Why is musical mimesis so much a part of the cultural world of indigenous Filipinos? What does it tell us about their musical sensibilities and their social world? This book addresses these issues through a study of the relations between musical poetics, myth, and magic in the musical and spiritual lives of T’boli men and women from the highlands of southwestern Mindanao. Manolete Mora’s study shows that musical mimesis is an intrinsic part of the cultural process of interpreting, articulating, making, and remaking the world. More significantly, it suggests that musical mimesis is intimately linked to a moral universe that is grounded in reciprocity. Musical mimesis is a way of establishing contact, fusion and identity with the “other”, and this is possible because of the existence of concepts of knowledge and being that are fundamentally different from our own. This book embraces wide-ranging ethnographic materials and issues that will be of interest to the musicologist, anthropologist, and student of Southeast Asian folklore and cross-cultural aesthetics.

Acknowledgements ... vii Introduction ... 1 1. Encounters with the T'boli ... 9 2. Myth, Mimesis and Nature ... 27 3. Ritual Magic in the Vocation of the Musical Adept ... 63 4. The Poetics of Utom ... 101 5. Symbols and Icons ... 141 6. The Ethics of Utom ... 171 7. Postscript ... 177 Appendices ... 187 Notes ... 189 Bibliography ... 215 Index ... 226