About

Oona Paredes is a Southeast Asianist specializing in the ethnographic and archival study of the southern Philippines, particularly its indigenous non-Muslim minorities known as the Lumad. She has worked primarily with the Higaunon Lumad of northern Mindanao and has conducted comparative research on other indigenous minority groups regionally and globally. Her research explores the cultural and historical intersections of religion, politics, and identity, focusing on how minority 'tribal' communities interact with state power and popular culture. At UCLA, she teaches courses on Southeast Asia, Indigenous Peoples, and the Philippines. Her scholarly work includes a focus on core Higaunon traditions of political authority and their articulation with oral traditions, customary law, and indigenous religion, reflecting concerns about identity, indigeneity, and cultural heritage preservation in the modern Philippine state. Her archival research has documented colonial-era contact between Iberian missionaries and Lumad ancestors, analyzing the enduring cultural impact of Western colonialism and Christianity on these communities. Paredes has authored the book 'A Mountain of Difference' (2013), which examines the cross-cultural encounters between Lumad communities and colonial forces as a form of pericolonial experience, highlighting their strategic incorporation of colonial alliances beyond direct Spanish control.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• History
• Gender studies
• Genealogy
• World Wide Web
• Ethnology
• Archaeology
• Ecology
• Biology
• Library science

Selected publications

• 1 (De)Constructions of Indigeneity in the Philippines

  University of Hawaii Press eBooks · 2025-08-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• (De)Constructions of Indigeneity in the Philippines

  University of Hawaii Press eBooks · 2025-09-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Babaylan Sing Back: Philippine Shamans and Voice, Gender, and Place

  The Journal of Asian Studies · 2023 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • History
  • Library science

  Given the title of this book and its well-known author, one can definitely be forgiven for any initial trepidation when approaching it as a serious academic publication. The Philippine babaylan (shaman) has become rather politicized recently, as the practices of Indigenous minority communities, many of whom retain some shamanic practices, have been appropriated by mainstream Filipinos seeking to “decolonize” themselves and reconnect with ancestral heritage. Especially prominent is the movement built around the babaylan as a proto-feminist icon of anticolonial resistance. This process has effectively dampened the Indigenous voice while brightening already-privileged mainstream majority voices as interlocutors of Indigenous representation. The author herself, Filipino pop singularity Grace Nono, whose esoteric musical style is inspired profoundly by Philippine native musical traditions, has long been associated with this trend.But the academic reader can be reassured that, from beginning to end, Babaylan Sing Back explicitly and unambiguously locates the babaylan/shaman squarely within the context of modern-day Indigenous minority communities of practice. Nono additionally grounds these communities and practices exclusively in the lived experiences of its modern practitioners and participants as members of marginalized Indigenous communities. Last but not least, Nono pays attention to how competing ideas about gender structure both the formation of the featured ritual specialists and their later positionalities, which in turn inflects the resulting embodiment of the ritual practices (including oral traditions) themselves.This particular contextualization is what makes this work an important contribution to the literature on Indigenous peoples, modern shamans, and oral traditions. Nono is already known for working with Indigenous artists, but what is remarkable here is how she manages to weave into a relatively brief text so many of the cultural, relational, religious, gendered, and discursive complexities embodied by individual ritual specialists vis-à-vis their specific communities of practice. Thus the stories of ritual specialists here are neither victimologies nor romances but dynamic portraits that bring out both their individualities and shared intersectionalities as key culture bearers of marginalized Indigenous minority communities.Embedded consistently throughout the text is a precise critique of those from outside of Indigenous communities who have commodified “babaylanism” as a tool for self-indigenizing and self-actualization. She acknowledges that “the construction of the archaicized, nationalized, and valorized babaylan as symbol of power available for all to appropriate has proved to be a rallying point for many urban and diasporic gender scholars and activists, themselves battling patriarchal and heteronormative colonial regimes,” but reminds the same audience that “the denial of Native ritual specialists' embodied contemporaneity and the appropriation of the babaylan title by subjects of greater privilege are considered by some as seriously offensive” and “demonstrates for some the complicity of feminism with colonialism” (7).The book consists of three stand-alone chapters that explore very different aspects of babaylan formation, practice, and identity. The first chapter, “Who Sings?,” presents the experiences of two Agusan Manobo women baylan, following one over the years from her novitiate to her current practice. The core elements of shamanic practice in the Philippines are introduced here but are deliberately complicated by the impact of the very real ills of the past and present (colonialism, religious conversion, etc.). Nono's treatment of the fascinating interplay between competing Christian and Indigenous texts, doctrines, practices, and human-spirit relations is particularly well done here and elsewhere in the book.The second chapter, “Shifting Voices and Malleable Bodies,” introduces us to T'boli women and Blaan transgender practitioners within the context of broader, contemporary conversations about gender. The first half explores the power dynamics of T'boli polygyny and how the Tudbulul sung epic, in which customary law is conveyed through the fantastical adventures of its eponymous hero and his relations, continues to inform gender ideology in a way that undercuts substantially any argument for proto-feminism being a defining characteristic of Indigenous shamanism. The second half focuses on two Blaan transgender men practitioners, opening up a spirited discussion of how, as nungaru, they embody the malleability and persistence of gender ideologies in changing times.The third and final chapter, “Song Travels,” takes us to the Indigenous diaspora through the portrait of Lagitan, an Ifugao mumbaki now based in Ohio whose formation and practice were structured by his positionality as an immigrant and visible racial minority in the colonial metropole. Lagitan's encounters with anthropologists, white neo-shamans, and other problematic figures might cause readers to question his inclusion. But here Nono asks the reader to consider the full spectrum of postcolonial realities that modern Indigenous shamans must contend with to sustain their practices.Beautifully written and substantial ethnographically, Babaylan Sing Back is a profoundly satisfying read. In embracing her unique positionality as an artist, Nono makes a solid intellectual contribution to the study of both oral traditions and Indigenous peoples in the Philippines. She also manages to work her way past the persistent contentiousness of “babaylanism” across the multiverse of Philippine cultures to compel us to witness modern shamans in all their complexity. We could certainly find fault with this book for being yet another representation of the Indigenous minority voice by yet another non-Indigenous author, but the author's presence in the text provides a clear delineation between her voice and that of the women and men she foregrounds in the book. As Nono states in chapter 2: “They need no other contemporary women to embody them as though they are not, themselves, embodied and historical. They need no other women to idealize them as though their conditions mirror the egalitarian past untainted by historical exigences that elite feminists imagine the precolonial times to be. They need no other women or men to save them, as though they do not have their own moral and other resources to address their needs. And yet, they also do not wish to be simply left alone” (104). And this is indeed a book that makes room for Indigenous babaylan to begin singing back.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Preface

