Owners and occupants: mapping the Blaan of Malbulen (Davao Occidental, Philippines).

Since the proclamation of the Indigenous People's Rights Act in 1997, the government of the Philippines has started to issue ancestral domain land titles, in an attempt to outline within its own legal framework how indigenous peoples should deal with land claims, disputes and ownership. Drawing on eleven months of fieldwork (2015–2019), this article describes the notions of ownership (fun) and occupancy (mnè) among the Blaan of Malbulen, and discusses whether their own views of the land are compatible with those proposed by the government. In fact, Blaan do not consider themselves to be the first inhabitants of the land. This status belongs to the fun spirits, its true owners, whose approval is needed to be accepted as an occupant, i.e. to build a house, to hunt, to cut down a tree or to cross a river. Humans are here believed to be mere occupants of the land. Places, humans and nonhuman beings are interwoven in ways that we have investigated through participatory and digital cartography. Mapping these beings reveals an interactive landscape. Its epistemology allows the anthropologist to question their own views and representations of space, and to understand how they may differ from local perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]