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MARANAO 497
or indirectly to one another, and this relationship is carefully recorded in an
individual's genealogy. Thus the Maranao live closely not only with the members
of their immediate family, but also with their more distant relatives. As a result,
they develop strong ties of loyalty to their kinsmen.
Special occasions, such as marriage, death or a unique individual achievement
(finishing an Islamic course at Al Azhar University in Cairo, for example), call
for a feast, at which there may be all or some of the following activities: chanting
the individual's genealogy, playing musical instruments, singing folk tunes,
telling folk tales, playing games, dancing. All these are highly developed folk
arts among the Maranao. The gathering together of all the relatives at such a
feast serves to renew and strengthen kinship ties.
By virtue of the prominence of a bilateral descent system, a Maranao possesses
membership in several villages at the same time. Membership is based on kinship,
not on residency, and an individual inherits kinship both from his father's and
from his mother's side. This is complicated by the tendency toward exogamy,
i.e., people tend to marry outside their own traditional descent group. Obviously
an individual can live in only one village at a time, even though he can claim
membership, with its concomitant rights, privileges, duties and responsibilities,
in several villages. There may also be people whose residence is in the territory
of a village community, but they are not members of that traditional village
community because they do not have the lineage required for membership in
that particular village. Thus Maranao perceive of villages as communities of
persons who share a descent group or a set of descent groups rather than places
or spatial territories. Furthermore, there is fluidity and change in the active
membership of a particular village, since an individual Maranao usually claims
only a portion of his descent group duties some of the time. His personality and
the amount of his energy and ambition determine the number of village communities
he can participate in and the extent of his participation.
While an individual's rights and duties are determined by his descent line,
his personal prestige and his ultimate ranking in the total society as seen by
himself and by others will largely be determined by acquired skills (as an orator,
a Quran reader, an authority on law) and his performance as a leader in his
village community (settling disputes, bravery in battle, avenging an insult or
killing of a close relative). A person with a low-ranking lineage may achieve
high status in the society by virtue of his personal skills and attributes. This
arrangement allows for social mobility and accounts for the competitiveness and
the tendency toward conflict in Maranao society.
Maranao Islam (Shafi school) shows vestiges of Sufi influence, notably in
some loan words and in some group chants at religious ceremonies. Pre-Islamic
beliefs and practices, especially those related to agriculture, the cycles of nature
and the spirit world, are more prevalent in the rural areas than in the urban
centers. The Maranao practice of the Islamic religion has been influenced by
Arab teachers who lived among and taught the Maranao, by young men and
women who have studied Islamic subjects in Middle East Arab schools and have