“Maling, A Hanunóo Girl from the Philippines” by Harold Conklin

Conklin’s Maling, A Hanunóo Girl from the Philippines reads as an extended vignette of a young girl (Maling) conscientiously navigating the dynamics and demands of the community-world she inhabits. The opening lines establish that Maling’s infant brother of 18 days, Gawid, has passed, which Conklin uses to pivot to Maling’s narrative and how she grew/grows into the roles she occupies.

To start, Maling’s 7 years of youth chipped in to support familial unity during Gawid’s birth. While Sukub, Maling’s mother, labors, Maling and her older sister Hanap prepare substances and readjust birthing conditions for their mother. The labor runs smoothly with the joyful new presence of the family’s first son, but Sukub’s complicated afterbirth prompts Maling to untie all things “lashed, woven, or spliced together… so that the afterbirth would come ‘undone’ likewise” (68). The task escalates from working within household walls to even unseeding the sweet potato vines Maling’s father had planted weeks ago. Finally, it’s Maling who undoes the final knot on her younger sister’s toy, ending the afterbirth’s stress and bringing forth a new peace to the family.

However, this state of being is transient with Gawid’s unexpected death. Noticeably, the event doesn’t quite shock Maling. Perhaps it’s because Maling lost a brother years ago, but through Conklin’s observations, it’s evident that Maling has grown into her position straddling childhood and adulthood for years already.

Four years later, Conklin returns to Maling’s family and finds her juggling even more social responsibility, namely that of 2 younger brothers and the expectations as an up-and-coming bachelorette. Always striving, Maling self-teaches the Hanunóo syllabary until firmly grasping literacy, but Conklin ends her narrative here, contextualising (and possibly questioning) Maling’s new forays with the realities of her role as a young female in an indigenous, lowland and island-living community.

Conklin’s writing puts into linear perspective and context several of the other readings in class by connecting cultural practices and themes of filial piety and sacrifice to Maling’s story. There are the obvious comparisons. For example, Carsten details practices in Longkawi Malaysians’ culture where preserving a woman’s “heat” through stressful parts of her reproductive activity is a priority. Conklin similarly observes a series of “comforting treatment[s]” provided to induce Sukub’s afterbirth, including “hot, liquid infusions… rubbed over [Sukub’s] limbs”, the keeping of a nearby fire and feeding Sukub of “hot rice gruel”, and the addition of “hot embers… [and] fresh scented herbs” to relieve Sukub (67-68). The interconnectedness of kinship and its bio-socio component in a community is what Conklin brings to life in a manner arguably more detailed and intimate than Carsten.

However, it’s Conklin’s layered observations to Maling’s profound self-awareness that intangibly mirrors Shohet’s analysis. Shohet argues that the Vietnamese practice of hy sinh is, fundamentally, a mode of social organisation which enables different members of society to fulfill their roles to the highest degree, often by sacrificing personal interest for the collective benefit. As Conklin notes, Maling does this time and time again – staying with her mother during labor, offering to uproot the plants, refusing to stop hunting for any final knots, and eventually taking over Hanap’s role as the elderly sibling hand.

It’s when Maling finally prioritises herself first by learning Hanunóo that Conklin’s perspective begins interjecting what’s been a relatively standard observational study. Conklin’s take on the lack of pragmatism in Maling’s language acquisition adopts an active, if not slightly patronising, attitude. This contrasts the basis for Conklin’s writing, having been conducted passively through observing, as a foreigner, Maling and her family. Conklin mentions the gaining of Maling’s trust, but also acknowledges that his ethnographic progress is also credited to Maling’s innate personality. But, it’s hard to miss the “outsider-looking-in” dynamic between Maling, the subject, and Conklin, the anthropologist who comes into her world with knowledge of society beyond Mt. Yagaw. With this begets questions about the value of an ethnographic piece like Maling which simultaneously details an intimate case-study of a girl in an isolated community while also reminding the audience of the inherent disjoint between Conklin and his subject matter.

What Conklin has done with Maling’s story is quite that – weaved it in a manner akin to storytelling, complete with a plot, narrator, and ambiguous endings left for interpretation – which is possibly the best balance he can strike given the circumstances.   

Questions: 

1. Maling’s parents and siblings in particular play crucial roles in influencing who she becomes, but Conklin seems to exclude their direct perspective from the majority of the piece. How might the narrative that Conklin’s presented of Maling have differed had he included, either via observations or directly interviewing/surveying, perspectives from those in immediate contact with Maling?

2. Although Conklin centers a chunk of the piece around Gawid’s birth, he also intersperses daily events in Maling’s life. How can each type of “event” (major life milestones vs. everyday interactions) provide meaning to the ethnographer, and is it possible that one confers more significance to understanding a culture than the other?

Quotes:

• “While I made more systematic attempts to elicit adult interpretations of such events, Maling often volunteered crucial details which her elders deemed either too obvious or too intimate to be mentioned. It was partly for this reason and partly because of her cheerful disposition and youthful enthusiasm that I was immediately drawn to her. Despite her childish exuberance, Maling was an obedient and respectful child, capable of almost infinite patience and concentration if necessary” (66).

• “Her status as a child neither prevented her from occasionally accepting some of the responsibilities of her elders nor blocked her intuitive analysis of their adult roles” (70).

• “Although Maling’s ability to read and write will probably prove to be very useful, it will not introduce her to any worlds beyond that which she can see from Mt. Yagaw. She has remained close to home all her life…” (78).