The Imitation of Christ in Bicol, Philippines

Abstract

This article considers the way in which the local practice of Catholicism in Bicol, centred here on a miraculous image of a 'dead Christ', is linked to the healing of spirit-caused sickness. I argue that the relationship of people in S. Ignacio to their saint is one of identification, in which ritual and daily life echo each other, and devotional acts often take the form of 'imitations' of Christ which create intimacy with him and access power in the world. Healers also 'imitate' Christ as one of a range of ways in which they seek to manage relationships with the spirits, and the dead Christ himself also stands as a shamanic exemplar. I suggest that this approach to the mediation of hierarchy is probably one of the historical continuities in Bicolano culture, which has often been pejoratively described as 'merely' imitative of the West. In this article, I examine religious and healing practices in one area of Bicol, a province of Southern Luzon, Philippines. Bicolanos, in common with Filipino populations in other lowland provinces, are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, and the religious practices I discuss centre on a particular saint-cult, that of the Amang Hinulid (or Ama), a miraculous wooden figure of Christ-taken-downfrom-the-cross whom I refer to in English as the 'dead Christ'. Healing seances are also an extremely important part of Filipino life in both rural and urban settings. They involve communication with spirits, and take complex forms which bridge the distinction often made in the literature between 'spirit mediumship' and 'shamanism'.1 Since the publication of Ecstatic religion (Lewis 1971), if not before, writers with quite contrasting theoretical interests have tended to stress how mediumship and possession can be oppositional to 'world religions'. This partly reflects the widespread historical fact of hostility between missionaries (or other agents of conversion) and local mediums, shamans or other practitioners, which applies to the history of the Philippines as to so many other contexts. However, the ethnography of Southeast Asia has tended to focus either on mediumship and possession as a discourse of the marginalized in relation to, especially, Islam (e.g. Ong 1987) or on areas marginal to the state, where mediumship and shamanship retain a central importance in the construction of (an oppositional) identity (e.g. Atkinson 1989; Tsing 1993).2 Because Christianity is the least widespread 'world religion' in Southeast Asia, its relation to mediumship has been less discussed than that of Islam. This article provides ethnography on the Philippine case, and contrasts with the existing literature in concentrating on the extent to which idioms are shared