Quizon-Costume, Kóstyom, and Dress

University of Pittsburgh- Of the Commonwealth System of Higher Education
Costume, Kóstyom, and Dress: Formulations of Bagóbo Ethnic Identity in Southern

Mindanao
Author(s): Cherubim A. Quizon
Source: Ethnology, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Fall, 2007), pp. 271-288
Published by: University of Pittsburgh- Of the Commonwealth System of Higher
Education
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COSTUME, KOSTYOM, AND DRESS: FORMULATIONS
,? ?, OF BAGOBO ETHNIC IDENTITY IN
SOUTHERN MINDANAO'
Cherubim A. Quizon
Seton Hall University
The Bagobo, a minority ethnic group in southern Mindanao, the Philippines, thin
about their traditional cloth and clothing as polysemic symbols of group ide
and personhood. The range of meanings connects them to the larger commun
of city, region, and nation. The Bag6bo call their ceremonial dress ompak (clothi
when discussing it among themselves but use k6styom (costume) when talkin
non-Bagobo. The diminished use of such clothing for everyday use, as well a
increased visibility of iconic Mindanao tribal dress in high profile regional cultu
festivals are repeated phenomena that the Bagobo themselves project. The de
ment of Bagobo identity and other marketable ethnicities as spectacle in a region
heritage industry, commonly approached from the lens of political econom
understood and interpreted in very different ways among the Bagobo. Kostyom,
neologism, symbolically and politically links them to the region and nation-state
Ompak, although referring to the same set of textiles, does not suggest perform
for others but instead refers to one's existence as a Bagobo and as a person.
same dress is present among different segments of Bagobo, such as the neighbor
Guiangan and Obo, who speak different languages (resulting in distinct name
otherwise identical artifacts) but share ceremonial clothing as a resonant idiom f
articulating and expressing belonging to the community. (Bagobo, Mindan
ethnic identity, aesthetics, textiles and dress)
The distinct ceremonial attire of the Bagobo, made of ikat textiles, is lik
referred to as costume or dress. But for the Bagobo, which word is used
a difference. They tend to use the word k6styom (costume) when speak
non-Bagobo, but among themselves they use their language's term for g
or clothing, ompak, more precisely, ompak'n Bagobo. Kostyom is
"costume" pronounced with a local accent; it refers to something more ex
the Bagobo, wearing these clothes takes on multiple meanings, delineat
many modes of being a modern Bagobo. As textiles continue to connect
to ideas of the self in relation to the group, especially with regard to shared
of spiritual coherence and belonging, textiles and clothes participate in
men's and women's attempts to connect to a desired modernity that pla
in the arena of the city of Davao and indirectly winds its way to the ide
nation itself.
The Bagobo have a linguistically complex background. As an ethnic identity
marker in the sprawling metropolis of Davao City, in the province of Davao del
Sur where most Bagobo live, the term Bagobo is often used to encompass three
271
ETHNOLOGY vol. 46 no. 4, Fall 2007, pp. 271-288.
ETHNOLOGY, c/o Department of Anthropology, The University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA 15260 USA
Copyright ? 2008 The University of Pittsburgh. All rights reserved.
272 ETHNOLOGY
groups: Tagabawa, Guiangan (or Jangan), and Obo. These three claim homelands
that are more or less contiguous, spanning the southeastern to southwestern
slopes of the Mount Apo range. Their members point to many shared cultural
features, the best known of which is their traditional clothing anchored on the
use of highly prized ikat-patterned abaca or banana-fiber cloth (Cole 1911, 1913;
Benedict 1916; Roces 1991; Reyes 1992; Quizon 1998a). The three commu
nities, however, do not share the same language, and the disjuncture occurs in
interesting ways. The Tagabatwa and Obo speak related languages from a
southern Philippine linguistic group, while the Guiangan idiom is from a differ
ent language branch (McFarland 1980). Geographically, however, Guiangan live
between the other two, going against expectations of the language map. In short,
there are three Bagobo groups spoken by linguistically distinct but ideologically
connected people with a common textile ensemble.
The Tagabawa-Bagobo term for cloth made of abacai is inabal (literally,
woven on the loom). Abaca cloth with sophisticated ikat patterns is used widely
among many Mindanao highland communities but is made only by a few of
them, such as the B'laan and the T'boli in south/southeastern Mindanao and the
Mand'aya in the eastern regions. T'boli refer to their abaca ikat cloth as tnadlak
while Mandaya refer to theirs as dagmay. These terms are used in the popular
and tourist-oriented literature to delineate subtle stylistic differences in motif and
technique, and are better known because of how these communities have main
tained limited but direct access to tourist and handicrafts markets (Quizon 1 998b,
Hamilton 1998). Regardless of origin, inabal textiles play a central role in
exchanges associated with marriage, and especially for the Bagobo, have com
plex associations with spiritual, political, or economic pre-eminence in ways that
break from as well as continue past practices (Quizon 1999).
Although a detailed description of the elaborate Bagobo textile taxonomy has
been presented elsewhere (Quizon 1998a), a brief overview of inabal types,
manufacture, and use is provided in this section, using Tagabawa terms.
Bag6bo ceremonial clothing consists of close fitting upper garments for
women (ompak ka bayi) and men (ompak ka mama), knee-length close fitting
trousers for men (saroar), and skirts for women (sonnod) that are made by
sewing several yards of loom-woven material into a tube shaped garment. The
clothing ensembles are widely regarded as reflecting a pan-Malay Southeast
Asian dress style with technical and stylistic modifications unique to Mindanao,
the most significant of which is the use of abaca and the associated dyeing
technologies that are not found in other areas famed for their cotton ikat cloths,
such as northern Borneo and Eastern Indonesia. Archaeological records on
the prehistory of Southeast Asian bast-fiber textiles with ikat patterns are
presently inconclusive, but there is at least one associated with a burial in the
central Philippines with a relative dating of about the fourteenth century A.D. A
KOSTYOM 273
combined textile technique using both bast fiber (which requires no spinning)
and ikat resist dyeing may be found as far north as Okinawa, as well as in nearby
Borneo. The museological record of known Bag6bo textiles (as distinct from
other Mindanao groups) is limited to late colonial times and goes back only
about 150 years using conservative measures. We do know that over this time
period, Bagobo upper garments have had a greater tendency to change in cut,
design, and fabric used, when compared to lower garments. Upper garments
worn by Bagobo men and women today are very likely to be made of modern
cloth in very different styles (such as the bell-sleeved varieties favored by many
Bagobo women today) when compared to those that I have analyzed in vintage
collections with reliable provenance; but the lower garments of both men and
women today are nearly identical in thread used (abaca), patterning (ikat resist
dye technique), and tailoring (Malay-type of flat trousers with triangular gussets
for men, uncut loom-length tube skirts for women) when compared to those used
more than a century ago. This conservatism in ideal lower-garment styles has
resulted in a greater scarcity of saroar and sonnod in Bagobo family collections;
loom-quality abaca' fiber itself is hard enough to come by, and a knowledgeable
weaver and dyer even more so. Lower-garment pieces remaining in family col
lections are understandably treated as heirlooms, while newer upper garments
made of commercial cotton or sometimes polyester, some echoing older styles,
are more readily available.
In times of economic hardship, sonnod and saroar are sold to certain Muslim
shopkeepers in the municipal markets who are known to trade in antiquities,
or to particular "runners" or buyers plying the region on behalf of dealers and
collectors in Manila, Europe, and the United States. Such decisions are not made
lightly and are fraught with anxiety and distress. What also distinguishes the
Bagobo from other abaca' ikat producing communities in Mindanao that have a
well-established presence in the Davao tourist market-the T'boli of South
Cotabato and the Mandaya of Davao Oriental-is that the latter groups have a
longstanding practice of weaving and selling loom-length yardage that enters the
tourist and handicraft markets as such and becomes transformed into wall
hangings, table runners, wallets, bags, and the like. By contrast, the abaca ikat
cloth produced by the Bagobo as well as their immediate neighbors, the B'laan,
is rarely sold as rolls of unsewn fabric but is almost always found as finished
garments, as clothes. I have examined the economic and symbolic implications
of this distinction elsewhere (Quizon 1998b), but in this article it is worth
emphasizing the cultural significance of finished garments over unfinished tex
tiles per se for the Bagobo.
In the Davao area, Bagobo can easily use languages other than their own, and
do so. My being an outsider increased their tendency to reach out to me in inter
esting ways: as a fellow Filipino but not a Bisaya (or Visayan-speaking settler),
274 ETHNOLOGY
coming from Manila (therefore a Tagaila) but also from New York as my then
graduate student business card indicated (therefore an Amerikaina). Although
working to learn the language, I was unlike a missionary, and while interested
in textiles, I was not a crafts dealer. Bagobo social scripts have a sliding tax
onomy for distinguishing between outsiders and insiders, and similarly have
modes of speech discriminating clothing and dress.
To understand this requires addressing three intertwined issues: the nature of
Bagobo group identity in southern Mindanao; the role of traditional or ceremo
nial clothing in the deployment of Bagobo identity as spectacle in a regional
heritage industry; and the nature of "sameness" in dress as a contested but still
meaningful idiom for articulating Bagobo identity today.
PERSISTENT MODERNITY
Late twentieth-century anthropology's shift from the study of tribes to that of

