Every culture and society has closely held superstitions, which can trace their origins back hundreds or even thousands of years. From reassuring people inside a home that you're a person (tao po) and not a demon to clapping and asking for permission to cross a potential supernatural dwelling (tabi tabi po) like an ant mound or clearing in the woods, the Philippines is rich with supernatural precautions. One of them is utilizing the sign of the cross to dispel any bad spirits and induce luck and

The “Biyay: Tradition, Ecology, and Knowledge among Philippines Negrito Communities” exhibition in the National Museum of Anthropology features artifacts from the various Negrito communities in the Philippines. Taken from the Ayta term for ‘life’, Biyay also features two of earliest discovered human remains in the Philippines’ both of whom belonging to the descendants of early Negrito groups. This exhibition was made possible by our colleagues at the Sentrong Pagpapalakas ng Negritong Kultura at

These humans faces aren't real. I took 5 languages from the group of most spoken languages in the Philippines and 5 of the least spoken languages and told AI to create an image of a human that represents characteristics of people from that language's region. Midjourney (the AI engine I used to generate these images) looks through countless relevant photographs of real humans and combines fractional pieces of each of them to create a unique, new, never before seen image of a fake human being. How

I am a nerd. I love history and anthropology and when you mix those two things together you inevitably also learn about mythology, because the myths of any group of people are tied to their history and culture. Filipinos have a rich pantheon of gods and there are nearly too many to count. Before the Spanish colonization, each group or tribe had their own unique set of "Anito", or ancestor spirits, nature spirits, and deities. You can see that some have similarities (like the Tagalog god of war,