Perla del Mar de Oriente, Nuestro Perdido Eden

I’ve recently been scanning through Blair and Robertson’s The Philippine Islands– the 56 volume compendium of translated Spanish documents about the Philippines. Every Philippine historian has to go through these books at least once in their careers and it’s quite an experience– almost 400 years of Philippine history in one set. I even have mine digitized so I can read it at home.

Doing history. No, really.

It’s striking how informative it can be too. Granted, I know and fully sympathize with the common complaint that Blair and Robertson (which is how the series is commonly known) talks more about Spaniards in the Philippines rather than Filipinos in the Philippines, but if we do Old Man Scott’s peering Behind the Parchment Curtain it still says something about the country’s history.

One thing that will quickly strike the observant historian is just how tenuous the Spanish hold on the Philippines was. The word “conquest” brings up images of settlement, subjugation, or domination and this clearly wasn’t the case in the Philippines. For one, the number of Spaniards there was extremely small for almost 200 years since the Spanish “conquest” in 1565– a few thousand at most, generally much less– up until the 19th century, the number of Spaniards in the Philippines probably never reached 4,000. Most of these Spaniards were in Manila, with a handful in other places like Cebu. There were parts of the Philippines where Spanish authority was far more nominal than Western triumphalism would have you believe.

Second, most of these Spaniards were priests–and these priests did more “conquering” than the Spanish soldiers. A lot of the Spanish influence was spread through priests coaxing and coercing Filipinos into accepting Christianity, which at this stage– what with notions of Spanish identity and patronato real– were tightly bound up with “Hispanization.” However, these priests often had to minister to very large flocks who lived in very far-flung settlements. Very often, they had to rely on visitaciones for their more outlying parishioners– traveling to Filipino communities in the hinterlands once every few months to preach for a few hours. So if “conquest” already has to be redefined, so does “Christianization.” Philippine Christianity has its peculiarities now and it had its peculiarities then in large part because it was allowed to amalgamate with pre-existing beliefs and “evolved” with often very little Church intervention.

What this made me realize– or reminded me, since I’ve thought of this before or been told it before– is that there is a rather large gap in Philippine historical literature. Mainly, there is no “grand narrative” work that covers the sweep of Philippine history. Historical writing in other fields has been shying away from this, but in the case of (for instance) American or European history this is because there are many, many books that try to cover “totalities” of history. There are only a small handful, all but one flawed, that do the same for Philippine history.

How are the two concepts linked? How is the apparently weak Spanish presence and ill-defined Hispanization linked to this lack of a grand narrative study? In a way it’s very simple, how did these people:

From the Boxer Codex-- 16th century inhabitants of the Philippines.

become these people:

I pulled this picture at random. I have no idea who these Filipinos are.

The problem begins with the fact that most Filipinos know very little about their prehispanic history other than vague images of Lapu Lapu looking uber-macho while he decapitates Magellan.

I strike you down for the Philippines that doesn't exist yet and which I can't possibly believe in!

Most people don’t know much more beyond this image, and a lot of the details– but especially–the context of Lapu Lapu and his world are unknown. The prehispanic peoples in the Philippine Islands had a worldview, a cultural, material and economic environment and a military style that while not unique to the Philippines was certainly Filipino. This prehispanic world has been the subject of a lot of study from people like Laura Lee Junkers, William Henry Scott (most famously), Benedict Anderson (mostly indirectly), my mentor Filomeno Aguilar and, yes, me. These factors or characteristics include the prehispanic Filipino worldview that revolved around spiritual prowess, the importance of manpower over land and a whole bunch of other stuff that are both very interesting and keys to understanding Philippine history and culture.

Unfortunately, this entire prehispanic world is mostly little known. Many Filipinos speak of their culture as “feudal” or “Asian” without much knowing the specifics and therefore assuming a similarity between the Philippines and Western cultures. A whole era of their own history is completely dark to most Filipinos– even the educated ones.

So how much of these prehispanic Filipino cultural or societal traits survived into the present day? How were these traits changed by the course of history– by Spanish colonization, Christianization, the American conquest, and so forth?

Take for instance farming and agriculture. The people of the prehispanic Philippines were not really agricultural. The lowland, coastal communities tended  to be maritime-oriented, with people like the Cebuanos being more engaged in trading and naval raiding or naval warfare than in agriculture. The upland Filipino peoples were often hunter-gatherers, and if they were farmers, they weren’t full-time farmers, tending towards a shifting,  swidden lifestyle that often still included a lot of hunting and gathering. These modes of life persisted well into the Spanish era– a Spanish observer named Domingez de Navarette described Philippine agriculture in the mid 17th century as slash-and-burn swidden farming.

This lack of prehispanic large-scale farming was both a product of and helped contribute to the settlement and economic patterns that existed in the prehispanic Philippines. Filipinos today caught up in the RH Bill debate might be stunned to know that until perhaps the early 20th century, the Philippine population was very small in relation to its land area. This was especially true in prehispanic Philippines and Filipino communities tended to be very widely dispersed while land was not always highly valued.

Not as old as people think?

It was the Spanish who introduced wide-scale farming to the Philippines.  One can imagine that the frequently voiced Spanish complaint of native “laziness” and “indolence” was because the Filipinos didn’t want to be good peasants supporting the Spaniards who wanted to be Reconquista-style hidalgos and dons.