ethnicity expresses a situational instead of an essentialist understanding of
collective identity (Cohen 1978:384-8, Clifford 1988). This shift, especially in
Southeast Asia and the Pacific, is related to the emergence, political saliency, and
adaptability of indigenous groups in modern states, and to tensions within nations
as they reflect the implications of being parts of much larger and often insti
tutionally defined social groups (Condominas 1977, Becker and Yengoyan 1979,
Anderson 1983, Guideri et al. 1988, Russell and Cunningham 1989, Chiengthong
2003). Once groups like the Bagobo are drawn into what are often presumed to
be inevitable processes of being molded into structures of the state or class, the
kinds of questions asked move away from a sense of meaning and balance
towards one of disorientation. As indigenous cultures increasingly become
"Westernized," nationalized, or incorporated into global modes, it is implicitly
perceived as narrowing the gap between the anthropologist's culture and that of
the ethnographic object. Nowhere is this shift more apparent than in ethnographic
accounts of urbanization and development where acculturation or deculturation
is almost always accompanied by a sense of loss. It is not clear if this shift is
a result of paradigm exhaustion, when structural-symbolic and interpretive
approaches do not survive the movement from the "traditional" and small-scale
to the industrial or global, or if it is an ontological assumption of anthropology
that rapid social change necessarily transforms traditional systems of meaning,
hierarchy, and community leadership at the same rate and in the same trajectory.
This uncertainty poses certain problems for the ethnographic project, especially
when there is a perceived systemic conflict between the interests and objectives
of supra-local agents, such as the nation-state or a transnational tourist-heritage
industry, and the communities with whom anthropologists work (Picard and
Wood 1997, Greenwood 1989). But "assertions of identity based on idealizations
KOSTYOM 275
of the ancestral past draw heavily on anthropological concepts-particularly

