Batanga

Batanga (also transcribed Fatanga) is a named human figure in the Bontoc cycle of Lumawig, the sky-descended culture hero. When Lumawig looked down from the sky he saw two sisters gathering beans at Lanao and came down to court them; the younger, Fukan, told him that her father's name was Batanga. After Lumawig astonished the family by miraculously filling their baskets with beans and multiplying their livestock, Batanga, delighted, offered his elder daughter as a wife, but Lumawig said he preferred the younger, and so married Fukan. Batanga is thus remembered as the father of Fukan and the earthly father-in-law of Lumawig, standing at the junction where the divine culture hero was joined to a Bontoc human family. He is one of the few individually named mortals in the Bontoc oral tradition, appearing in the ethnographic records of Jenks and Seidenadel and in Cole's retelling.

Domains

• ancestry and lineage

Relations

• father of: FukanIn the myth of Lumawig's descent to earth, Fukan (Fucan) is named as the younger of Batanga's two daughters; Lumawig chose her over her elder sister, making Batanga the father-in-law of the Bontoc culture hero.Mabel Cook Cole, Philippine Folk Tales (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1916), 'Lumawig on Earth'. (secondary); Joy Christine O. Bacwaden, 'The Lumawig Bontoc Myths,' Philippine Studies 45, no. 1 (1997): 3-49. (secondary)

Sources

• Batanga is the mortal Bontoc man of Lanao, father of the two bean-gathering sisters, whose younger daughter Fukan the culture hero Lumawig took as his wife.: Mabel Cook Cole, Philippine Folk Tales (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1916), 'Lumawig on Earth'. (secondary); Albert Ernest Jenks, The Bontoc Igorot (Manila: Bureau of Public Printing, 1905). (secondary); Joy Christine O. Bacwaden, 'The Lumawig Bontoc Myths,' Philippine Studies 45, no. 1 (1997): 3-49. (secondary)