Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the dynamic character of sociality in Ifugao, the Philippines, and demonstrates the ways in which values gave shape to sociality's dynamics after the murder of an innocent foreign visitor to a village in Ifugao, the Philippines.

Paper long abstract:

In Ifugao, the Philippines, the scope of sociality constantly extends and contracts. Humans and non-humans, villagers and outsiders, enter into, become partially included in and are drawn in and out of sociality in a dynamic that is only partially controlled by those implicated in it. Sociality is thus never totalized, always conditional, proportional and involved in a pulsating shifting dynamic. This paper examines how values and ethical judgements give shape to this dynamics and how values imbue this process with both specific historical and political dimensions. The ethnographic focus point for this paper is the actions taken by villagers before and after a quite unfortunate event: the allegedly accidental murder in an Ifugao village of a foreign visitor by one of the villagers. I discuss how this event got entangled in an ongoing dispute between families in the village and thus was drawn into the political tensions of sociality's extension and contraction. I examine the actions taken by those involved in the event, both those leading up to the murder and those that followed after it, as well as the explicit ethical judgments of these actions by other villagers in an attempt to elicit the different values that shaped and transformed sociality's form throughout the events.