Exploring the Ga’dang Collection
- Jul 27
- 9 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
When cultural bearers from Paracelis came to the Bahay this May, they gave the collection’s Ga’dang holdings back their names and revealed a design language written in thread and bead.
BAHAY UGNAYAN RESEARCH CENTER · BAGUIO CITY · VISIT HELD 14 MAY 2026
Every object in the Mercedes Zobel Collection carries a label, and every label carries somewhat of an assumption. Where did this belong? Who made it? What is it called, and what did that name mean to the person who first spoke it? For much of a collection’s life, those answers are the best guesses of the people who acquired and catalogued it. And then, if you are fortunate, the people who actually know walk through the door.
In May 2026, they did.
A visit generations in the making
The Bahay Ugnayan Research Center welcomed three Ga’dang cultural bearers from Paracelis, Mountain Province: Ms. Margarita Balansi, Ms. Marcelina Balansi, and Mr. Antonio Cayyog, the community’s Indigenous Peoples Mandatory Representative (IPMR).
They travelled with the NCCA-GAMABA team of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, led by Commissioner Reden Ulo of Lake Sebu, South Cotabato, alongside GAMABA Chief of Staff Ellen Danganan and staff members Roche Severo and Ros Amosco.
Only days earlier they had been teaching, passing traditional Ga’dang beadwork and embroidery to a new generation at the University of the Philippines Baguio, as part of an NCCA event held with the CORDITEX Project and titled, “Continuity by Means of a Needle: Lecture and Workshop on Ga’dang Manu’bak and Ameru.” The phrase could serve as a motto for the whole of Ga’dang material culture: a tradition threaded forward, one stitch at a time.
One person who was scheduled was missing, and her absence was felt. Amparo Balansi Mabanag - the Ga’dang National Living Treasure, honored with the Gawad sa Manlilikha ng Bayan (GAMABA) for her mastery of beadwork and embroidery. Regular readers of our Ga’dang community page will already know her name; the bearers who came in her place share it, and carry her knowledge with them.
The point was never to admire, it was to correct
Their visit had a clear purpose: to sit with the Ga’dang objects from the collection for data-gathering, validation, and the exchange of knowledge. Many of these pieces have travelled a long way to reach this moment. A large number came to the collection from the designer and collector Patis Tesoro, others arrived by way of the Ayala Museum.
This is precisely the kind of encounter the Bahay Center was built for. Our records are, by our own admission, a work in progress, much of the current documentation reflects when and how each item was acquired rather than what its own community would call it. We say this openly, we actively invite communities, scholars and stakeholders to help us interpret what we hold and to correct us where we are wrong. A visit like this one is that invitation answered in person.
What follows is a selection of what the cultural bearers shared. Some of it confirmed what we believed. A great deal of it did not.
Setting the record straight
Not everything filed under “Ga’dang” is Ga’dang and the surest way to learn that is to ask. Take the piece catalogued as Tinali. The bearers identified it without hesitation as a Kalinga armband, not a Ga’dang wearable accessory at all.
A cluster of beaded ornaments recorded as Pawisak, Bawisak, Painga and Buraway turned out to hold several languages at once: Pawisak (or Bawisak) is the Kalinga name, while Buraway is the Ga’dang term; whether Painga is a Ga’dang word remains to be confirmed.
A group of baskets and wickerwork in the collection, labelled as associated with several communities including the Ga’dang, drew puzzled looks. The visitors did not recognize them as their own, and suspected they belong instead to the Bontoc and/or the Ifugao. None of this is an embarrassment. It is the collection getting better in real time.
The difference between a label written from the outside and a name spoken from within.
Even the experts were surprised
Bakwat
Here is the part no one expected. Among the objects laid out that day were several the cultural bearers themselves could not immediately place, pieces that sparked as much fascination and curiosity in them as in us. Far from diminishing the collection, these puzzles pointed to something richer: a Ga’dang tradition deeper and more various than even its living practitioners had assumed.
Consider the bakwat, a woman’s belt. It was adorned with metallic embellishments the bearers know well - angkararong, sakkalang and aragolya - but which they would expect to see on a Ga’dang pouch or sayay, not on a belt. That these ornaments had migrated onto a belt genuinely surprised them.
Baruwasi
Then there were the upper garments. Ga’dang upper garments, the visitors explained, are generally defined by the lallad - the striped motif - and the lallad alone. So they were struck to find garments in the collection, among them a barawasi (a woman’s upper garment) and a kuton, worked with the inammata design instead. In the Ga’dang scale of things the lallad is the everyday, ordinary decoration; the inammata is the elaborate, culturally weightier one. To find it where they expected only stripes was to watch the collection quietly rewrite a rule.
Even a humble headscarf held a surprise. One barangal - the Ga’dang neckerchief - appears in the collection in a triangular shape, where the form is usually a four-sided quadrilateral.
A language written in thread and bead
If there is one thing to carry away from this visit, it is this: the Ga’dang have encoded their world. Their trees, their animals, their very anatomy are entwined in the grammar of cloth and bead.
To learn the names is to learn to read it.
