Violent potentials: exploring the intersection of violence and masculinity among the Bugkalot

Abstract

This article explores the social significance of violence as potentiality and performance among former headhunters engaged in ritual killings. Taking its outset in an ethnographic study of violence and masculinity among the Philippine people known as the Bugkalot, we explore how violence as ‘performed violent potentiality’ plays a critical role in relation to Bugkalot men's construction of hegemonic masculinity and the sustaining of complex egalitarian relations. The Bugkalot have a notoriously violent history; until the late 1970s more than half of the adult men engaged in ritual killings. While most Bugkalot men have today abandoned headhunting, the potentials for violence and dominance, which the act of headhunting sought to elicit, remains a critical aspect of masculinity. We propose that a focus on the social significance of performative violent potentiality among Bugkalot men can provide general insights that can also be used in other contexts to understand how men construct hegemonic masculinity by strategically adopting the interspace of civility and violence.

Keywords:

• masculinity
• violence
• potentiality
• headhunting
• Bugkalot

Notes on contributors

Henrik Hvenegaard Mikkelsen is a post-doctoral researcher at the department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. He is currently affiliated with the Center for Healthy Aging and his research focuses on aging and masculinity.

Thomas Friis Søgaard is an anthropologist by training and an Associate Professor at Center for Alcohol and Drug Research, Aarhus University, Denmark. His research interests include masculinity, violence, bouncers, security networks, the night-time economy, ethnic minority youth, and the reformation of criminals and gang members.

Notes

1. This proposition reaffirms Bataille's suggestion that desire and disgust are inextricably linked.

2. This observation is supported by the ethno-historian Scott (1979). He wrote that headhunting among the Bugkalot did not have any significant influence on the social status of the killer, who was neither awarded with special privileges, nor subsequently classified as belonging to a warrior elite.