Pain, Breathing, and Personhood: The Practice of Customary Tattooing in Pantaron Manobo Communities in Southern Mindanao, Philippines

This is a presentation of our sustained ethnographic study on pangotoeb, or the customary tattooing practice of highland Manobo people in the Pantaron Mountain Range, southern Mindanao, Philippines, and its relationship to the creation of proper Manobo persons. Considering tattooing primarily as technology (Gell 1998) and momentarily bracketing off the final visual product as the main locus of meaning can surface new significations and understandings of tattooing. Of singular importance in customary Manobo tattooing is the anticipation of pain and actually experiencing it during the tattooing process. Specifically, the status of this experience of pain as “willed” or “chosen” for oneself—as many tattoo recipients assert—is integral to the cultivation of self-determined Pantaron Manobo persons. Experiencing pain is moreover crucial to understanding the protective property of customary tattooing. Unlike previous analyses of protective tattoos that construe skins as surfaces for “skirmishings” (Fleming 2001) and sites of “breaching” (Solomon 2022) in need of fortification, Manobo tattooing instead protects its bearers by “registering” (Anzieu 2016) pain and the sense of marginality and vulnerability that it brings—and this registrations allows recipients to reconstruct their social worlds anew. This analysis of the protective functioning of tattoos challenges the almost-axiomatic spatialized construal of persons and bodies as comprised of interiors and exteriors, and better fits the “breath-based” ontology of highland Philippine groups that we have previously argued (Paluga and Ragragio 2023) to be a durable “metaphysics” across the Austronesian-speaking world.