The Monkalun or Go-between
125. Nature of his duties.—The office of the monkalun is the most important one to be found in Ifugao society. The monkalun is a whole court, completely equipped, in embryo. He is judge, prosecuting and defending counsel, and the court record.[2] His duty and his interest are for a peaceful settlement. He receives a fee, called lukba or liwa. To the end of peaceful settlement he exhausts every art of Ifugao diplomacy. He wheedles, coaxes, flatters, threatens, drives, scolds, insinuates. He beats down the demands of the plaintiffs or prosecution, and bolsters up the proposals of the defendants until a point be reached at which the two parties may compromise. If the culprit or accused be not disposed to listen to reason and runs away or “shows fight” when approached, the monkalun waits till the former ascends into his house, follows him, and, war-knife in hand, sits in front of him and compels him to listen.
The monkalun should not be closely related to either party in a controversy. He may be a distant relative of either one of them. The monkalun has no authority. All that he can do is to act as a peace making go-between. His only power is in his art of persuasion, his tact and his skillful playing on human emotions and motives. Were he closely related to the plaintiff, he would have no influence with the defendant, and mutatis mutandis the opposite would be true.
Ultimately in any state the last appeal is to a death-dealing weapon. For example, in our own society a man owes a debt which he does not pay. Action is brought to sell his property to pay the debt. If he resists, he is in danger of death at the hands of an agent of the law. Much more is he in danger if he resists punishment for crime. The same is true in the Ifugao society. The lance is back of every demand of importance, and sometimes it seems hungry.
An Ifugao’s pride as well as his self-interest—one might almost say his self-preservation—demands that he shall collect debts that are owed him, and that he shall punish injuries or crimes against himself. Did he not do so he would become the prey of his fellows. No one would respect him. Let there be but one debt owed him which he makes no effort to collect; let there be but one insult offered him that goes unpunished, and in the drunken babbling attendant on every feast or social occasion, he will hear himself accused of cowardice and called a woman.
On the other hand, self-interest and self-respect demand that the accused shall not accept punishment too tamely or with undue haste, and that he shall not pay an exorbitant fine. If he can manage to beat the demands of the complainant down below those usually met in like cases, he even gains in prestige. But the monkalun never lets him forget that the lance has been scoured and sharpened for him, and that he walks and lives in daily danger of it.
The accuser is usually not over anxious to kill the accused. Should he do so, the probabilities are that the kin of the accused would avenge the death, in which case he, the slayer, would be also slain. The kin of each party are anxious for a peaceable settlement, if such can be honorably brought about. They have feuds a-plenty on their hands already. Neighbors and co-villagers do not want to see their neighborhood torn by internal dissension and thus weakened as to the conduct of warfare against enemies. All these forces make for a peaceful settlement.
It is the part of the accused to dally with danger for a time, however, and at last to accede to the best terms he can get, if they be within reason.