Some indigenous cultures believe that being photographed steals the soul. The superstition hails from magical beliefs that reflections contain vital parts of a person’s being that can be stolen or captured by modern technology.

If photographs could indeed capture souls on print, then pictures of Mangyan communities taken by Raymond Panaligan showed snapshots of a culture dispossessed.

Lisa C. Ito, writer for the alternative Philippine newsmagazine Bulatlat, said Panaligan’s images capture “portraits of a people dispossessed by colonial and contemporary incursions into their ancestral lands, disenfranchised in their own communal territories, and left behind in an archipelago surrounded by crisis.”

FYI: About the Hanunoo Tribe

"Hanunoo," in the Minagyan language of the Mangyans, means "genuine", "real" or "true".

The Hanunoo Mangyans live in a mountainous area about 800 square km in southeastern Oriental Mindoro. According to NCCP-PACT, the Hanunoo tribe numbered around 18,500 in 1998.

Despite their proximity to the lowland Christian settlements, the Hanunoo Mangyans persist in insulating themselves from lowland influences, and this has helped them preserve their culture.

Source:Servano, Minia. “Mangyan.” CCP Encyclopedia <http://litera1no4.tripod.com/ mangyan_frame.html>

Ito’s article analyses Panaligan’s images of the Hanunoo Mangyans, one of the seven existing tribes populating Mansalay and Bulalacao, in the Southeastern region of Mindoro Island, Philippines.

The Mangyan documentation project used photographs to show the lives of Mangyans in Mindoro since 1993, when Panaligan spent immersions, fact-finding operations and peace missions there. Panaligan deliberately initiated the decade-long project to present images from the margins. He is concerned that despite archival materials on Mangyan tribes, “existing visual evidence of Mangyan communities is sparse and rare.”

Portraits from the periphery

Ito wrote that photo coverages of minority tribes for ethnographic studies and for foreign tourist consumption are often taken as “samples of the exotic and uncivilised under the false assumption of cultural and material inferiority.” Panaligan’s images do the opposite; they show the Mangyans from their own point of view, unlike the “voyeuristic tokens of native savages.” The pictures remain intimate and straightforward, showing the photographer’s affinity with his subjects.

Ito described the snapshots in detail, providing some analyses of the people’s struggles. Even without seeing the actual photos, one can almost see and feel their hardships:

The photograph of a smiling Mangyan baby, for instance, is laden with the beaded bracelets, basketry, and textiles that Mangyan women have also started to produce for commercial, as well as personal, consumption over the years.
A photograph of three tribes people wandering through a commercial area with a few handwoven wares reminds the viewer of their struggle to survive in a society that refuses to integrate their specific needs into the whole economy.
The image of a lone Mangyan child, crunched up in hunger before three empty calderos, (food pots) is a stark reminder of the contrasting realities in Philippine society.

Images of struggle

The photos show the bleak poverty and everyday struggles of a community of living in a world far removed from urban realities. Despite government claims of economic progress and development in the Philippines, indigenous peoples like the Mangyan tribes still suffer from basic social problems.

“Hunger, landlessness, terror wrought by militarisation and counter-insurgency campaigns, displacement by foreign multinational incursions into potential mining sites, lack of access to basic social services such as health care and education” are evident in the various photographs. Other problems include lack of irrigation, damaging floods, lack of food, little electricity, and potable water. Still even more sinister are human rights violations not documented by Panaligan, including the military’s murders and tortures of Mangyans suspected to be New Peoples' Army (NPA) members or supporters during counter-insurgency campaigns.

Through the photos, the project hopes the rest of the world will see the plight of the Mangyans and get a glimpse into the life of a people, and in some way, capture part of their souls.

Sources:

“Images from the Margins: The Mangyan Struggle against Dispossession
in the Documentary-Photography of Raymond Panaligan.” Bulatlat, 5(50) January 29-February 4, 2006. <http://www.bulatlat.com/news/5-50/5-50-margins.htm>

Grant, Douglas. “Magick and Photography.” ASHE, Journal of Experimental Spirituality, 2 (3) <http://www.ashe-prem.org/three/grant.shtml> .