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Originally Posted by mandaukudi
The piece doesn't let any doubt about the symbols used to frigthen away bad spirits. I was aware that this was practized also among the Dayak but had never seen such a clear example.
at final another legend told by former curator Jan Ave of the Leiden Museum when I took lessons years ago.
Once there was a female village chief who was going to a meeting with several other village chiefs. The had been enemies in the past so she was not completely happy being among them. During the long conversation that followed they indeed suddenly tried to attack her with their mandaus, but before they could even stab her she jumped up and undressed completey.... there she stood totally naked and the chiefs where nailed to the ground. Jan Ave assured that that was (like we normal man should think) not by her nice shapes,rounds and curves but that the look upong someones genitials was associated with taboo. It was just "not done" to attack her now.
I think such stories would end whole different outside Borneo....
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Thanks Arjan for that interesting story
In the Philippines' precolonial era and even up to the recent past in our remote areas, such practice to stop men dead on their tracks is still very much alive.
I can't remember the author at the moment. But for our Cordilleran highlanders (i.e., Igorots), a woman who chances upon a headhunter on his way to a hunt can turn him away and shame him by lifting up her skirt, and shouting something like: "Go back to where you came from!".
From a
local news article on our recent Maguidanao massacre tragedy where a lot of women were butchered (thus defying age-old traditions), we read of similar practices of women disrobing to shame man the aggressor:
Sending women to accomplish dangerous missions is a traditional practice in many communities. Sometime in the 1980s, in Sagada, Mt. Province, women were sent out to negotiate the retrieval of dead bodies killed in a shootout between the military and the New People’s Army. The decomposing bodies threatened the sanitation of the river, and there was no time to wait for the fighting to stop. In the 1970s, a group of Kalinga women bared their chests before the engineers of the National Power Corporation and the soldiers of the Philippine military to express their opposition to the Chico River Dam.
Time and again, in Maguindanao and Maranao societies, women would be sent to explore the ground for negotiations that would settle a festering dispute between families.
Why send the women? The logic in doing so exploits the duality of what women are and how they are perceived in most societies. On the one hand, many women possess the inner strength that has helped them cope with life circumstances that are often not under their control but are in the hands of men (fathers, husbands, religious, civic and government authorities). Thus, there will always be brave women willing to take on such dangerous missions when called upon, especially if it would mean saving lives and averting more serious harm.
At the same time, men commonly perceive the women as vulnerable and weak. Women do not traditionally carry the weapons – the men do. They fulfill the non-transferable function of reproducing life, which is necessary for the survival of the race. They are cared for and protected, along with the children. It would be a shame for the men to kill them. And when they bare their chests – a practice done not so much in Islamized communities but in other indigenous communities in the Philippines and countries like Colombia -- it is to humiliate the men for their arrogance...
Such technique of course confounds the common man, as to its logic.
On a related matter, very recently in Baguio City (the most urbanized Igorot city), concerns were being raised in a town hall meeting about the incidence of rape rising.
An old Igorot elder then broke his silence and suggested half-jokingly that maybe, the women should start getting topless again (because rape was reportedly non-existent during his time when women still dress traditionally, i.e., topless).
Surely there's a lot of cultural idiosyncrasies with regard to clothing or the lack thereof