Catalog Record:
There are approximately 140,000 Ifugao living in scattered districts over some 170 square miles in northern Luzon. They are agrarian farmers who have perfected a system of sustainable rice terracing uniquely suited to the heavy rainstorms and rugged terrain of northern Luzon, Philippines. In their tribal society, rice is more than a basic sustenance; it also serves as a medium of exchange and a signifier of status. Rituals, ceremonies, and events are tightly interwoven into the Ifugao people's daily lives. The characteristic richness and diversity of the Ifugao agriculture, religion, and music is strongly evident in The Harold C. Conklin Philippine Collection, which includes what arguably is one of the largest, most comprehensive set of audio recordings on the Ifugao in existence. It documents continuity and change in some of the most important features of Ifugao culture over the course of forty years.
The recordings chronicle a wide range of Ifugao ceremonies, events, rituals, and sub-rituals, with much of the collection divided between strictly oral, strictly instrumental, and combined oral/instrumental field recordings. Field recordings document, for example, mythical or genealogical recitations, women's rituals, chants, invocations, rice harvesting, storytelling, children's games, language exercises, voice letters, interviews, and discussions. While a handful of the recordings are in the languages of Buhid, Hanunóo, Ilongot, Kallāhan, or English, the majority are recorded in the Ifugao Baynīnan dialect, one of the twenty-three dialects spoken by the Ifugao. With regard to geographical coverage, the documentation comes from twenty-seven of approximately one hundred and fifty agricultural districts, thereby providing a respectable sampling of the Ifugao. Therefore, due to its topical, geographical, and temporal scope, the recordings not only capture the exact details of ritualized Ifugao ceremonies, they situate them within the larger cultural context. Additional recording locations in the Philippines include: Tukukan, Nueva Vizcaya-Dupax del Sur, Nueva Vizcaya-Kakidūgen, and Mindoro Oriental.
Conklin began making original field recordings of the Ifugao in 1961. He used a combination of tape recorders (Fi-cord, Nagra, Sony, and Uher), recording formats (discs, reel-to-reel tapes and cassette tapes), and recording speeds (1 7/8, 3 3⁄4, 7 1⁄2, and 15 ips) in the course of his field work, adopting new technologies as they became available. Recordings on 5-inch reel-to-reel tapes and sixty-minute cassettes are the predominant original formats in this collection, which totals 262 first-generation sound recordings.
All recordings were originally given three distinct numbers by Conklin. In this system, the first number denotes the year, the second denotes the reel or cassette number, and the third denotes the side of the reel or cassette as noted (example: original field recording 61.5b is the B-side of the fifth recording made in 1961). With the exception of twenty-four recordings made in 1955, 1960, 1965, 1966, 1970, and 1977, Conklin is the primary recordist or interviewer for all of the original Ifugao recordings.
A copy of Conklin's own Philippine Collection
Harold C. Conklin (professor emeritus, Yale University) is a renowned anthropologist, linguist, ethnobiologist, and preeminent authority on the Ifugao and Hanunóo people of the Philippines. Born in Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1926, Conklin developed an early interest in anthropology and the history and culture of Native Americans that was supported and encouraged by his family. By the end of his high school career, Conklin had formed a number of influential friendships with American Indians, worked as the only non-Indian National Youth Association Indian Counselor, and served as a part-time volunteer at the American Museum of Natural History, where he worked under the supervision of curator and department chairperson, Clark Wissler.
By 1943, Conklin's interests in high school, particularly in American Indian studies and linguistics, had prepared him for undergraduate study at the University of California, Berkeley. In his first year there, he was introduced to Austronesian languages through a hasher (cook's assistant) job at the Gamma Phi Beta sorority house, where he first began speaking, reading, and writing in Malay. In his second semester, Conklin built upon this introduction to Malay by enrolling in an advanced linguistics course where students were assigned the task of transcribing Australian and American broadcasts for Indonesians living throughout the archipelago, then occupied by the Japanese during World War II.
In July of 1944, Conklin was inducted into the U.S. Army and served two years with the 158th Regimental Combat Team in the Philippine Islands, northern Luzon. After arranging to be discharged in the Philippines in 1946, Conklin spent a year and a half conducting serious anthropological research and fieldwork in Manila, Mindoro, and Palawan. During this period, he made his first set of Philippine recordings, and was given locally crafted artifacts, plant leaves, and cuttings in exchange for his freely given store of seed beads, post-war relief clothing, and medicines. The resulting collection of artifacts was later donated to the Philippine National Museum. During his stay in Manila, Conklin was also given a serendipitous crash course, by botanist H.H. Bartlett, on the proper way to prepare, press, and store the botanical specimens he had accumulated during his stay in the Philippines. Upon his return to the United States in 1948, Conklin finished his undergraduate work at Berkeley, but not before cataloging his collection of bamboo manuscripts written by natives from Mindoro and Palawan, publishing two articles on the Mindoro, and typing up a 600-page Hanunóo-English dictionary.
