Kalinga triumvirate: power structure, ethnolinguistic culture, voting culture: a case study on the City of Tabuk.

Abstract

How does ethnolinguistic culture affect the power structure here in the Philippines? This paper aimed to answer this question by using the Province of Kalinga as its focus. The Province of Kalinga is one of the few provinces in the Philippines to house only one ethnolinguistic group. And what is also special about the province is that it shares the same name with the ethnolinguistic group, Kalinga. The Kalinga Ethnolinguistic group, according to Roy F. Barton, has one of the most developed political organization. Power is cooperatively shared and is never wielded by the same person in the Kalingas. Although a ‘Pangat’ or village leader makes the final decision, positions such as the peace-pact holder, and the Ap-apu, to name a few, exist to distribute community power. What interested me the most about their political structure is that the people have the power to mandate and leadership is legitimized by the consensus of the mandating power of the people. The people have a specific set of criteria in choosing or placing a specific person in a specific role. This study achieved the following objectives: • Analyzed the power structure of the province; • Identified the similarities of the province’s current power structure with the power structure of the ethnolinguistic group, Kalinga; • Identified and assessed the power wielders and the voting culture of the Kalinga Province; and • Discussed the effects and outcomes of the current power structure of the province with some future study recommendations . The paper found out that there are similarities between the leadership culture of the province and that of the ethnolinguistic group Kalinga.