Kabunianism & Pneumasomatic Sickness

The Cordillera mountain ranges in the Philippine Northern Luzon Island are the home of indigenous people collectively known as Kaigorotan (Igorot peoples). These indigenous communities have a homogeneous identity in sociocultural traits and religious beliefs. The traditional religion has its own cosmic worldview. The supreme God is often identified with the sun and lives in space, referred to as Kabunian. Western influences arrived in the Cordillera in the early 20th century when the Catholic missionaries started schools and hospitals as a means of spreading Christianity. They unscrupulously prohibited all traditional cultural practices of the people. This paved the way for Museumization of Kabunianism. Today only a small minority of people practice pure traditional native religion and traditional cultural practices; the majority follow a conflated or mixed version of Christianity or Kabunianism.The author favors the unprecedented term Kabunianism to classify the unorganized religion of this indigenous people and, their major concept of sickness as pneumasomatic sickness.