Female rice deity "bulul"
Rudolf Kratochwill, Graz, Austria
Austrian Private Collection
Dorotheum Vienna, 9 June 2016, Lot 172
Erwin & Susanne Melchardt, Vienna, Austria
Description
wood, encrusted sacrificial patina, rest.
This figure shows the style of the carver Tagiling and his workshop. Tagiling lived and worked in the village of Kababuyan in the province of Hingyon. He is considered to be the only carver in Luzon known by name. No records exist, but his surviving descendants say he was born in the 1870s and died in the 1930s.
A formally and stylistically comparable work by his hand is published in Eric Moltzau Anderson, In the Shape of Tradition, Leiden 2010, p. 118, ill. 139.
The “bulul” are primarily associated with the cultivation of rice. They are considered prestigious objects whose possession was largely reserved for the ruling class, who owned the rice fields. According to Moltzau Anderson (2010, p. 100) most “bulul” were created in connection with elevation in rank to the status of the elite called “kadangyan”.
The main purpose of the “bulul” was to protect the rice stocks from thieves and vermin, to favour the growth of the rice plants and to prevent famine. To this end, they were “charged” with magical power by the priests, ceremonially sacrificed and placed in the rice storehouses. Willcox (1912) mentions that “bulul” were sometimes buried in rice fields, and it is quite possible this was part of an ancient rice field consecration ceremony.