these racialized and gendered taxonomies, Masferré’s portfolio finds purchase within an ethnic tourism industry that is continually searching for the disappearing native. In the postcolonial milieu, colonial modes of knowledge and truth production are repeatedly played out in touristic practices of delivering or seeking out what is perceived as the authentic. In Masferré’s case, the fixing of an elusive and dying subject and culture is what constitutes this perception of the authentic, deriving its authority from a long-established and familiar 166

colonial visual vocabulary of the native body on paper. Even as anthropologists have, by and large, abandoned narratives of the idyllic purity of natural native life, the tourist industry continues to produce and sell the romance of cultural contact in many guises. The performance of “spectacular corporeality” by the “soft primitive” in the ethic tourism industry constitutes one of the foundational premises of visiting this former colony (Desmond 4). In this sense, the act of visiting constitutes a continuation of colonial rituals and frameworks of knowledge formation that combined travel with pedagogy.

Within the logics and frameworks of these initial anthropological lessons, the native body functions as a shorthand for entire cultures and life worlds, signaling authenticity through its exhibition of pastness, difference and indigeneity (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 150). This metonymic reduction—collapsing complex cultural histories and social landscapes to a knowable, transparent visual body—is the pedagogy of imperial anthropology. Today, it goes hand in hand with a pedagogy of gratitude: in contemporary ethnic tourism, the attraction of a destination is often attributed to the careful reconstruction or preservation of cultures, something made possible by the diligent management and scientific documentation of imperial anthropology. Ironically, ethnic tourism, itself partially responsible for the changes brought to so-called “authentic” native lives, is able to congratulate itself for conserving what is left or for lending it new life.24 The impulse to witness the “long-lost tribe” or the festival where outsiders are rarely allowed is rooted in what James Clifford and others have called salvage anthropology, an almost self-congratulatory pose of altruistic scholarship with regard to preserving the perpetually disappearing native.25 The impulse to preserve finds its resolution within the logics of ethnic tourism. As a developmental policy, tourism, and in particular, ethnic tourism, promises quick rewards with minimal investments in infrastructure. Indeed, the World Travel Organization’s (WTO) embrace of the altruistic potentials of tourism for developing states as a way to achieve “liberalization with a human face,” claims that tourism unequivocally contributes to economic growth, foreign exchange, investment & job creating sectors.

With a unique potential to deliver directly to the local level as tourists and entrepreneurs seek new destinations, it can contribute significantly to rural development, agricultural transformation, community enrichment and social empowerment, particularly for women. (WTO)

More often than not, however, such neoliberal macro-level goals to alleviate poverty and encourage small-scale entrepreneurship are sacrificed in the name of elite management of the local tourism industries, further disenfranchising the romanticized poor (and women) whom tourism is supposed to uplift. As one of the hallmarks of struggling Third World economies like the Philippines, tourism disciplines the “friendly natives” on different fronts. As a Cold War 167

developmental policy, it represents the imposition of lending policies dictated by supranational organizations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Martin Mowforth and Ian Munt emphasize that these supranational organizations are, in effect, enforcing economic colonialisms: “This relegates the role of the national government to one of providing the necessary infrastructure, leaving it more indebted than before” (294). This loss of national economic sovereignty, Dennison Nash argues, renders tourism as a new form of imperialism where the wishes of “metropolitan centers” are imposed on the development policies of “alien regions” (42).26 Both point out the results on local and global levels, such as dislocation from land, disconnection from developmental decision-making, pollution, and increased class and race cleavages on national and global levels.

The dependencies created by tourism described by Mowforth, Munt and Nash have not quite wiped out Sagadan autonomy. Partially mitigated by its remote location, Sagada has held on to a collective sense of decision-making about the roles that tourism plays in its community. The invasion of tourists has brought with it increasing strains on the ecological system, tensions over land usage, and accelerated cultural hybridization. Sagadans therefore balance their dependence on the foreign currency brought in to their small town with a consciousness of the changes that these cash influxes bring. They play native for a price: tourism creates much-needed service work in restaurants and inns, as well as cooperatively-managed guide work. Sagada’s reputation as a frontier in ethnic tourism rests on the continuing allure of its remote, untouched wildness, and on the persistence of a centuries-old archive of Igorot men and women, both of which are strategically exploited by its citizens.

