Just who are “Cowboys’? Or what is the “Cowboy Culture”? The ‘Cowboys’ basically referred to the people of the west who maintained ranches, or tends cattle or animals in America after the civil war. Overtime, they developed a personal culture, a set of traditions, which are even highlighted on ‘wild west films’. The Western Cowboy culture, or at least the image of it, was left by the colonial Americans in their occupation of the islands in the 1900’s. The question is, why did the people from the highlands adopted it? How did they come to love it and live the image of it?
The Americans having chosen Baguio, and most parts of Benguet and Mountain Province as their mountain resting resort because of the cool climate, also attracted the ‘highlanders’ to crowd movie houses showing ‘cowboy films’, and even influenced their taste of music. So how did our people came to love the cowboy culture? An article I read when I was in high school explained that it is because we can relate to the ‘cowboys’. As hardworking people, the ‘highlanders’ can relate to the hard labor which is demanded from people who maintained ranches; as humble people, we can personally relate to them because they were ranked below the social class in those times; as mountain people, we can relate to wearing a thick leather jacket, or using boots on muddy trails just how they did in the west - there are actually myriads of explanation to our embracing of ‘everything cowboy’ that in the present time we even contrived a term to celebrate it: “Kinobouyan”. Beyond, however, the fashion or the external outfit, or the country music and the line dancing, is an attitude or an outlook which set a standard of being a “cowboy” in the Cordilleras. It is the attitude of being practical, or being pragmatic in any given situation, or what we call “kinobkoboy”.
‘Kinokoboy’ or’ Kinobkoboy’ revolves around being adoptive to environment, even creative or resourceful in tough situations (with all the elements of ‘taraki’ or ‘diskarte’). This mind-set is expected of highlanders, a sort of an initiation process to claiming a membership of the highland people. An example is where we use anything we see in lieu of modern tools. There are many situations which defines a “kinobkoboy” which only a “koboy” recognizes. This culture is perhaps, an upshot of the innate tendency towards survival. As a sort of initiation, this culture is majorly passed through traditional socialization, although the source was first derived on many communication tools such as the movies or the arts, or even inebriated discussions. In traditional socialization, it includes verbal discussions which set the standard towards a ‘kinobkoboy’ attitude (may even include a father lecturing his son of those standards) or even igorot country music which describes how ‘Cowboy and Taraki” Cordillerans are, and non-verbal communication of peers or group having the same tendencies or actions which heavily uses observation to decode messages. In any of those channels, the message is received and the receiver also becomes the ‘source’ of those attitude, knowledge, social system or culture. The effectively of the process is reinforced by various tools like music (Igorot country sounds), events and even enterprises (there is even a bar called “kinobouyan” with most costumers wearing cowboy outfit and listening to country music, and let us not forget BCS), which necessarily passes such knowledge or culture to more receivers. The result is a systematic passing of culture from one entity to another.
I must be clear though that the “Igorot and country’ music and fashion, even though it is a culture in itself, serves as a communication tool. Beyond the music and the fashion is the attitude of “Kinobouyan”, or the attitude of resourcefulness and strength that defines our character as highlanders, which is a culture worth passing especially to the younger generation.
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