Mark Geimil Tajan BS-CpE 1-2
2015-02695
Fang Od is a graceful woman who despite her age
continues to work nearly every day. That may seem like nothing
special. Although all of the tattooed warriors are now gone, the
village is filled with tattooed elderly women that wear the artistry
of the last Kalinga tattoo artist of Fang Od who learned the art of
tattoo. Even in the village, it is rare to find people as heavily
tattooed as she is.
As the head-hunting practices vanished, the inking
tradition slowly followed suit. Tattooing is becoming less and less
popular with the younger tribe folk. A quick visit would show
tourists waiting for their turn to be tattooed.
Whang-Od keeps her tattooing tools under the floor boards
of her stilted hut. Her tattoo kit is comprised of a coconut bowl to
mix a pigment of ash and water, a suha thorn attached to the end
of a small bamboo stick, and another short stick used to tap the
thorn into the skin. Two bamboo sticks clacked in rapid cycle,
hammered one onto the other, causing the long suha thorn at the
end of one of the sticks to prick and pierce the skin.
When the Spanish came to the Philippines, the Christian
evangelization profoundly altered their spiritual and social
outlook. Other Christians think that tattoo is a bad charm, and
tries to avoid being tattooed. For the Kalinga, nature has always
provided a kind of talisman or luck against a link to ancient
traditions because it is constant, changing and eternal. Nature is
the basis of which many Kalinga cultural traditions appear and
none more so than the ancient art of tattoo.
Tattooing is the natural language of the skin that gave
voice to the ancestors and descendants of those who attempted
to surpass them by sacrificing their own bodies to make them
more lasting and sacred.
Sadly however, Fang-Ods generation may be the last to
wear these indelible symbols so closely tied to nature, Kalingas
Mark Geimil Tajan BS-CpE 1-2
2015-02695
identity, and the past of their ancestors. And like the headhunters
who once roamed the mountains and forests of Kalinga only a
century ago, these elders are the last mark of an era that will
soon fade away into memory.