The examples are clear in two great motifs. The inammata is the eye-like, diamond-shaped pattern the Ga’dang regard as special and elaborate; the lallad, the stripe, is its plainer everyday cousin. The inammata is precise enough to have a front and a back: diamonds with a black dot at their centre mark the front of a textile, while diamonds with a white dot mark the reverse. A third diamond motif, easily mistaken for it, is the annalifambang, the butterfly.
Motifs drawn from a living world
Antalasik - a triangular beadwork pattern named for the talasik, a thorned tree of the Ga’dang homeland. The thorns’ meaning, the bearers explained, is protection, or “defence”: to wear the pattern is to be guarded as the tree is guarded by its thorns.
Ambalisi - a stitch named for the balisi, better known as the balete or strangler fig, whose tangling vines gave the pattern its shape.
Si’ru - the “V” stitch.
Agagurong - a snail-like form; during the American period the stainless aluminium for this embellishment often came from repurposed flashlights.
Anniyong - the nose-like pattern, worked in red and yellow along a garment’s edges.
The centipede motif - a long, many-legged embroidery usually reserved for men’s garments, and sometimes used as joinery or a hemline border. It appears in the report under the names an-afat, ampala-pakku (a fern-like motif) and a stitching type called amparat.
Ambulon - the rainbow design, in beadwork.
The vocabulary of technique
Ameru - embroidery.
Manu’bak - beadwork.
Sinon - weaving.
These three names sit at the root of the whole craft.
Langi - an embroidery-like technique with an embossed, almost circular, cord-like surface, worked in the inammata motif and created directly on the garment. On the barawasi it runs vertically down the back, from the neckline to the hem.
Balad - a supplementary weave set near the hemlines of capes, upper garments and wrap-around skirts, and so fine it is commonly mistaken for embroidery.
Kasobba - the pompoms.
Ansing - the tassel beads.
A craft that keeps changing
A living tradition is never frozen, and the collection is full of evidence that its makers adapt.
The materials tell part of the story. In the karaweweng, a beaded ornament here strung with American-period coins and hung with Bululung tiger bells, the beadwork mixes old and newer beads, a sign the string has been restrung over time. (The original beaded string has its own name: binunnaw.) The base comb of one hair ornament was built from aluminium; in older times, the visitors noted, carabao horn would have been used. Even the source of the beads has shifted with the centuries: historically beads reached the Ga’dang through trade; today they are bought in Quiapo or ordered through shopping apps such as Shopee. It is why the oldest textiles carry the smallest, finest beadwork, the tiny beads were simply the ones that trade once brought.
Netannab - “naibigay ng bayabas.” Offered by the guava.
And then there is the tapet - the man’s cape - that arrived as a puzzle of color. Most tapet are predominantly blue, but this one has brown with black stripes. One visitor offered a theory as elegant as it was practical: the piece may have begun life black and white, and later been soaked or dyed in guava-leaf extract, which stained it its distinctive brown. The Ga’dang even have a word for cloth touched this way netannab, glossed for us as “naibigay ng bayabas”: offered, or given, by the guava.
What an object carries
Among the day’s most affecting exchanges was not about pattern at all, but about what happens to these belongings when their owner is gone.
The visitors shared a Ga’dang practice around death and inheritance. When a Ga’dang person dies, their belongings are displayed during the wake. Afterwards, relatives may take them on as heirlooms, but only once a ritual has been performed. Traditionally, lemon leaves are boiled and the infused water is flicked over the possessions of the deceased; the sour scent and taste of the lemon, which spirits are said to dislike, wards off any that might linger on the items. Only then may a relative claim them.
It is a quiet reminder of something a collection can too easily forget: that before these pieces were catalogue entries, they were belongings, worn, inherited, cleansed, and loved.
The conversation continues
A visit like this closes nothing; it opens. Several questions were deliberately left unresolved. Whether Painga is truly a Ga’dang term, and what part of the body the ornament called angkararong takes its name from (somewhere in the region of the throat or larynx, the bearers thought, though this too is to be confirmed). The BURC team has pointed the cultural bearers to various data sources along with our own website so the exchange can carry on.
Every correction and confirmation gathered that day will find its way back into the catalogue and into our Ga’dang community pages. The aken skirt, the saklong hat, the laggud comb, the ginading bracelet and their companions to name a few, so that what visitors read here grows steadily closer to what the Ga’dang themselves would say.
If you are a member of the Ga’dang community, a researcher, or simply someone who knows something we do not, we would be glad to hear from you. That is not a courtesy. As this visit showed, it is how the work actually gets done.
With thanks
The Bahay Ugnayan Research Center extends its deep gratitude to Ms. Margarita Balansi, Ms. Marcelina Balansi and IPMR Antonio Cayyog for their generosity, patience and expertise; to Commissioner Reden Ulo and the NCCA–GAMABA team - Ellen Danganan, Roche Severo and Ros Amosco - for making the visit possible; and to Ga’dang National Living Treasure Amparo Balansi Mabanag, whose knowledge travelled with her community even when she could not travel herself.
Reading the Collection of Ga’dang
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