How the Internet Conquered the Headhunters of Ifugao
90-year-old Guinid has watched life unfold in the jungle village of Batad since before World War II. Here he pounds rice at home in the Ifugao province of the Philippines.
A TWISTY, 12-HOUR BUS RIDE north of Manila lies Ifugao, a jungle state where indigenous people carved ingeniously engineered rice terraces into the mountainsides some 4,000 years ago.
The same families farm the paddies today, using the practices they’ve always used: river-fed gravity irrigation, fertilizing only with chaff, and mortar-and-pestle de-husking.
They still paint bulol harvest god figures with sacrificial chicken blood, praying for an abundant crop. Daily conversation is in Iyangan, the tribal language they have spoken for millennia.
Until a few generations ago, the men of neighboring Ifugao villages warred with each other and collected the heads of their enemies. The warriors were fiercest in the village of Batad, according to Batad’s elder, a 90-year-old man named Guinid who has watched life there unfold since before World War II.
Guinid, who sports a single tooth, a traditional red loin cloth, and a headdress decked with chartreuse flowers cut from a Mountain Dew bottle, sat for two conversations with me on a recent visit to Batad. Our translator was a young local man named Jerick, who spends his days guiding travelers around the village and running deliveries for neighbors when rice farming duties are light.
Guinid recounted that an ancestor named Poon Yee once came back from a hunting trip with the head of a man from another village who he’d encountered in the forest. That night the people of Batad sacrificed a pig, danced, and drank rice wine in wild celebration.
There was social pressure to collect only male heads; return with a woman’s and you would be labeled gay, Guinid noted.
The warriors of Batad were not only able to fend off local rivals, they also outmaneuvered Japanese soldiers trying to take Ifugao in World War II. Guinid, born in 1935, was a boy at the time. “The Japanese thought they were very smart and they were,” he said. “But they didn’t know the mountains.”
“Where war and even religion have failed to conquer, the Internet is driving a wedge.”
Neither the Spanish colonialists nor the U.S, which controlled the Philippines from 1898 to 1946, ever made inroads in Batad, said Guinid.
Even an American Anglican priest who lived in Batad 1950-1960 and who translated the Bible into Iyangan got only so far. While the villagers did convert, they seem to treat Christianity as a “both/and” proposition with their traditional animist beliefs.
“There is still lightning, still the mountains,” that deserve respect and recognition, observed Jerick, 27.
Today, a handful of households in Batad host visitors via Airbnb while others sell food, carvings, and woven goods to travelers. Many speak Tagalog and some speak English. But they still refuse to allow a driveable road into the village, which remains accessible only by a steep walking path.
So far Batad seems to be maintaining the tight bonds of a small, interdependent collective. Villagers share fruits and vegetables from their gardens, look after each others’ elderly and young, and freely use each others’ front terraces as walking paths around the mountain.
But sadly, where war and even religion have failed to conquer, the Internet is driving a wedge.
Jerick told me that when he was a child, he and his friends spent school holidays foraging for fruit and building swimming holes in the streams.
Now the children are on their parents’ phones from a young age, watching videos and playing games. Like a lot of kids in the U.S. and elsewhere, they don’t play as much outside and they don’t want to help their parents with the rice, said Jerick. Batad kids’ connections to tradition, nature, and their community are being supplanted by addictive content from oceans away.
“Phone-addicted kids can be real assholes – whether in Oakland, California or rural Ifugao.”
I heard the same thing the next place I visited, the town of Sagada, known for its hanging coffins, limestone caves, and handicrafts. My homestay host, Myrlie, who hails from a separate Ifugao tribe, was constantly on top of her 11-year-old son to get off his phone and help her clean. “He always says ‘later,’” she complained. “But by then it’s done.”
This was painfully familiar to me from my son’s childhood in Oakland, CA. He was born in 2005, two years before the introduction of the iPhone, and was therefore an early guinea pig of the “smart phone generation.”
I tried to warn Myrlie that my son and other kids from his cohort now regret winning the phone argument when they were young. Today they know their brains are the worse for it. “You’re the only one who can make your son stop,” I warned. “It’s up to you to set limits.” When she agreed, her son poked her in the ribs and ran off with his phone.
Phone-addicted kids can be real assholes – whether in Oakland, California or rural Ifugao.
“In the thronged metropolis of Manila, AI is all the rage.”
Phone addiction was the hot topic at Sagada’s Mt. Carmel Catholic Church, where I decided to take in some local religious culture the Sunday I was in town. The Ten Commandments are hand-painted on a sign in front of the church, which proclaims this Number One: “Thou shalt have no strange gods before me.”
Alternating between English and Tagalog, the priest sermonized that “In reality, God is the center of the world. But on Facebook, YOU are the center of the world.” He criticized Facebook for preying upon peoples’ inherent ego-centrism and creating disconnection among Filipino families.
Meantime a pink-clad toddler ran around the sanctuary with a smart phone in her hands.
Four hundred kilometers south, in the thronged metropolis of Manila, AI is all the rage. A friend who lives there told me that many people in his circle have formed what they consider deep friendships with ChatGPT. They confide in the chatbot and take its advice without much pause. “They say it knows them better than anyone,” my friend said. “They aren’t suspicious people. They discuss ‘what ChatGPT said’ as if it’s their therapist or their wisest friend.“
So good luck to them, to us, to every parent and child. And to societies who draw their strength from an engaged, thoughtful, connected citizenry. In every corner of the world, humanity is firmly in the thrall of addictive pixels – the strangest god of all.
Jerick — farmer, guide, translator, and delivery runner — overlooking the rice terraces of Batad
