Cordillera and Moro People: Dis/Engagement

Analyn Salvador-Amores is Professor of Anthropology and former Director of the Museo Kordilyera, the ethnographic museum of the University of the Philippines Baguio. Her research interests include anthropology of the body, non-Western aesthetics, material culture, endangered cultures, ethnographic museums, Indigenous Peoples and colonial photography in the Cordillera region in the Philippines. She studied anthropology at the University of the Philippines Diliman, her MPhil and DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford University through a Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program.

In addition to her award-winning book, Tapping Ink, Tattooing Identities: Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Kalinga Society (University of the Philippines Press, 2013), she is the author of many scholarly articles published in various books and journals. 

Her recognitions include one of the Outstanding Filipinos (Teacher) by the Metrobank Foundation (2015), and Outstanding Young Scientist in the field of Anthropology by the National Academy of Science and Technology (2014). 

As a public service professor, she continues to engage Indigenous communities in her work, and promotes Indigenous knowledge in different platforms. She actively carries out anthropological fieldwork among the Indigenous communities in Northern Luzon, and has published extensively on this subject. Recently, she is involved in the research on Northern Luzon Philippine collections in the archives and museums in the US and Europe, reconnecting historical documents, archival photographs, and material culture to communities of origin in Northern Luzon through digital repatriation and rematriation. The culmination of this collaborative work with German museums is the book, Hunting for Artifacts: 19th Century German Travelers in the Luzon Cordillera (2025) edited by Professor Emeritus Delfin Tolentino, Jr.  and published by the Cordillera Studies Center, University of the Philippines Baguio.

 

Darwin Absari is a former Student Regent of the Mindanao State University System. He obtained his undergraduate degree AB in Political Science at the Mindanao State University in Tawi-Tawi in 2004 with University System Leadership Award. In 2013, he finished his M.A. in Islamic Studies at the Institute of Islamic Studies in the University of the Philippines (UP) in Diliman.

His M.A. Thesis PAG-TUHAN: The Tausug Spiritual Tradition was a recipient of the 2015 National Book Development Thrust Fund. Its book form which was published by UP Press in 2021 was selected as finalist for the best book in Spirituality and Theology during the 40th National Book Awards.

Currently he is an assistant professor and College Secretary at the UP Institute of Islamic Studies teaching Islamic Thought, Legacies of Islamic Civilization and Moro Arts, History, Society and Culture. His other research interests include Pre-Hispanic Philippine History, Islam in Southeast Asia and many others.