There are probably some 3,500 Ilongots, inhabiting a forested area of about 1,536 square kilometers, primarily in the province of Nueva Vizcaya, Northern Luzon, Philippines (see Map 1). An initial survey of the Ilongot region, which included visits to and hikes in the vicinity of current and abandoned mission bases, revealed a world of over thirty-five dispersed settlements, each from twenty minutes to a several-hour hike from its nearest neighbors, and composed of two to nineteen households, with an average of seven inhabitants in each household. Excepting the four instances where houses clustered around a mission home and airstrip, the most striking feature of these settlements was their apparent lack of physical organization. Houses, built near gardens under immediate cultivation, were as much as half an hour from each other, and between them there were no communal buildings, no recognized public grounds – only rivers, ill-marked forest trails, and an occasional field of ripening rice.

William Jones, an American anthropologist whose diary record of the “picturesque” and fertile country where he was killed in 1909 first interested us in the Ilongots, had also noted this lack of any local organization: “Village life as I know it in America is wholly absent. At this moment, I can only liken it to a country community, with the Ilongot community on a much abbreviated scale” (1908:6).