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Imagining igorots : performing ethnic and gender identities on the Philippine Cordillera Central

Gender, ethnicity, landscape, nation — none exist as real places or categories but as the effect of various
practices that bring bodies and spaces into being. This dissertation attempts to rethink concepts of gender
and ethnicity away from traditional ideas of places and cultures. To do so, it embeds them within social
practice as performatives emerging from the colonial encounter. The text reports on ethnographic field
research among Igorot communities originating on the Philippine Cordillera Central. By applying
Burawoy's extended case method to local narratives of identity, history and migration, the argument
extends theorizations of locality and gendered subaltern agency. The analysis locates the imaginative
work that produces local places, subject positions and subjectivities within a palimpsest of transnational
discourses, outmigration and local innovations. Locality and subjectivity are shown to be embedded in
and produced by both local experiences and global identifications of difference originating within
colonial histories. In narrating and dis-placing colonial stories of places and people, the power of these
discourses on gender and ethnicity to constitute subjects with coherent names is challenged. By tracing
the-persistence of the colonial past in the apparently de-colonized present, this text suggests that the
concepts of performance and naming can help to make greater theoretical and empirical sense of the
(post)colonial world.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/10924
Date05 1900
CreatorsMcKay, Deirdre Christian
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
RelationUBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/]

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