Such moments of complicity and agency have their limitations. These imaginings of the Filipino native—as Igorot, as Sagadan—are reflected in the continued economic and political marginalization of indigenous peoples in Philippine society. While their colorful authenticity resonates in tourism circuits, these same claims to authenticity have failed thus far to gain them the kind of political and economic parity they have sought in the present. Native representations, in this sense, continue to haunt lived realities, constraining the political horizon for indigenous peoples in the different subaltern zones they occupy.

As a Filipina-American writer, Hagedorn redeploys these same narratives and images, participating in their complex and complicit recirculations even as she lays bare the geopolitical stakes of this consensual postcolonial nightmare/ dream. As she explains, returning to the Philippines to stage her novels is due to the “pull” of its “lush, stark, abundant, untainted and polluted” space and 168

history. Ironically, her return to the postcolonial Philippines performs a selfconscious meta-Heart of Darkness maneuver in order to lay bare the politics behind a collective fantasy of “going native” in a “Lost Eden.”27 Rendering the Philippines as a dream jungle is not just an exercise of imaginative power, but also a territorialization of America in the Pacific—the Philippines as possession, contact zone, war theater, film set, and playground—a territorialization in which Hagedorn herself must participate. The novel functions as a “guidebook” to the Philippines as dream jungle, even as it simultaneously attempts to unpack the web of colonial fictions and representations that sustain the unequal terrains of U.S.-Philippine relations.

The cover illustration of Dream Jungle is a sepia-toned photograph taken by an American during the U.S. colonial era in the Philippines. Titled “Anonymous Visayan Beauty,” Hagedorn chose it because she felt the young girl in the photograph not only evoked the heroine of the novel, but also “the Philippines” and its “beautiful, waiting, fierce presence… seduction and danger…”

(Hagedorn). One hundred years later, the recirculation of this photograph to illustrate a semi-fictional novel about imperial fictions offers a complex story about the afterlives of the colonial visual archive. Does the girl in the photograph invite the reader to take part in the seductive temptation of knowability, or does she refuse that relationship in the last instance? Is she offering a story of a colonial nightmare, or an exotic dreamscape? The ambiguity of the young girl’s gaze, particularly within the context of Hagedorn’s novel, haunts the continuing vexed relationship between the Philippines and its former colonizer. As part of the visual archive of the colonial past, the photographs captures the tensions and complicities of postcolonial tourist economies that are the legacy of cultures of U.S. imperialism.

1. Maraming salamat to Allan Punzalan Isaac, Pensri Ho, and Jaime Harker—generous and critical readers who have at one point or another given valuable feedback to earlier drafts.

2. See Hemley’s account (Invented Eden) of this purported hoax staged by the Philippine government, which centers the fate of the twenty-six Tasaday in its exploration of the political, journalistic and scientific intrigues that surround their “discovery.”

3. Although the site that I explore in depth in this paper is located in the northern region of the Philippines (whereas Hagedorn locates the Taobo in Mindanao in the South), the flexibility, interchangeability, and homogeneity of the native as savage and primitive allows for this creative mapping. What matters is not the scientific or geographic specificity of such “discoveries” but rather their location in a particular imaginary topography—the Philippines as Dream Jungle.

4. As Gail Bederman, Donna Haraway, Amy Kaplan and Kristin Hoganson and other scholars have asserted, the new territories opened up by American imperialism at the turn of the 20 th century

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created a frontier space where the American male, beleaguered by the crises of immigration, workingclass foment, race relations, and feminism, could recoup his physicality and masculinity.

5. See Marina Espinosa’s Filipinos in Louisiana.

6. See Gatewood’s “Smoked Yankees” and the Struggle for Empire, a collection of letters from African American soldiers. See also Balce’s essay, “Filipino Bodies, Lynching and Empire.”

7. There are, of course, significant differences. While African Americans were considered chattel under the slavery system, Filipinos, as colonial wards, had more freedom and were not considered property. However, particularly during the debates on the imperial question, Filipinos were racialized in ways reminiscent of African Americans, particularly in the U.S. popular press.

8. See Strachan’s Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean on tourism as a plantation economy in the Caribbean.

9. The often-cited announcement by William McKinley, who was president during this period, has him anguished over the decision to annex the Philippines. He solves the ethical dilemma of colonialism by justifying the uplift and Christianizing of America’s “little brown” brethren, the majority of whom had already been under Catholic Spain for 350 years.

