Pala’wan Highlanders Verbal Arts is a fascinating multimedia, ring-binded booklet with DVDs, sourced and compiled from in-depth ethnographic and linguistic research and fine audio-visual documentation done intermittently between 1970 and 2015 by French linguistic anthropologist Nicole Revel in Palawan Island, Philippines. The volume is a comprehensive set of printed summaries of verbal arts that are contextually grounded in the lives of inhabitants whose culture and history have adapted to (1) the forested mountainous ecosystem of Southern Palawan Island, (2) the hillsides facing Sulu seas, and (3) the western coast of the island where islamicisation had crept in. Faithful to a realist science, the representations in this work are grouped into ten chapters, each devoted to a particular genre of artistic and rhetorical utterance (music included). Two chapters are rendered into multimedia platform DVD form, for a total of five as follows: DVD 1 (197mn 02s) on myth (tuturan), teaching of ancestors, and epic (tultul); DVD 2 (33mn 08s) on seduction song (kulilal), lullabies (tinggayan), and birds songs; DVD 3 (46mn 47s) on rhythmic bossed gong music (basalan), rice wine jar song, and invocation; DVD 4 (10mn 30s) on juridical discussion and written syllabary; and DVD 5 (32mn 27s) on puppet divination (kunduq) and tales (sudsugid). The booklet and the DVDs are tightly structured for ease in retrieving information and, true to the digital medium, this can be accessed in a non-linear manner according to the reader’s desire.

An overview of a genre—in both printed and recorded performance in the DVDs––serves as a compass to the meaningful performative contexts of the Palawan Highlanders’ verbal art. The author strives to avoid a static representation of culture in favour of one that is indicative of a relation to the broader ecosystem which breeds its artistic and performative dimensions. This also entailed a great deal of attention to the particular social history of this group and their relationship with neighbouring groups. In short, on examining representations, the author foregrounds an understanding of expressive culture as processes and values, albeit in terms of normative pragmatics rather than through the lens of emergent performance, which deals with contingent and quite particular meanings.

In the DVDs, the voice over of the author mediates the treatment of the topic at hand. The pacing is unhurried and refined, with elegant commentaries spoken with a light and lyrical diction, yet without ever veering away from the intellectual rigour that frames the enterprise. The “bonus” materials in the DVDs are particularly significant. They are documentations of actual performances as recorded and delivered without the scholar’s intrusion (save the text transcriptions and translations that felicitously accompany the excerpts of full performances and enhance their legibility and scholarly transparency). Revel has curated all these recorded performances in the DVDs and her authoritative understanding of Pala’wan verbal arts shines lucidly in the selection of examples. The chosen examples are indeed comprehensive, as they encompass a wonderfully wide range in terms of uniqueness, variety, and subtlety. The combination of written and spoken word on the one hand, and video and sound recording on the other, is exceptional in that it allows the author to showcase her deep respect for, and the sense of responsibility she feels towards, the sheer diversity of musical and linguistic utterance on display in this unique region of the planet.

Overall, the substance of the work is nested within the discourse of ethnography of speaking and ethnopoetics in which speech (parole) forms are clear, dynamic articulations of lived cultural values and hence are ethical (i.e., one that is cognizant of cultural difference). Conceptually, the presentation is guided by a synthetic framework (p. 13) that grew out of long years of scholarly reflection on orality and its diverse manifestations. The vocal genres are characterised multidimensionally in terms of voice (monologue, dialogue, multivoiced), spoken or chanted, measured or non-measured, and accompanied or alternating in music texture. As the framework reveals, the verbal genres are driven by inner psychological impulses so that no matter their use or form, the verbal arts are always a kind of action directed towards both nature and humans in a social word.

The complexity of the local knowledge inscribed in this ethnographic documentary material is admirably rendered. The presentation bespeaks a multidisciplinary, humanistic approach towards a form of artistic verbal behaviour of which music is only a part. The first chapter on myth, for example, is accompanied by a table containing a rich categorisation on the kinds of beings that populate nature or the environment. In the presentation of epic song (tultul: chapter 2), detailed diagrams show complex social relationships in the narrative as the epics’ protagonists journey in the world. It is awe-inspiring to reflect how marginalised groups such as the Pala’wan (who practice rudimentary material economic subsistence) could create such mind-boggling mental structures in the realm of imagination and contemplate the creativity exhibited by such bards such as Usuy, Masinu, Karit, and Buntali. In the chapters on musical genres (2 to 6), José Maceda’s music transcriptions of lute, flute, and jaw harp music are included to illustrate the universal Philippine principle of drone and melody of the lute on the one hand, and on the other the description of particular onomatopoeic renditions of small insects and birds as found in nature. The table of terms on rhythm (basalan), music of gongs and sanang (pair of small gongs), as well as varieties of gong combinations across the landscape, and various kinds of (rice wine) jar songs, are strong evidence of solid, indeed impeccable, scholarship. What emerges from this material is the close theoretical kinship between music and language as they inform the larger and important domains of cultural identity and communication.

A fundamental grammar of Pala’wan language, covering aspects of phonology, agglutination, morphology, temporal inflections, pronouns, voice, and a list of grammatical categories is appended at the end. This is followed by a general but exceptionally fine-tuned bibliography on the area of the ethnography of speech as practised by an island Austronesian culture. Revel’s work on this region is unequalled and the linguistic sophistication it has brought to bear on a case relevant to studies in culture and communication has much to teach students of music traditions worldwide. This is especially the case in relation to the paradigm that Charles Seeger had envisioned and cried out for ethnomusicology and its older parent, musicology at large. The significance of the material transcends the musicological disciplines, as it has a lot to offer to the cognitive sciences and evolutionary biology, as well.