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In a country famous for its many festivals, the Ati-Atihan Festival on the island of Panay near the geographic center of the Philippines stands out not only for its devotion to the Santo Niño, or Holy Child, but because of its claim of being the country's oldest festival. Believed to date from 1212, this festival grafts the veneration of the Santo Niño onto a kind of thanksgiving commemorating the "voluntary" gift of land from the indigenous population to their "brothers" from present-day Borneo. This article traces the "Mardi-Gras-ization" of the festival through an examination of its more extravagant, public, and theatrical elements, while considering what this weeklong event means for its tens of thousands of active participants.
Billed as the "Filipino Mardi-Gras" on numerous websites, the Ati-Atihan Festival in the provincial town of Kalibo juxtaposes the sacred and the profane as devotees of the Santo Niño (the Holy Child) mingle in the streets with drunken merrymakers and spectacularly attired dancers day and night for seven days. Culminating on the third Sunday in January, Ati-Atihan commemorates the confluence of two pivotal mytho-historical events: the displacement of the darker-skinned indigenous Ati1 population by their seafaring Malay cousins, who sought refuge from a despotic sultan in Borneo, and mass conversions to Christianity a number of centuries later. Because Ati-Athihan is believed by many locals to be the oldest festival in the Philippines, and one that predates the arrival of Christianity, it has come to serve as an imaginative reconstruction of a past in the absence of a written record. In its current incarnation as the "Filipino Mardi Gras," the focus has increasingly been on enhancing spectacle and attracting tourists, while retaining the spiritual foundation of the event with its focus on the Santo Niño in this predominantly Roman Catholic country.
This article, based on fieldwork conducted at the 2009 and 2010 festivals, will focus on the increasing theatricalization of the event that gained momentum after martial law was declared by the Marcos administration in 1972. Because the entire festival is too vast a field to cover, particular attention will be paid to the costumes and visual extravagance evidenced in the street dancing competitions on the final Saturday of the weeklong festival, while also charting the increased marginalization...