When the United States subdued the Philippine independence movement in 1906, American anthropologists acquired the largest colony of subjects they had ever had access to other than native Americans. After the anthropologists had adjusted to the momentary embarrassment of being citizens of an imperialist power in Asia, they began to explore the treasure that they had been unexpectedly handed. Most of the early American anthropologists bypassed the hot, flat lowlands and headed for the cool highlands in the rugged mountainous center of the northern part of the island of Luzon. What attracted them - in addition to the invigorating weather - was the possibility of studying the notorious headhunters of the North Luzon Highlands, a particularly independent and assertive people who had successfully resisted the Spaniards for centuries.
This area contains what has come to be known as eight distinct ethnolinguistic groups, and these people were visited and researched by some of the most famous names in early American anthropology - Roy Franklin Barton, H. Otley Beyer, Fay-Cooper Cole, Albert Ernest Jenks, and Felix M. Keesing. The most accessible and most often studied of these groups are the Bontocs and the Ifugaos. The others are the Apayaos (or Isnegs), Kankanays, Ibaloys, Gaddangs, Ilongots, and, or course, the Kalingas.
The Kalingas live in the north central section of what is sometimes called the Cordillera Central, a rugged and sharply dissected block of mountains averaging about sixty-five kilometers in width that lies between 120 degrees and 122 degrees longitude and stretches north from approximately sixteen degrees north latitude for about 320 kilometers. Boasting several peaks over 2,740 meters high, this massive, mountainous terrain is the largest in the Philippine archipelago. Kalinga territory extends perhaps thirty kilometers north-south and eighty-kilometers east-west around the seventeen degrees north latitude mark.
The characteristic vegetation around the tops of the mountains is a pungent pine forest. A thick grass with extensive roots covers the steep slopes. A semitropical and tropical growth of trees, bushes, and vines is found on the gentle slopes and in the river valleys. The color of the vegetation shifts from shades of green and blue with the changes in elevation and with the progression of the season for the rice crop as the terraced and irrigated stacks of small rice fields are planted, weeded, and harvested.
Patterns of village life
Amid this scenic beauty of changing colors, majestic peaks, plunging waterfalls, and awesomely terraced mountainsides, the villages come to life. Typically, the ears of the awakening villager open to sounds of the laughter of children blended with the squealing of pigs, the savage growing and barking of semi domesticated dogs, the roaring of a nearby mountain river, and the morning thump-thump-thumping of pestle and mortar as the women pound the daily supply of rice. The nose of the villager is met by the smell of the ever-present pig manure, the blood from frequent animal slaughterings, the wood burning in the hearth, and the always welcomed mountain coffee.
These sounds and smells are typical of the village's life, among a crowded cluster of huts where the Kalingas live and die. Often located on fairly inaccessible lower ridges for defense and usually marked by
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