10. The Philippine-American War officially lasted from 1899–1902, with hostilities continuing a decade later. See Silbey’s A War of Frontier and Empire for one of the most recent histories of this war.

The Philippines became a U.S. commonwealth in 1935, with planned independence (interrupted by Japanese invasion and occupation) by 1945. It was not until July 1946 that the Philippines became an autonomous nation-state.

11. See Rydell (World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions) and Brown (Contesting Images: Photography and the World’s Columbian Exposition).

12. Vergara notes that American anthropologists were already in the Philippines two years ahead of the St. Louis World’s Fair, recruiting subjects for the Filipino reservation.

13. See Vergara (Displaying Filipinos) and Rafael (“The Undead: Notes on Photography in the Philippines, 1898–1920s”). For photography’s role in the imperial venture, specifically with reference to the world’s fairs and the modes of seeing that were practiced, see Brown (Contesting). The American tradition for viewing racialized populations and in particular indigenous peoples was of course laid out over its conquest of North American western territories (Bush and Mitchell).

14. Vergara argues that photography was crucial in documenting the incontrovertible proof of the archipelago’s unmanageable heterogeneity (and thus inability to cohere together as a self-governing nation) by recording the political-scientific production of different types of Filipinos.

15. Renato Rosaldo, who in the 1970s, journeyed to the Philippines to conduct an alternative ethnography on the headhunting Ilongots, observes that academic and popular fascination with the primitive, particularly in the American colonial era, stems from their perceived and constructed “wildness” and “picturesque” qualities. He blames the invention of the timeless primitive on a lack of rigor on the part of the discipline of anthropology: a failure to consider the constructedness of the social. He argues “American anthropology has bequested an enduring archive of visual iconographies and textual narratives to and about its former colony” (14). Rosaldo’s critical ethnography, about the Ilongot people (the neighbors of the Igorot people that I focus on here), like Hagedorn’s novel, becomes easily coopted within a larger dominant narrative of “going native.”

16. While theories of tourism that frame the industry as a new kind of plantation focus on the “hotel as plantation” (and the service economy as the new slavery), this project looks not only at the economic structure but the familiar racializations of the plantation (and colonialism) as commodity of tourism itself.

17. Worcester also pays attention to the Negritos, another set of indigenous Filipino people, whom he regarded as a kind of missing link, “which is not now missing, but soon will be” (Worcester 1912: 849).

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18. See Worcester 1912: 867, 882–3, 886 for photos of this type.

19. Malek Alloula, writing about French colonial postcards of Arab and North African women, notes the ocular possession these postcards meant for French colonists in The Colonial Harem.

20. See Lutz and Collins, 25, 115–6, 137, 172, 174–5, 177, 249, 264.

21. These interviews took place during the Fall of 2003 when I was conducting fieldwork in Sagada.

Subjects ranged from local Sagadans to international and domestic tourists.

22. Tam-awan village, an artists’ “village” composed of traditional Ifugao architecture, was set up in Baguio, the former summer capital of the American colonial administration, also in the mountains of Luzon, by Manila-based artist Ben Cabrera, and is staffed by Igorot men artists. Their art uses Igorot images and has made the village a popular stop for tourists.

23. Eduardo Masferré. Untitled photograph. José: The Literary Quarterly of the Philippines 1.3 (July 1983): 3.

24. See Ross’ critique, which points out that the touristic assumption of anthropological roles has translated into a proclivity for benignly preserving the disappearing native, a pose which takes its cues from a rationale of biological essentialism that was once used to wipe out indigenous hangers-on who continued to survive in defiance of Darwin.

25. See Clifford. The term “salvage anthropology” indicates a drive to preserve that was notable in the works of such anthropologists as Alfred Kroeber, who worked on the Californian Native American population.

26. See Britton’s “Political Economy of Tourism in the Third World” and Ambiguous Alternatives: Tourism in Small Developing Countries on the “subordination of national authority” as a result of economies dependent on tourism.

27. According to her interview with Aguilar-San Juan, Hagedorn states that she conducted an interview with real-life “discoverer” of the Tasaday, Manuel Elizalde: “It was 1974. The world was desperate to believe in a tribe of innocent primitives and a ‘lost Eden.’”

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