Shamanism, Catholicism and Gender Relations in Colonial Philippines, 1521-1685

Carolyn Brewer's Shamanism, Catholicism and Gender Relations in Colonial Philippines, 1521 to 1685, published by Ashgate in 2004, is an academic monograph examining how Spanish colonial missionaries targeted the babaylan, the predominantly female and sometimes gender crossing shamanic ritual specialists of the pre-colonial Philippines, as a deliberate strategy for imposing Catholic patriarchal order. Brewer draws on Spanish missionary and colonial administrative records read against the grain, extracting evidence of the babaylan's precolonial authority from documents written by the very missionaries working to suppress it. Its strength is that critical reading of colonial sources for what they reveal despite their own hostile intent. Its limit is that the pre-colonial babaylan tradition survives today mainly through those same outside, often hostile colonial accounts, since indigenous textual records from before conquest are scarce, so a claim about babaylan practice entirely independent of the colonial lens it survives through needs to be stated as reconstruction, not direct testimony.