Organizer: Fenella Cannell, London School of Economics
Chair: Mark Johnson, University College, London
Discussant: Vincente L. Rafael, University of California, San Diego
This panel brings together contributors from complementary academic backgrounds to consider aspects of contemporary ethnography in the lowlands which are rooted in the social history of the American period.
Ambeth Ocampo considers the history and vicissitudes of Rizal Day, a Philippine patriotic celebration created under the early American regime after the model of American national heroes days. Fenella Cannell discusses the centrality of "home economics" and other bodily disciplines in American period Philippine schooling. Carol Hau maps Binondo and the Filipino Chinese "community" from within both before and after the arrival of the Americans, while Lotta Hedman examines changing notions of public space, market exchange and leisure patterns associated with the emergence of malls and "malling" in the urban Philippines.
Each of these case studies speaks to those accounts of Philippine lowland culture which would stress its "Westernization" by tracing back four particular historical trajectories in the Philippine encounter with the United States. Within the broadest context of political and economic transformations since 1898, therefore, each paper aims to describe one part of the attempt to create citizens of a democratic and capitalist country. While we regard Filipino people as active agents in the making of their own culture, we would not stress one single logic of "resistance" but a number of parallel processes by which both rejection of and assimilation to the different colonial agendas may be separately at work.
Memory and Amnesia: Rizal Day Celebrations, 1898-1995
Ambeth R. Ocampo, University of London
Monuments, commemorations and historic sites are meant to maintain the memory of a specific event or personage in the minds of a people, but forgetfulness often results from the effort. In the Philippines, veneration of the national hero, Jose Rizal, was instituted and encouraged during the American colonial period which saw the erection of Rizal monuments in every town plaza and schoolyard in the whole archipelago. All towns and cities have an obligatory Rizal avenue, street or alley. Rizal's profile is etched on the most circulated currency, the one-peso coin, and the anniversary of his execution, December 30, kept as a national holiday. All Philippine schools, colleges and universities are mandated by law to teach the life and works of Rizal. In image or text, Rizal is emblazoned on everything from matches, cement, bicycles, and banks, to cinemas and even funeral parlors.
Despite the omnipresence, Rizal is obscured by monuments and commemorations. The paper examines the celebration of Rizal Day from its beginnings in 1898 to the present, tracing its development from a day of mourning to a carnival and eventually into the formal state ceremony today. Rizal Day celebrations illustrate how Rizal has been used and abused by the American colonial government out to stifle the aspirations for independence and by Filipinos themselves in the obsessive search for an elusive national identity.
Malling the Philippines: Consumers, Flaneurs, and Citizenship
Eva-Lotta Hedman, Cornell University
Large shopping mall complexes line Manila's busiest transit routes and have become major landmarks dotting the Philippine urban landscape in both the capital region and provincial cities. As public place, the mall serves as perhaps the most familiar and widely shared contemporary symbol of material progress and capitalist development in the Philippines. As public space, moreover, the mall offers an unusually accessible and desegregated social venue to broad cross sections of the country's urban population.
This paper examines the emergence of a commodity culture associated with Philippine malls and "malling," particularly as they relate to questions of social class and public space. Ostensibly a "neutral' space open to all social classes, malls also represent an opportunity for both the flaunting and the disguising of status defined by things manufactured and consumed. Similarly, "malling" has also become a leisure activity replacing public park outings (Ocampo, 1991) with a decidedly more commercially oriented and stuctured space than the Luneta, for instance. The paper also situates the reduction of spatial and temporal barriers to market exchange realized by the mall within the larger historical context of retail trade, economic growth and urban development in the Philippines. Finally, the paper discusses the implications of the rise of consumers and consumerism associated with the proliferation of shopping malls upon notions of citizenship in the Philippines. Representing a commodified public space that serves-however imperfectly-to blur traditional social distinctions and-however fleetingly-to focus modern individual aspirations, the shopping mall reflects and reproduces an image of limited equality that resonates with realities of "democratic citizenship."
"Opportunities for Improvement": Home Economics and Practical
Instruction in Philippine Education
Fenella Cannell, London School of Economics
This paper explores the teaching of "home economics" and related non-academic disciplines in Philippine schools of the American period, from an anthropological perspective. The context and political bias of Philippine school textbooks has been well discussed, yet the teaching of agriculture, crafts, sports and "domestic economy" has not. However, located at the meeting point of agendas of health, industry and education, these subjects constituted a focus of intense interest for American educational policy from the inception of the public school system.
"Practical" subjects promoted a new series of bodily disciplines which aimed to produce "healthy," "sanitary" and "democratic" citizens, and gradually to domesticate the Filipino home and family for America. These topics can be seen as constructing an image of (gendered) production and consumption which reflected American hopes for a particular engagement with capitalism which they found disturbingly lacking in the Philippines of the 1900s.
These subjects have remained central to the curriculum children encounter in Philippine elementary and high schools up to the present. It is doubtful, however, whether Filipinos chose to learn how to live by "home economics" as willingly as they learned how to teach it, thus creating new avenues for women's social and geographical mobility. Moreover, "home economics" cannot be seen simply as a case of colonializing "bodily regimes," since similar programs were being developed contemporaneously within America, and the image of regulated domestic life played out inside the colonizing power as well as inside the colony.