Reclaiming the Indigenous Body: Discourse, Social Media, and the Aesthetic of Igorot Activism

• Main Author: Calabias, Jose Kervin Cesar B.
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: fetad; Igorot; Philippine Anti-Terror Law; red-tagging; strategic essentialism; Worcester archive
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss39/25; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/2004/viewcontent/KK_2039_2C_202022_2024_20Forum_20Kritika_20in_20Honor_20of_20Edel_20E._20Garcellano_20__20Calabias.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

This essay analyzes online activist media addressing the red-tagging and trumped-up criminal charges against members of the Cordillera Peoples Alliance in the wake of the Anti-Terror Law in 2020. Engaging with critical scholarship on the archiving, colonial discourse, and representation of the Igorot body, I argue that these online activist media published on the organization’s official Facebook account deploy strategic essentialism by subverting the colonially othered and criminalized marker of the savage-terrorist. The Igorot body is rendered as a quasi-heroic figure of the Igorot warrior who invokes and appropriates traditional bodily customs on warfare and gender relations to embody a self-styled heritage of resistance and martyrdom that undergirds the performance of their self-acquittal against the charges of terrorism and the authority of the colonial archive. Concurrently, the protested/protesting Igorot body moves against the “sovereign trickster” by staging an online fetad or the traditional mass mobilization of communal support, consolidating power from the “networked publics” against the threat of state terrorism.