Organizer: Sulo: The Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU

Type/Location: In Person / New York, NY

Description:

Sulo: The Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU, Espacio de Culturas at NYU, and NYSEAN present “People of the Book: Translating an Oral Tradition into Written Form in Lumad Mindanao,” a talk by Dr. Oona Paredes, Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at UCLA.

About the Lecture:

Over the past decade, a small Higaunon team devoted their free time to transcribing their core oral tradition, known as the Panud, into book form. The Higaunon are a Lumad (Indigenous) minority community on the island of Mindanao (Philippines), and the Panud is the story of their people from the earliest ancestors to the present. It takes the form of a genealogy, but the Panud also contains, among other things, their creation story, religious doctrines, customary laws, and a record of migrations, land claims, and wars. The first all-Higaunon book written by Higaunons, Su Panud Ta Baligiyan (2023) was quickly adopted for use in the local government’s Indigenous Peoples Education Program. This talk will present the history of the Panud project, and the challenges (logistical, political, and epistemic) our team faced in transforming this unique oral tradition into written form. Through the story of the Panud project, we will explore some of the core epistemic differences between oral and literary cultures. The process also reveals some of the dilemmas inherent to “preserving tradition” and heritage making, and the complexities of being a ‘culture bearer’ in a modern Indigenous minority community in Southeast Asia.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Oona Paredes is an anthropologist and ethnohistorian specializing in the study of Indigenous minorities in Southeast Asia. She is currently Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at UCLA’s Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, and Associate Director of the CMRS-Center for Early Global Studies. Previously, she at the taught at the National University of Singapore, and in 2017 was the inaugural Strom Visiting Professor in History at the University of Toronto. Since 2013, she has been supervising the compilation and transcription of Higaunon oral traditions for heritage preservation and for use in local Higaunon schools as a ‘mother tongue’ text. Her most significant publications include: A Mountain of Difference: The Lumad in Early Colonial Mindanao (Cornell SEAP, 2013); “(De)Constructions of Indigeneity in the Philippines” (co-authored with J.A. Ruanto-Ramirez) in Indigeneity in the Philippines: Studies on Knowledge, Identity, and Rights (University of Hawaii Press, 2025); “Custom and Citizenship in the Philippine Uplands,” in Citizenship and Democratization in Postcolonial Southeast Asia (Brill, 2016); and numerous journal articles including “Preserving ‘Tradition’: The Business of Indigeneity in the Modern Philippine Context” (JSEAS, 2019), and “More Indigenous than Others: The Paradox of Indigeneity among the Higaunon Lumad” (Sojourn, 2022). She is currently writing a book on Indigenous leadership and customary law among the Higaunon Lumad of Mindanao.

Registration:

To attend the event in person, please register here.