ideas about culture-as they have entered Western popular thought" (Keesing
1989:23). Whether approached as a self-conscious ideology of post-colonial local
elites or nationalist expressions of an all-embracing modernity, rituals of affirma
tion narrate "that the ancestral cultural heritage lives on" in spite of the colonial
experience (Keesing 1989:19).
With ethnography as a disciplinary practice deeply entangled with the social
and intellectual lives of ethnographic subjects, the range of ideological processes
is especially observable in the performance of traditional ceremonials, music,
and dance, and the concomitant use of an array of clothing-as-costume and
related artifacts. How ethnographers perceive such visible and explicitly material
expressions as art, artifacts, and other commodities, does not always coincide
with what they mean for the people who make them. The differences in meaning
are attributable to ethnographers' cultural and methodological biases on the place
of art or art-making in indigenous knowledge systems (Gell 1992), especially
when the aesthetics that inform and infuse a meaningful life do not necessarily
seek the making of things (Coote 1992).
Discussions that situate traditions that are "old" as opposed to the "invented,"
or as a negative reaction to the impingement of forces of modernity inevitably
accommodate the ways that the very notion of "tradition" itself becomes a central
component in a society's reservoir of ideal behaviors and cultural symbols
(Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983, Anderson 1983). As post-essentialist ethnographic
practices respond to this reality on the ground by moving towards the study of
meanings, reflections on an unchanging "essence" itself motivates and animates
individuals and communities under study, even in explicitly changing contexts
(cf. King 1985, Lindstrom 1990, Ong 1993, Bowie 1993). Traditional cultures
and life ways that are believed to be compromised by modernity can instead be
approached as already possessing and experiencing a persistent modernity since
such communities deploy multiple strategies to manage relations with familiar
neighbors and less-familiar outsiders.
It appears then that tradition is what a community makes of it and certain
encounters make such processes more explicit. If tradition is understood to give
reference to the past while demonstrating a sustained viability and mean
ingfulness, then interactions with relatively more recent types of outsiders such
as tourists, missionaries, and anthropologists present new opportunities for
observing what are probably well established processes of cultural translation
and domestication (Picard and Wood 1997). In the same way that the transitions
between Bagobo usage of costume and kostyom in modes of speech delineate
continuities in meaning rather than disjunction or rupture, the way by which
outsiders are referred to trace transformations in actual as well as desired
relations.
276 ETHNOLOGY
This appears elsewhere, as in Toraja Land in Sulawesi, Indonesia, with the

patterned ways by which local people refer to others. When it was a colony, all
whites were called Balanda or Dutchmen (Volkmann 1984:166), which later was
replaced by the more generic turis (tourist). The newer usage is indicative of the
community's integration into the tourist industry. In heavily studied areas, the
Torajans will even distinguish between a mere turis and an anthropologist, and
will volunteer information on the "famous anthropologists" who lived among
them and have studied their community (Adams 1988). Torajans are well known
for their clothed wooden funerary figures that are placed in tombs in steep cliff
faces, and for their spectacular ancestral houses. By making explicit the structure
of viewer and the viewed, as well as the tensions between Torajan Christianity
and the secular, religiously neutral realm of custom (adat/aluk), the local
community engages in a semiotic understanding and re-expressions of their own
Toraja culture (Volkman 1990).
Toraja strategies for addressing the dynamics of their identity are similar to
the situation of the Bagobo and their highland and lowland neighbors in
Mindanao. On the one hand, local Torajan religious identity seems to be more
concerned with the tension between their own Christianity and the older non
Christian ways, while regional concerns tend to address questions of superiority
and inferiority in relation to their highly visible, well politicized, more nationally
integrated neighbors, the Bugis and the Makassarese. Hence "many Torajans
today draw on selected aspects of their arts and rituals to demonstrate among
other things, their 'traditional proximity' to Christianity, their claims to an
elevated position in the local status hierarchy, and their cultural wealth in relation
to other ethnic groups" (Adams 1988:25). Interestingly, the continuity in Torajan
tradition, such as that expressed in the building and rebuilding of the ancestral
houses, is understood to be a constantly "modernizing" project-as houses are
continually being built and replaced, old styles that are known to be rapidly
disappearing are replaced with new expressions of what is "ancestral" (Kis
Kovak et al. 1988). The meaningful valuation of Torajan culture as demonstrated
by tourist interest, among others, is simultaneously a way of asserting their
equality or superiority to their neighbors. More recently, these tensions have
found particular expression in a well-developed Southern Sulawesi tourist
heritage industry where Bugis have begun to use a number of iconic Torajan
visual idioms in ostensibly non-Torajan enterprises. These developments are
understandably lamented by Torajans as recent expressions of older rivalries,
which Adams (1998) ironically refers to as an example of art working not as the
hoped-for weapons of the weak, but as weak weapons of an already put-upon
people (Adams 1998:345-46, Scott 1985).
Forging a Bagobo cultural identity within a national identity in the
Philippines is linked to claims of authenticity in social spaces most associated
KOSTYOM 277
with tourism. Whether approached as a transnational culture and leisure industry,

