Babaylan Sing Back: Philippine Shamans and Voice, Gender, and Place.

Exquisitely written in a multivocal ethnographic voice endeavoring to exalt the perspective of her babaylan subject-informants rather than her own, the author aims to make sense of the proliferating discourses around the babaylan and parses out the silencing dynamic that she argues lurks unwittingly even in the most "woke" of its discursive articulations (e.g., feminist, anticolonial). Persecuted as agents of evil and superstition or valorized as symbols of woman power, gender pluralism, and land-based anticolonial resistance, these Native ritual specialists and their oral discourses have not had many opportunities to publicly contest hegemonic constructions about them. In the US and Canada, spearheading the movement for indigenization is a nonprofit organization that calls itself Center for Babaylan Studies (CfBS), the term "babaylan" referring to the spiritual healing (shamanic) tradition found (and variously called by different names) among the Philippines' diverse Indigenous communities. [Extracted from the article]