57U C R UN D E R G R A D U A T ERE S E A R C HJO U R N A LSpiritual Sustenance: The History, Ritual and Significanceof the Bulol Figures of the Philippine Ifugao PeopleKimberly Zarate1, Jennifer Hughes21Department of Media and Cultural Studies,2Department of Religious StudiesUniversity of California, RiversideKimberly Zarate is a first yearstudent with a double major inAnthropology and Film and VisualCulture. Her main areas of researchinterest include twentieth-centuryand contemporary visual media,visual anthropology/ethnography,journalistic documentation, religionin media and popular culture andpopular culture trends. In particular,Kimberly is interested photographicrepresentation and propaganda ofsocial conflict/revolutions as well asthe material culture of religion. Shehopes to further pursue her interestsin graduate school. She alsoexpresses great gratitude to herfaculty mentor for her encour-agement, support, patience andguidance.A U T H O RKimberly ZarateFilm and Visual CultureA B S T R A C TJennifer HughesDepartment of Religious StudiesThe UCR CHASS Connect program gives our incoming first year studentsa liberal arts college experience within a large, public university setting.Here they learn not only broad interdisciplinary content and methods butalso garner skills to succeed throughout their undergraduate career.Freshman Kimberly Zarate enrolled in the CHASS first year sequence “Manifestationsof Spirituality.” Her major project for my class on religious images (Winter 09) repre-sented original research on the Philippine Ifugao images called bulol. Ms. Zarateadopted key analytical categories and questions from course lecture and reading andapplied these to formulate a religious studies interpretation of the figures. Already anexceptional writer and careful thinker, she consistently sought to test and explore herideas and theses with me over the course of the quarter. The result is this impressivepiece on the changing significance of these traditional objects of material religion froma student only just beginning her undergraduate studies.F A C U L T Y M E N T O RThis paper examines the ritual uses and history of the bulol rice god figures of the Ifugaopeople in northern Luzon, Philippines. Anthropological and ethnographic studies of theIfugao stress the traditional cultural and economic gravity of rice as sustenance butneglect to explicitly acknowledge how external, non-indigenous forces impact thereligious significance of rice – particularly the use of bulol figures in agricultural religiousrituals. By examining the colonial history of and recent economics and tourism in theIfugao province, as described in anthropological, historical and conservationist sources,I clarify how foreign cultures and religions influence those of the Ifugao. I argue that theincreasing prevalence of Christianity and contemporary economic pressures have drivena decrease in the religious potency of the bulol figures by allowing the tourism market toprioritize the figures’ commercial value as cultural curios rather than their religious valueas representations of an agriculturally efficacious deity.SPIRITUAL SUSTENANCE: THE HISTORY, RITUAL AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BULOL FIGURES OF THE PHILIPPINE IFUGAO PEOPLEKimberly ZarateINTRODUCTIONDesignated a World Heritage Site by the UnitedNations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organi-zation (UNESCO) in 1995, the rice terraces in thePhilippines have also been unofficially dubbed theEighth Wonder of the World.1Carved into the steepfaces of the Cordillera Mountains in northern Luzon,Philippines, the rice terraces exhibit agriculturalingenuity unaided by the use of modern technology.Also constructed into these highland terraces, however,is the identity of the Ifugao – a people rich withindigenous and colonial history, an elaboratelyritualized religion and a way of life trademarked by theancestral tradition of rice cultivation. Evidenced by adeeply rooted spiritual and physical connection to theearth, the religious ritual aspects of the Ifugao cultureare as complex and diverse as the terraces arenumerous. The bulol images have figured prominentlyin this religious and agricultural landscape; the carved,wooden statues representing the rice deity Bulol haveacted as domestic and shamanic ritual objects essentialto Ifugao collective religion for at least severalcenturies.2However, the growing prevalence of Chris-tianity and contemporary economic pressures havebeckoned the Ifugao away from their maintenance ofthe rice terraces and belief in the power of the bulolfigures. In 2001 – just six years following its UNESCOdesignation as a World Heritage Site – the rice terracesin the Ifugao province have been placed on theUNESCO List of World Heritage in Danger.3Subse-quently, the bulol rice god figures face an equal endan-germent as their religious and cultural significancedeteriorates.In this paper, I argue that while the bulol figuresmaintain some of their historical significance throughthe ongoing practice of nearly twenty distinct ricerituals, the religious significance of the bulol figures tothe Ifugao ultimately continues to erode as partici-pation in these (now erratic and “optional”) rituals nolonger possesses the agricultural urgency it once heldand as the figures themselves acquire a new commercialvalue in the tourism market driven by contemporaryeconomic pressures. This phenomenon was firstsuggested to me in Fruto Corre’s Mountains of Water:The Terraces and Traditions of the Ifugao (1998), anethnographic film briefly discussing the bulol figures aspart of a general study of the cultural deterioration ofIfugao rice rituals. This paper provides more a detailedexamination than Corre’s film by taking the figuresthemselves and the rituals in which they are involvedas the central focus. I have therefore accumulateddisparate sources to assemble an understanding of thechanging religious and ritual significance of the bulolfigures in Ifugao culture. My investigation revealed thatthe bulol figures have been commonly discussed as partof ethnographic or cultural conservationist studies butare infrequently studied in their own right and evenmore rarely analyzed within a specifically religious ordevotional framework. Bringing together early andmid-twentieth century ethnographic works on theIfugao, recent scholarly literature on the spiritual signif-icance of rice in Asia and ecological writings on culturaland environmental erosion among