as an explicit though unevenly administered state policy, or as projects of local
initiative or entrepreneurship, the segmented providers of Philippine tourist
experiences are, from a structural standpoint, nearly identical (Richter 1989,
Alcedo 2007, Ness 2002). From the participants' point of view, however,
motivations for involvement differ in significant ways. Perhaps as a reflection
of a more segmented colonial and political history, as well as the existence of a
majority of Christian lowlanders, Philippine nationalist discourses have formed
a more discontinuous narrative in relation to the place of political and cultural
minority groups. The idea of a Philippine nation from the late 1 890s onwards has
been characterized variously as a popular mass movement led largely by a newly
emerged European-educated generation (Agoncillo and Guerrero 1977), as a
primarily elite, bourgeois movement that co-opted the revolutionary impact of
peasant upheavals (May 1987), and as an indigenous movement brought about
by native interpretations of Christian text and imagery within a framework of
understanding and imagining freedom and personal liberation (Ileto 1979, Rafael
1988). At the same time, the presentation of political ideology, whether pro
ceeding from a past military dictatorship or from an ongoing armed insurgency,
has generally been made with a rhetorical appeal to a pan-Malay unity or a
shared oppression by successive foreign powers (Bankoff and Weekley 2004,
Quizon 2005). Highland communities such as the Bagobo are described in offi
cial state language as indigenous peoples, such as in the Indigenous Peoples Act
of 1997, implicitly suggesting that lowland Filipinos who are either of the
Christian majority or the Muslim minority are somehow descendants of transient
populations that came from elsewhere, a widely held yet unexamined assumption
with no factual basis (Republic of the Philippines Senate 1997).
BINAGOBO IDENTITIES IN VILLAGE AND TOWN
In 1994, a very old Bagobo woman showed me a fine abaca' ikat tube skirt
that appeared to be of B'laan manufacture. In the B'laan language it is called a
tabi mlato, a high-status skirt of the widest type of ikat pattems appropriate for
bridewealth prestations among this neighboring ethnolinguistic group in southem
Mindanao. The old woman referred to her textile not as a tube skirt, but as a
blanket (kisi) in her own language of Tagabawa-Bagobo. More significantly, she
characterized the piece not at all as B'laan but as Binagobo (literally, one that has
been turned into Bagobo). I had previously encountered the term as a way of
referring to a language style, in the same way that Visayan or Tagalog idioms
would be referred to as Binisaya or Tinagalog speech.
Binagobo as a term is frequently used to refer to a broad class of phenomena:
Binagobo marriage as opposed to a Christian one; Binagobo healing as opposed
278 ETHNOLOGY
to its modem Western counterpart; Binagobo religious practices as opposed