However, it was really the Spanish friars who introduced wide-scale agriculture to the Philippines. In their effort to Christianize Filipinos–or in an effort to export their culture and societal patterns– they began to encourage Filipinos to abandon their previously dispersed, swidden or nomadic lifestyle because this made them hard to convert. One simple proof of this, for instance, is that while the water buffalo was native to the Philippines (I think) it wasn’t used as a farming animal until the Spanish taught the Filipinos to hitch it to an implement they introduced–the plow (the Filipino word for plow, araro, is Spanish). The Spanish friars began to gather Filipinos into villages– this process was called the reduccion–where they could be more easily preached to and watched by the small handful of Spanish friars. The conquest in this case was much a matter of inducing the Filipinos, convincing them– consent– as it was forcible coercion. Here you see the Spanish simultaneously trying to make political, social, economic and cultural changes.

The Filipinos didn’t just passively accept what the Spaniards tried to impose– but neither did they just blindly resist these changes. The Spanish were far too weak to impose their demands on the Philippines through outright force, and they had to rely on slow cultural education along with occasional coercion. What occurred, then, was civilizational exchange where both were affected by the other and not necessarily domination and conquest. The Filipinos didn’t just accept Christianity and Spanish culture wholesale– they often picked what they would accept, and they often adapted what aspects of the foreign culture they did accept. What happened was essentially a kind of cultural discourse– perhaps even a cultural dialectic.  The long period of Spanish rule was not just a period of domination– it was a period of dynamic cultural exchange. It wasn’t always peaceful and the power relationships between Filipino and Spaniard was hardly fair, but it was a form of cultural dialogue nevertheless.

Instead of San Miguel, they're having San Dugo! *rim shot*

For me, this cultural exchange– bounded and concurrent with material, political and military change– is the crux of Philippine history and it is what Filipino students should be learning. Instead of teaching our students bare facts like names and dates they do not understand or that do not have context, I think the Philippine historical establishment should try to teach them this “grand narrative” of Philippine cultural becoming (if you will).

Now I know this sounds very much like traditional statist history, the seemingly old-fashioned kind of history that assumes that there is a linear progression from the past towards the present, with the inevitable outcome being the nation-state. Yeah, I get that, this is basically appropriating history for the state project. In my defense, the hegemonic process when applied to history need not offer a simplistic image of the past. The current image of Philippine history is far more simplistic since it assumes straight lines going back to the past– for instance, I hear a lot about how”family oriented” Filipinos are and how this is grounded in history without much notion of what the Filipino family was. Additionally, I happen to believe there is nothing wrong with a grand narrative approach. As I said before, fields like European or American history now move away from these grand narrative approaches to more particular studies– but they can afford to do so. Philippine history has a far smaller body of work and currently there are only a small handful (one, really) of history books that offer a comprehensive grand narrative approach (and I have serious reservations with it).

It has a lot of relevance too. Take, for instance, the last elections. Noynoy Aquino ran on a platform of “kung walang corrupt, walang mahirap” or “Without corruption, there would be no poverty” to the Tagalog challenged.

The statement is fascinating and it clearly had a resonance among the Filipinos since Noynoy won by a large margin– in part because of his promise to lead a “moral” government. Here, in one person and in one line, you can see so much of Philippine history and cultural development coming together. The idea that the inward, moral nature of a person would manifest itself as good leadership and a “natural” right to rule, along with the idea that the leader’s inner qualities would affect the material world are ancient– they are prehispanic. The fact that the “inner quality” being asked is essentially a form of Christian morality and piety is Spanish influence (one can see the overt link to piety and religion with the candle imagery in the back, something normally done in Church). These two cultural trends of prehispanic notions of spirituality and Spanish Christianity combined like they did for messianic leaders like Apolinario dela Cruz– and Noynoy promises the same thing as leaders like dela Cruz: worldly bliss, free from want. However, his campaign had modern elements to it– it promises political judicial clean-up through the elimination of corruption and graft which hearkens to the middle class Filipino desire to create an efficient, transparent, professional and modern Western-style democratic government.

The above was the national anthem apparently to be shown in theaters and made by the TV channel GMA-7. It’s full of… inaccuracies. The swordfighting in Mactan I found particularly droll. There were others, like the Katipunan having rifles (they barely had 10 guns for a few hundred people during their first attack) or Gomburza calmly going to their deaths (at least one of them was something less than collected, I believe it was Zamora). However, its heart is in the right place and I find I approve. It’s still history of a sort.

It’s stuff like that that makes me think that, fundamentally, the main task of the very small band of Philippine historians to create this cultural history that I discussed in this post. So the Philippines needs a Howard Zinn or Eric Hobsbawm. There are already some excellent historians in the Philippines– people my own mentor Filomeno Aguilar, or Rico Jose, or a slew of others. They have mainly produced studies somewhat more limited in scope, but this is good since perhaps it makes the job easier.

There are big histories of the Philippines, but the two most famous (and widely used) are woefully outdated and very, very tendentious (which has marred their scholarship). The newest and most informative is the multi-volume Kasaysayan series, written by some of the best historians in the Philippines today. However, it is expensive, large, and lacks a certain amount of depth and tends more to narrative history. Also, it suffers from not being written by one person and so it doesn’t have an intellectual focus or consistent overarching theme.

I suppose that’s the challenge for future Filipino historians– and I’m not the first to voice it. One day somebody will write a comprehensive “grand narrative” history of the Philippines. It’s much needed. As an aside, I don’t think it’s likely I’ll be the one to write it. It just doesn’t play to my strengths or my future goals. My main contribution, if I ever manage it, will hopefully be a military history of the Philippines, updating the works of Uldarico Baclagon and Carlos Quirino. Either way, I await the future young turk who will shake Philippine history with his or her great vision of the Philippine past. If that seems like a cop out– putting the burden of change and creation on the next generation–then at least I’m in good company, since that was Jose Rizal’s cop out at the end of the Fili too.

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