Intersecting cosmologies : Kalinga morality, misfortune, ritual, and religious change

Abstract

This thesis examines a rural Kalinga, northern Luzon, people's contemporary religious assertions and practices. In particular it explores the cosmological principles that shape much of Kalinga quotidian domestic activity. Kalinga society is configured relative to an ethicized cosmology in which persistent sickness and serious injury are commonly taken as retribution from a transcendent Other (either indigenous spirits or God) for an individual's moral transgressions. The understanding that immorality is linked to misfortune is so tightly woven into the fabric of social life that people define this axiom as a 'commandment', linking it to biblical scripture, as well as to their own identity as Christians (Catholics and Anglicans). The plurality of religious activity at the village level encompasses trans-local Christianity, a vernacularization of Christianity in the form of an indigenous Sunday mass, and manifold local traditions including domestic animal sacrifice as reparation for moral trespass, and the expiation and propitiation of malevolent spirits. The analysis focuses on the social, moral and cosmological incongruities, tensions and gaps that can arise when people construe particular events and circumstances in their lives according to distinct and sometimes contradictory elements of an otherwise encompassing religious framework - itself informed by both long-established Kalinga as well as more recently introduced (1930s) Christian cosmology and doctrine. I ask how these historically, doctrinally and cosmologically distinct liturgical orders, Kalinga and Christian, cohere to the extent that locals participate in them more or less equally. Pursuing this question I draw on Rappaport's (1999) model of contingent sanctification, and of the interrelatedness among assertions concerning an apical divinity, cosmological axioms, and the ritual activity that affirms all of these. I build on Rappaport's work by bringing this model to bear on not just a single-religious context but the multi-religious environment of highland Kalinga. In doing so I argue that such distinct and co-occurring religious traditions are locally made to cohere, not by people's claims that the same God is their ultimate referent, but by being mutually framed by the Kalinga axiom that links morality to misfortune to other-worldly retribution. I further argue that the advantage of an approach which focuses on such axiomatic principles, separate from an analysis of ritual enactments and the apical divinities these affirm, is that it allows for a more in-depth account of the articulation between disparate forms of religious activity, local and trans-local. Show more