to Christian, or more specifically, Roman Catholic; and Binagobo language as
distinct from other local ones such as Inobo (Obo/Manobo) or translocal ones
such as Ininglis (English). All Bagobo informants, whether Tagabaiwa, Guiafngan,
or Obo, used this term to indicate what was meaningful to the Bagobo and not
to others.
The category, Bagobo, is a late twentieth-century polysemic identity of the
Tagabaiwa, Guiangan, and Obo. Being Bagobo means a symbolic oneness of
several communities in a roughly contiguous territory after about a century of
trade and intermarriage (Quizon 1 998a: 106-09). This collectivity, though never
politically centralized, dealt constantly with intrusive supra-local authority, as
with early colonialists, or more recently with the postwar state (Abinales 2000).
What appears today as Bagobo cloth and clothing may be the material expression
or manifestation of alliance-building that started taking shape a hundred years
ago. By the late 1960s and early '70s, a tripartite Bagobo identity had been con
solidated, with some government intervention that at times reinforced these
subdivisions, and at others diluted them (Manuel 1973, in Payne 1985:13-5).
As the Bagobo became better educated and as public resources for them grew
scarcer, they were believed to have "vanished," losing their culture and authen
ticity to become like the rest of Christian Filipino society. Cannell (1 999) argues
that the negative conception of the Christian Filipino majority-as "broken,
contentless, or insubstantial" (Cannell 1999:6) or as either exploitative feudal
elite or simpleminded exploited peasantry-can be traced to the American
colonialists' role as benevolent imperialist and their administrative practices
(Cannell 1999:241-44). The belief that Christian Filipinos suffer from a diffuse
form of cultural alienation, whether supported or not, is deeply embedded in
Philippine thought, as suggested in the educational system, among intellectuals,
or in the popular media. Thus, when Bagobo appear like everyone else, it is
generally believed that they too have vanished as a people and as a culture. But
that perception masks yet another transformation of Bagobo self-presentation.
By the 193 Os, American Protestant missionary groups had made significant
gains in claiming converts among large segments of the Tagabawa Bagobo
population in the region of Davao del Sur. However, following prior patterns
of conversion by Roman Catholic missionaries in Mindanao and elsewhere,
Bagobo conversion at the beginning of the twentieth century was neither deeply
rooted nor consistent over large areas. The rise of a competing modern Tagabaiwa
Bagobo religion called Langi's (literally "oil" or "holy oil," but commonly
referred to by Visayan speakers as Lanahan, from the Cebuano word for oil,
ldna)-founded in the 1930s by Engul Betil, a Digos area Bagobo, former
Christian convert, and budding pastor-presented a cogent choice for many
"converted" families (Payne 1985, Gloria 1987). Family affiliation may be listed
KOSTYOM 279
officially as Christian in order to safeguard the children's access to schooling

while at the same time most of the adult members may be followers of Langis.
The renegade quasi-Christian character of Betil's religion combined with the
committed use both of the Tagabawa Bagobo language and elements of
Tagabawa oral literature and indigenous cosmology made a consistently appeal
ing alternative to ostensibly Christian Bag6bo heads of household. Over time,
followers have become more secretive and inward-looking, but the religion
continues to thrive in parts of Davao del Sur as well as the upland areas of Toril
in Davao City. This is why the Bagobo today are likely to be second- or third
generation Protestants of various denominations, and clothed in Christian
(Western) attire.
As Western clothing became readily available, initially from missionary
groups and later through the ubiquitous second-hand clothing markets, the uzkay
utkay (literally, dig-dig, referring to bins of clothing that one must excavate), an
alternative dress emerged for all upland groups like the Bagobo which made
them appear like any other Visayan population of Mindanao. Bagobo community
leaders who constantly traveled, as in the past, between coastal city centers
and upland villages, who wished to educate their children or looked to safeguard
their agricultural land holdings, dealt with the changing political and economic
landscape in ways similar to that done by Bagobo in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. While American colonial authorities were favorably
impressed by Bagobo dress from the 1900s onwards, state authorities of the
newly independent Philippine republic in the mid-1940s to early '50s were less
so.
The postwar era was characterized in the Philippines by a total embrace of
modernity where tribal elements of the body politic, though sometimes deeply
valued, were expected by government policy to become integrated into a national
mainstream (Rodil 1994). At the same time, their place in the popular imagi
nation was gradually moving towards a distant and sometimes mythical past that
can be interpreted in different ways (Scott 1992, Roces 1994). Conventions of
dress and how the cultured body appears become part of a wider national and
international political theater (Roces 1995). Given these contexts, Bagobo cloth
ing has increasingly become a ceremonial rather than an everyday form of dress,
one of several modes of presenting the self on the stages of town, city centers in
the Davao region, and to a lesser extent, the world.
Contemporary Bagobo identity as seen through dress may therefore be better
viewed as self-presentation, and as part of a series of not-so-seamless choices
that have been consistently made by succeeding generations since the 1930s.
Although where to live, whom to marry, what language to speak, what food to
eat, or what music to celebrate by has changed much more slowly in the villages
of the highlands than in the Bagobo neighborhoods in the coastal towns, the
280 ETHNOLOGY
combination of a community-wide interest in public schooling for children and

a desire to maintain control over their lands made the longstanding connections
between urban dwelling Bagobo and their upland kin even more valuable. As
Bagobo clothing increasingly withdrew into the domain of a non-quotidian
traditional or ceremonial dress, knowledge of cloth and cloth making increas
ingly became the domain of a handful of specialists. The weavers who remain
active live in the mountain villages where abaca is more abundant, while those
who are knowledgeable in traditional ways of making and embellishing garments
are in both urban and rural locations.
It is in this consolidation of two distinct but inextricably linked modes of
being a Bagobo-the cosmopolitan urban dweller on one hand and the upcountry
"native" on the other-that generated two distinct social niches for Bagobo
traditional dress. Although the actual assemblage of textiles, garments, and
accessories is identical, an important conceptual divide has emerged between
the urban and the countryside understandings of traditional Bagobo dress. It is
delineated by speech where, depending on who are part of the conversation,
"traditional" clothing is referred to either as kostyom or as ompak.
KOSTYOM (COSTUME), HERITAGE, SPECTACLE, AND THE SELF
There is a literal distinction between the concepts of costume and dress.

