Description:
Exploring the notion of masculinity among the Bugkalot, Cutting Cosmos is not only an experimental, anthropological study of the paradoxes around which Bugkalot society revolves, but also a reflection on anthropological theory and writing.
Brief description:
Henrik Hvenegaard Mikkelsen holds a PhD from the University of Aarhus, Denmark. He has carried out fieldworks in Denmark, Canada (Montreal) and the Philippines, focusing in particular on aging, sexuality, loneliness, violence and politics. He is currently a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen.
Review Quotes:
"...[an] intriguing study of masculinity and ritual transgressive events among the Bugkalot in the southern Sierra Madre Mountains in Luzon, the Philippines...[that] forces us to rethink relations between values and social life, about the relations between cosmology and rituals, between everyday life and spectacular events." - The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology
Despite the fact that the book addresses plenty of major topics for its capacity (e.g. equality, masculinity, cosmology, ideal), it nevertheless offers a perfectly readable and interesting discussion of issues of the egalitarian social order maintenance in a masculine dominated society. Especially with the perspectives on 'transgressions' as maintaining order and on "man" as self-sanction and social balance work expands the framework for all who know the most to the classical Western, hegemonic notion of masculinity, but would like to explore 'men and masculinity' through other understandings." - Tidsskriftet Antropologi
"The ethnographic data are valuable and the theoretical discussion is well-set within a series of intellectually rigorous, philosophically informed anthropological frames." - Maria D. Vesperi, New College of Florida
"Mikkelsen's compelling writing and excellent fieldwork research adds effectively to the classic literature in social/cultural anthropology, renewing and extending the famous monographs of Michelle and Renato Rosaldo." - George Marcus, University of California, Irvine