“What Strange Woman is Here?”:
Laura Benedict’s Fieldwork among the Bagobos of the Southern Philippines, 1906-1908
Juan Fernandez
Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian History
University of Wisconsin-Madison
For fourteen months between 1906 and 1908, the American anthropologist Laura Benedict was conducting participant observation fieldwork among the Bagobos of Mindanao, a people infamous in the colonial anthropological imaginary for their practice of human sacrifice, but likewise for the richness of their material culture. Benedict’s work has largely been overshadowed by her physical and mental breakdown resulting from the grueling conditions she faced in the field, but likewise, I argue, was a situation that stemmed from her intense commitment not only to the work of research, but also to her deep identifications with the Bagobos. According to her contemporaries, her later fieldwork was characterized by an increasing “paranoia” towards the American hemp planters of the region, whose incursions, she believed, caused “a severe crisis in [the Bagobos’] tribal history,” representing a breakdown of their “traditional” way of life, thus looking on in horror at the Bagobos’ acculturation. This talk analyzes Benedict’s fieldwork to make sense of the early history of anthropological fieldwork in the American colonial Philippines by contextualizing Benedict’s fieldwork praxis through her gendered experiences of research, and examining the way that the Bagobos of Mindanao invited, of their own volition, Benedict’s participation in their cultural and religious life.