Costume denotes artifice, clothes that are worn to transform and to suggest
another persona, such as in the theater, or to signal a well-defined assemblage
that has a specific referent, such as a "national costume." Dress, by contrast,
denotes a more everyday concern, what is worn at home or in public places
everyday.
Costume as a term also denotes a type or an assemblage of clothing that seeks
to reaffirm known categories, such as that worn by both children and adults at
Halloween or masquerade parties; clowns must have a certain type of make-up
and bright, outrageous clothing while wild animal characters must have the
denotative mane or tail or spots, as the case may be. Dress, or sometimes attire,
however, is a more general category of clothing that is less circumscribed, more
ephemeral, and ultimately more open to change and reinterpretation (Roces
2005:355-6). Perhaps this is why it is deemed preferable as an analytic category
(Weiner and Schneider 1989, Hansen 2004).
The political dimension of these words, the semantics of the post-colonial
subject, gets turned on its head when minority groups such as the Bagobo, widely
pe.rceived to have been wronged by their own countrymen and by colonialists,
refer to their traditional dress as kostyom. Traditional attire is no longer worn
daily, and in that sense Bagobo dress is a costume, a ceremonial artifice, or at
least a non-quotidian category of clothing. Its increasing rarity contributes to its
KOSTYOM 281
gradually becoming more ceremonial, whether played out in the civic arena
during the annual Davao City Day parade or in the more intimate rites of passage
in the village that mark school graduations, marriages, and deaths.
But the word kostyom is less frequently used when Bagobo discuss the same
traditional textiles and garments among themselves. Then, the term ompak
(dress), or ompak'n Bagobo (Bagobo dress), is most likely to be heard in homes
in the city or village. Ompak may be used loosely to refer to a shirt, but is very
precise in always referring to Bagobo (i.e., non-Visayan) attire. When everyday
work clothes are discussed, Visayan words such as sinina (blouse) or maong
(denim trousers) are used.
What do the city-dwelling Bagobo mean when they refer to their ceremonial
attire as kostyom? The Tagabawa word ompak does not strictly translate into
English as "costume"; but if we take kostyom as a Bagobo neologism, akin to
Leach's (1954) delineation of agumsa space for action, then it can be understood
to mean Bagobo ceremonial dress worn for a non-Bagobo audience. It is an
urban Bagobo word coined by those who speak English well enough to confi
dently translate ompak as "costume," but at the same time do not appreciate or
are not troubled by its more limiting semantic field. It is a shifting back and forth
in modes of being and sensibility that has been observed elsewhere, such as in
the West African seselelame (feeling in the body, flesh and skin) that serves as
foundational schema for how others see you and how you conduct yourself
(Geurts and Adikah 2006:37-47). These cultural models for feeling and action
are especially significant within changing social contexts where material culture
acts as a marker or an expression of such transformations. The most frequent use
of the term kostyom among Bagobo is with those who have the most formal
education. The Philippine public schools tend to minimize local or regional
ethnicities in favor of an abstract national identity. With this educational phi
losophy, local forms of dress are often limited to school pageants, if they appear
at all. Bagobo dress in the school context is not ceremonial wear per se but a type
of "native costume," a form of civics-class pageantry.
The term kostyom reflects another facet of Bagobo multilingualism, one that
includes English along with half a dozen major Philippine languages and local
Mindanao vemaculars. It delineates a mode of being Bagobo that has ineluctably
been drawn into an urban discourse of "nativeness." It would be convenient if
kostyom described an outward looking discourse of Bagobo dress as geared to
or responding to an overarching non-Bagobo society and ompak delineated a
more inward-looking dialog on group-specific dress appreciated by fellow
Bagobo. But that would be misleading and over-representing the dichotomy.
Informants often use the word kostyom interchangeably with ompak when
speaking with non-Bagobo. In using kostyom, urban Bagobo seek to be helpful
by using a word that would be easier for a non-Bagobo to grasp. This reaching
282 ETHNOLOGY
out through language is a kind of civility, a courtesy recognized, appreciated, and

