Concerning Constructions of Self and Other: Auto-racism and Imagining Amerika in the Christian Philippines

Abstract

The term ‘colonial mentality’ is popularly used among many Filipinos to refer to a tendency to compare themselves negatively to Amerikanos. This paper explores the everyday form such deprecating self/other constructions take on the island of Siquijor in the Central Visayas region of the archipelago. It sheds light on how these constructions are socially situated, deployed and reproduced, their limits and their effects. It shows that comparisons between categories of Filipino and Amerikano must be understood in relation to local hierarchies. On Siquijor, local imaginings of Amerikano lifestyles and bodies not only serve as reference points for ideals of affluence and beauty, but act as markers of prestige in competitions for status between neighbours and kin, sustaining a sense of Amerikano superordinancy. While, on Siquijor, superordinancy presumes neither innate nor moral superiority (and, indeed, there exists ambivalence towards the relative moral status of Amerikanos and Filipinos), there is a strong presumption specifically that the ‘failure’ of the Philippines to achieve similar levels of affluence to the US is due to moral deficiencies of the Filipino self. Thus, outward-looking desire is contained by inward-looking discontent, the latter keeping the former from spilling over into demands for change to a global status quo.

Keywords:

• Self and other
• Colonial mentality
• Auto-racism
• United States
• Philippines

Notes

1 The majority of the research for this paper was funded through the Australian National University and the fieldwork was conducted while I was a Visiting Research Associate at the Institute of Philippine Culture (IPC), Ateneo de Manila University. Supplementary information was collected while I conducted fieldwork for a project funded by the Australian Research Council (see below). I thank these institutions for their support. I am grateful to Christine Helliwell, Deirdre McKay, Piers Kelly and the anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions and comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. All errors and omissions, of course, remain my own. Finally, I am indebted to all those on Siquijor, who generously shared their time, experiences, thoughts, and friendship with me.

2 This three-year project, entitled ‘Intimate relationships and the politics of personhood in the Philippines’, is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award.

3 In Cebuano, words are made plural by the insertion of ‘mga’ before the noun. However, where I use Cebuano words in the context of English sentences in this paper, for clarity I add ‘s’ to the ends of these words to indicate plurals. Cebuano also contains irregular plurals that do not require the addition of a plural marker, as does English (such as, a fish/many fish). The noun ‘Siquijodnon’ can suggest either plural or singular, depending on the context, and therefore I do not pluralise this term.

4 E. J. R. David (2011, 10) relatedly comments of his upbringing in the Philippines and the US: ‘In my mind at that time, Americans equalled White’.

5 The term ‘Saudi’ was used by my informants to encompass the Middle East.

6 Focusing on the island of Bohol, Borchgrevink (2002) shows that cleanliness is a key organising concept among Visayans. Meanwhile, according to Anderson (2006) there was a perception among the American colonial administration in the Philippines that darker ‘races’ were less hygienic than ‘whites’. Anderson shows that a concern with cleanliness was a key feature of colonial rule in the villages.

7 The stated connection on the packet between beautiful skin and milk is that milk contains vitamin A, which promotes healthy skin. However, while in the Philippines I have also heard people suggest that milk can help to make your skin white, and I doubt this was lost on the designers of the Nestlé milk packet.

8 The term mestizo denotes mixed descent. In the Philippines it originally connoted indigenous Filipino and Spanish ancestry, but is now used more broadly.

9 Ulaw is the Visayan equivalent of what in Tagalog is called hiya (Lynch 2004 [1984], 42). As Rafael (1988, 126) points out, hiya ‘can take on a wide variety of significations’. It is the feeling of ‘irritation or vexation at being made an object of amusement or a foil for someone else’s aggrandizement…’ as well as ‘the dominant affect that arises from the failure to return what one has received’ (Rafael 1988, 126). In this latter respect, the ‘displeasure produced by the feeling of hiya therefore comes from being made to think of all the things one would like to give back in return but cannot, as well as all the things one would like to receive but can no longer ask for’ (Rafael 1988, 126). Hiya, like ulaw, ‘also has a positive sense… to render respect, to consider and honor someone’ (Rafael 1988, 126).

10 In a study of everyday politics in a Central Luzon village, Benedict Kerkvliet (2002 [1990], 60–62) points out that Weber’s definition of status as incorporating honour, prestige, and esteem is not appropriate for the ethnographic context where the ‘rich-poor stratification’ is the central component of status. On Siquijor, where the rich-poor stratification is similarly central, status is normally accompanied by prestige, but not necessarily by honour or esteem.

11 Similarly, Ira Baskow argues that among the Orokavia of Papua New Guinea views of ‘whitemen’ are ‘complex and ambivalent’ (Bashkow 2006, 3) involving both criticism and admiration.

12 Stephen Leavitt (2005) draws on a comparison between humiliation and shame to make a similar point with regards to the Bumbita of Papua New Guinea.

13 Deirdre McKay (2012, 16) similarly observes that villagers in Ifugao, in the northern Philippines, ‘share a popular discourse that blames “poor Filipino values” for political strife and underdevelopment.’

14 This ambivalence between somewhat contending concepts of ‘moral economy’ (Scott 1977) is drawn out in greater depth in a work-in-progress paper tentatively entitled ‘Development In-tension: Values of Social and Economic Organisation in Notions of Development on Siquijor Island, Philippines’.

15 Sahlins (2005 [1993], 39) suggests, ‘In addition to the coercion and destruction unleashed by global capitalism, we should not underestimate the complementary means of cultural debasement such as the propagation of Christianity’. Joel Robbins (2005) picks up on Sahlins’s comment. He argues that ‘among groups who have been deeply influenced by the colonial process but have remained physically peripheral to it, those who have engaged Christianity seriously are the ones most likely to abandon their efforts at cultural reproduction and to take on ideas of development as their own’ (Robbins 2005, 45). A study on this would be germane in the Philippine context, particularly through comparison with non-Christian groups in the archipelago.