Note 8 — The family

Here, there, and everywhere, singly or in groups, boys perform the Igorot dance step. A tin can in a boy’s hands is irresistibly beaten in rhythmic time, and the dance as surely follows the peculiar rhythmic beating as the beating follows the possession of the can. As the boys come stringing home at night from watching the palay fields, they come dancing, rhythmically beating a can, or two sticks, or their dinner basket, or beating time in the air—as though they held a gangsa8. The dance is in them, and they amuse themselves with it constantly.