Surveillance as Rupture: Entanglements of Everyday Resistance, Power and Restricted Agency among Manobo Indigenous People

This paper examines how the Manobo-Pulangiyon, an Indigenous community in the Philippines, exercise power and resist surveillance in their everyday lives. It explores the concept of restricted agency to describe their pursuit of ancestral land rights amid systemic constraints. Drawing on James Scott’s (1980) infrapolitics, Vinthagen and Johansson’s (2013) theory of everyday resistance, and the Creative Voice method (Lopez et al., 2018), the study highlights both visible and subtle forms of resistance—creative, symbolic, and strategic—that assert Indigenous identity and autonomy. Central to this analysis is the concept of pakigbisog, which frames resistance through a repertoire of actions, agents, sites, and temporal dimensions. The paper foregrounds the lived experiences of Manobo-Pulangiyon activists, revealing how their daily practices challenge surveillance and red-tagging, which have increasingly targeted Lumad communities. Despite the vulnerability of coalition movements and the risks posed by state scrutiny, the Manobo-Pulangiyon continue to assert their rights through culturally embedded and resilient forms of resistance. Ultimately, this study contributes to broader understandings of Indigenous agency by showing how restricted agency operates as a counternarrative—negotiating visibility and invisibility, power and repression, within a landscape shaped by rupture and control. Keywords: Everyday Resistance; Indigenous Power; Restricted Agency; Surveillance