Organizer and Chair: Susan D. Russell, Northern Illinois University
Discussant: Mark R. Woodward, Arizona State University
Anthropological studies of kinship in the Philippines rarely have progressed much beyond the highlighting of general themes such as the importance of the bilateral kindred, the flexibility by which both close and distant kin may become recognized members of the active kindred, the primacy of the family, the occasional presence of corporate-like cognatic descent groups, and the tendency of local-level political factions to form along dominant and wealthy family lines. More recent anthropological studies elsewhere have questioned the universality of biological (as opposed to social) definitions of kinship and focus instead on how various peoples define and construct their notions of relatedness. Recent trends in Philippine social history also debate the changing ideological bases upon which kinship and political coalitions are formed. Violence and warlordism, as well as traditional forms of patronage politics, now co-exist with more entrepreneurial and ideological ways of forming successful coalitions. The papers in this session aim: (a) to provide an anthropological perspective on the different ways and degrees to which family dynamics persist in the current political culture of the Philippines; and (b) to highlight the various ideological bases on which kinship and family coalitions are transformed through case histories of specific 'elite' families in various parts of the country.
"Islamic Family Organizations" in Cotabato: The Formalization of Kin
Networks by an Emergent Muslim Counterelite
Thomas M. McKenna, University of Alabama, Birmingham
The late martial law period in Cotabato saw the reascension to power of Muslim traditional leaders (datus) whose local rule in the previous years had been both fiercely challenged by the separatist rebels of the MNLF and sharply curtailed by the occupying army of the martial law state. By 1980, however, the armed rebellion had subsided, military rule was loosened, and Muslim establishment elites, virtually all of whom were politically aligned with the martial law regime, sought to enhance their legitimacy and reorganize their political connections by means of proclamations of traditional titles and the establishment of numerous "royal descendants" organizations.
These activities prompted an unprecedented response from members of an emergent counterelite aligned with Muslim separatist forces and composed largely of former smugglers of the Cotabato coast. They formed "Islamic Family Organizations," which were revivals, in a rationalized and self-consciously Islamic form, of cognatic descent groups (tupus) long defunct in Cotabato.
This paper examines the largest and most active of these organizations, the Tabunaway Descendants Association. While this kin-based organization had few formal functions, it provided an institutional frame for political and economic attachments (including interclass connections) among members. More consequentially, it presented a potent oppositional ideology, combining Islamic renewal and local tradition, to counter the representations of rule displayed by the datu aristocracy and the martial law regime.
Kinship, Success and Political Culture in a Tagalog Coastal Community
Susan D. Russell, Northern Illinois University
This paper focuses on kinship networks and their role in political culture and economic success in a coastal community in Batangas in the Philippines. An extremely diverse economy has arisen in this Southern Tagalog region, marked by a complicated blending of old and new ideas about appropriate forms of political authority and the power of wealthy families. Family names are especially important assets in areas such as coastal Batangas, where wealth differences are not extreme. In the fishing village of San Andres, Bauan, political culture on a day-to-day basis revolves around issues of fishing prowess (or 'fishing success') in addition to wealth and family networks. In this coastal community, where all village elites are boat owners, a family's reputation in fishing is an integral element of crew recruitment as well as political recruitment of followers. The ideology of 'skippers,' or captains, reveals an underlying rhetoric of power, hierarchy, authority and kinship on board the boats of the local purse seining fleet. This ideology is useful to compare with the larger context of land-based forms of authority and political legitimacy in this community. The way that captains and boat owners manage their crews stands in contrast to the manner in which kinship networks and other political coalitions formed and operated during the 1992 elections. This paper describes the two dominant styles of 'captainship' (and their associated ideologies of skipperhood) and relates them to the histories of the two most powerful Tagalog kin groups in the village in order to provide a broader view of the relationship between kinship and changing political ideology in the rural Philippines.
Kinship and Art in Philippine Society
Sally Ann Ness, University of California, Riverside
This paper focuses on the relationship between kinship and artistic success in the regional Philippine context of Davao City, Mindanao. The paper compares the family histories and artistic records of three artists from Davao City, in order to examine the importance of extended family networks in the training, creative work, and career development of professional Philippine artists, and the influence of Philippine family value systems on artistic life and culture. The artists involved in the study, one a painter, one a musician, and one a jewelry maker, have all scored major successes at regional and national levels in artistic endeavors. All are permanent residents of Davao City. All have extended family networks that encompass all major regions of the Philippines. However, their family histories are diverse, in terms of ethnicity, social classes and occupations, and the diversity and breadth of their extended family networks. The paper argues that, while family-based support networks have played important, if not vital, roles in the development of each artist's creative work and career success, the means by which kin-based resources, of whatever symbolic and/or material sort, have been called into play differs substantially in each case. The roles of extended family networks in relation to the particular career path of the Philippine artist are shown to be flexible, far from all powerful, and pragmatically defined-even in the case of the most powerful kin networks. Research for the paper has been conducted on an ongoing intermittent basis in Davao City, Philippines since July 1992.
A Visayan Family in Flux: Local Concerns and Global Processes
Jean-Paul Dumont, George Mason University
Bohol and Siquijor, respectively the tenth and the twenty-fifth largest islands in the Philippine archipelago, are both at once large enough to enjoy provincial status, yet small enough to be provincial precisely. To live on either is necessarily to be remote and perhaps even aloof from more momentous events that might occur elsewhere, in the near-by and booming regional capital city of Cebu or in the farther-away and bustling megalopolis of Metro Manila. And yet, for all the quiet isolation of their insular setting, families that until recently appeared, generation after generation, to have reproduced themselves, their poverty, and their inequalities and rivalries, have been increasingly caught up in global processes that have forced them to enter willy-nilly onto the grander and more threatening scene of transnationalism. The point of this paper is to document how both peasant and bourgeois members of a specific family have been affected by changes associated with the emigration of family members outside the provincial setting and abroad