"Magsama-sama Tayong Panoorin": A Creative, Collaborative, and Ongoing Ethnography with Sama Banguingui Women Dancing in the City of Manila

• Main Author: Bautista, Regina Salvaña
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: dance; ethnography; pansak; Manila; Muslim; Sama Banguingui
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss40/11; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/2021/viewcontent/KK_2040_2C_202023_2011_20Forum_20Kritika_20on_20Dancing_20Democracy_20in_20a_20Fractured_20World_20__20Bautista.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

For the Sama-Bajau and Sama Banguingui women living in Manila, the traditional dance pansak (or igal) is a vital dimension of life. This paper focuses on Radzmina Tanjili, a Sama- Banguingui from Zamboanga, well-known in her barangay1 for her dancing. Her life as a dancer is filled with performance opportunities and cultural exchanges for her and the group of Sama- Bajau women and children who belong to the same NGO she volunteers for. She and the group perform for government, non-government organizations, and academic institutions. Apart from this, she also continues to dance pansak in its traditional improvised form at wedding ceremonies around Luzon. Underlying such creative and cultural pursuits, however, are the difficult realities she faces as a Muslim woman without a stable source of income living in a predominantly Catholic Christian city. This article takes a critical approach to dance studies and an engaged and collaborative approach in ethnography, which resulted in a creative project. It explores how to best articulate what it means for an indigenous Muslim minority group to be dancing their traditional dances in the predominantly Catholic and Tagalog-speaking city of Manila. The critical and engaged lenses are necessary to foreground the agency of the Sama Banguingui in their dancing, but at the same time draws attention to the complex position that they occupy and the realities they face as marginalized women belonging to the urban poor population.