As carriers of oral/aural culture, Agusan Manobos know many stories. Below are two well-known ones that are presented here because they form the basis of their music. There are many stories set in contemporary settings and which would therefore involve Christian characters, but these are left for another presentation because they are not directly relevant to subject of indigenous traditional Agusan Manobo music-culture.

The cry in the wilderness: Manobo creation myth

Set in mythic time, this is a story of young children who were siblings and their uncle, a warrior named Dinagye-an and his partner Dehunajun. The children could not produce pulp juice from sago palms. An old woman approached the children for food. The children were mistreated by their uncle. In an act of pity, the old woman brought the children to the upper part of the mountain where she miraculously transformed their boiled water into meat. Then, the old woman approached the uncle of the children to ask food from him, but she was shamed (read: not recognized as a human being) and not given food. The power of lightning (anit) then struck the couple and it seems as if they had committed incest taboo for lightning is associated with disorder. Out of this awesome power of nature, the Manobo split into the mountainworld and seaworld. Various life forms emerged on earth. The greedy couple was washed away from the river upstream to the border of the cosmos downstream where they were separated. The female crocodile cried in despair over the loss of his partner and this nostalgic, plaintive cry in the wilderness is a cry for human union that the myth allegorizes. The cry is simulated in the lip-valley flute that men play solo during their free time.
Video: "Dehunajun"

Signs of recognition: myth of reciprocity

This is the myth that forms the basis of Agusan Manobo spirit-possession ritual. Which came first--myth or ritual--is an intellectual question, but the two are absolutely inseparable. In the story, an anarchic pig destroyed the garden of Ujahay, right in the center of it (see event numbered 1 in the Outline of the Myth of Reciprocity). He then requested his wife to seek help from his brother (see number 2) as they were dying of hunger, asserting the man’s right to receive help from a blood sibling when in need. His brother, however, did not heed his obligation and recognized the blood relationship. Thus, Ujahay went to search for food himself in a different direction, away from society to nature (number 3 in the figure), and found a pig owned by the spirit-maiden of the forest. This deity (diwata) instructed Ujahay to kill her pig and gave the meat to him. The maiden told Ujahay to share the meat to his brother, along with a rice grain (that later miraculously multiplied) and half a betel nut. Upon returning home, Ujahay did as was told and shared the gifts, via his wife again, to his brother despite the memory of the earlier breach of social contract. As usual, his brother arrogantly refused the gift, shaming Ujahay for the second time. It was at this juncture that the spirit maiden reappeared, bringing Ujahay to the transcendental mythic mountain world, accompanied by drum and gong music.

In this simple story with a repetitive symmetry in the episodes, the Manobo person (in the name of Ujahay) is positioned between two existential domains, "vertical and horizontal": (1) death or hunger (see event labelled 1 above) and life or joy (event labelled 6) and (2) between nature and society. The person’s relationship in nature and society is gendered, with interesting structural inversions and reversibility of effects. What the person (Ujahay) is to receive via a medium (his wife) from his brother (=the person’s katungod or related self) is what that person (Ujahay) is to receive from another medium (the female spirit). The rupture of interpersonal relations in the story, the non-recognition of the person’s rights to receive, give, and share is the condition for the expression of pity, which comes about almost automatically or miraculously in the image of a spirit. What divisions society brings to interpersonal relationships (as the brothers are both married and hence are, in principle, independent) is what nature mysteriously heals. The appearance of the spirit compensates for the ruptures in human relationship; the spirit pities; it balances the loss of resonance that proper human conduct must necessarily have.

The didactic content of the myth rings with clarion tones. The moral value of the story is mimetically represented in curing rites. In fact, a curing ritual is like a mise-en-scene of the basic value of the Gift, which particularly functions as a sign of recognition. The symbolic value of the Gift in Manobo culture is therefore different from Mauss’s concept of Gift, which demands a return. In Manobo culture, the Gift essentially indicates an interpersonal relationship--a presence of self to a related other--that do not co-erce a countergift. In the story, Ujahay clearly and merely demanded the rights for his presences to be recognized by a related Other, his brother.

Video: "Spirit possession scene"
Video: Singing spirit
Video: Male Elder Spirit
Video: Visayan Spirit