It's Abstract Time!

I had the great privilege of having a paper accepted to the CORD-SDHS annual conference on music and dance, and cherish the opportunity to present some of my more academic work to the world. 

To take a peek at what I'll be discussing, have a read through my abstract, and accept my apologies in advance for the academic speak. Code switching is real. 

"Erode You Mountains: Singing Citizenships in the Ikalahan Ancestral Domain"

In this paper, I draw on thesis research conducted in the village of Imugan, Nueva Vizcaya, Philippines, and focus on two improvisatory song types - ba-liw and dayomti - of the Ikalahan Indigenous People Group.

By investigating the roles that ba-liw and dayomti play in Ikalahan community life, I suggest that these songs offer a unique look into how citizenships are developed and mobilized in a minority indigenous people’s group, and more specifically how citizenships are understood through and built upon connections to place and land.

This research builds on ideas of flexible citizenships (Ong 1999), participation (Anderson 1994), and musicking (Small 1998) and examines where these concepts intersect. I suggest that these concepts are highly fluid and strategically utilized in the Ikalahan community’s interior life as well as in its representation of and advocacy for itself and its cultural and land rights to the larger Philippine nation.

Specifically, I discuss how these song traditions create a familiar historical-spatial narrative ground on which Ikalahan singers and listeners can engage with their connections to land, community, and nation, and negotiate expressions of citizenships related to each. I further discuss how as an intergenerational performance space, ba-liw and dayomti provide the younger, more mobile generation within the community a place to integrate, disentangle, and mobilize these citizenships toward continuing the community’s cultural and land rights and restoration work into the future."