Culture Share: Philippines - Engagement and Wedding feasts in Ifugao

This post is part of The Writer's International Culture Share, in which writers discuss their personal experience with world cultures: Rochita Loenen-Ruiz discusses engagement and wedding feasts in the Ifugao province of the Philippines.


Engagement and Wedding feasts in Ifugao by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz

In Ifugao, courtship begins with a show of informal interest between a man and a woman.  If a man is interested in pursuing a formal relationship with the woman, his first step is to approach the elders of the woman’s family. Not just her parents but also her elders.

While there may be some unspoken agreement (as tends to be the case in this modern age) the woman’s family will still ask the woman for her reply to the man after the man has presented his case and asked for the permission to court her formally.

If the woman says “no” before the elders, this means the man has been turned down. If she says “yes” to the man’s declaration, then it means that they will have to arrange for a formal engagement ceremony. This ceremony is negotiated by the mediator and usually takes place some months after the woman has given her “yes” to the man’s declaration.

To the Ifugao, this formal courtship is the man’s statement of his seriousness and his intent to marry.
If the woman says yes then the following things take place:

1.    The man has to bring a mediator who will speak on his behalf. In my brother’s case, we had a family friend who was a former Mumbaki (native priest). This man agreed to negotiate and act as go-between for elders of the woman’s clan and my brother.
2.    The mediator is very important because it is he who negotiates the date for the engagement ceremony which must take place before the entire clan. This engagement ceremony is called the moma.
3.    The mediator also negotiates the number of pigs the prospective groom must bring to the moma. In my brother’s case, he was asked to bring two pigs of a good size.
4.    During the engagement ceremony itself, only the groom, the mediator and members of the woman’s clan are present.  Sometimes a member of the groom’s family will be allowed to attend, but basically the ceremony is held for the woman’s clan.

These are symbolic elements used during the engagement ceremony:
Rice
Betelnut
Salt
Dried Meat

In some cases, the engagement ceremony is as far as it goes. Marriage is a very costly endeavour and unlike marriages in cities like Manila that are westernized, there is no such thing as rsvp when you get married in Ifugao.

In Ifugao, the wedding feast is a community endeavour with the entire community pitching in and everyone working together to prepare the food and to provide for the wedding feast.

Tradition dictates that marriage should take place a year after the engagement ceremony. Terms are set before the engagement. In the case of my youngest brother, his wife-to-be expressed her desire to continue on with her intention to obtain her degree in medicine. In this, her family as well as my brother agreed to support her.

Terms were also set with regards to what the family desires the man to provide for the marriage ceremony. The normal demand is for the groom to provide ten to twelve good-sized pigs for the wedding feast.

Some couples chose to elope or to get married in the Western way to evade the high costs. Some get married in the city as getting married in the mountains costs a lot. One of our friends who got married spent half a million pesos for her wedding. This included the cost of a wedding performed in the Christianized way as well as the cost of a marriage feast conducted in the Ifugao way.

There is a reason why ten to twelve pigs are asked for.  A marriage is meant to be celebrated with the entire village and it is meant to symbolize a sharing of joy as well as a sharing of abundance.  It is not simply an endeavour of the groom. The bride’s family and her community contribute towards the feast as well. Some will bring rice for the marriage feast, others will bring salt and herbs needed for cooking, and others will bring vegetables as well as other delicious treats.

During the wedding feast itself, there is no telling the exact number of guests who will come as the feast is open for guests who are considered family, friends, and members of community as well as the extended community.

Rochita was the first Filipina writer to be accepted into the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop. She attended the workshop in 2009 as the recipient of the Octavia Butler Scholarship. At present, Rochita resides in the Netherlands, but this could change in the future. Her short fiction has been published in The Philippines as well as outside of The Philippines. She has a livejournal at  http://rcloenen-ruiz.livejournal.com

Culture Share: Philippines - Gates and Exterior Walls by Charles Tan

This post is part of The Writer's International Culture Share, in which writers discuss their personal experience with world cultures: Charles Tan discusses gates and exterior walls in the Philippines.

Gates and Exterior Walls by Charles Tan

As a Fine Arts student, I was taught various design aesthetics. Gothic architecture. Modern architecture. It's even more interesting when you apply it to Philippine homes, mainly because we've been heavily influenced by our previous colonizers like Spain and the US. And yet, when I compare the image of houses here to houses elsewhere, there is a significant difference between the two. I couldn't quite pinpoint it at first and it was the simplicity of it all that eluded me: Philippine houses have gates and exterior walls.

This is a significant cultural detail. It's not because Filipinos are paranoid by nature, but if we analyze Philippine history, we're very much a feudal country and that kind of legacy has had a lasting impact. Just as an example, land ownership is a significant portion in our Constitution and land reform is a never-ending political issue. The obsession with land is a factor in our architecture, be it consciously or unconsciously.

Every single house in the Philippines has a gate and an external wall (the only exception are squatter's homes). Whether you're rich or poor, your home will always have those two. Sometimes, it's just a token presence rather than any practical hindrance: I've visited houses where the gates are only waist high and the "wall" is actually a short fence. At other times, it's a secure fortress, with steel gates more than twice my height and equally towering walls that are reinforced with barbed wire. Because of this, certain US concepts are foreign to us. We do have lawns but they're hardly open to the public so the morning paper will never end up on our lawn. Similarly, automated garage doors are redundant so most people--even wealthy citizens--simply don't have a garage door.

What's interesting with gates and exterior walls is that there's variation in design and not all of them are practical in keeping out intruders. Our gate for example looks like a net so anyone passing by can see through it, and when I get locked out of the house, I easily climb the gate. (Of course it has to be said that we live in a village, which is a walled-off community.) On the other extreme is a gate with the paint faded and all you have is this huge metal slab with a peekhole. Exterior walls have a lot of variance. I've seen some home owners allow vegetation to cover their gate while others make do with a paint job. What's on top of the exterior wall however is what's surprising. The school near our house, for example, has shards of broken glass embedded on top of their walls to deter trespassers. Some houses incorporate spikes and fences into their design. And others are simply flat, relying on sheer height to deter intruders.

The presence of gates and exterior walls is so commonplace that many of us take it for granted and it's simply assumed when discussing architecture. From a cultural perspective, this all ties back on how we value land in the country and this is simply one manifestation of it.

Charles Tan lives in Manila, in the Philippines.