deployed by Bagobo and nearly every other inhabitant of contemporary
Southeast Asia who, almost by default, live in multilingual communities (Siegel
1993).
The word kostyom can then be better understood as a new Bagobo word that
more exactly describes the unprecedented new contexts within which traditional
Bagobo dress may be viewed: donned by Bagobo and non-Bagobo at civic
parades celebrating the founding of the city of Davao, worn by Bagobo children
at school graduations, modeled by contestants in "ethnic" beauty pageants during
annual city-wide tourist festivals, and sported by Bagobo carolers and gong
players who go from house to house in Davao City's more prosperous neigh
borhoods at Christmastime. For all intents and purposes, the clothing remains
the same and is recognizably Bagobo in style and accessory. The juxtapositions
however can be jarring: heirloom three-panel abaca' tube skirts may be observed
worn by street dancers (which is deemed by Bag6bo as a lower category of per
formance than dancing on a stage or on social occasions) who perform side by
side with those who wear newer single-piece abaca' skirts of much lower status.
The finest skirts may be seen paired with brightly colored blouses cut in the
newer bell-sleeved style, or more commonly, exquisitely tailored and beaded
garments in subtle hues following the classic older clothing styles but rendered
in the unmistakable sheen of polyester cloth. All these contribute to an overall
sense of kostyom as Bagobo bricolage that somehow effectively maintains a
center of gravity within a distinct Bag6bo style.
Bag6bo dress glossed as k6styom therefore coincides with the emergence of
an awareness of Bag6bo heritage following decades of ripening notions of
national or cultural identity (Harrison 2004, Durham 1999, Herzfeld 2003).
Furthermore, this polyvalence creates a welcome social space for new formu
lations of explicit, politically constituted identities (cf. Muehlebach 2003,
Atkinson 1992). The Bag6bo, and particularly the more educated urban mem
bers, are similar to East Sumbanese weavers in being acutely aware of the uses
and misuses of "heritage" in the tourism-led cottage industry (Forshee 2001).
But what of ompak? Although this domain of traditional dress is far from
the vibrant identity spectacles playing out in the city, the inward-looking
significance of ompak Binag6bo continues to resonate with members ofthe com
munity on many levels. The imagery in Bagobo oral literature strongly associates
inabal and traditional clothing with moral and aesthetic concepts: beauty,
goodness, and splendor. The inner state of the person is believed to reflect out
ward appearance, and an aesthetic pre-eminence brings potency that may be
derived politically, economically, or spiritually. Bag6bo men today tend to
associate Bag6bo ceremonial clothing with glory, splendor, and notions of
virility and power. This often translates into idioms of economic prosperity
KOSTYOM 283
where new Bagobo ceremonial attire is commissioned from female kin at

considerable cost, or where there is a family heirloom, the item is regarded as
emblematic of a valued relationship-the fruit of loving labor of a deceased and
deeply accomplished mother or wife. With Bagobo women, ceremonial cloth and
clothing tend to be framed in terms of personal beauty, youth, and skill, of outfits
once worn by them as captivating young women or proudly worn by their attrac
tive daughters at graduation or in a local pageant or festival.
Both old and young, however, believe that the performance of certain rituals
that often require wearing Bagobo garments (whether owned or borrowed by the
ritual participants) is necessary to ward off ill health. Hence, newly married
Bagobo couples often have a second, more private Binagobo marriage ceremony
performed sometime after a church wedding. The reason given for these addi
tional ceremonies is to ward off sickness. Accounts abound of recalcitrant
couples who fell mysteriously ill after failing to have some form of Binagobo
marriage ritual. These illnesses, of supernatural causes like witchcraft, range
in severity and are deemed incurable by Western medical practice. In addition,
certain types of cloth, not necessarily made of abaca but identified as such
by pattern or color, are required as part of a healer's compensation.
CROSS-ETHNIC DRESSING
The Davao City Day parade features columns of elementary, high school, and
college students marching and dancing through the city streets to the beat of
Bagobo gongs and Mandaya drums, wearing complete dress ensembles of vari
ous culture groups indigenous to Davao to which they themselves may not
belong. The participants, young men and women decked out in highly stylized
but recognizable Mandaya and Bagobo dress, perform dramatic narrative and
dance routines miming the story of Davao's Christianization. The performance
is a school spectacle, an almost codified narrative of an imagined pre-colonial
history played out in Philippine social studies textbooks from elementary school
onwards. It also involves Visayan students wearing Mandaya, Bagobo, and
Muslim attire giving an enthusiastic performance for the glory of their school (as
well as for earning good grades). This is kostyom at its most extreme, yet
ironically at its most familiar. It suggests that ethnic identity in the Philippines
is often visualized as pageant and morality play where identity categories are
fluid, interchangeable, and performative.
Perhaps even more ironic is that the parade includes Bagobo participants,
many of them older, who dance for the joy of it. Dancing for their own pleasure,
they appear less choreographed and less uniformly attired. Bagobo participation
in such city-wide events is often recruited through the same local government
channels; and by the mid- to late 1 990s, certain Bagobo were counted on by city
284 ETHNOLOGY
and tourism officials to make a colorful showing. These performers, unlike the
street dancers mentioned above, are often from a single family, and interestingly
enough, Tagabawa Bag6bo troupes rarely appear side by side with Guiangan
or Obo, although all the Bagobo members of these performing troupes
acknowledge a shared connection. From the point of view of visitors and tourists,
Bagobo as well as Mandaya participation in these public celebrations has come
to be expected in Davao City.
In these public arenas, the similarity in dress of the Tagabaiwa, Guiaingan, and
Obo Bagobo is evident as they are juxtaposed with other de rigueur bearers of
local color, the Mandaiya or the Muslim, in their festival or pageant modes. The
degree of knowledge about and familiarity with fellow Bagobo is deep and far
reaching. In participation at public events such as parades, each Bagobo is able
to indicate not only the home villages of other participants but also their
infamous exploits and indiscretions, or atrocities perpetrated by a famous datu
(chief or local head) from one lineage against another.
The professed unity of the Bagobo is played out at many levels and the
seemingly innocuous realm of dress and textile is one of the most contested
domains. What binds individual Bagobo even more closely into a community is
a pervasive sense of intertwoven destinies, whether it is the disappointments of
debt and delayed reciprocity or a symbolic sanctuary of equal protection from
evil or sorcery so that one's spiritual well being can be assured. Whether viewed
as kostyom or ompak and taking into account its increasing rarity, the symbolism
of shared cloth and clothing continues to resonate in the community. Abaca' cloth
and clothing are good to have but lacking that, they are good to think about as
they help delineate the boundaries of geographically disparate but symbolically
bound communities whose members may choose to find meaning in one of many
Binagobo ways of life.
CONCLUSION
Why is the distinction between two words, kostyom and ompak, that refer
to identical artifacts so remarkable? In seeking to answer this question, three
related issues were explored: the dynamics of group identity in southern
Mindanao; the place of traditional or ceremonial clothing in the deployment of
Bagobo and other identities as spectacle in a regional heritage industry; and the
nature of "sameness" in dress as a changing but still resonant idiom for
articulating Bagobo identity today.
The Bag6bo and their neighbors inhabit a complex linguistic landscape.
Although languages such as Tagabaiwa that are indigenous to Mindanao operate
in most cases as an ethnic identity marker in the sprawling metropolis and the
nearby provinces of Davao, I have argued that the term Bagobo is not a language
KOSTYOM 285
as much as an identity category that encompasses three speech communities

