The Terraces at Banaue and the Songs Kept to Farm Them By

The stone walled rice terraces the Ifugao carved into the Cordillera slopes over centuries, radiating outward from the town of Banaue, were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1995 under the name the Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras, recognition of both the engineering, an irrigation system carrying mountain water down through thousands of stepped fields, and of the living agricultural religion still bound up with maintaining them. Rice cultivation in Ifugao practice is not a secular technical matter set apart from Kabunian and the anito, planting, harvest and the terraces' upkeep are accompanied by ritual addressed to both.

Central to that ritual life is the hudhud, a chanted narrative tradition performed by older women during harvest and at funerals, recounting ancestral heroes and genealogies across sung episodes that can run for days. UNESCO recognized the hudhud in its own right in 2001, among the first works proclaimed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, citing a decline in the number of practitioners able to perform it in full as the tradition's younger generations moved toward wage labor and formal schooling, a documented loss set against the terraces' own continued, if also pressured, survival.