"What Strange Woman is Here?": Laura Benedict's Fieldwork among the Bagobos of the Southern Philippines, 1906-1908

For fourteen months between 1906 and 1908, the American anthropologist Laura Benedict conducted participant observation fieldwork among the Bagobos of Mindanao in the southern Philippines, a people infamous in the colonial anthropological imaginary for their practice of human sacrifice. Benedict's work has largely been overshadowed by her physical and mental breakdown resulting from the grueling conditions she faced, but likewise, I argue, 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 and published ethnography 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.

Juan Fernandez is an Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he is working on his first book project, "Becoming Natives/Becoming Anthropologists," which is a history of how gender and ethnographic fieldwork intertwine to produce anthropological knowledge in the early twentieth century in the American Philippines.

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EDGS Talk: "What Strange Woman is Here?" Laura Benedict’s Fieldwork