living in roughly contiguous areas near Mount Apo. The identity term Bagobo
therefore defines a multilingual state of being that is expressed visually,
materially, and spiritually through a shared understanding of ceremonial dress
and related practices. Although the abaca' fiber textiles used to make ceremonial
attire are technologically demanding because of their ikat or resist-dyed patterns,
the Bagobo textiles are stylistically distinct when compared to those made and
used by other Mindanao groups.
Bagobo men and women shift between the terms kostyom (costume) or
6mpak (dress) when referring to their ceremonial attire. The choice of term
subtly delineates, through everyday speech, their interpretation of the relation
ship with the people they are addressing. Hence, the use of the word kostyom is
commonly used when speaking to non-Bag6bo. Although derived from English,
kostyom is not just a corrupted pronunciation of "costume" but refers to an entire
range of Bagobo experiences as active participants in the forging of a regional
heritage industry, whether as middlemen and craftswomen in the tourist trade,
or as members of Bagobo performing troupes. The multiple meanings from
wearing these clothes echo the many modes of being a modern Bagobo. At the
same time, the use of the term ompak alludes to deeply held ideas of the self
in relation to one's family and group, including ideals of spiritual coherence,
wellness, and belonging that outsiders will not easily understand. This domain
of ompak, referring not to costume but to one's own clothes, also traces the
existence of intimate social spaces distinct from those shared with outsiders.
Consequently, the term Binagobo as verb and as adjective suggests intentionality,
to purposely render something as Bagobo, and serves to describe and define a
range of social practices that both emphasize old ways yet accommodate the
new. Ceremonial clothing participates in Bagobo men's and women's attempts
to bridge connections to their village origins, to their surprisingly deep roots in
mixed communities in the larger arena of the city of Davao, and to their newer
claims to being part of the nation itself.
NOTE
1. Research support was provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation (Grant No. 5983), the
traditional arts subcommittee of the Philippine National Commission for Culture & the Arts
(NCCA-SCCTA) chaired by Felipe de Leon, Jr., and the University Research Council of Seton
Hall University. For their assistance in Davao, I thank Tina Lopez, Giselle Baretto, Nina and
Lydia Ingle, the late datu Oscar Udang, and Jhuna Roman, as well as the Bangkas, Nakano,
Monon, Bato, Vigilancia, Desabilla, and Oguit families. I also gratefully acknowledge David
Hicks, Bill Arens, Barbara Frank, Ruth Barnes, and Brian Durrans for their input on this article
through its dissertation and conference phases; and Len Plotnicov along with the anonymous
reviewers of Ethnology for reading and commenting on prior versions of this paper.
286 ETHNOLOGY
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University of Pittsburgh- Of the Commonwealth System of Higher Education

Costume, Kóstyom, and Dress: Formulations of Bagóbo Ethnic Identity in Southern

University of Pittsburgh- Of the Commonwealth System of Higher Education is

Late twentieth-century anthropology's shift from the study of tribes to that of

of the ancestral past draw heavily on anthropological concepts-particularly

This appears elsewhere, as in Toraja Land in Sulawesi, Indonesia, with the

with tourism. Whether approached as a transnational culture and leisure industry,

BINAGOBO IDENTITIES IN VILLAGE AND TOWN

to its modem Western counterpart; Binagobo religious practices as opposed

officially as Christian in order to safeguard the children's access to schooling

combination of a community-wide interest in public schooling for children and

KOSTYOM (COSTUME), HERITAGE, SPECTACLE, AND THE SELF

There is a literal distinction between the concepts of costume and dress.

out through language is a kind of civility, a courtesy recognized, appreciated, and

where new Bagobo ceremonial attire is commissioned from female kin at

as much as an identity category that encompasses three speech communities

Greenwood, D. 1989. Culture by the Pound: An Anthropological Perspective on Tourism as

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