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2023

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  DOI

• More Indigenous than Others: The Paradox of Indigeneity among the Higaunon Lumad

  Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia · 2022 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies

  SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthropology, sociology, and history.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Making Mindanao: place-making and people-making in the southern Philippines

  South East Asia Research · 2022-01-02 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• New Decade, New Directions: Advancing the Study of Southeast Asian Religions

  Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia · 2021-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthropology, sociology, and history.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Indigenizing culture

  Routledge eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology

  This chapter relates one anthropologist’s ongoing experience with active collaboration with the indigenous Lumad community in the course of an ethnographic study examining the history, development, and present-day challenges of traditional political authority figures among the Higaunon in northern Mindanao. In addition to multi-sited ethnographic field research, the project in question has also included an effort to preserve Higaunon oral traditions as well as the complete genealogy of one descent group from which key “founder” ancestors of the Higaunon people are said to have come. This chapter will focus on the internal debate over heritage and identity among the Higaunon Lumad that has emerged over the course of my ongoing study. This internal debate reveals contested indigenous understandings of “culture” itself, including what “Higaunon culture” might potentially encompass, what mattered/matters/will matter in terms of heritage, and how these in turn construct for them quite divergent conceptualizations of “Higaunon-ness.” Specifically, I focus on the differences in engagement with and attitudes towards cultural preservation and “reinvention” at play across different descent groups, different generations, and between urbanized and rural communities. The influence of government schooling, Christian conversion, and mainstream Filipino popular culture on this debate will also be addressed. The article discusses the ethnographic, ethical, and epistemological advantages of actively involving communities in research design, the process of obtaining informed consent, data collection, analysis, and the (re)presentation of ethnographic knowledge itself.

  PublisherDOI

• Preserving ‘tradition’: The business of indigeneity in the modern Philippine context

  Journal of Southeast Asian Studies · 2019-02-01 · 22 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  What are the practical and cultural consequences of embracing the ‘Indigenous’ label? Despite universalising aspirations, the concept of indigeneity carries distinct political connotations in the Philippines, where the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act has created a bureaucracy that purportedly responds to the special needs of Indigenous Peoples, including the preservation of cultural traditions and securing title to ancestral lands. While laudatory on the surface, in practice the current legal and bureaucratic framework allows the state to impose its own definition of indigeneity, often compelling indigenous minorities to conform to stereotypes in order to acquire the fundamental rights and benefits that, by law, are supposed to be guaranteed. The Philippine states’ requirements for being recognised as ‘Indigenous’ are transforming how Indigenous Peoples maintain and perform their ancestral traditions, often leading to highly divisive internal debates about proper cultural and political representation. This article examines the case of Higaunon Lumads in northern Mindanao, who have been responding locally to over thirty years of national trends in participatory development that require increased engagement with government bureaucracy. I explore how ‘indigeneity’ has been defined and employed by Higaunons in the service of ‘preserving tradition’, the political and other consequences that have emerged in this context, and the perils of representing and commodifying indigeneity in modern Southeast Asia.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Between rights protection and development aggression

  2018-02-19 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter describes the current state of indigenous peoples (IP) in the Philippine archipelago by outlining the historical and political origins of ‘IP’ as a population category, contextualizing key aspects of their plight as national minorities and identifying elements that influence how IPs are perceived by mainstream Filipinos. Specific topics addressed include: the etymology of various political terms that have been used for IPs; the major ethnic sub-categories of Indigenous Filipinos (Cordilleran, Lumad, Aeta, Mangyan); Moros as indigenous minorities and the phenomenon of Lumads as second-order minorities; the development of colonial and post-colonial government policies pertaining to IP populations, including the current IPRA laws; the colonial roots of differentiation and the legacy of racial discrimination; patterns of development aggression and land alienation unique to IPs; and the future challenges faced by IPs in the Philippines.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sora Park

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

• Ross Wong

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

• Yinghui Wu

  1 shared

• Pierre-Emmanuel Soon

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

• Brendan O'kane

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

• Anne Austin

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

• Rebekah Baglini

  Aarhus University

  1 shared

• Mun Chunyang

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D. in Anthropology, School of Human Evolution and Social Change

  Arizona State University

  2008

Awards & honors

• Wenner-Gren Foundation award
• Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research grant
• Henry Luce Foundation award
• American Association of University Women fellowship
• Graduate Research Fellow of the U.S. National Science Founda…