During his first two years as a Yale graduate student (1950-51), Conklin continued to engage in scholarly dialogue with numerous faculty members, visiting scholars, and fellow students who shared his interest in anthropology and linguistics. From 1952 to 1954, he returned to the Philippines to complete fieldwork on the Hanunóo people for his dissertation. At this time, he began making his second set of Philippine recordings with equipment lent to him by Moses Asch of Folkways Records. Although he officially completed his graduate research in 1955, Conklin's analysis of the Hanunóo, based on his four field trips to Mindoro between 1947 and 1958, was not completed until 1961. Almost immediately thereafter, he began studying the Ifugao of northern Luzon in order to provide cultural contrasts to his work with the Hanunóo. From 1961 to 1973, Conklin continued his fieldwork in northern Luzon, making six field trips during this twelve-year span. The audio material he recorded during these visits comprises his third and most comprehensive set of Philippine recordings.
In 1954, Conklin accepted a position at Columbia University, where, for the next eight years, he taught and explored his research interests in cognition, kinship, language use, and folk classification. From 1962 to the present, Conklin has taught at Yale University, where he has continued to pursue research on shifting cultivations, ethnology, and ecologies of tropical forested areas of the Pacific Basin. A prolific writer, Conklin has authored over thirty scholarly essays and seven books. In addition, he has contributed to, co-authored or edited over forty other publications and provided the source material for the Folkways recording,
The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the Library's online catalog. They are grouped by name of person or organization, by subject or location, and by occupation and listed alphabetically therein.
For a listing of Ifugao ceremonies, events and rituals, see Appendix A. For a listing of musical instruments, see Appendix B.
Listening access to the collection is unrestricted. Listening copies
of the recordings are available in the Folklife Reading Room. Restrictions may
apply concerning the use, duplication, or publication of items in this
collection. Consult a reference librarian in the Folklife Reading Room for
specific information regarding this collection. See
From 1961 to 1995, Harold C. Conklin made approximately ten field trips to northern Luzon to record the audio material in this collection. These recordings, plus twenty-four recordings made by friends and acquaintances, comprise his third and last set of field recordings made in the Philippines. In September 1999, Conklin loaned this third set of Philippine recordings to the Archive of Folk Culture (AFC) at the Library of Congress so that duplicate copies could be made. The Cutting Corporation recording laboratory (Bethesda, Md.) was contracted by the Library to produce two reference CD copies and one 10-inch preservation reel-to-reel tape copy, and completed the duplication of the Conklin recordings in the fall of 2001. The preservation reel-to-reel tapes and one copy of the reference CDs were retained by the AFC, while all original field recordings and the second copy of reference CDs were returned to the collector in accordance with the terms of the AFC's agreement with him. After the audio duplication of materials was completed, the collection was organized and rehoused by Judy Ng in 2001.
Harold C. Conklin Philippine Collection (AFC 2001/007), Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
In addition to this collection, the Archive of Folk Culture holds duplicate copies of Conklin's earlier Hanunóo and Buhíd audio field recordings. The first set, accessioned in 1949, is the
The second and larger of these two sets was accessioned in 1988 and is titled
Additional points of access to Conklin materials can be found in the administrative files of this collection, as well as in the Corporate Subject, Collection, and Correspondence files in the Folklife Reading Room.
Includes this Collection Guide and the Reference CD Concordance. Also includes list of searchable terms on Access database.
Includes AFC's correspondence with Harold C. Conklin and the Cutting Corporation (sound engineer and recording laboratory). Also includes acquisition and transferal records, Cutting Corporation's bidding proposal, AFC research on potential recording laboratories, and AFC funding proposals for the Conklin duplication project.
Conklin's
Conklin's
Information on the stock, size, format, sampling rate, and duplication assignment of the 10-inch reel-to-reels and CDs used by the Cutting Corporation Recording Laboratory.
The 99 10-inch analog reel-to-reel preservation tapes, RWE 6960-RWE 7058, are located in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting & Recorded Sound Division.
Field recordings from 1969-75, 1977, and 1980.
Field recordings from 1980 and 1982-84.
Field recordings from 1984, 1990-91, and 1995.
Field recordings from 1960-61, 1968, and 1995.
Field recordings from 1961 and 1963-66.
Field recordings from 1966, 1968, and 1970.
Field recordings from 1955, 1961-62, 1966-68, and 1970.
100 Mb Iomega zip disk; includes a searchable database for this collection, created by the AFC.