opass

The Rice Terraces in northern Luzon are considered one of the great Wonders of the World. And after having seen them I fully agree. Lowland Filipinos tend to put down the highlanders, saying they are only a hundred years from the loincloth and headhunter stage. While it may be true they were once a fierce warrior culture, that’s hardly reason to diminish them. We so-called, and self-called, advanced folks of the West haven’t been very successful at keeping the Dogs of War on a short leash either.

To build and maintain those terraces required that the Ifugao have a very structured social order. In that environment one person doesn’t, can’t, just go out and level off a piece of mountainside to plant his rice. He has to coordinate his work and energy with others to define boundaries and allow drainage so all other terraces get equal access to water run-off. This clearly has to be a coordinated community effort. And they began doing this more than 2000 years ago when many of our own ancestors in the West had a primitive existence.

Frankly, however, I found the Ifugao houses more impressive than the terraces. I stayed at the Native Village Inn, a hotel where the guest “rooms” are really native houses. Because of the laid-back lifestyle there in the mountains I’d often return to my cottage to read or relax. But I’d find myself instead looking up and studying for long periods the complexity of the interior of the houses. They really are works of some very intelligent engineering.

Lowland Filipinos lived, and many still do, in simple houses of nipa grass around a frame of four poles. F. Sionil Jose, in his Rosales series of novels wrote about how lowlanders would migrate with just the four poles since the rest of the housing material was easily found and replaced. Instant housing, if you will.

But the Ifugao clearly built for the long term. Their houses are of solid hardwood columns and beams, joined with dowels and rattan cordage, or with mortise and tenon. Not a nail anywhere, and yet the houses appear to last for generations. The resident manager of the hotel told me her own family, now living in a modern house in the nearby village of Uhaj, has a house like that on their land on the far side of a nearby mountain. The house was built during the Spanish colonial period and is still as solid as the day it was finished.

She said that while a similar house could now be put up in a matter of weeks because they have chainsaws, in the past it took several family members months of very intense work.. The Ifugao used bolos, a tool we would call machetes, to cut the trees and trim the lumber, all of which was hardwood. She proudly added that, unlike lowlanders’ houses, their’s are earthquake and typhoon resistant.

They are massive structures that must weigh hundreds of kilograms. At the base are four vertical columns mounted in the ground, about 1.5 meters high. Then crossbeams lay across the columns, followed by another set of beams crossing those, covered with solid lumber to make the floor. More vertical poles, just short of a meter high, rest atop the floor, then more crossbeams to make the shelf space that forms the widest portion of the house. From that level upward they place vertical poles that converge at the peak of the house, linked again with cordage and dowels. Then the exterior is covered with matting of horizontal half-inch sticks covered by cogon grass as thatch. Only the cogon thatch needs to be replaced periodically.

Primitive people the Ifugao? I don’t think so. There is a lot of very impressive and intelligent action behind the building of those houses as well as the terraces.